jdupuis | December 2, 2013While browsing through my various social media feeds this morning I noticed that Amazon is having crazy Cyber Monday Kindle sales. Not much science or technology is on offer -- it's mostly popular fiction -- but there is a very nice selection of Einstein books that you can purchase.
They are all $2.82 TODAY!
The World As I See ItOut of My Later Years: The Scientist, Philosopher, and Man Portrayed Through His Own WordsEssays in HumanismThe Theory of Relativity: and Other EssaysLetters to Solovine: 1906-1955Letters on Wave Mechanics: Correspondence with H. A. Lorentz, Max Planck, and Erwin…
jdupuis | December 2, 2013Some capsule reviews of books I've finished over the last little while, in the spirit of catching up.
van Grouw, Katrina. The Unfeathered Bird. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2013. 304pp. ISBN-13: 978-0691151342
This is a seriously beautiful coffee table-sized scientific illustrations book on birds. Basically the idea of the book is to explore birds through drawings mostly of whole or partial skeletons but also some of musculature and "plucked" bodies. A bit odd, a bit creepy but breath-taking. The book opens with a very general section on what birds have in common and then goes into…
jdupuis | November 29, 2013Do Librarians Need Tenure? Depends on Which Ones You Ask.
The Hunt Library, Innovation, and Tenure
Academic Freedom! Huh! What is It Good For?
My Thoughts on Faculty Status for Academic Librarians
How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang
An Academic Cartel?
Women and the Internet in Four Parts: Online and Offline Violence Towards Women; Context Collapse, Architecture, and Plows; Sexytime, Gender Roles, and Credit Where Due; Feminism's Twist Ending
The Gendering of Technology Work
Academic scattering
We Are Not Hypnotized (rejecting the extremes wrt online ed)
Libraries in the Time of MOOCs
The…
jdupuis | November 28, 2013It is time. The season of lists begins again!
Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that I can find around the web in various media outlets.
From the beginning it’s been a pretty popular service so I’m happy to continue it.
For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or technology innovation. Deciding what is and isn’t…
jdupuis | November 28, 2013The College Boom Has Peaked
The Emergent Academic Proletariat and its Shortchanged Students
Why I’m quitting the academy
On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs
Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself
Dear corporations, we’ll trade you a few cents for a better life
MOOCs and Economic Reality
When MOOCs profit, who pays?
Miami-Dade County Will No Longer Close Any Public Libraries But 169 Librarians Would Lose Jobs, Hours Reduced
Rebuilding the world technology destroyed
College for Free
Blood Money, or How Academia is like The Sopranos
A…
jdupuis | November 24, 2013It is time. The season of lists begins again!
Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that I can find around the web in various media outlets.
From the beginning it’s been a pretty popular service so I’m happy to continue it.
For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or technology innovation. Deciding what is and isn’t…
jdupuis | November 14, 2013It is time. The season of lists begins again!
Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that I can find around the web in various media outlets.
From the beginning it’s been a pretty popular service so I’m happy to continue it.
For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or technology innovation. Deciding what is and isn’t…
jdupuis | November 13, 2013Admitting Our Agendas
A queer, feminist agenda for libraries: Significance, relevance and power
Agendas: Everyone has one
I dreamed of a book …
Why I'm not waiting for tenure to change the world...
Value of Libraries Megapost
Librarians, Gender, and Tech: Moving the Conversation Forward
Silencing, librarianship, and gender: award hate and the silencing of recognition
Public Libraries as Social Innovation Catalysts
The private-data-for-services trade fallacy
Business Model of the Internet Has Been Surveillance
Science and Its Skeptics
Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley
You Can't Get…
jdupuis | November 10, 2013It is time. The season of lists begins again!
Every year for the last bunch of years I’ve been linking to and posting about all the “year’s best sciencey books” lists that I can find around the web in various media outlets.
From the beginning it’s been a pretty popular service so I’m happy to continue it.
For my purposes, I define science books pretty broadly to include science, engineering, computing, history & philosophy of science & technology, environment, social aspects of science and even business books about technology trends or technology innovation. Deciding what is and isn’t…
jdupuis | November 8, 2013It's been a really bizarre and surreal week (and month and three years) to be a resident of Toronto. Each day brings a series of more outrageous revelations about our beloved and not-so-beloved mayor, Rob Ford.
But if there's anything that warms a Canadian's heart more than attention in the American press, well, I don't know what that is. And The Onion?! The Onion loves us, it really loves us!
Oh, the mixed feelings, how they wound.
Nation Not About To Start Giving A Shit About Canadian Politics
WASHINGTON—Despite Toronto mayor Rob Ford’s recent controversial admission to having smoked crack…
jdupuis | October 25, 2013It's been kind of a crazy week for me, so I haven't really had much of a chance to contribute to or even read a lot of the Open Access Week calls to arms out there right now.
So I thought I would kind of commandeer my Friday Fun silly lists habit and redirect that energy to open access.
So here it is, from Peter Suber:
Open access: six myths to put to rest
The only way to provide open access to peer-reviewed journal articles is to publish in open access journals
All or most open access journals charge publication fees
Most author-side fees are paid by the authors themselves
Publishing in a…
jdupuis | October 22, 2013Sarah Boon (Twitter, blog) has organized a series of posts on science policy in Canada over the next month or so to be published in the iPolitics online magazine. The first four are out with another eight (two approximately every Monday) between now and November 18th. Which is just in time for the upcoming Canadian Science Policy Conference in Toronto starting November 20th.
The articles are available open access. I'll list the first bunch here, including my own contribution comparing what's going on at Library and Archives Canada with similar assaults on science. I will update this post as…
jdupuis | October 17, 2013Chris Turner's The War on Science: Muzzled Scientists and Wilful Blindness in Stephen Harper's Canada (website) is a book that absolutely must be read by every Canadian interested in the future of science and science policy in the country.
And the Prime Minister Stephen Harper's Conservative government is wagering that that's a pretty low percentage of the population. If Susan Delacourt and Darrell Bricker and John Ibbitson are to be believed, the strategy that the Prime Minister is using focuses on an emerging coalition of western Canadians and new Canadians and suburbanites in eastern…
jdupuis | October 16, 2013With Open Access Week next week, there could be no greater open access-related news here in Canada than that the three granting councils are coming together to draft a common Open Access Policy.
Of those agencies (Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council and Canadian Institute of Health Research), the CIHR already has a OA policy in effect. The process will be to first release a draft policy based on the CIHR one and then consult widely in the various communities that are involved and come to an agreement for a new common policy…
jdupuis | October 8, 2013Yes, another science blogging community among the many and yet another where an established print magazine enhances its online presence with a blogging network. And a bit more shuffling of the chairs on the deck as people with established blogs switch places or even some people start up whole new blogging personas.
The Popular Science Blogging Network!
Here's the welcome post and the list of blogs
Welcome To The Popular Science Blog Network
Today we’re unveiling 13 new blogs on PopularScience.com, each one home to a notable writer covering a specific area of innovation. We live in an era…
jdupuis | October 6, 2013How bad is it? Even the New York Times has noticed what is going on with Canadian science, comparing the situation here unfavourably with the situation in the US under George W. Bush.
It began badly enough in 2008 when scientists working for Environment Canada, the federal agency, were told to refer all queries to departmental communications officers. Now the government is doing all it can to monitor and restrict the flow of scientific information, especially concerning research into climate change, fisheries and anything to do with the Alberta tar sands — source of the diluted bitumen that…
jdupuis | October 4, 2013Nikola Tesla is a science rockstar. How can you tell? Like any great rockstar, he's dead. And he has a rock band named after him. He's wild and colourful. He epitomizes the mad scientist. He was flamboyant and yet strangely ascetic, he was fond of spectacle and showmanship yet also a bit of a hermit. He was a prodigious inventor and scientist, perhaps unparalleled in his own or any time. He's inspired web comic wars, even. And a Indigogo campaign to raise funds for a museum. And a Kickstarter for a graphic novel adaptation of his life. (Yes, I supported both...)
In fact, his out-sized…
jdupuis | October 2, 2013I have a son who's starting his second year as a physics undergrad. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog.
By necessity and circumstance, the items I've chosen will be influenced by my son's choice of major and my own interest in the usefulness of computational approaches to science and of social media for…
jdupuis | September 27, 2013Last night I attended the Lane Anderson Award dinner where this year's winners were announced. A huge congratulations to all the winners and nominees and sincere thanks to the organizers for inviting me to such a wonderful event.
Here is the press release from last night:
$10,000 Lane Anderson Award Winners
Celebrating the Best Science Writing in Canada
Toronto. 26th September, 2013: The Fitzhenry Family Foundation announced the winners of the 2012 Lane Anderson Award. Finalists and winners were feted at an intimate dinner in Toronto.
The annual Lane Anderson Award, now in its fourth year,…
jdupuis | September 18, 2013It took me a long time to get through The Innovative University: Changing the DNA of Higher Education from the Inside Out, something like eighteen months to finally wade through it. And it's not that it was even that bad. It a lot of ways, it was better than I expected. Part of it is the fact that it came out just before the MOOC craze hit and it seemed odd for a "future of higher education" book to sort of miss that boat. Part of it is the fact that Christensen and Eyring's book is very deeply rooted in the US experience so maybe parts of it weren't so relevant to my experience in Canada.…