jdupuis | October 28, 2011With The Onion implementing a new paywall with non-US users, I'm forced to look for a new source of cheap amusement.
Yes, I'm too cheap to pay for The Onion online. For a paper copy, I'd easily pay $5 per week but online infotainment has no monetary value for me, and I suspect for anyone else. Writers starving? At a fundamental level, I'm ok with that. Hey, Onion, good luck with the new system. Can't win either way?
Anyways, if you Yanks are going to make me pay, I'll be turning my comical attentions to Canada's colonial master -- the Brits.
And that brings us to News Biscuit!
And this…
jdupuis | October 28, 2011As reported here and elsewhere, Amazon is actually dipping its toes into the world of publishing.
Which of course is an interesting challenge and threat for traditional trade publishers. And who knows, maybe academic publishers too, if Amazon decides it wants to disrupt that market as well.
In any case, The New York Times has a nice set of four essays debating the topic, Will Amazon Kill Off Publishers?.
Amazon is getting a lot of heat these days over its attempts to push its way into the hearts and minds of readers, writers and the larger book culture -- even comic books. Indeed, the news…
jdupuis | October 26, 2011Ah, #OccupyScholComm.
The perfect Open Access Week topic!
And just like the broader Occupy protests movement, the aims and policy pronouncements of the "movement" are perhaps not as vague as they might seem to the casual observer.
Basically, #OccupyScholComm is about scholars rejecting profit-driven toll-access publishing and taking back the control of their own scholarly output.
Or something like that.
Anyways, it all started with this tweet from OpenAccessHulk:
OA HULK WANTS TO KNOW WHO TO OCCUPY! ELSEVIER!? ACS!? HARPERCOLLINS!? YOU NAME IT, OA HULK WILL OCCUPY AND SMASH! #…
jdupuis | October 24, 2011For your reading and collection development pleasure!
Planned Obsolescence: Publishing, Technology, and the Future of the Academy by Kathleen Fitzpatrick
Academic institutions are facing a crisis in scholarly publishing at multiple levels: presses are stressed as never before, library budgets are squeezed, faculty are having difficulty publishing their work, and promotion and tenure committees are facing a range of new ways of working without a clear sense of how to understand and evaluate them. Planned Obsolescence is both a provocation to think more broadly about the academy's future and…
jdupuis | October 21, 2011I like to think of Nobel Week as stretching through the entirety of October and certainly The Cronk has made that much easier this year with a fun little article, Nobel Prize Committee Snubs Professor Huckman's Bigfoot Research Again!
For the thirteenth time in thirteen years, Professor Mikael Huckman's write-in campaign to the Nobel Prize in Physiology was overlooked in favor of what Huckman refers to as "political hogwash."
Huckman has been the head researcher at the Sasquatch Studies Institute for over two decades and has appeared in over 100 self-produced documentary films and scholarly…
jdupuis | October 20, 2011
Social Media for Scientists Part 1: It's Our Job
Social Media for Scientists Part 2: You Do Have Time
Social Media for Scientists Part 2.5: Breaking Stereotypes
Social Media For Scientists Part 3: Win-Win
The economics of science blogging
The three things I learned at the Purdue Conference for Pre-Tenure Women: on being a radical scholar
Coming to blows over books
Where should our information literacy standards come from?
Asked and Answered: Here's What I Think the Aaron Swartz Case Means
Are Teaching and Research Distinct?
Doing Science in the Open
Joe Murphy as Apple Advertisement - We've…
jdupuis | October 19, 2011I've long been a believer in the power of blogs to drive and aggregate conversations at every level. Frivolous, for sure. But also serious and scholarly.
The rise of science blogs over the last few years has certainly demonstrated that. In librarianship as well, blogs are a powerful source of comment, theory and practical advice. I've always thought that the practical side of the library world was ripe to be the first field to truly leave journals behind and embrace blogging as a kind of replacement. It would be messy, sure, but it would be democratizing and re-invigorating.
The kinds of…
jdupuis | October 14, 2011The science fiction news site blastr has a very entertaining series going for the month of October, 31 Days of Halloween.
As you would imagine, every day this month they are featuring a post about Halloween. And fortunately the topics range from the bizarre to the ridiculous all the way to the barely safe for work.
Here's a sampling:
33 scary stories you can read RIGHT NOW from great horror writers
Vader, Spock, Spidey and 26 other sci-fi icons as rotting zombies
18 LEGO creations so unnerving they could give you nightmares
Zombies and vampires rule in 14 horrific Halloween board games
What…
jdupuis | October 12, 2011Waaaaay back on September 20, I flew down to New York City to take part in one of the Science Online New York City panel discussions, this one on Enhanced eBooks & BookApps: the Promise and Perils (and here).
Ably organized and moderated by David Dobbs, the other panelists were Evan Ratliff, Amanda Moon, Carl Zimmer and Dean Johnson.
Here's a description of the panel:
Enhanced ebooks and tablet apps clearly offer new ways to present material and engage readers. Yet some of the software restrictions and rights deals that these ebooks, apps and their platforms use can make them unfriendly…
jdupuis | October 8, 2011Inspired by John Scalzi, I thought I'd poll all my readers out there and see what you are reading this weekend.
Books, magazines, blogs, whatever.
I'm reading Ross Macdonald's Meet Me at the Morgue for fiction, Gotham Central Book 1: In the Line of Duty by Greg Rucka, Ed Brubaker and Michael Lark in the graphic novel category and since I'm leading a book club session on it in a couple of weeks, I'm planning on spending a fair bit of time wth Rebecca Skloot's The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. Magazine-wise, I'll be taking a look at the most recent issue of The New York Review of Science…
jdupuis | October 7, 2011Leave it to The Onion to put it all into perspective. A couple of articles on Wednesday's passing of Steve Jobs.
Last American Who Knew What The Fuck He Was Doing Dies
CUPERTINO, CA--Steve Jobs, the visionary co-founder of Apple Computers and the only American in the country who had any clue what the fuck he was doing, died Wednesday at the age of 56. "We haven't just lost a great innovator, leader, and businessman, we've literally lost the only person in this country who actually had his shit together and knew what the hell was going on," a statement from President Barack Obama read in part…
jdupuis | October 6, 2011As I'm sure everyone who's spent anytime exposed to any media at all over the last day knows that Steve Jobs has died. The death of anyone so young and with so much left to give is a tragedy to their immediate circle of family, friends and co-workers and they certainly have my sincere sympathy for their loss.
But of course, Steve Jobs was a very public figure who's death has had a huge emotional impact on many people, including many he never met.
And that's because of the immense impact of the full range of Apple products have had on people's everyday lives. Steve Jobs seemed somehow…
jdupuis | October 6, 2011A real straggler of a list for your reading and collection development pleasure.
Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos
Through the Language Glass: Why the World Looks Different in Other Languages by Guy Deutscher
The Disappearing Spoon: And Other True Tales of Madness, Love, and the History of the World from the Periodic Table of the Elements by Sam Kean
The Wave Watcher's Companion: From Ocean Waves to Light Waves via Shock Waves, Stadium Waves, andAll the Restof Life's Undulations by Gavin Pretor-Pinney
Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian…
jdupuis | October 2, 2011It's time for my annual post taking issue with Thomson Reuters (TR) Nobel Prize predictions.
(2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009, 2010)
Because, yes, they're at it again.
Can the winners of the Nobel Prize be correctly predicted? Since 1989, Thomson Reuters has developed a list of likely winners in medicine, chemistry, physics, and economics. Those chosen are named Thomson Reuters Citation Laureates -- researchers likely to be in contention for Nobel honors based on the citation impact of their published research.
Reading this you would reasonably assume that TR thinks there is at least a…
jdupuis | October 1, 2011
10 Reasons Why Your (EDU) Boss Should Tweet
The digital scholar - which way to go?
Facebook is scaring me
#ArsenicLife Goes Longform, And History Gets Squished
Science Online: London 2011 - Keynote, Michael Nielsen - Video & Storify
Op-Ed: Stop Feeding Facebook, It's Time for Moderation
Bibliographies (CS scholars should post copies of articles on their websites)
Reading, Risk, and Reality: College Students and Reading for Pleasure
Access to scientific publications should be a fundamental right
Honor Your Campus Library
Academic Publishing and Zombies
Who killed videogames?…
jdupuis | September 30, 2011w00t!
It's Ig Nobel Prize season again!
A brief description:
The Ig® Nobel Prizes
The Ig Nobel Prizes honor achievements that first make people laugh, and then make them think. The prizes are intended to celebrate the unusual, honor the imaginative -- and spur people's interest in science, medicine, and technology.
"Last, but not least, there are the Ig Nobel awards. These come with little cash, but much cachet, and reward those research projects that 'first make people laugh, and then make them think'" -- Nature
The video of last night's ceremony is archived here.
Here are some highlights…
jdupuis | September 27, 2011Computer science and computer science education are a couple of my evergreen topics here on this blog, as you can see by perusing the computer science tag.
And of course, my trip to Harvard for LIAL this past summer perhaps has that institution on my radar a bit more than usual.
So how wonderful is it to find a way to connect those two things?
Along comes Hacking Stereotypes by Steve Kolowich.
It's about a program called HackHarvard which is part of a series of efforts at Harvard to encourage technology entrepreneurship: and increase enrollments in their basic computing course,
HackHarvard,…
jdupuis | September 26, 2011My 2011 summer reading was pretty meagre this year. For various reasons too boring to go into here, there wasn't much actually much vacation for me this summer. I think I'll probably have a better December/Christmas reading list than summer. Such is life.
Anyways, what I did read was pretty good, so let's get to it.
Bradbury, Ray and Ron Wimberly. Ray Bradbury's Something Wicked This Way Comes: The Authorized Adaptation. New York: Hill and Wang, 2011. 144pp. ISBN-13: 978-0809087464
Bradbury, Ray and Dennis Calero. Ray Bradbury's The Martian Chronicles: The Authorized Adaptation. New York…
jdupuis | September 24, 2011
The Future of Libraries
The Guardian's 9/11 mistake shows we're still learning the boundaries of Twitter
Feeling pointy
A Quick Buck by Copy and Paste: A review of Gamification by Design
Stop the Internet, we want to get off!
Open Access Is Infrastructure, Not Religion
Internet Ruffles Pricey Scholarly Journals
Think Different? Not in Higher Ed
Counting books is boring
Note to vendors:
Academic Librarian Research: A Survey of Attitudes, Involvement, and Perceived Capabilities
Introverts and Customer Service in the Library: An Unexpected Fit
What does curation mean, anyway?
Why do we…
jdupuis | September 23, 2011There's this weird phenomenon on Twitter of HULK accounts, where some secret individual or cabal creates an online persona to criticize the status quo in some area of human experience, but in the lively patois of the old school Marvel Comics character, The Incredible Hulk.
Feminist Hulk, Adjunct Hulk, Editor Hulk and many others.
Now we can add OPEN ACCESS HULK to the party!
I was a huge fan of the Hulk comic series from the 1970s all the way through to the 1990s so I'm thrilled to see this development.
Who makes up the secret cabal of tweeters? Librarians? Scientists? No one really knows.…