jdupuis | January 19, 2011Yeah, I'm talking about you, #scio11. The conference that still has significant twitter traffic three days after it's over. I've been to conferences that don't have that kind of traffic while they're happening. In fact, that would be pretty well every other conference.
Every edition of ScienceOnline seems to have a different virtual theme for me and this one seemed to somehow circle back to the blogging focus on earlier editions of the conference. Of course, the program is so diverse and the company so stimulating, that different people will follow different conference paths and perhaps…
jdupuis | January 16, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of Dreaming in Code: Two Dozen Programmers, Three Years, 4,732 Bugs, and One Quest for Transcendent Software, is from August 9, 2007.
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Every organization relies on software these days. Big custom systems,…
jdupuis | January 14, 2011As you read this, I'm on a plane winging my way to the ScienceOnline 2011 conference. It's a great learning, sharing and networking opportunity for anyone interested in the way science happens online. It's highlight of the conference year for me.
It's also a serious hoot. A blast, a party, off the chain.
And it's reflected in the Twitter traffic. Here's a sampling from the last little while.
avflox A.V. Flox
Research indicates you can basically think yourself to orgasm. I didn't believe it either until I started to follow the #scio11 hashtag.
BoraZ Bora Zivkovic
I set up my #scio11…
jdupuis | January 13, 2011Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
The Australian
Eating Animals by Jonathan Safran Foer
The Independent
Bad Ideas?: An arresting history of our inventions: How Our Finest Inventions Nearly Finished Us Off by Robert M. L. Winston
Seeing Further: The Story of Science and the Royal Society: 350 Years of the Royal Society and Scientific Endeavour by Bill Bryson
January Magazine
Animal Factory: The Looming Threat of Industrial Pig, Dairy, and Poultry Farms to Humans and the Environment by David Kirby
Here's Looking at Euclid: A…
jdupuis | January 13, 2011Yes, ScienceOnline 2011 is coming up next week already! My how time flies.
Just as I did last year and in the tradition of Bora's introductions of the various attendees for the upcoming ScienceOnline 2011 conference, I thought I'd once again list all the library people that are attending.
I'm not going to try and introduce each of the library people in any detail, I'll leave that to Bora. I'll just get a list of all of us together in one place.
Over the years, there's been a solid tradition of librarians and library people attending Science Online and this year looks to be no exception.…
jdupuis | January 12, 2011Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Present At The Creation: The Story of CERN and the Large Hadron Collider by Amir Aczel
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Erik M. Conway and Naomi Oreskes
Massive: The Missing Particle That Sparked the Greatest Hunt in Science by Ian Sample
Why Does E=mc2?: (And Why Should We Care?) by Brian Cox and Jeff Forshaw
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book…
jdupuis | January 12, 2011First of all, let me make this perfectly clear: Scott Rosenberg's Say Everything: How Blogging Began, What It's Becoming, and Why It Matters is a seriously terrific book. If you're a blogger, if you're interested in the phenomenon of blogging or even if you're just interested in where the media are headed, then you owe it to yourself to read this book.
I wanted to get that out of the way because, while I really enjoyed the book, there were some things that I would have liked to have seen done a bit differently and I be focusing on those quibbles more than on the things I liked about the book…
jdupuis | January 11, 2011Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Merchants of Doubt: How a Handful of Scientists Obscured the Truth on Issues from Tobacco Smoke to Global Warming by Naomi Oreskes and Erik M. Conway
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom
The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us by Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons
What…
jdupuis | January 10, 2011Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Emperor's New Drugs: Exploding the Antidepressant Myth by Irving Kirsch
How Music Works: The Science and Psychology of Beautiful Sounds, From Beethoven to the Beatles and Beyond by John Powell
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
From Eternity to Here: The Quest for the Ultimate Theory of Time by Sean Carroll
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets…
jdupuis | January 10, 2011
Research intelligence - Rip it up and start again
David Thornburg on Open-Source Textbooks
"Beginnings Are Always Messy": Thoughts on Transliteracy and Inquiry from a Learning Advocate
Student Blogging about Physics
Follow-up: Transliteracy, Theory, and Scholarly Language
Lib-Value Website Now Available
The Rise of 'Convergence' Science
How Will Students Communicate?
Study: Labour market outcomes of Canadian doctoral graduates
Predictions 2010: The Growth of Intimacy
'Saturday Night Live,' Floor Wax, and the Life of the Mind
10 Things Facebook Won't Say
Going beyond a single scientific…
jdupuis | January 9, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This post, from April 4, 2009, covered two books:
Content: Selected Essays on Technology, Creativity, Copyright, and the Future of the Future by Cory Doctorow
Mafiaboy: How I Cracked the Internet and Why It's Still Broken by…
jdupuis | January 7, 2011I'll be doing a session at the upcoming ScienceOnline 2011 conference on ebooks with David Dobbs, Tom Levenson and Carl Zimmer:
Here's the description:
Sunday, 11.30-12.30
eBooks and the science community - Carl Zimmer, Tom Levenson, David Dobbs and John Dupuis
Ebooks are by far the fastest growing sector of the publishing industry. The New York Times is about to launch a best-seller list exclusively for ebooks. New systems, such as Amazon CreateSpace, allow writers to directly place their ebooks in the marketplace. In theory, they could do away with the need for a conventional publisher.…
jdupuis | January 7, 2011A nice tutorial for all those Born Digital Natives out there who only know how to use the dagnabbit newfangled flibbergibbet iPadnicks and Kindlemawhoosits and Kobots.
HOW TO OPERATE THE NEW PAPER BOOK YOU RECEIVED FOR CHRISTMAS:
1) Pick up book. Place in lap.
2) Open book.
3) Read the words.
Voila! Just three easy steps for you to enjoy that brand new paper book you received from Santa.
Put that in your manual typewriter and smoke it, you whippersnappers!
And get off my lawn!
jdupuis | January 6, 2011Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick
MacroWikinomics: Rebooting Business and the World by Don Tapscott and Anthony D. Williams
You Are Not a Gadget by Jaron Lanier
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
The Upside of Irrationality: The Unexpected Benefits of Defying Logic at Work and at Home by Dan Ariely
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media…
jdupuis | January 6, 2011Another bunch of lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
US News & World Report
Packing for Mars: The Curious Science of Life in the Void by Mary Roach
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
WGBH/Harvard Book Store
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Seattle Times
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival" by John Vaillant
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If…
jdupuis | January 6, 2011
Managing Scientific Inquiry in a Laboratory the Size of the Web
Wake Up, Geek Culture. Time to Die
7 Major Ways We're Digitizing Our World, And 3 Reasons We Still Want Hardcopies
WIRED is dead. Long live the Internet
Wikipedia References [in US patent documents] Increase 81 Percent in 2010
2011 Predictions: Top 12 Reasons Businesses Will Fail at Social Media
Librarian Roles in Institutional Repository Data Set Collecting: Outcomes of a Research Library Task Force
Wikileaks and the Long Haul and Half-formed thought on Wikileaks & Global Action
7 Library Predictions for 2011
Welcome to…
jdupuis | January 5, 2011Another couple of lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
I've tended not to highlight individual people's bloggy lists that much here, just for the sake of my sanity and so as not to go too crazy with the number of posts, but I thought that these two list were interesting enough to merit inclusion. I've done it before, maybe I'll do it again!
Jennifer Ouellette
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Superbug: The Fatal Menace of MRSA by Maryn McKenna
The Poisoner's Handbook: Murder and the Birth of Forensic Medicine in Jazz Age New York by…
jdupuis | January 5, 2011Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. This list is from the December 5, 2010 edition of the Sunday Times. Unfortunately, I can't link to it because they have a paywall between me and the content. I did, however, get access to the full text via one of our article databases. Yay Academic OneFile!
Alex's Adventures in Numberland by Alex Bellos
Cycles of Time: An Extraordinary New View of the Universe by Roger Penrose
The Eerie Silence: Are We Alone in the Universe? by Paul Davies
Drawing the Map of Life: Inside the Human Genome Project by Victor K…
jdupuis | January 3, 2011I've been doing this for a few years now, last year, 2008 and 2007 and it seems like an interesting and maybe even useful thing to continue this year. I really enjoy seeing other people's reading lists (like here, here and here) and enjoy adding my own to the mix.
So, below you'll find a list of all the books I started in 2010. In other words, it'll include a few books I'm still reading as well as a few that I've abandoned. I've been recording every book I've read since 1983 and on my other (mostly lapsed) blog I've been occasionally transcribing the list on a year by year basis. I've…
jdupuis | January 2, 2011I have a whole pile of science-y book reviews on two of my older blogs, here and here. Both of those blogs have now been largely superseded by or merged into this one. So I'm going to be slowly moving the relevant reviews over here. I'll mostly be doing the posts one or two per weekend and I'll occasionally be merging two or more shorter reviews into one post here.
This one, of David Suzuki: An Autobiography, is from October 3, 2006.
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We live in a time when the military, industry, and medicine are all applying scientific insights, with profound social, economic, and political…