jdupuis | December 16, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg
Common as Air: Revolution, Art, and Ownership by Lewis Hyde
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Master Switch: The Rise and Fall of Information Empires by Tim Wu
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see one that I haven't covered, please let me know at jdupuis at yorku dot…
jdupuis | December 16, 2010Two recent announcements that are worth noting here.
The first is for Digital Science, a Macmillan / Nature Publishing Group project involving some of the usual science online suspects like Timo Hannay and Kaitlin Thaney and some others in a really dynamic-looking multi-disciplinary team.
The press release is here and the about page here.
Digital Science provides software and information to support researchers and research administrators in their everyday work, with the ultimate aim of making science more productive through the use of technology. As well as developing our own solutions, we…
jdupuis | December 15, 2010Another bunch of shorter lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Salon.com
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Concurring Opinions (Privacy books)
The Peep Diaries: How We're Learning to Love Watching Ourselves and Our Neighbors by Hal Niedzviecki
The Facebook Effect by David Kirkpatrick
Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age by Viktor Mayer-Schonberger
New York Magazine
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
(The Skloot book probably deserves a special award for so often being the only science book on a list…
jdupuis | December 15, 2010
Powerpoint or Blackboard? (for presentations)
Sharing Data on the Web
The rise of scientific journalism
Affirming Science's Place (in anthropology)
Introductory Research Course: Replicate a Paper
Publishers, don't pave that cow path: Lonely Planet's Gus Balbontin on agility in the digital age
Comparing potatoes and truffles
Why Teens Don't And Won't Tweet
The role of trust in science
Advice to the potential library school student
Overview: The people who use Twitter
The Hole in the Soul of our Culture: part 1 and part 2
Why your Facebook ID is marketers' Holy Grail
The Truth Wears Off: Is…
jdupuis | December 15, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant
Packing For Mars by Mary Roach
The Legacy by David Suzuki
Four Fish: The Future of the Last Wild Food by Paul Greenberg
Blind Descent: The Quest to Discover the Deepest Place on Earth by James M. Tabor
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
Eaarth: Making a Life on a Tough New Planet by Bill McKibben
Extra Lives: Why Video Games Matter by Tom Bissell
Keeping…
jdupuis | December 14, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. I've cobbled this together from the critic-by-critic list I point to above.
You Are Not a Gadget: a Manifesto by Jaron Lanier
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Ego Tunnel: The Science of the Mind and the Myth of the Self by Thomas Metzinger
The Plundered Planet by Paul Collier
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see one that I haven't covered, please let me know at jdupuis at yorku dot ca or in the…
jdupuis | December 13, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
Colossus: Hoover Dam and the Making of the American Century by Michael Hiltzik
Deep Blue Home: An Intimate Ecology of Our Wild Ocean by Julia Whitty
Delusions of Gender: How Our Minds, Society, and Neurosexism Create Difference by Cordelia Fine
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha Mukherjee
The Gun by C.J. Chivers
The Twilight of the Bombs: Recent Challenges, New…
jdupuis | December 13, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. This list is the Holiday Reading list from the Toronto Star Public Policy Forum, picked from individual lists in today's print newspaper. Bizarrely, I wasn't able to find the list online.
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
Unquenchable: America's Water Crisis and What To Do About It by Robert Glennon
The Grand Design by Stephen Hawking and Leonard Mlodinow
Carbon Shift: How Peak Oil and the Climate Crisis Will Change Canada (and Our Lives) by Thomas Homer-Dixon
I'm…
jdupuis | December 12, 2010I 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 King of Infinite Space: Donald Coxeter, the Man Who Saved Geometry, is from December 11, 2006.
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I'm reading a lot of science auto/biography these days, and generally enjoying it a lot. While generally not…
jdupuis | December 11, 2010I 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 Screams of Reason: Mad Science in Modern Culture, is from January 18, 2007.
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A little pop-cultural analysis is never a bad thing, taken in small doses. In larger doses, however, it can be a bit problematic…
jdupuis | December 10, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Country Driving: A Journey Through China from Farm to Factory by Peter Hessler
A Vast Machine: Computer Models, Climate Data, and the Politics of Global Warming by Paul Edwards
Biology is Technology: The Promise, Peril, and New Business of Engineering Life by Rob Carlson
The Rational Optimist: How Prosperity Evolves by Matt Ridley
Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation by Steven Johnson
What Technology Wants by Kevin Kelly
The Emperor of All Maladies: A Biography of Cancer by Siddhartha…
jdupuis | December 10, 2010Er, sorry. Apparently it's one of those weird Internet twitter meme things today that all the kids think are really neet-o and groovy.
Anyways, here's a couple from the blastr post:
@StuartPownall: Stormtrooper armour to be investigated after recent firefight leaves no survivors.
@MaxReboYouKnow: Death Star construction oversight committee recognized vulnerable defense point in exhaust port, considered it "secure"
@deathspal Series of Droid mutilations baffle storm troopers. "Their arms are just ripped clean off" Said one trooper
@dclas: Leaked memos re: Bespin mining colony raid prove…
jdupuis | December 9, 2010Yes, it was quiet for a while there, but it seems that change and disruption are inevitable in the world of science blogging.
Welcome to Yet Another Science Blogging Community: Occam's Typewriter.
Apparently born amidst much controversy and drama, it's a new community formed mostly (all?) from former Nature Network bloggers. For at least a bit of the inside story, run on over to NN survivor Eva Amsen's blog for My friends moved away, but I have their new addresses which seems to nicely encapsulate the science blogging world over the last six months or so.
Anyways, here's the really very fine…
jdupuis | December 9, 2010...Instead of a different Creative Commons license, such as CC-BY? Or just with normal copyright restrictions?
(You can get an explanation of CC0 here: it implies relinquishing all rights and essentially means releasing something into the public domain.)
A good question, one that I attempted to answer as part of my Exploring Open Science session at Brock University several weeks back. While I was talking about the importance of Open Data within the Open Science movement, one of the audience members very properly pressed the point of why it's important for data to be open.
I think I gave…
jdupuis | December 8, 2010
Getting Rid of Books: A Heresy
Arsenic-associated bacteria (NASA's claims)
The Gatekeeper is Dead! Long live the Gatekeeper
The Library: Three Jeremiads
The Future of Advertising
Web Developers Get Real (Time): The massive amount of real-time information available is leading to new programming approaches
Discover more than 3 million Google eBooks from your choice of booksellers and devices
Education and the social Web: Connective learning and the commercial imperative
7 game-changing mobile trends for 2011
Wikileaks and the Long Haul
What Publishers, Authors & Journalists Can Learn from…
jdupuis | December 7, 2010Another bunch of shorter lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
LaCrosse Tribune
Real Monsters, Gruesome Critters, and Beasts from the Darkside by Brad Steiger
Becoming a Doctor: From Student to Specialist, Doctor-Writers Share Their Experiences edited by Lee Gutkind
How Pleasure Works: The New Science of Why We Like What We Like by Paul Bloom
How It Ends: From You to the Universe by Chris Impey
STLtoday
The Gun by C.J. Chivers
The Facebook Effect: The Inside Story of the Company That Is Connecting the World by David Kirkpatrick
The Immortal Life of…
jdupuis | December 7, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure. This one really annoys me because the list is solely embedded in the text of the article, with no separate listing of the titles or even bolding or italicizing the titles. But that's just me, I guess.
Map of a Nation: A Biography of the Ordnance Survey by Rachel Hewitt
Life Ascending: The Ten Great Inventions of Evolution by Nick Lane
The Language of Life: DNA and the Revolution in Personalised Medicine by Francis Collins
Genetic Twists of Fate by Stanley Fields & Mark Johnston
The Immortal Life of…
jdupuis | December 6, 2010Another bunch of shorter lists for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
Minneapolis-St. Paul Star Tribune
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Seeing Further: The Story of Science, Discovery and the Genius of the Royal Society edited by Bill Bryson
Chamber Four
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
Quill & Quire
The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by Johan Vaillant
I'm always looking for recommendations and notifications of book lists as they appear in various media outlets. If you see one that I haven't…
jdupuis | December 6, 2010Another list for your reading, gift giving and collection development pleasure.
The Atlantic: Great Sea Battles, Heroic Discoveries, Titanic Storms, and a Vast Ocean of a Million Stories by Simon Winchester
Becoming Animal: An Earthly Cosmology by David Abram
The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks by Rebecca Skloot
The Most Powerful Idea in the World: A Story of Steam, Industry, and Invention by William Rosen
Travels in Siberia by Ian Frazier
Water: The Epic Struggle for Wealth, Power, and Civilization by Steven Solomon
And a non-science book that, for obvious reasons, looks particularly…
jdupuis | December 5, 2010I 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 covers three books and is from March 1, 2007:
The Best American Science Writing 2006 by Gawande, Atul, editor & Jesse Cohen, series editor
The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2006 by Greene, Brian, editor…