jdupuis | October 1, 2010You can always tell it's Nobel season -- because that's when the Ig Nobel prizes are announced!
The 2010 laureates have been announced. Here are some "highlights:"
ENGINEERING PRIZE: Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse and Agnes Rocha-Gosselin of the Zoological Society of London, UK, and Diane Gendron of Instituto Politecnico Nacional, Baja California Sur, Mexico, for perfecting a method to collect whale snot, using a remote-control helicopter.
REFERENCE: "A Novel Non-Invasive Tool for Disease Surveillance of Free-Ranging Whales and Its Relevance to Conservation Programs," Karina Acevedo-Whitehouse,…
jdupuis | September 28, 2010Your Hate Mail Will be Graded: A Decade of Whatever, 1998-2008 is a collection of John Scalzi's favourite posts from the first decade of his blog's existence. And it's quite a collection too -- of course one that is best taken in short doses, one or two posts per day over a longish period of time. Just like you you consume a blog.
Scalzi started Whatever way back in 1998 and since then it's become one of the most popular science fiction author blogs out there. His mixture of humour, politics and just general zaniness is hard to resist. Most of all, Scalzi is passionate, he has a strong…
jdupuis | September 27, 2010
A photo tour of the Large Hadron Collider
Does Every Question Matter?
An American In Paris Says Au Revoir To His Laptop
U of Calgary Library Video Game Collection rocks Twitter! and Video game centre installed on campus
Accessibility isn't a "feature": Responding to a drive-by comment
A collaborative proposal on research metrics
Where can scientists host their web pages? Please help
The Rise of Apps Culture
Time is running short for county's trove of law books
10 paths and they're all hard (Privacy cliffhangers)
Scholarly Impact of Law School Faculties: Extending the Leiter Rankings to the…
jdupuis | September 24, 2010I'm a life-long fan of science fiction, mostly as a reader but occasionally as a book reviewer. Way back, when dinosaurs walked the earth, I even took a couple of science fiction literature classes.
And, as readers of this blog well know, I love nothing better than a good list of books.
So combining all those passions is a big win for me.
Take a look at this, from io9, A syllabus and book list for novice students of science fiction literature.
I'll list the books here, but please head over to the io9 post for the rationales for chosing each book.
WHAT THIS LIST IS AND ISN'T
There are a few…
jdupuis | September 24, 2010It's time for the annual Mocking of the Thomson Reuters session.
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.
Check out my previous iterations of this amusing pastime: 2002, 2006, 2007a, 2007b, 2008, 2009.
From a recent Globe and Mail article:
"We choose our citation…
jdupuis | September 22, 2010
Almost Halfway There: an Analysis of the Open Access Behaviors of Academic Librarians
The eReaders Bill of Rights (the Kobo Perspective)
Plagiarism and essay mills
Do Students Listen to Others' Views?
Bad at Math?
Visualizing the Science Blogosphere (and Open-Sourcing It)
Writing: Find the Time or Don't
Mind-bending mysteries at the Perimeter Institute
The 10 Core Values Of A Winning Personal Brand
Six Reasons Why I'm Not On Facebook, By Wired UK's Editor
iPad vs Kindle
How Many Computers Will You Own?
Google Books Blur the Line between Book & Internet
Totally hip video book reviews by…
jdupuis | September 17, 2010Having started my working life as a software developer, I know a bit about epic bugs. Let's just say I've had my share and leave it at that. At very least, I can say I never caused any vehicles to crash or any companies to fail.
So, from ComputerWorld, Epic failures: 11 infamous software bugs.
Instead, this story is about outright programming errors that caused key failures in their own right.
Have I missed anything important? Consider this a call for nominations for the biggest bugs of all time. These are my suggestions; if you have any honorable mentions, bring 'em on. The worst anyone…
jdupuis | September 16, 2010
12 Rules for New (Academic) Administrators
The Facebook Reckoning
Kickin' it old-school: The rise of the mature student
In the context of web context: How to check out any Web page
Value of Academic Libraries Report
SIMCITY by Neil Gaiman
On open data and disruptive innovation
Data mash-ups and the future of mapping
Research Data: Who will share what, with whom, when, and why? and Retooling Libraries for the Data Challenge
The Fall of Book Publishing: The Rise of New E-Book Business Models
Berners-Lee mounts rousing call for net neutrality
Sort of a review of Cognitive Surplus
Let's Stop…
jdupuis | September 15, 2010I know I'm sure as hell having a hard time keeping up with all the comings and goings. If anything, the impression is probably that the lights are practically out and we're all singing Old Lang Syne. This, of course, is far from the case. The lights are still on, we're most of us blogging away.
Here's a list compiled from the Blog Index page and from the drop down on every page. I'm also only including reasonably active blogs, ones with posts since January 1, 2010.
WCG Common Sense has also provided a nice graphical representation of some of the recent science blogospheric ebbs and flows…
jdupuis | September 15, 2010From this day forward, Scott Rosenberg is an honorary librarian.
One of the things that librarians talk about a lot is how to evaluate a random web page -- what signs and signals to look for that will give the unsuspecting student a clue as to whether or not they might want to use a particular web page in an assignment.
We talk a lot about the various W's -- who, what, why, when and all the rest. Who created the page, what does it say, does their appear to be any bias, is it current. There has been tons of literature on the subject and a very large number of online tutorials.
Scott…
jdupuis | September 14, 2010Yet another science blogging community: Wired Science Blogs.
From Meet the New Wired Science All-Star Bloggers:
At Wired Science we are always looking for new ways to deliver you more science and more awesome. Starting today, we are bringing on a group of hand-picked, superstar science bloggers to help us do just that.
*snip*
We hope Wired will give these bloggers the platform and attention they deserve and help bring quality science blogging to the forefront of science discussion across the web. In recent weeks, several science blogging networks have sprung up, including PLoS blogs,…
jdupuis | September 13, 2010
UTSA opens fully electronic science, engineering library
The Future Of Reading
Bye Bye, Big-Box Bookstores
The Rubik's Cube Conjecture PROVEN! (Do we care?)
On Great Myth of the Librarian Grays
What Do You Call Facebook For Scientists? Um...Facebook
Shutting down social media access: I take umbrage
A Personal Librarian For Every Drexel Freshman
Free...as in the British Museum
Post-publication Review: Is the Dialog of Science Really a Monologue?
The line between book and Internet will disappear
From Good Study Habits to Better Teaching
7 Things You Should Know About Privacy in Web 2.0…
jdupuis | September 10, 2010It's nice to see the occasional Cracked post that is definitely SFW and funny enough to be worth highlighting here.
And The 5 Strangest Things Evolution Left in Your Body definitely qualifies on both counts.
If you don't believe in evolution, you have to spend a lot of time wondering about the useless shit the creator threw into our bodies. Why don't our wisdom teeth fit in our heads? Why do we need an appendix?
The answer is that evolution is a sloppy and haphazard process. Take a close look at your body and you'll see some of the leftover junk. Like...
In descending order:
Goosebumps…
jdupuis | September 9, 2010That's the question Eugene Wallingford asks in a recent post at his blog, Knowing and Doing.
If you studied computer science, did your undergrad alma mater or your graduate school have a CS culture? Did any of your professors offer a coherent picture of CS as a serious intellectual discipline, worthy of study independent of specific technologies and languages?
In graduate school, my advisor and I talked philosophically about CS, artificial intelligence, and knowledge in a way that stoked my interest in computing as a coherent discipline. A few of my colleagues shared our interests, but many…
jdupuis | September 9, 2010
Has the Future of the Internet come about?
A virtual counter-revolution: The internet has been a great unifier of people, companies and online networks. Powerful forces are threatening to balkanise it
How a watch works (via)
On Wikipedia, Cultural Patrimony, and Historiography (via)
Institutional repositories and digital preservation
The decline of studying: How university students are spending less time hitting the books while earning better grades than ever
Science publishing: the humorous side
Obsolescence in the CS literature and Confronting the Myth of Rapid Obsolescence in Computing…
jdupuis | September 7, 2010Inspired by Bora, but with perhaps a slightly different emphasis.
Eight Strategies for Communicating with Challenging Parents (via)
Why natural history museum collections rock!
How to Write Up Major Results
Get in the goddamn wagon
The All E-Book Diet
A glimpse into the future of the classroom: how the Steelcase node will change the way we teach
Wikipedia for Credit
Cornering the Marketplace of Ideas
Geeky fun: The "sound" of different sorting algorithms
Textbook Publishing vs. Lifelong Learning Publishing
Newly Customized Majors Suit Students With Passions All Their Own
Wikipedia, and the…
jdupuis | September 6, 2010Forty-four or 44 Blues is a fairly well know blues standard and is certain a song that I really love. I was first introduced to it during an Eric Clapton concert a number of years ago, during his From the Cradle tour. It wasn't part of the album, but he did perform it live. It actually took me a while to figure out what the song was and to get a few versions of it. I don't believe it's ever appeared, live or studio versions, on an official Clapton album.
And in the tradition of the One Song I Really Love post I did for Soulshine a while back, I thought I'd give a quickie for 44 for a…
jdupuis | September 3, 2010It seems like everything's dead these days: the Web, our attention spans, Microsoft, Apple, Google, whatever.
Harry McCracken has a nice post summarizing the casualties over at Technologizer: The Tragic Death of Practically Everything:
Wired Editor in Chief Chris Anderson is catching flack for the magazine's current cover story, which declares that the Web is dead. I'm not sure what the controversy is. For years, once-vibrant technologies, products, and companies have been dropping like teenagers in a Freddy Krueger movie. Thank heavens that tech journalists have done such a good job of…
jdupuis | September 2, 2010Peter Brantley has a provocative post up on his blog Shimenawa: Get in the goddamn wagon. It's basically a call to arms -- specifically for younger librarians to seize a greater role in discussing and shaping the future of libraries.
The problem is that a lot of the public, official discussion about the future is restricted to senior administrators -- a huge problem in the insanely hierarchical world of libraries:
I was intrigued when I saw an announcement for an ARL-CNI meeting, "Achieving Strategic Change in Research Libraries", to be held in mid October, because Lord knows this is a good…
jdupuis | September 1, 2010The last little while has seen an amazing proliferation of science blogging communities. Scientopia, Guardian Science Blogs and PLoS Blogs are only the three most recent that I know of.
I think it's great -- the more the merrier I say. Of course, as networks take up more and more space in the science blogging ecosystem it seems to me that independent bloggers might feel isolated or under pressure or neglected some how. I don't think that will be a huge problem as independents will continue to thrive in niches large and small and will continue to draw audiences to what they have to say.…