jdupuis | April 12, 2010A nice interview with Jimi Hendrix's sister Janie on the Bravewords.com site. It's talking about the latest collection of unreleased Hendrix material to hit the stores, Valleys Of Neptune.
Janie Hendrix: "He's probably laughing."
BraveWords.com: Yeah, he must be laughing, going, "how can I be ruling the rock world..."
Janie Hendrix: "40 years after my death. 'Yes, all right!' Well, it's interesting because, yes, he did have the talent and it seems like he kind of knew in some ways that he didn't have a whole lot of time left here to create what he needed to create, so here we have decades of…
jdupuis | April 9, 2010This is sick, sick stuff. But actually quite funny, really, in a very black humour sort of way.
It's a web comic about the creatures from the Alien films invading the Hundred Acre Wood and basically turning all our most beloved childhood characters into monsters. The comic probably goes on a tad too long, stretching out a rather amusing concept to somewhat pointless length. This is the kind of thing where you have to hit the high points immediately and then run for cover.
There are, however, a couple of really good lines, like, "Suddenly Pooh found himself in the middle of a gastronomic…
jdupuis | April 7, 2010Not me actually, but Joshua Kim on the blog Technology and Learning. Kim's blog is easily the most relevant to libraries of the Inside Higher Ed BlogU stable, even more so than the apparently defunct Keywords from a Librarian which always seemed bizarrely stuck in 1979.
Anyways, Kim's latest piece is 11 Ideas About Which I May Be Wrong, but really should have been titled "11 Things that you're going to have to convince that I'm wrong." While some of the items are a bit narrowly defined and perhaps not too relevant to the library world, I think on most of them he's pretty well right on…
jdupuis | April 3, 2010OK, so Friday Fun a day late.
Anyways, April Fools day was a couple of days ago and I thought that the ScienceBlogs home page was the funniest science-related prank of the day.
So, for those of you that missed the headline and the little story that went with it, here goes:
CERN Scientists Awaken Balrog
When the Large Hadron Collider brought protons up to full speed on Tuesday,
smashing them together at 99 percent the speed of light, the world did not end
as some feared. But disturbing news emerged Thursday morning that CERN
scientists have desperately been trying to cover up a catastrophe of…
jdupuis | April 1, 2010From the news release:
Google to Digitize Lost Library of Alexandria
by Paoli du Flippi
-- posted @ 4/01/2010 12:01:00 AM PT
Today at Google Headquarters in Mountain View, California, Executive Dan Clancy, head of the Google Books project, announced plans to digitize the contents of the Lost Ancient Library of Alexandria.
Initially, some confusion arose among the assembled media representatives, who immediately began to inquire about the details of dealing with the recalcitrant and xenophobic government of Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak. But Mr. Clancy quickly set the press corps straight…
jdupuis | March 31, 2010From the April Communications of the ACM, the Kode Vicious column is on The Data-Structure Canon.
The reader question is:
In most areas of science there are a few basic underlying laws that inform the rest of the study of a given subject. Physics, chemistry, and electrical engineering all have these basic equations. What are the basic equations in computer science? Or is computer science baseless?
In other words, what's the fundamental intellectual basis of computer science? Well, according to KV, it's data structures!
If there were any set of basics that I wanted to hammer into software…
jdupuis | March 30, 2010The second Book Camp TO is coming up in about 6 weeks or so: Saturday, May 15, 2010 from 9:00 AM - 5:00 PM.
Last year's edition was terrific and I'm really looking forward to another great conference.
What's it about?
What: BookCampTO is a free unconference about the future of books, reading, writing and publishing. Ebooks have arrived, and with them great changes are afoot. BoomCampTO 2010 will focus on what happens next, how this big shift to digital is changing different parts of the book business, and how we are adapting. Our focus is not so much on ebooks as everything else.
When:…
jdupuis | March 29, 2010Another list of songs I really love, this time leaning a bit on the heavy side.
I by Black Sabbath (performed by Heaven & Hell). This is one of my favourite Dio-era Sabbath songs, from the underrated Dehumanizer album (Dio/Sabb box set). This sizzling live version is performed by the reformed Dio-era version of the band which is playing and recording under the name Heaven & Hell.
30 Days in the Hole by Gov't Mule. An old Humble Pie song, I like the Gov't Mule version an awful lot, especially the live version on their Live...With a Little Help from Our Friends CD.
Dreaming Neon…
jdupuis | March 26, 2010Wednesday was Ada Lovelace Day!
Ada Lovelace Day is an international day of blogging to celebrate the achievements of women in technology and science.
The first Ada Lovelace Day was held on 24th march 2009 and was a huge success. It attracted nearly 2000 signatories to the pledge and 2000 more people who signed up on Facebook. Over 1200 people added their post URL to the Ada Lovelace Day 2009 mash-up. The day itself was covered by BBC News Channel, BBC.co.uk, Radio 5 Live, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Metro, Computer Weekly, and VNUnet, as well as hundreds of blogs worldwide.
In 2010 Ada…
jdupuis | March 26, 2010Interesting little slideshow article, one that makes you think about the transformation we've seen in the last century or so: The Jobs Of Yesteryear: Obsolete Occupations.
Here's the list -- note that each page in the slideshow has an audio interview with someone that used to do the job in question.
Lector (reads aloud to people while they're working)
Elevator Operator
Copy Boy
Pinsetter (sets up pins in bowling alley)
River Driver (logging)
Iceman
lamplighter (Manually lights street lamps)
Milkman
Switchboard Operator
Typist In A Typist Pool
Typesetter
Telegraph Operator
Actually, lectors…
jdupuis | March 24, 2010Nice article by Delaney J. Kirk and Timothy L. Johnson on Blogs As A Knowledge Management Tool In The Classroom (via).
Based on their experiences in a combined 22 business courses over the past three years, the authors believe that weblogs (blogs) can be used as an effective pedagogical tool to increase efficiency by the professor, enhance participation and engagement in the course by the students, and create a learning community both within and outside the classroom. In this paper they discuss their decision to use blogs as an integral part of their course design to contribute to both…
jdupuis | March 22, 2010For the last little while I've been compiling lists from various media sources giving their choices for the best books of 2009. Some of the lists have been from general media sources, in which case I've just extracted the science-related books. From science publications, I've included most or all of the mentioned titles.
What I'm doing in this post is collating all the books I've mentioned in all those lists and compiling a sort of master list of all the books mentioned three or more times. There were twelve of them and they are listed below.
Some notes/caveats:
These aren't in any way…
jdupuis | March 19, 2010John Scalzi's latest AMC column Why Hollywood Always, Always Gets the Future Wrong is, as usual, very smart and right on target.
And pretty funny too.
Everybody gets the future wrong. It's not just Hollywood or science fiction writers. When it comes to the future, no one knows anything. At the close of the 19th century, British physicist Lord Kelvin declared heavier-than-air flight an impossibility (despite the existence of, you know, birds) and that radio was just a fad. In the '70s, the president of Digital Equipment Corp. voiced doubts that anyone would ever need a personal computer. In…
jdupuis | March 18, 2010I received an email a couple of weeks ago from Daniel Cromer of the Hrenya Research Group located in the Department of Chemical and Biological Engineering at the University of Colorado at Boulder. His group was interested in expanding their online presence and had stumbled up the presentation I'd given a couple of years ago on Academic Blogging: Promoting your Research on the Web. He asked me if I could explore those same ideas in a short presentation to the group.
That was Monday. Sadly, I wasn't able to actually go to Colorado for the presentation -- it was all online using the…
jdupuis | March 17, 2010An interesting and provocative article in The Scientist by Steven Wiley iof the Environmental Molecular Sciences Laboratory, To Join or Not to Join.
The thrust of the article is that scholarly societies are having trouble offering true value to their members in the Internet age, that their business models and even their raisons d'etre are being disrupted.
In years past, the answer was easy because being a member came with tangible benefits, such as inexpensive journals and the ability to submit abstracts to annual meetings. Nowadays, these perks don't seem very important. Most society…
jdupuis | March 15, 2010ISTL is a great resource for those of us in science and technology libraries. I'm happy to report on the tables of contents from the last two issues.
Winter 2010
Evaluation of an Audience Response System in Library Orientations for Engineering Students by Denise A. Brush, Rowan University
Open Access Citation Advantage: An Annotated Bibliography by A. Ben Wagner, University at Buffalo
Information Portals: A New Tool for Teaching Information Literacy Skills by Debra Kolah, Rice University and Michael Fosmire, Purdue University
Are Article Influence Scores Comparable across Scientific…
jdupuis | March 12, 2010Oh, I love The Onion. Oh so funny and yet oh so directly on target.
So funny it hurts. In reference to the Great Buzz Privacy Boondoggle, this is what they have to say: Google Responds To Privacy Concerns With Unsettlingly Specific Apology.
The whole piece is brilliant -- go and read it right away, and I mean you George Smith of 5432 Murray Crescent, Podunk, ON.
"Americans have every right to be angry at us," Google spokesperson Janet Kemper told reporters. "Though perhaps Dale Gilbert should just take a few deep breaths and go sit in his car and relax, like they tell him to do at the anger…
jdupuis | March 11, 2010A big list of 35 titles in various categories: Astronomy, Biography, Biology, Climatology, Environmental Science, Evolution, Geology, Health Sciences, History of Science, Mathematics, Natural History, Neurology, Oceanography, Paleontology, Physics, Psychology, Science, Technology, Zoology.
This particular list that Library Journal does every year is one that I always use for collection development. I'll order pretty well all the books that we don't already have. It's also heartening that a good chunk of the books that we do have were checked out when I checked the other day.
BTW, I may get…
jdupuis | March 9, 2010Yesterday was International Women's Day and since I'm a firm believer in International Better Late Than Never Day, I thought I thought I'd add my little contribution to the celebration. Or at least highlight a great post from someone else.
Computer Scientist Amy Csizmar Dalal's recent blog post Does Barbie's career matter? has some great things to say about the importance of role models and positive examples for girls who might be interested in scientific or technical careers:
I was a somewhat normal (don't laugh too hard) but nerdy kid growing up who loved math and science. And while I had…
jdupuis | March 5, 2010The Huffington Post has a couple of posts featuring the most amazingly beautiful libraries in the world, Part One here and Part Two here.
Here's the text from the two posts:
Times are changing for libraries everywhere. But even as many libraries build their digital collections and amp up their technological offerings, we thought we'd take a step back and show our appreciation for the beauty of many of these vast collections of books. Below are some of the most amazingly beautiful libraries from around the world.
Let us know what you think of these and let us know your favorites.
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