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Giant Mucus Blobs Increasing

National Geographic reports on a new consequence of global climate change: giant, mucus-like sea blobs.  They've been around for a while, actually, but now there are more of them.  style="display: inline;"> This is from the on-line article, href="http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2009/10/091008-giant-sea-mucus-blobs.html">Giant, Mucus-Like Sea Blobs on the Rise, Pose Danger.  The danger comes from the fact that these blobs harbor bacteria: The study team discovered that the blobs are hot spots for viruses and bacteria, including the deadly E. coli. Coastal communities…

On VP Choice, Obama Plans to Use Email and Text to Tell Supporters Before the Media

Will Joe Biden get the VP nod from Obama? Obama is expected to announce his VP choice in the next 24 to 36 hours and the selection won't be unveiled by way of the usual media leak followed by a press conference. Instead, in a sign of Obama's new model of campaigning, the digitally networked candidate plans to first announce the selection by way of early morning e-mails and text messages to his millions of online supporters and then to take advantage of a full day's news cycle of coverage. This type of "special access" granted to his digital network is a novel and easy way to reinforce the…

Why does Tim Worstall hate corrections?

Instead of correcting his erroneous post Tim Worstall has put up another post coming out against corrections. This time it's about an inaccurate textbook. Can you pass the test at the book's online study centre? Question 16. True or False? Worstall claims that book is accurate, offering this interesting argument: But many other problems are much less clear-cut. Science doesn't know how bad the green-house effect is." Indeed this is so. Climate sensitivity (how much warming from a doubling of atmospheric CO2) is the most important unknown at present. The IPCC thinks somewhere from 2…

Behe: spanked again

Behe's ideas have been rejected by his colleagues; it seems those ideas were also the subject of a public forum at his university, with essays on the issue available online. During the fall semester, a Chaplain's Forum held on campus to offer differing perspectives on the contentious issue drew a standing-room-only crowd. The six faculty members who participated addressed the implications of intelligent design for science and for religion. This series of essays, which grew out of the Lehigh forum, is intended to shed light on an issue that all too often engenders only heat. Behe's essay is…

Adapting-In-Place Guest Post Week 3

M. is due with her baby any minute now, so at some point there may be a hiatus, but for now, she's got a lot to say about what her family is thinking about.  You can read her bio here. This week I did some very hard work for this class.  I have to admit, it wasn't anything exactly on the homework, but there is a hard decision my family needs to make and this class has allowed me to approach it from a new angle and I think opened up the discussion more between me and my husband. Basically, we have to decide whether to stay in Maryland, where we have a lot of friends, a pleasant house and…

When Cheap Food Isn't Cheap

The Miami-Herald is reporting today that food stamp use has more than doubled among Floridians in the last three years: More than 2.5 million Floridians are on food stamps, up from three years ago where 1.2 million residents received assistance. That's according to records kept by the Department of Children and Families, which administers the program. DCF Secretary George Sheldon told the South Florida Sun-Sentinel Tuesday that Florida's food stamp rolls grew the fastest in the nation since 2007. Some of this is due to increased efforts on the part of states to expand access, but it is also,…

The Amazing Meeting 5.5, Plantation, FL

I wrote this last night in Florida, but the hotel wifi was on the blink, so I couldn't get it on-line. I am now at Newark airport in New Jersey, having just eaten my first bowl of matzoh soup. Oy vey, good stuff! Audience frowning in concentration I've been to gaming conventions and academic conferences and recently my first blogging convention, and now I've experienced my first skeptics' convention: The Amazing Meeting 5.5, a 1.5-day mini-con hosted by the Amazing Randi himself. James Randi demonstrating Geller-like powers Friday offered a solid four-hour round-robin lecture on podcasting…

Distracted at #scio2010

I am going against the herd here at ScienceOnline 2010 — I am not tweeting and blogging throughout the event, but am just sitting back and enjoying the talks, while all the nerds are pounding away at their keyboards. (Note sneaky implication that I am not a nerd with the rest of 'em.) However, I did just do my interview with Reddit, so it's all recorded and done with and merely awaiting editing and publishing. It will probably be available online on Tuesday — be patient, I'll put up a link when it is available. I will remind you also that tonight at 9pm EST I'll be helping to raise money for…

Teaching the Mad Biologist

Someone is using a post from this blog for a course. The ongoing corruption of the youth of America continues.... I noticed links from this website, which is an online syllabus for a course on digital curation. The course seems interesting (even if the description is written in that jargony, coursebook way): Digital curation focuses on the active and on-going management of digital artifacts through their lifecycle, particularly by maintaining and adding value to a trusted body of digital information for current and future use. Curation activities and policies enable data discovery and…

Lights! Camera! Evolution!

The National Center for Science Education (NCSE) is expanding its on-line video presence with its new YouTube channel! Here you'll find reports from the evolution/creationism wars -- footage of contentious testimony, landmark and illuminating speeches, conference coverage, excerpts from television appearances, and presentations. In the future, look for classroom videos, tutorials for teachers, videos contributed by NCSE members, and much more. When you visit the NCSE YouTube channel, check out a couple of key areas. At top right you'll see the latest, hot video. (In this case, executive…

Around the Web: Librarians and change, Amazon self-destructing

Change Rhetoric: Good and Bad Three challenges: Engaging, rightscaling and innovating Time for a little dissent To Be Or Not To Be A Library Director How to Answer “So You Need a Degree to Do That?” Putting Things in Perspective Here’s how Amazon self-destructs Amazon vs. your public library Small Pieces Loosely Kludged: Peer Review and Publication in Math Scholarly Communication The Awesomest 7-Year Postdoc or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Tenure-Track Faculty Life If We Share Data, Will Anyone Use Them? Data Sharing and Reuse in the Long Tail of Science and Technology…

EMBL Online Symposium: No travel costs! Attend for free!

The EMBL graduate students have organized an ingenious conference titled: Life Sciences - Shaping the Future. Learn about Omics and Systems Biology from speakers like Leroy Hood, Stuart Kim, and Ronald Krause (and more). Explore options for career development, and learn how you can join the Web 2.0 science revolution in the session on scientific communication. The conference will take place Dec. 4th-8th, 2006. Don't worry if you don't have a plane ticket or a place to stay, you're virtually there. How? It's all on-line. Some of you might be wondering how a virtual conference works. 1…

Newsflash! Mercola bemoans ignorance of Americans! Offers to help for only $25/month!

I'm off to the west coast (of Michigan) for a few days, and if I don't blog, I shall die...or something. So I have a few posts from my old blog to share with you. This is rich. This is really rich. Mercola is speaking out against the one thing that keeps him in business: the scientific illiteracy and credulity of Americans. He bemoans ignorance that leads to beliefs such as "the Sun revolves around the Earth", or the bird flu panic. Then, presumably with a straight face, he invites you to join his "inner circle", further perpetuating ignorance, and relieving you of the inconvenience carrying…

Misc. link-lovin', and an appeal

A bit busy today, so I'll direct you elsewhere for some good reading. First, afarensis is thinking about re-naming his blog Aetiology Jr. after writing another post on bacterial meta-genomics in the sea; Mike discusses the Republican War on Epidemiology; John has more about the candiru I mentioned here, and Joseph revisits probiotics. Second, as mentioned, an appeal. Some of you who are Panda's Thumb readers may remember this post from November, mentioning the death of Allan Glenn (aka "WinAce" from Wonderful World of WinAce). If you've not seen that site before, check it out--it's…

Open Science Proposal

Cameron Neylon is putting together a proposal for a UK research council to fund a network with the general theme of 'e-science enabling open science'. The network would fund meetings and travel with the specific aim of driving the open (notebook) science agenda forward. Cameron explains this in a couple of blog posts that I urge you to read: E-science for open science - an EPSRC research network proposal, Follow on to network proposal and The research network proposal - update II. The proposal would be to support 2-3 meetings over three years, including travel costs, and provide funds for…

SEED Magazine Sponsors a Writing Contest

Do you have opinions about the future of science in the USA? What does that future look like? What should the role of science be in America and how is your vision different from today's reality? What should America do to preserve its role as a leader in scientific innovation? I know that many of you, dear readers, are good writers and that you think deeply about these and other topics, so now you have the chance to share your opinions with the editors and readers of SEED Magazine. Seed Magazine is pleased to announce its first annual science writing contest. This contest is now accepting…

Looking for a summer internship? Like environmental microbiology?

The 2009 Summer Research Experience for Undergraduates in Environmental Microbiology at UNLV is now accepting applications. This NSF supported program provides undergraduates with an opportunity to perform independent research under the guidance of a faculty mentor. Students will collaborate with faculty mentors in developing and carrying out hypothesis-based projects on microorganisms from diverse habitats such as hot springs, the deep terrestrial subsurface, hypersaline lakes, arid soils, and ephemeral water sources. Students may also choose to explore the mechanisms of magnetotaxis,…

Fornvännen's Summer Issue On-Line

A teenage boy carved this imagery, along with some lines of runic script copied from a book, onto a Viking Period whetstone he found in a Sigtuna spoil dump. Read it all on-line, Open Access! Lars Larsson presents some Late Palaeolithic antler artefacts from Scania. Olle Andersson makes and tests lots and lots of spearheads to investigate how the Iron Age ones found at Uppåkra got all bent and curled up. Helmer Gustavson announces the confession of the man who faked the Sigtuna runic whetstone, and looks at how scholars have dealt with this strange object in their writings. Timo Salminen…

More Surveillance Authority Overreach

Not only do they want to know every single phone call you've ever made, they also want to know every single webpage you've ever visited: The Justice Department is asking Internet companies to keep records on the Web-surfing activities of their customers to aid law enforcement, and may propose legislation to force them to do so. The director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation, Robert S. Mueller III, and Attorney General Alberto R. Gonzales held a meeting in Washington last Friday where they offered a general proposal on record-keeping to a group of senior executives from Internet companies…

(OT) US Press - growing a spine?

This is not directly climate related, but it does pertain to the media and its abject failure to take its responsibilities towards democracy more seriously.  Via The Huffington Post, I read these strong words from an angry press towards a secretive Whitehouse Administration: Speaking on behalf of the White House Correspondents Association, I can say a broad cross section of our members from print, radio, online and TV have today expressed extreme frustration to me about having absolutely no access to the President of the United States this entire weekend. There is a very simple but important…

A workshop on transitioning back into academia

The ADVANCE Center for Institutional Change received an award from the National Science Foundation ADVANCE program to hold professional development workshops for Ph.D.-level women in industry, research labs, consulting, or national labs who are interested in transitioning to academic careers in STEM. The first workshop will be held October 18-20, 2009 in Seattle. A recent press release about the workshops is at: http://uwnews.org/uweek/article.aspx?id=49062 The workshop speakers will primarily be successful women faculty members who began their post-Ph.D. careers in industry, research labs…

Open Access Talk

Last week, before I headed to my current location in the land of Coca Cola and the Cartoon Network (the hotel is so nice here that when my friend stopped outside so that I could drop my bags off, the concierge asked him if he wanted would like some water while he waited), I attended a very inspirational talk on open access by Jonathan Eisen. The video is now available online (lecture 2.) Well worth watching as it was a good talk laying out the case for open access to research journals (which Eisen makes sure to delineate from open science. Say the word open science, I guess, and some…

warm waters = smaller fish

Image of yellowfin tuna via Wikimedia Commons. I love fishing. As with every fisherman, I have my fair share of "the one that got away" stories steeped in *mostly* truth. So, you can imagine my interest in reading research that shows fish appear to be shrinking in warming waters. Warm waters carry less oxygen, which makes it difficult for fish to breath...especially larger fish. Metabolism is also higher in fish living in warm waters. Higher metabolism means the fish need more oxygen. The gills of fish are responsible for extracting oxygen from water and when they reach their maximum…

Avoid racists wearing 'intellectual' garb

[via Times Online] Dr Watson, co-discoverer of the structure of DNA and author of "Avoid Boring People", says that he was "inherently gloomy about the prospect of Africa" because "all our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really.". He said he hoped that everyone was equal, but countered that "people who have to deal with black employees find this not true". Did he really say that? Sheesh. Here's a sensible response to that from the same article Commenting on Dr Watson's current views about race, Steven Rose, a…

Would You Like To Stretch Your Donors Choose Dollars?

I know I would. So how do you do that? Well, Seed Media Group will help you by matching your donation. The first $15,000 in donations made through the Scienceblogs Challenge will be matched by Seed Media Group through its Science Literacy Grants. From the press release: Seed Media Group is launching the Seed Media Group Science Literacy Grants, a commitment valued at $100,000 through a combination of cash (matching contributions of funds raised on its online community site Scienceblogs) and in-kind advertising (in its print magazine Seed and on Scienceblogs). Today, science affects every…

Friday Sprog Blogging (bonus reader participation issue): circus detectives.

Yesterday, the Free-Ride family visited Circus World. It was a full day, and we're still working on digesting the experience, but there were some animal performers that made an impression, including dogs, a pony, a camel, and an elephant. This put us in mind of our visit with Bora last July to the Circus exhibit at the Lawrence Hall of Science. That exhibit featured specimens (simulated and odorless) of droppings from various animals that have been part of traveling circuses. And here's where the reader participation comes in. For each of the following dung samples, (1) what is the animal…

New Year's Eve gabfest.

If I were not involved in preparing food for Casa Free-Ride's New Year's Eve celebration (after which, I will be joining my family members to celebrate and/or test our endurance in the face of fatigue -- I'll let you know afterward which of those it ends up being), I would totally be writing you a nice ethics-y and/or science-y post. Since I'm not, and since you appear to have a moment to be reading this, let's make it a party. Use the comments to share: What you're doing (or have done) to ring in 2010 What you're eating and/or drinking as part of your celebration Your hopes, fears, goals,…

Friday Sprog Blogging: Santa and science.

Other kids may be convinced that Santa Claus uses some kind of Christmas magic to get the job done. Not the Free-Ride offspring. They have told me that obviously, Santa is putting his trust in science. (And also technology. But the holidays are no time for ugly spats about disciplinary boundaries.) From the younger Free-Ride offspring: Santa needed to do research, of course, to work out the details of flying reindeer. Apparently, much of this was online research. (Also, it looks like Santa uses a MacBook.) From the elder Free-Ride offspring, two items science relies on: The elastic in…

Art and Human Evolution at the Black Dog Cafe

Please join Abbi Allan and me at the black Dog Cafe next Tuesday. Art and Human Evolution - June 14, 2011 6:30 p.m. to 8:30 p.m. Are humans the only creatures who create art? At what point in human evolution did artistic creations become separate from tools, become art for arts' sake? What in us is so driven to create? Dr. Greg Laden is a biological anthropologist who has done research in human evolution as well as eco-tourism in South Africa. In his own words: "I think of myself as a biologist who focuses on humans (past and present) and who uses archaeology as one of the tools of the trade…

Share This Online, 334 Ways!

Enthralled by the power of online social networking and search engines to advance my research projects and feed my insatiable appetite for information, I was under the impression that things were more or less under control. I was wrong. It began innocently, with tentative explorations into Twitter feeds and Facebook pages from professional organizations, then expanded into LinkedIn. Whenever I find a new article of interest to my friends and colleagues, my instinct is to share with them, in the hope that they will learn from it and possibly use it in their work. As a scientist doing…

Dot-Mac Security Issue

Warning to Mac Users: Security Flaw with .Mac: "The de facto online connectivity software sold along with many Apple computers, .Mac, has a Web interface through which users can check their 'iDisk' while away from their own computer. However, there is no Log-Out button in this Web interface, so most users just close the browser and walk away... not realizing that their iDisk has been cached by the browser and that anyone who wants to can open up the browser, go back to the link in History, and get into their iDisk completely logged in. From here, files can be downloaded and/or deleted. This…

And Sometimes You Luck Out

From Science Online... In April 2006, Maya Tolstoy, a geophysicist at Columbia University, received some good news and some bad news during a research expedition at sea. The submarine volcano that she and her colleague Felix Waldhauser had been monitoring for years had recently erupted. This was exciting, because only a handful of other deep-sea eruptions have been detected (1), and it was the first time ocean-bottom seismometers were in place during such an event. However, two-thirds of the instruments were stuck in the new lava on the sea floor (see the figure). Would the remaining third…

Richard Dawkins, The Economist & bylines

The Economist has a review up of a book about Richard Dawkins' influence, The Selfish Genius: How Richard Dawkins Rewrote Darwin's Legacy. But it would really be nice to know who wrote something like this: Her argument that the selfish-gene model is being superseded by other forms of evolutionary explanation relies on an overinterpretation of those alternatives. In disputed areas of science perspective matters, and who someone is is a critical part of the information in judging their argument. I'm assuming this book review was written by someone who knows some evolutionary biology, in fact,…

How to make your own robot

Want to make your own robot? You can do this the easy way, or you can do this the hard way. Or, both, if you like. The basic home made robot is a robot because it moves around, and the way that is usually achieved is with two independently powered wheels, a third wheel (or something) to balance the thing, an energy source, some logic circuitry, some sensors, and some sort of remote control. You can learn how all these technologies work, buy the various parts, put them together, program it, and have your own robot. Or, you can just get one of these guys, and you're nearly done. The robot…

ScienceOnline2010 - interview with Jack, Staten Island Academy student

Continuing with the tradition from last two years, I will occasionally post interviews with some of the participants of the ScienceOnline2010 conference that was held in the Research Triangle Park, NC back in January. See all the interviews in this series here. You can check out previous years' interviews as well: 2008 and 2009. Today, I asked Jack from Miss Baker's Biology class at Staten Island Academy, to answer a few questions. Jack wrote about his experience at ScienceOnline2010 here and wrote a blog post about video/computer games here. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you,…

Manley: Climate and the British Scene

From the department for historical research. I happened to be in the Oxfam bookshop trying to empty our house, when I looked down and saw this in the pile of new arrivals. It hadn't been priced but they took a fiver for it, which seems fair enough. Its a very British-meteorologist book, you can practically see him puffing on his pipe as he writes it. I am, of course, going to skip over all the nice climate and weather stuff, and look at the climate change, much to his dismay. Manley factoid: he is buried in Coton churchyard. You can read a few pages I've uploaded if you like, but you're…

The Real Threat to the Humanities

Among the side effects of all the asinine hand-wringing over the phony problem of “scientism” is that it distracts attention from the real threat facing the humanities. I am referring to the corporate mindset that has come to dominate many aspects of higher education. That threat is on full display in the current fracas at the University of Virginia, where the Board ousted the popular President, basically because she wasn't moving fast enough to gut the humanities. HuffPo has a useful run-down: Members of the board, steeped in a culture of corporate jargon and buzzy management theories,…

Deflategate: The Final Chapter

The low-level cold I've been nursing for a month now finally exploded into the full unpleasantness of my usual winter illness Saturday, or else I would've been more active following up on my Deflategate article and my ideal gas law post. As it was, for most of the day, I could barely keep on top of clearing comments from moderation. Anyway, a few things deserve more prominent responses than a comment at the end of a long post, so: -- I was in bed during the great Bill Belichick press conference, though I saw some mockery of it come across Twitter. While it may not have played well with the…

Poultry Addicts of the World, Unite!

"It is soooo hard to wait, Mom!" Isaiah is seven years old and when you are seven, uncertainty is torture. He asks me when the mail will get here 20 times a day, and can he go out and wait for the mail truck? I point out that it is 4 degrees F out there, and the mail won't be here for three hours, but he and his youngest brother still go out until the cold drives them back. What's he waiting for? Not birthday presents or toys, he's waiting for the Murray McMurray hatchery catalog to come in the mail. Isaiah, you see, is a poultry addict, and his addiction is all my fault. Last year we…

From the Archives: E-Science, Science 2.0, Open Science

During my summer blogging break, I thought I'd repost of few of my "greatest hits" from my old blog, just so you all wouldn't miss me so much. This one is from September 3, 2008. There was some nice discussion on Friendfeed that's worth checking out. ===== Some recent posts that got me thinking about various escience/science 2.0/open science issues: First, Christina gets us rolling with some definitions: So I'm asking and proposing that e-science is grid computing - using distributed computing power to do new computational methods in other areas of science (not in CS but in Astro, in bio,…

Social media evangelism

It's that time of the year. Spots for ScienceOnline are a hotter commodity than Justin Bieber concert tickets amongst the pre-teen crowd; The Open Laboratory 2011 has just come out in print; and academics are discussing the utility of social media in full force. This topic has long been an interest of mine; with Shelley Batts and Nick Anthis, I even wrote a peer-reviewed paper on the topic way back in 2008. And it's fresh on my mind, as last week I braved the world of the University of Iowa's Internal Medicine Grand Rounds to discuss "Social Media and Medicine," evangelizing for social media…

ScienceOnline'09: Interview with Miriam Goldstein

The series of interviews with some of the participants of the 2008 Science Blogging Conference was quite popular, so I decided to do the same thing again this year, posting interviews with some of the people who attended ScienceOnline'09 back in January. Today, I asked Miriam Goldstein of the Oyster's Garter blog to answer a few questions. Welcome to A Blog Around The Clock. Would you, please, tell my readers a little bit more about yourself? Who are you? What is your (scientific) background? I am a graduate student at the Scripps Institution of Oceanography in La Jolla, California. I write…

Sidr hearsay blogging

Just talked to my mother today and she phoned relatives in Dhaka. Everything is OK, electricity is coming back online. She seemed dismissive of the idea when I asked if it was all well in the rural areas where some of my distant relatives live; it wasn't that big of a deal. On the other hand a cousin married a man whose family is from Barisal. Her husband went to check out the situation (family has estates and properties around the Sundbarbans) which was in the path of the storm, and it wasn't as pretty there as everything had been blasted away and tossed around. The main aim of my call…

Around the Web: The device wars, Feudalism knowledge, The wrong kind of Open Access and more

Seniors, Women Embracing Tablets, E-Readers Open access to scientific knowledge and feudalism knowledge: Is there a connection? I Got the Wrong Request from the Wrong Journal to Review the Wrong Piece. The Wrong kind of Open Access Apparently, Something Wrong with this Inherently... Do More, Own Less: A Grand Theory of the Sharing Economy Now Can We All Agree That The "High Quality Web Content" Experiment Has Failed? A way forward on reformatting conferences Five Hard Truths About Blogging Social Media - Oversold and Undervalued Collections are library assets The Internet of things will…

Blogrolling: G

Let's keep moving down the alphabet. Let me know what is missing from this list... Galactic Interactions The Geek Counterpoint Gene Expression Genesalive - another science blog Genetics and Health The Geomblog German Joys Get Busy Livin', or Get Busy Bloggin' Getting Real (Over Coffee) Getting Things Done in Academia Gingerivers Girl with a one-track mind Girl in the Locker Room! Give Up Blog Global Voices Online Glorfindel of Gondolin The Glory of Carniola GNIF Brain Blogger God is for Suckers! Good Math, Bad Math (old) Good Math, Bad Math (new) Graduate Students Grand Rounds Gray Falcon…

An Innovative Use of Twitter: monitoring fish catch! Now published.

A few months ago, I posted about a very innovative way of using Twitter in science - monitoring fish catch by commercial fishermen. The first phase of the study is now complete and the results are published in the journal Marine and Coastal Fisheries: Dynamics, Management, and Ecosystem Science 2009; 1: 143-154: Description and Initial Evaluation of a Text Message Based Reporting Method for Marine Recreational Anglers (PDF) by M. Scott Baker Jr. and Ian Oeschger. It is relatively short and easy to read, so I recommend you take a look. The next phase will continue with the program, with…

Welcome to EveryONE

EveryONE? What's that? It is the new PLoS ONE community blog: Why a blog and why now? As of March 2009, PLoS ONE, the peer-reviewed open-access journal for all scientific and medical research, has published over 5,000 articles, representing the work of over 30,000 authors and co-authors, and receives over 160,000 unique visitors per month. That's a good sized online community and we thought it was about time that you had a blog to call your own. This blog is for authors who have published with us and for users who haven't and it contains something for everyone. Just launched, this blog will…

US attacks ... Syria?

Obviously a careful anti-insurgent action, not likely an invasion of Syria. People online think of it as a possible October Surprise. But I think that that at this point, no matter what the GOP tries to do will be only seen as a gimmick to help McCain. Any attempt at an October Surprise by them will be seen as such and will backfire. And I think they realize this. Thus, I don't think this has anything to do with the election, but the military identified with 100% certainty a post, just inside the Syria-Iraq border, from where insurgents organized their attacks, targeted them precisely,…

Strikes a chord....

Mathematician Cracks Mystery Beatles Chord: It's the most famous chord in rock 'n' roll, an instantly recognizable twang rolling through the open strings on George Harrison's 12-string Rickenbacker. It evokes a Pavlovian response from music fans as they sing along to the refrain that follows: It's been a hard day's night And I've been working like a dog The opening chord to A Hard Day's Night is also famous because for 40 years, no one quite knew exactly what chord Harrison was playing. Musicians, scholars and amateur guitar players alike had all come up with their own theories, but it took a…

Triangle Research Libraries Network Launches New Search Function

From the Library Journal: The Triangle Research Libraries Network (TRLN) pioneered the nation's first consortial online catalog back in the 1980s, and this week, took that legacy a step further with the launch of "Search TRLN", which officials say adds "next-generation search capabilities" to the consortium's combined collection of 16 million volumes. Search TRLN, is a new single-interface discovery tool, enabling users to search across the entire collections of the four member institutions: Duke University, North Carolina Central University, North Carolina State University, and the…