Social Media
jdupuis | July 22, 2010A great article in last Friday's Globe and Mail, Will the last bookstore please turn out the lights?
The main thrust of the article is that while there's a lot of doom and gloom in the industry, there's also some hope and, more importantly, some innovation.
One source of Bleumer's optimism is the "ferocious" level of reading she sees going on among young people. Those ferocious readers will be the regular book buyers of the future. What stores need to do, she insists, is not only focus on old-fashioned face-to-face customer service, but also remain flexible enough to adapt to whatever comes…
jdupuis | July 12, 2010For now, at least.
My natural inclinations about this whole mess are probably closest in nature to either Chad Orzel's or Jason Rosenhouse's, so reading them will probably give you a pretty close idea of where I stand. Bora, not surprisingly, has collected a lot of the reaction.
I also really like what Christie Wilcox has to say:
Let me make it clear, though - I don't blame anyone for leaving. I don't hold it against them. While I may not have had the same visceral reaction they did, I also haven't been here that long. I haven't dealt with this kind of mismanagement and gotten fed up about…
emjohnson | July 11, 2010Three years ago I didn't even know what science blogging was. Frustrated as a freelance writer, I typed "science blog" into my search engine and was thrilled when this network showed up first on the list. Here was a community of researchers and writers whose love of learning and the sharing of knowledge was communicated on a daily (and sometimes hourly) basis. After spending much of the day reading through posts by GrrlScientist, PZ, Bora, Carl, Chris and Sheril as well as John and Afarensis I was hooked. I made a decision right then and there that I would write for ScienceBlogs. I…
jdupuis | July 7, 2010So, PepsiCo has started up a new blog here on ScienceBlogs called Food Frontiers.
From the profile:
PepsiCo's R&D Leadership Team discusses the science behind the food industry's role in addressing global public health challenges. This is an extension of PepsiCo's own Food Frontiers blog.
This blog is sponsored by PepisCo. All editorial content is written by PepsiCo's scientists or scientists invited by PepsiCo and/or ScienceBlogs. All posts carry a byline above the fold indicating the scientist's affiliation and conflicts of interest.
From the introductory post:
On behalf of the team…
emjohnson | July 6, 2010At ScienceBlogs we value our independence. Just consider the recent posts over the laughable PepsiCo nutrition blog to see how seriously people take this. But one thing that would never happen is for anything we write to be edited without our consent.
As I wrote yesterday, I am disappointed in the Huffington Post's decision to grant a public stage to David Klinghoffer, Senior Fellow at the intelligent design "think tank" known as the Discovery Institute. DI is a self-avowed propaganda vehicle seeking to "wedge" religion into public schools. Once HuffPo handed him the megaphone…
jdupuis | July 6, 2010Nice article by Vit Wagner in Sunday's Toronto Star, Tough times, but some bookstores have a different story.
A couple of different independent bookstore owners/managers in the Toronto area talk about some of the challenges faced in surviving and even thriving in what should be a period of death and decline for bricks and mortar bookstores.
But while some of the competition is retrenching or worse, BakkaPhoenix, which recorded a double-digit increase in sales last year, is expanding. In stark contrast to the recently shuttered This Ain't the Rosedale Library, BakkaPhoenix is readying a fall…
jdupuis | June 21, 2010Yes, that David Gilmour.
Anyways, there was a post on Gilmour's blog a few months ago that provoked quite a little storm: Chopping up albums.
Basically, the point Gilmour makes is that many albums are really meant to be listened to as a whole and shouldn't be split into individual tracks at record companies' whims. Read the whole thing to get the full sense of his argument, but I think the excerpt below gives a good sense:
I'll go first: Blood on the Tracks' frenetic 'Lily, Rosemary and the Jack of Hearts' by Bob Dylan. There, I said it. (Forgive me, Bob.) More often than not, it gives me an…
jdupuis | June 16, 2010Last week I was at the Canadian Engineering Education Association Inaugural Conference in Kingston. It was a great conference and a very auspicious beginning for this very new organization. I have a summary post in the works which I hope to have up fairly soon.
I presented the above titled paper on Monday afternoon, June 7th. It went pretty well -- I was part of a session with a couple of other librarian presentations so it was mostly just us librarians. However, there were several faculty members present and I did get a couple of nice comments about the presentation later on in the…
jdupuis | June 11, 2010Priceless, just priceless.
PALO ALTO, CA--All 1,472 employees of Facebook, Inc. reportedly burst out in uncontrollable laughter Wednesday following Albuquerque resident Jason Herrick's attempts to protect his personal information from exploitation on the social-networking site. "Look, he's clicking 'Friends Only' for his e-mail address. Like that's going to make a difference!" howled infrastructure manager Evan Hollingsworth, tears streaming down his face, to several of his doubled-over coworkers. "Oh, sure, by all means, Jason, 'delete' that photo. Man, this is so rich." According to…
jdupuis | June 3, 2010A cautionary tale from Cory Doctorow in his most recent Locus column, Persistence Pays Parasites.
My friend Katherine Myronuk once told me, "All complex ecosystems have parasites." She was talking about spam and malware (these days they're often the same thing) and other undesirable critters on the net. It's one of the smartest things anyone's ever said to me about the net - and about the world. If there's a niche, a parasite will fill it. There's a reason the cells of the organisms that live in your body outnumber your own by 100 to one. And every complex system has unfilled niches. The only…
jdupuis | May 31, 2010For your reading and collection development pleasure:
137: Jung, Pauli, and the Pursuit of a Scientific Obsession by Arthur I. Miller
"The history is fascinating, as are the insights into the personalities of these great thinkers."--New Scientist Is there a number at the root of the universe? A primal number that everything in the world hinges on? This question exercised many great minds of the twentieth century, among them the groundbreaking physicist Wolfgang Pauli and the famous psychoanalyst Carl Jung. Their obsession with the power of certain numbers--including 137, which describes the…
jdupuis | May 21, 2010Funniest. Onion. Article. Ever.
New Social Networking Site Changing The Way Oh, Christ, Forget It: Let Someone Else Report On This Bullshit
Virtually every line is laugh-out-loud funny.
According to sources we feel really, really sorry for, Foursquare works by allowing users to "check in" from their present location, whether it be a bar, restaurant, nearby magazine stand, or man, this piece would be perfect to hand over to that schmuck Dan Fletcher at Time magazine right about now.
By "checking in," users can earn tangible, real-world rewards. For instance, the Foursquare user with the most…
kcollins | May 20, 2010
Now THIS is what I was writing about in my last post about how YOU can help the science festival. Monty Harper tweets about the festival (@montyharper), submitted a jingle into the festival contest, writes about the festival on his blog born to do science, publisizes the festival by sporting one of our t-shirts AND he is even going to be performing at the Festival in the Fall!! Thanks MONTY for getting the word out about the USA Science and Engineering Festival in so many ways!
From his blog Born to do Science
USA Science and Engineering Festival Theme Song
I'm really excited about this,…
kcollins | May 20, 2010Promethean Planet is also using social media like I was discussing in a recent post about how YOU can help the science festival. They also tweet about the festival regularly @planet_tweets if you want to follow them. Thanks Promethean Planet for helping promote the festival and the Kavli Video contest
Check out one of their most recent promotions of the Kavli Video Contest on their Website:
Science is fun! New festival and video contest
USA Science & Engineering Festival As educators, we are constantly encouraging our students to "think outside the box" and "test out their theories," but…
kcollins | May 18, 2010I am going to make a little confession here, I love science and I really love working for the USA Science and Engineering festival. Why? I am passionate about getting science into our culture in a hands-on way and making people say: wow...science is cool AND fun.But one thing I have found about working for the Festival in its inaugural year, not everyone is aware of the festival and I want to change that.
Do YOU love science? Do YOU use social media? Are YOU interested in helping the USA Science and Engineering festival? You CAN in a variety of different ways. Check this video out first.
As…
jdupuis | May 13, 2010By some strange coincidence given yesterday's post, this post on Raising your internal profile as an academic liaison librarian by Emma Woods came across my Twitter feed this morning.
As part of a task and ï¬nish group on internal marketing of academic liaison librarians at the University of Westminster, I posted a message to a couple of JISCmail lists to see what other librarians do in this respect. As ever, I was delighted by the number of responses I received and the amount of interest there is on this topic.
In the current ï¬nancial climate where every penny counts, raising our internal…
jdupuis | May 4, 2010That's the title of the short article I have in our most recent York Libraries Faculty Newsletter. It's a rejigged version for faculty of the two posts I did a while back on the blog I use for IL sessions, here and here. I'll be doing a more formal report on the IL blog at an upcoming conference, but that's for another post.
A lot of the newsletter is of local interest only, but there are a couple of articles that will have a broader appeal:
Information Literacy and Peer Tutors in the Classroom
Research Study on Perceptions of IL
It's also worth pointing out the short profile of Toni…
jdupuis | April 14, 2010From Twitter, here's the announcement:
Have you ever sent out a "tweet" on the popular Twitter social media service? Congratulations: Your 140 characters or less will now be housed in the Library of Congress.
That's right. Every public tweet, ever, since Twitter's inception in March 2006, will be archived digitally at the Library of Congress. That's a LOT of tweets, by the way: Twitter processes more than 50 million tweets every day, with the total numbering in the billions.
We thought it fitting to give the initial heads-up to the Twitter community itself via our own feed @librarycongress. (…
jdupuis | April 14, 2010This is one of those books that I just seemed to argue with constantly while I was reading it. You know, "Hey, you, book, you're just plain wrong about this!"
But, as much as I argued with it, as much as I wanted all of the main points to be wrong, as much as I disagreed with many of the details, by the end I grudgingly accepted that Chris Anderson's Free: The Future of a Radical Price might just have a few very valid things to say about the way the economics of online content is evolving.
This is the Google generation, and they're grown up online simply assuming that everythng digital is…
emjohnson | April 11, 2010
In his recent TED Talk Sam Harris, author of The End of Faith and Letter To A Christian Nation argues that science can and should be used to address moral issues. His newest book, The Moral Landscape: How Science Can Determine Human Values, will be published in October, 2010.
For more see Sam Harris, Franics Collins, and the NIH, The Feeling of What Happens, and the debate with Michael Shermer, Deepak Chopra, and Jean Houston Does God Have A Future?