clock | March 16, 2009Big, big congratulations to Dorothea Salo for getting the richly deserved Advocates-Movers & Shakers 2009 award!!!
As digital repository librarian at the UW-Madison Library, all Dorothea Salo's computer knowledge is self-taught, leading to a "rough and ready" approach to making things work. Steve Lawson, humanities librarian, Colorado College, Colorado Springs, says that Salo's "exhortation to just 'beat things with rocks until they work' has been a source of much inspiration for me."
That same relentlessness extends to Salo's pet cause, open access. "Dorothea is the Cassandra of open…
clock | March 16, 2009Children As Young As Preschoolers Tend To Follow Majority Opinion:
When we are faced with a decision, and we're not sure what to do, usually we'll just go with the majority opinion. When do we begin adopting this strategy of "following the crowd"? In a new report in Psychological Science psychologists Kathleen H. Corriveau, Maria Fusaro, and Paul L. Harris of Harvard University describe experiments suggesting that this tendency starts very early on, around preschool age.
Your Looks, Creditworthiness May Go Hand In Hand, At Least In The Eyes Of Some Lenders:
New research suggests that a person…
clock | March 16, 2009You know I am very interested in the way the Web is changing the workplace, in many instances eliminating the need for having a physical office.
Michael Rosenblum appears to feel the same way about it:
Two years ago, we began a very interesting experiment with a major cable provider.
We built and ran (and continue to run) a hyper-local TV station which is probably the most cost-effective in the country. It's a model for others.
Now, after two years, we are going to start our second one.
When we sat down to do the budgets, the first thing we cut out was the office.
We had an office for the…
clock | March 16, 2009July 24, 2008 presentation by Stephen Schneider for the Stanford University Office of Science Outreach's Summer Science Lecture Series.
Professor Schneider discusses the local, regional, and international actions that are already beginning to address global warming and describe other actions that could be taken, if there were political will to substantially reduce the magnitude of the risks.
The Stanford Summer Science Lecture Series is a set of informal lectures about cutting edge research from four of Stanford's most esteemed professors.
clock | March 15, 2009In Italy for thirty years under the Borgias they had warfare, terror, murder, bloodshed; they produced Michelangelo, Leonardo da Vinci and the Renaissance. In Switzerland they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did they produce? The cuckoo clock!
- Orson Welles, 1915 - 1985
clock | March 15, 2009From SCONC:
Wednesday, March 25
7 p.m.
"Something for the Pain: One Doctor's Account of Life and Death in the ER," a book reading and discussion by author Paul Austin, MD hosted by the American Medical Writers Association, Carolinas Chapter. Austin, a former firefighter who is now an emergency room physician at Durham Regional Hospital, has written "a relentlessly honest look at modern emergency medicine," in the words of Publisher's Weekly. At the Friday Center, UNC-Chapel Hill. Please RSVP by March 18 to Ellen Stoltzfus (estoltzfus@nc.rr.com).
clock | March 15, 2009 20 years ago, Tim Berners-Lee invented the World Wide Web. For his next project, he's building a web for open, linked data that could do for numbers what the Web did for words, pictures, video: unlock our data and reframe the way we use it together.
clock | March 15, 2009You must have been sleeping if you have missed SciCurious' post Friday Weird Science: Condoms and 'Blunt Puncture' the other day. If you missed it - go now and read it.
But, the comment section also produced the idea that Sci should do an anonymous survey of the readers who have experienced condom breakage so she can do the analysis targeting the questions/factors not considered by the original article she blogged aboout, make a cute graph or two, and generally have a good excuse to blog about this topic yet again ;-)
So, now you need to do the survey. A couple of minutes of your time and it'…
clock | March 15, 2009The Giant's Shoulders #9 are now up on The Evilutionary Biologist
Four Stone Hearth #62 is up on Osteologiska föreningen
The 94th Carnival of Space is up on Out of the Cradle
Friday Ark #234 is up on Modulator
clock | March 15, 2009Dave Winer called up Jay Rosen and interviewed him about the potential of twitter-like platforms to become a news/journalistic medium. Listen to the podcast here. Join the discussion here.
Related: What does twitter mean for breaking news stories?
On Thursday morning (US Pacific Time), March 12, 2009, a piece of debris came close enough the International Space Station to require the astronauts to take refuge in the Soyez module, just in case there was a collision. In the end, the debris passed by without incident.
I experienced this event almost entirely through twitter. This essay is to…
clock | March 15, 2009Archy continues to post snippets of his research on the history of the discoveries and descriptions of mammoths:
The description of the mammoth as a subterranean animal that dies on exposure to surface air is almost identical to that given by the Chinese writer Tung-fang So in the second century BC....
clock | March 15, 2009Andrew Blum in WIRED:
...More than 2 million flights pass over the city every year, most traveling to and from the metropolitan area's three busiest airports: John F. Kennedy, Newark, and LaGuardia. And all that traffic squeezes through a network of aerial routes first laid out for the mail planes of the 1920s. Aircraft are tracked by antiquated, ground-based radar and guided by verbal instructions issued over simplex radios, technology that predates the pocket calculator. The system is extremely safe--no commercial flight has been in a midair collision over the US in 22 years--but, because…
clock | March 15, 20091985 talk by Terry Pratchett:
....One may look in vain for similar widespread evidence of wizards. In addition to the double handful of doubtful practitioners mentioned above, half of whom are more readily identifiable as alchemists or windbags, all I could come up with was some vaguely masonic cults, like the Horseman's Word in East Anglia. Not much for Gandalf in there.
Now you can take the view that of course this is the case, because if there is a dirty end of the stick then women will get it. Anything done by women is automatically downgraded. This is the view widely held -- well, widely…
clock | March 15, 2009Rocketboom interviewed a bunch of young researchers - here is one (check the "related videos" for others):
clock | March 15, 2009Daniel Lemire asks this question when observing a fallacy voiced in an editorial:
.....only a small fraction of the top 100 papers ranked by the number of citations (17 of 100) were published by single authors.....a published paper resulting from collaborative work has a higher chance of attracting more citations.
You can discuss the fallacy if you want, but I am much more interested in the next question that Daniel asks - are solo authors and groups of authors inherently attracted to different kinds of problems, or if solo vs. group dynamics make some projects more conducive for solo work…
clock | March 15, 2009Electronic Journal of Academic and Special Librarianship: The Business of Academic Publishing: A Strategic Analysis of the Academic Journal Publishing Industry and its Impact on the Future of Scholarly Publishing:
Abstract: "Academic libraries cannot pay the regularly escalating subscription prices for scholarly journals. These libraries face a crisis that has continued for many years revealing a commercial system that supports a business model that has become unsustainable. This paper examines the "serials crisis," as it has come to be known, and the economics of the academic journal…
clock | March 14, 2009Time is a wealth of change, but the clock in its parody makes it mere change and no wealth.
- Rabindranath Tagore, 1861 - 1941
clock | March 14, 2009Science Depends on the Diffusion of Knowledge:
According to the National Science Foundation, there are over 2.5 million research workers worldwide, with more than 1.2 million in the U.S. alone.1 If we look at all the articles, reports, emails and conversations that pass between them, we could count billions of knowledge transactions every year. This incredible diffusion of knowledge is the very fabric of science.
Given that the diffusion of knowledge is central to science, it behooves us to see if we can accelerate it. We note that diffusion takes time. Sometimes it takes a long time. Every…
clock | March 14, 2009Timothy Burke: Journalism, Civil Society and 21st Century Reportage:
As the failure of many newspapers looms and public radio cuts its journalistic offerings, the complaint against new media by established journalists gets sharper and sharper. The key rallying cry is that new media can't provide investigative reporting, that it can only piggyback on the work of the mainstream print and radio media, and that when the newspapers go, there goes investigative work and all the civic value it provided.
As a starting point in a conversation about the future, this complaint is much more promising…