around the web

Occupy was right: capitalism has failed the world Nasa-funded study: industrial civilisation headed for 'irreversible collapse'? In One Stunning Graphic, NASA Shows Us What Climate Change Will Do to Earth by 2099 Exxon Mobil's response to climate change is consummate arrogance We Should Be in a Rage Capitalism simply isn't working and here are the reasons why Paul Krugman: Why We’re in a New Gilded Age Surviving the post-employment economy The Wolf Hunters of Wall Street Revealed: Apple and Google’s wage-fixing cartel involved dozens more companies, over one million employees Tech Workers,…
I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here. Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments. I did a similar compendium about a month ago here. NMC Horizon Report > 2014 Higher Education Edition Technology to the Rescue: Can Technology-Enhanced Education Help Public Flagship Universities Meet Their Challenges? Policy…
Publishing may be a button, but publishing isn’t all we need The Vacuum Shouts Back: Postpublication Peer Review on Social Media bioRxiv: The preprint server for biology Debt, Pensions and Capitalisation: Funding schol comms innovation How to maximise usage of digital collections Librarian, Heal Thyself: A Scholarly Communication Analysis of LIS Journals How to energize scholarship for the digital age Why universities should care about Altmetrics Some Things Last A Long Time (How long does it take to publish a paper) Do blog citations correlate with a higher number of future citations?…
Up to Here With Trolls? This Is What It’s Like To Be a Woman at a Bitcoin Meet-up An Open Letter to Brogrammers So You’ve Got Yourself a Policy. Now What? Technology’s Man Problem Why the ‘Open’ Internet Is So Closed to Women The Brutal Ageism of Tech Years of experience, plenty of talent, completely obsolete
 Silicon Valley’s Youth Problem New Study: Internet Trolls Are Often Machiavellian Sadists Twitter I Love You But You’re Bringing Me Down Something’s Wrong When Sarah’s Quiet The Brogrammer Effect: Women Are a Small (and Shrinking) Share of Computer Workers Hey Silicon Valley! Not every…
As part of the celebrations for Canada's upcomming 150th birthday, the Canadian federal government has released its Digital Canada 150 strategy paper, and while it`s not all bad, at the same time there is not an awful lot to recommend it. Especially considering it was four years in the making. My sense is that its main purpose is for the Harper Conservative government to be able to say it has a digital strategy during the next election campaign in 2015. The most telling thing about the strategy, of course, is which department it originated in: Industry Canada. Not Culture, not Heritage, not…
Yesterday was April Fools' Day, a day I enjoy immensely. I even contribute to the fun every now and then. This year the crop among the science/scholcomm/library community seemed especially strong so I thought I'd share. Science, Nature Team Up on New Journal / Science PeerJ now requires authors to deposit ‘selfies’ in a data repository prior to publication / PeerJ Publish or Perish: Is Publishing the Career it Once Was? / The Scholarly Kitchen Oxford Commas to Perform at ALA Meeting / The Scholarly Kitchen Announcing a better way to measure your value: the Total Impact Score / Impactstory…
I'm always interested in the present and future of libraries. There's a steady stream of reports from various organizations that are broadly relevant to the (mostly academic) library biz but they can be tough to keep track of. I thought I'd aggregate some of those here. Of course I've very likely missed a few, so suggestions are welcome in the comments. Shaping the Future of Monograph Publishing in the Liberal Arts: Results of a survey to Oberlin Group Faculty 2014 Planning Guide for Data Management ECAR Study of Undergraduate Students and Information Technology, 2013 Higher Education's Top-…
Trope or fact? Technology creates more jobs than it destroys Will robots steal our jobs? The humble loom suggests not. The technology and jobs debate raises complex questions Chasing Entertainment Thinking the unthinkable: a library without a catalogue You're not going to read this The OPAC is Dead Concordia rethinking its downtown library Libraries are community assets Think We No Longer Need Libraries? Think Again. Students, faculty decry Penn plan to cut math and science libraries Saving the Library Reference Library Unveils 3D Printers, Is Cooler Than Indigo
I have a son who's in the middle of his second year as a physics undergrad. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog. By necessity and circumstance, the items I've chosen will be influenced by my son's choice of major and my own interest in the usefulness of computational approaches to science and of social media…
Many of my readers may recall that back in October I published a post announcing the Draft Open Access Policy consultation process launched by the Canadian Tri-Councils -- Social Sciences & Humanities Research Council, Natural Sciences & Engineering Research Council and Canadian Institutes of Health Research. The deadline for submissions was December 13th. Since the deadline was just before the holidays I thought it best to wait awhile before compiling all the publicly posted responses. And that was probably a good idea, as many of the responses were published in the new year. I…
Taking a Longer View Why librarianship is difficult and contentious Schism in the Stacks: Is the University Library As We Know It Destined for Extinction? The Future of Libraries: Harvard Students Are Thinking Outside the Box Why piles of bad applications may not portend disaster Silencing, librarianship, and gender: sticking up for stories Making Space for the Silenced A New Year’s Vision of the Future of Libraries as Ebookstores How Users Search the Library from a Single Search Box 5 Futures for Libraries How Netflix Reverse Engineered Hollywood Who needs facts? We appear to be in the Post…
Silicon Valley goes to school – notes on Californian capitalism and the ‘disruption’ of public education The End of Higher Education’s Golden Age The Death Of Expertise Closing Time for the Open Internet Tech Workers, Political Speech and Economic Threat Does Ikea Hold The Secret To The Future Of College? Let’s Be Real: Online Harassment Isn’t ‘Virtual’ For Women Can Pearson Solve the Rubric’s Cube? Who Takes MOOCs? For online higher education, the devil is in the data Making It: Pick up a spot welder and join the revolution Higher Education Is Now Ground Zero For Disruption Stupid Simple…
As is occasionally my habit when a big story breaks, I have gathered together all the relevant documents I could find concerning the recent controversy about the Canadian Conservative government's recent consolidation of the libraries at their Department of Fisheries & Oceans. The consolidation has resulted in severely weeded collections, library closures and staff layoffs. I have more to say on the situation, probably next week, but I thought I'd compile this list first both for the common good and to help me frame my own thoughts. As usual, if you note any errors or omissions in my,…
This is a tale of two companies and a bunch of not-so-innocent bystanders. Both Elsevier and Academia.edu are for-profit companies in the scholarly communications industry. Elsevier is a publisher while Academia.edu is a platform for scholars that, among other things, allows them to post copies of their articles online for all the world to see. Both are trying to make money by adding value within the scholarly communications ecosystem. There is absolutely nothing wrong with that. There is plenty of room within that ecosystem for all kinds of players, both for-profit and non-profit. It's all…
Do Librarians Need Tenure? Depends on Which Ones You Ask. The Hunt Library, Innovation, and Tenure Academic Freedom! Huh! What is It Good For? My Thoughts on Faculty Status for Academic Librarians How Academia Resembles a Drug Gang An Academic Cartel? Women and the Internet in Four Parts: Online and Offline Violence Towards Women; Context Collapse, Architecture, and Plows; Sexytime, Gender Roles, and Credit Where Due; Feminism's Twist Ending The Gendering of Technology Work Academic scattering We Are Not Hypnotized (rejecting the extremes wrt online ed) Libraries in the Time of MOOCs The…
The College Boom Has Peaked The Emergent Academic Proletariat and its Shortchanged Students Why I’m quitting the academy On the Phenomenon of Bullshit Jobs Our great, global cities are turning into vast gated citadels where the elite reproduces itself Dear corporations, we’ll trade you a few cents for a better life MOOCs and Economic Reality When MOOCs profit, who pays? Miami-Dade County Will No Longer Close Any Public Libraries But 169 Librarians Would Lose Jobs, Hours Reduced Rebuilding the world technology destroyed College for Free Blood Money, or How Academia is like The Sopranos A…
Admitting Our Agendas A queer, feminist agenda for libraries: Significance, relevance and power Agendas: Everyone has one I dreamed of a book … Why I'm not waiting for tenure to change the world... Value of Libraries Megapost Librarians, Gender, and Tech: Moving the Conversation Forward Silencing, librarianship, and gender: award hate and the silencing of recognition Public Libraries as Social Innovation Catalysts The private-data-for-services trade fallacy Business Model of the Internet Has Been Surveillance Science and Its Skeptics Why We Are Allowed to Hate Silicon Valley You Can't Get…
I have a son who's starting his second year as a physics undergrad. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog. By necessity and circumstance, the items I've chosen will be influenced by my son's choice of major and my own interest in the usefulness of computational approaches to science and of social media for…
Choosing Real-World Impact Over Impact Factor Practicing Freedom in the Digital Library Dandelions, Prestige, and the Measure of Scholars Programmers insist: “Everybody” does not need to learn to code Digital Decay by Bruce Sterling New York Public Library Rethinks Design CIOs Wear Second Hat (ie. head of small colleges libraries too) Can't Buy Us Love: The Declining Importance of Library Books and the Rising Importance of Special Collections A New Polemic: Libraries, MOOCs, and the Pedagogical Landscape Ethical reflections on MOOC-making (Rebecca Kukla) Why Teach English? Learning Styles:…
I have a son who's starting his second year as a physics undergrad. As you can imagine, I occasionally pass along a link or two to him pointing to stuff on the web I think he might find particularly interesting or useful. Thinking on that fact, I surmised that perhaps other science students might find those links interesting or useful as well. Hence, this series of posts here on the blog. By necessity and circumstance, the items I've chosen will be influenced by my son's choice of major and my own interest in the usefulness of computational approaches to science and of social media for…