Confessions of a Science Librarian

Best Science Books 2007: Royal Society Prize Short List

2008-05-22T16:40:00.003-04:00

The short list for the The Royal Society's annual prize for science books is announced here.

A Life Decoded by J. Craig Venter
Coral: A pessimist in paradise by Steve Jones
Gut Feelings: The intelligence of the unconscious by Gerd Gigerenzer
Six Degrees: Our future on a hotter planet by Mark Lynas
The Sun Kings: The unexpected tragedy of Richard Carrington and the tale of how modern astronomy began by Stuart Clark
Why Beauty is Truth: The history of symmetry by Ian Stewart

Google Scholar and the future of A&I databases

2008-05-22T16:00:00.000-04:00

This is a bit of a "told you so" post inspired by something I saw on Open Access News the other day: Google indexes 90% of recent engineering research. The post mentions a recent article in the The Journal of Academic Librarianship, May 2008: John J. Meiera and Thomas W. Conkling, Google Scholar’s Coverage of the Engineering Literature: An Empirical Study. The abstract says it all:

Google Scholar’s coverage of the engineering literature is analyzed by comparing its contents with those of Compendex, the premier engineering database. Records retrieved from Compendex were searched in Google Scholar, and a decade by decade comparison was done from the 1950s through 2007. The results show that the percentage of records appearing in Google Scholar increased over time, approaching a 90 percent matching rate for materials published after 1990.

My first Google Scholar post was way back in 2004 and I think what I said then is just as valid today:

Winners & losers:
Loser: the A&I industry. Big time. Google Scholar is free, their products are definately not. Can they add enough value to the data they have to make it worth our (ie. libraries) while to subscribe to their services? No one's cancelling all those indexes this year, or even next, but what about five years from now? The key here is adding value. Google's product will be one-size-fits-all, always a bit overwhelming. Also, it will be probably be limiting itself to stuff online-only. Will Google get the metadata for journal backruns that aren't online and refer users to their local academic library?

Winner: students. Big time. Students want to use simple interfaces, easy searches with highly relevant results. If Google can deliver that with this product like with their regular search engine, this will be a hugely popular tool amongst students.

Loser: non-OA journals. More and more, if a journal's content is not online for free, it will not exist for the new generation of scholars. Why use journal A behind some weird pay-money-or-else screen when journal B has their articles right here. I know that you can get to A via your friendly neighbourhood proxy server/academic library, but really, at 3 am with the paper due tomorrow and the student doesn't even know where the library is on campus, that's not going to happen. Also, anyone not afiliated with a subscribing institution will automatically choose B. It's only a matter of time before Google puts a "Free full text only" check box on the screen. Open Access will mean survival for journals in the Google world. Not this year, not next year, but maybe in five or ten.

Winner: academic libraries & librarians. Yes. We're winners. Think of what this could do for our budgets! Finally we can demo tools in the classroom that the students will think are relevant! No more blank stares & sneers! But seriously, the advantages of basically using one interface are huge in terms of teaching students how to get the most out of their search experience. Google will continue to be overwhelming for many and confusing to some, so we will still have the role of helping students navigate. Oh yeah, we'll actually be able to spend more time on concepts like critical thinking, scholarly communication and all those information literacy standards we talk about but rarely have time to actually teach.

Loser: vendors of federated searching products. One search is here. This is it. The real challenge, of course, will be figuring out how to get link resolver products like SFX to work with Google Academic. Also, for us Ontario universities, all our content is on a central server. How do we get our students using Google Scholar to find the content on our platform rather than automatically going to the publisher's site. An interesting challenge.

Winner: the general public all over the world. Obviously, this will bring together a lot of information and make it accessible to everyone. As more and more stuff becomes OA, more and more scholarly content will become easily accessible to everyone. This is a good thing.

Musings on the future of A&I indexes also played a very important part of my My Job in 10 Years series, with a whole post devoted to the issue -- one of my all-time most read posts, if that has any meaning. I won't quote here, but my main point was that in a Google Scholar world, A&I providers will have to struggle to figure out how to add enough value to the bibliographic, citation and indexing data to make it worth our while as librarians to license those databases. The evidence from the study cited above would seem to indicate that we're getting closer to the day where we can start doing other things with that money. Sure, there's still quite a few cases where the vendors add tons of value to the data (SciFinder, Illustrata, Web of Science...), but for how much longer is it going to be worth the huge investment on our part. Personally, I'd much rather be spending the money on acquiring full text content, digitizing our own unique collections and new services to reach out to our patrons.

Some of the places I've talked about this (and related issues) before:

Toronto Rising...on Nature Nework?

2008-05-20T20:29:00.003-04:00

Thanks for Larry Moran for pointing me to this article on the surprising concentration of biotech research in Toronto.

When the University of Toronto managed to lure chemical geneticist Guri Giaever away from Stanford University two years ago, part of the inducement was a new, bigger lab, and part was a prestigious government-funded research chair. But the biggest factor in the move, Giaever says, was the colleagues with whom she would be working. "In terms of what I'm doing, I would pretty much say hands down that Toronto is the best place in the world," she says.

Canadian scientists and administrators welcome such adulation. With the much bigger and richer United States to the south, Canada has often been preoccupied with a brain drain, as the brightest minds sought greater rewards at one of its neighbour's institutions. Increasingly, though, the country's biggest city, Toronto, is celebrating a 'brain gain' as it succeeds in attracting top researchers, often to work at brand new research centres. Federal and provincial efforts that began a decade ago are helping to attract high-calibre researchers and putting them in charge of long-term, 'big science' projects, according to researchers and business development officials. The new policies are an attempt to build on Toronto's impressive existing research infrastructure.

No more than a brief mention for York, unfortunately, a hazard that comes with being far outside the city centre, even though we do have a biotech institute.

Now, given the incredible concentration of life sciences researchers that this all entails, you'd think Toronto would have more of a presence on Nature Network!

As it happens, NN is looking to open up more fully fledged Hub Cities, adding to London and Boston. People can "vote" for their city by changing the city & (potential) hub in their own NN profiles. Corie Lok explains on this SciBarCamp forum posting (more info). So if you're a Toronto life sciences person (or any scitech person), go on over to Nature Network and create yourself a profile, sign up for a hub and get Hogtown wired into Science 2.0. The Toronto "potential hub" is pretty sparse so far.

Update 2008.05.21: Matt Brown has more. It seems that after 24 hours of the new potential hubs feature, Toronto is actually right up there with Berlin!

Tapscott, Don and Anthony D. Williams. Wikinomics: How mass collaboration changes everything. New York: Portfolio, 2006. 295pp.

2008-05-18T14:34:00.000-04:00

It seems that at least half the time I mention this book to someone interested in the way the web is changing social patterns the response is, "Oh, I tried to read it but just couldn't finish." It's an interesting response in many ways, one that tells us a lot about this book. Mostly it tells us that we're dealing with a seriously flawed book, one that has a lot of very interesting ideas in it, but that the presentation leaves a bit to be desired.

Personally, it did indeed take me a long time to read this book, at least a couple of months, reading a chapter here and there and putting it down for weeks at a time before taking it up again. It also took me a long time to get around to writing this review; I finished the book in the fall and I'm only just writing this now in May.

The topic? The affects of the sharing and collaboration promoted by web 2.0 technologies and how they will affect mainly businesses, but also other parts of society. Blogs, wikis, recommendation systems, user-generated comments, copyright, intellectual property, all the regular stuff. Interestingly, though, this was one of the first books to really tackle these issues and bring them to wide attention in the business community.

The issues? Typically of hype-oriented business strategy books, many of the claims seem wildly over-inflated and unsupported by facts or reality. The book is also incredibly repetitive, seemingly so that each paragraph, page or chapter could stand on its own. It's a strategy I see in a lot of business books: assuming that the reader has an incredibly short attention span and wants to get the main point just from reading a few pages or a chapter or two. At the same time, of course, no one's going to pay hardcover prices for a couple of chapters. So, just repeat and rephrase the main points constantly in each chapter. I find it kind of scary that there's a new expanded edition that's just gone on sale.

The book also overplays a lot of its points -- a lot of times I thought there was a bit of almost naivite involved, that the authors couldn't see the downside of some of the ideas they promoted. Globalization, deskilling, "race to the bottom," glorification of CEOs and top executives, the 100:10:1 phenomenon in online communities, a certain disdain for anything not new, hip or cool. An unawareness of the potential for tragedies of the commons in some of the areas. The idea that what are currently fringe activities are inevitably going to become dominant in the mainstream. The authors only spent very scant and almost dismissive attention to the human cost of economic paradigm shifts.

Frustrating, yes. On the other hand, there are a lot of good reasons to stick it out and read the whole book. It does make a lot of very good points about the benefits of openness and sharing for businesses and organizations of all types and sizes. There were actually many times while reading the book that I thought that if I could give one single book to every faculty member at my institution, this would be it. It so completely encompasses what is best about the web's ability to break down barriers and promote sharing and collaboration (not necessarily primary virtues in academia) that it would be interesting to see the effects of 1200+ faculty members all reading it together. This book is really a call to action for sharing and collaboration.

Read this book, the chapter on sharing and collaboration in eScience/Science 2.0 is very good. Be persistent and you'll make it all the way through. Read it, argue, engage and debate.

Friday Fun: Books & Beer

2008-05-16T14:27:00.000-04:00

Will it be a lite beer with that Star Trek novel, sir?

Check out Jeff VanderMeer's two part series exploring beer & book combos:

For a long time, I’ve wondered why wine and food should have all the fun. Here at Omnivoracious, we also believe in the complementary pairing of books with...beer. Now, please note that we’re not advocating irresponsible reading, but with the current popularity of micro-breweries and the role of beer in the writing of books over the centuries, it seems somehow irresponsible not to pair the two. We’re frankly a little surprised no one’s done it before.

Thus, I took it upon myself to explore the connection between hops and writing chops, going far afield to ask a diverse group of writers what beer or beers would go best with their latest work. The results were so revelatory and comprehensive that we’re running the first half of this feature today and the second half on Thursday...

Lots of comments on both posts, so they're well worth checking out.

Michael Swanwick is one of my favourite writers and Guinness is pretty well my favourite beer, so one of the suggested pairings is nirvana for me:

Michael Swanwick (The Dragons of Babel) and Daniel Abraham (A Betrayal in Winter) both recommended Guinness, Wise Old Man of Beers, Swanwick “because it's the favored draught of storytellers” and Abraham as the perfect ending for the book, after “starting off with a dark ale.” Swanwick’s selection of Guinness, he said, must include the reader picturing “me standing with an elbow on the bar and the glass in my hand, saying, ‘Listen. There once was a boy who loved dragons, and suffered because of it, but learned better...’” Abraham was also emphatic on beer purity: “nothing with funny flavors in it. No blackberries or raisins or any of that.”

And I heartily agree with Abraham about those weird fruity beers.

(Via via Lisnews.)

IEEE Trans on Education: Special issue on plagiarism

2008-05-16T14:00:00.000-04:00

The latest issue of the IEEE Transactions on Education (v51i2) has a special section on plagiarism. A bunch of the articles look very interesting, both to scitech faculty and to librarians looking to collaborate with those faculty. I haven't read the articles in detail yet, so I'm not sure if librar* are mentioned in any of them.

Here's the relevant parts of the TOC:

Guest Editorial: Plagiarism by Kaynak, O.; Braun, R.; Kennedy, I.
The Plagiarism Decision Process: The Role of Pressure and Rationalization by McCuen, R. H.
On Students' Strategy-Preferences for Managing Difficult Course Work by Jian, H.-L.; Sandnes, F. E.; Huang, Y.-P.; Cai, L.; Law, K. M. Y.
A Technological Tool to Detect Plagiarized Projects in Microsoft Access by McCart, J. A.; Jarman, J.
Detection of Plagiarism in Programming Assignments by Rosales, F.; Garcia, A.; Rodriguez, S.; Pedraza, J. L.; Mendez, R.; Nieto, M. M.
A Cautionary Note on Checking Software Engineering Papers for Plagiarism by Kaner, C.; Fiedler, R. L.
A Longitudinal Study of Nonoriginal Content in Final-Year Computing Undergraduate Projects by Culwin, F.
Towards a Definition of Source-Code Plagiarism by Cosma, G.; Joy, M.
Avoiding Plagiarism in Contexts of Development and Change by Beute, N.; van Aswegen, E. S.; Winberg, C.
Faculty and Student Classroom Influences on Academic Dishonesty by Broeckelman-Post, M. A.
A Consideration of the Use of Plagiarism Tools for Automated Student Assessment by Graven, O. H.; MacKinnon, L. M.

Ok, this could be expensive

2008-05-15T16:23:00.002-04:00

The Chess & Math Association is moving their Toronto store from about a 15 minute walk from my house to, literally, right around the corner.

The Chess'n Math Association established in Toronto in 1993. After 15 years on Bayview, and a recent change in landlords, we were forced to look for a new location for our retail outlet - Strategy Games - as our rent was about to double...

We have now signed a 5-year lease nearby at 701 Mt. Pleasant Rd. (South of Eglinton and opposite Sobeys). Cutomers will find parking to be better than on Bayview and this new location is also within easy walking distance of the subway. Lessons and school administration will continue at 1650 Bayview for the next few months.

Our lease at 1683 Bayview expires June 30th but if all goes well we expect to start operating out of Mt. Pleasant on or around June 20th.

We would like to thank everyone for their support over the years and we hope you will visit us at our new location.

Sincerely,

Larry Bevand
Executive Director
Chess'n Math Association

York to the Power of 50: Chair in E-Librarianship created

2008-05-15T11:42:00.003-04:00

The official announcement is today. The search process hasn't started yet (and I'm not sure if the time line is established yet on the search), but if it's the kind of thing you might be interested in, put your thinking cap on for a project. This is an amazing opportunity and a real step forward for us and really for librarianship.

A $1-million gift to York University through the York University Foundation from the family of William Pearson Scott is helping York create a new kind of library for the digital age.

The gift from Michael Scott, his wife Janet and their family, matched by the University, will create the W.P. Scott Chair in E-Librarianship, tasked with researching the innovations and implications of new developments in computing and information technologies. This extends to exploring areas such as e-learning, digital collections, collaborative Web spaces, social software, and interactive and integrative online services and information. The Chair will develop real-world services and programs for York University Libraries, ultimately benefiting students, faculty and the larger community.

"This is an exciting opportunity for all York's Faculties," says York President & Vice-Chancellor Mamdouh Shoukri. "A Chair in E-Librarianship will attract leading academics internationally and advance teaching and research well into the future."

"It's an unparalleled opportunity for York to lead Canadian innovation in this important area of learning," says University Librarian Cynthia Archer. "In fact this is the only Chair of its kind in Canada." The Chair will evolve quickly as technology does. The establishment of the Chair also supports York to the Power of 50, the University's fundraising campaign – already at more than $150 million in pledges or three quarters of the way toward its $200-million goal.

The interdisciplinary research possibilities for the W.P. Scott Chair in E-Librarianship are wide-ranging in scope. Specific projects could include advancing student engagement by incorporating such applications as Facebook, blogs, wikis and RSS feeds; exploring the provision of electronic books online for children in the developing world; establishing a presence in Second Life, an online virtual world inhabited by millions of "residents"; taking part in anthropological studies of students in a wired library; reviewing emerging economic models for electronic publishing; and creating and enhancing virtual research communities where scholars around the world can collaborate on common projects.

"The Internet has produced learning opportunities never before thought possible. Today's students and scholars are digitally savvy and want information to come to them – on demand," says Archer. "Ultimately, technology is transforming not only the way libraries operate, but universities as well. We must respond to the way today's students research and learn."

The Scott family was excited about the forward-looking nature of the project and felt naming the Chair was both a fitting tribute to the late William Pearson Scott and a way to continue his pioneering support of York.

William Pearson Scott – Pete Scott to friends and family – was one of the first members of the York University Board of Governors in 1959 and served as the chair of the board from 1966 to 1971. Never having attended university himself, Scott was one of York's greatest supporters during its formative years, also serving as the chairman of the finance committee. He spent most of his career with Wood Gundy. In the First World War, he was a lieutenant in the Royal Flying Corps Special Reserve. During his life, he was also actively involved with the Toronto Arts Foundation, Stratford Festival, Toronto Board of Trade, United Community Fund, Toronto General Hospital and Wellesley Hospital. He was conferred with an honorary doctorate of laws (LLD) from York in 1971; and both the Scott Library and the Scott Religious Centre are named in his honour. Last year, a renovated room on the third floor of the Scott Library was named the W.P. Scott Study Room in recognition of a generous gift from the W.P. Scott Charitable Foundation.

For more information, visit the York University Foundation Web site.

Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship, Winter-Spring 2008

2008-05-15T11:28:00.003-04:00

Lots of very interesting articles in the Winter-Spring ISTL.

Library Research Skills: A Needs Assessment for Graduate Student Workshops by Kristin Hoffmann, Fred Antwi-Nsiah, Vivian Feng, and Meagan Stanley, The University of Western Ontario
...As a first step, we conducted a needs assessment study via focus groups and an online survey. The study looked at graduate student perceptions of their library research needs, their preferences for learning about library research, and the appropriateness of a common instruction program for students in these disciplines. We found that graduate students wanted to learn about strategies for finding information, bibliographic management tools such as RefWorks, and tools for keeping current with scholarly literature. Students preferred online instruction, although in-person workshops were also found to be valuable. Students in all four faculties identified common information literacy needs, while expressing a desire for subject-specific instruction.
Providing Information Literacy Instruction to Graduate Students through Literature Review Workshops by Hannah Gascho Rempel, Oregon State University and Jeanne Davidson, Arizona State University
As future professionals, graduate students must be information literate; however, information literacy instruction of graduate students is often neglected. To address this need, we created literature review workshops to serve graduate students from a wide range of subject disciplines at a point of shared need. Not only did this strategy prove to be successful in reaching a large number of students from a wide range of subject disciplines, the data gathered from the students identified some of the gaps graduate students have in their knowledge about library services.
Evolution of Reference: A New Service Model for Science and Engineering Libraries by Marianne Stowell Bracke, Purdue University, Sainath Chinnaswamy, University of Arizona, and Elizabeth Kline, University of Arizona
...In a time of shrinking budgets and changing user behavior the library was forced to rethink it reference services to be cost effective and provide quality service at the same time. The new model required consolidating different service points, i.e., circulation desk, photocopy desk, and reference desk into one central location to be staffed by library associates. First we performed a financial analysis and determined the cost per hour of the existing staffing model. This was followed by logging questions at different service points to understand the type of questions asked at different locations. This data-drive approach also uses a robust referral system where complex reference questions are referred to individual subject librarians. We performed Action Gap Surveys to measure customer satisfaction levels before and after we employed the model...
Does Chemistry Content in a State Electronic Library Meet the Needs of Smaller Academic Institutions and Companies?
by Meghan Lafferty, University of Minnesota, Twin Cities
Smaller academic institutions and companies are not always able to afford access to Chemical Abstracts, the major source for the chemical literature, via SciFinder, SciFinder Scholar, or STN. In Minnesota, as in many other states, citizens do have access to a suite of interdisciplinary databases that offer some coverage of the chemical literature. I examined the coverage dates, document types, full-text availability, impact factor, publishers, and searchability and indexing of the chemistry-related content of Academic Search Premier and Business Source Premier which index academic and trade publications. A number of key journals in the field are indexed in the databases, but coverage does not go back very far. For this reason, I would not recommend it for undergraduates. The length of coverage may not be as important in industry as their needs are different.

Also highly appreciated are Ibironke Lawal's review of Scholarship in the Digital Age: Information, Infrastructure, and the Internet and Bob Michaelson laying the smackdown on the The American Chemical Society and Open Access:

If the ACS is to be a party to discussions of OA, they must stop getting their policy advice from PR flacks and start making rational contributions to the discourse. Otherwise they will continue to poison the waters, and deservedly will be accorded no credence.

To which there is really nothing to add.

Books I'd like to read

2008-05-12T14:55:00.002-04:00

The first highlighted book is one I'm definitely going to read, because I already bought my copy this past Saturday. It's Canada's Fifty Years in Space by Gordon Shepherd and Agnes Kruchio. This one has a York connection as Gordon Shepherd is a long-time York faculty member and director of York's Centre for Research in Earth and Space Science. It was launched as part of the York activities for Science Rendezvous.

Canada's Fifty Years in Space by Gordon Shepherd and Agnes Kruchio

International space science began suddenly with the creation of COSPAR (Committee on Space Research) in October, 1958, and its first plenary meeting was held in London, in November the same year. Canada was at the table for both the creation and the first plenary meeting. Canada's Fifty Years in Space describes the parallel growth of the Canadian space science program from that date up to the 50th Anniversary of COSPAR, to be celebrated in Montreal in July, 2008...

The final achievement of the fifty years is a Canadian-built lidar that is part of the NASA Phoenix mission and is on its way to Mars, destined to land there in May, 2008. This work is about these missions over the fifty years, but also about the people who built them, launched them, captured the data and published the scientific results.

Hackerteen Volume 1: Internet Blackout By Marcelo Marques

This engaging graphic novel probes the modern online world where an increasing number of middle school- and high school-aged kids spend their time. Hackerteen teaches young readers about basic computing and Internet topics, including the potential for victimization. The book is also ideal for parents and teachers who want their children and students to understand the risks of using the Internet and the proper ways to behave online.

Note: My sons will love this one! (Ok, I'll love it too)

Illustrated Guide to Home Chemistry Experiments: All Lab, No Lecture by Robert Bruce Thompson

For students, DIY hobbyists, and science buffs, who can no longer get real chemistry sets, this one-of-a-kind guide explains how to set up and use a home chemistry lab, with step-by-step instructions for conducting experiments in basic chemistry. Learn how to smelt copper, purify alcohol, synthesize rayon, test for drugs and poisons, and much more. The book includes lessons on how to equip your home chemistry lab, master laboratory skills, and work safely in your lab, along with 17 hands-on chapters that include multiple laboratory sessions.

Microcosm: E. coli and the New Science of Life by Carl Zimmer

What is life? Can we make it from scratch? Are there rules that all living things must obey? Can there be life without death? Biologists today are seeking answers to these fundamental questions about life. Few people know that many of those answers may reside in a species of bacteria that live in our guts: E. coli.

In this startlingly original biography of a germ, Carl Zimmer traces E. coli's pivotal role in the history of biology, from the discovery of DNA to the latest advances in biotechnology. Zimmer describes the remarkably sophisticated strategies E. coli uses to stay alive, from practicing chemical warfare to building microbial cities. He reveals the many surprising and alarming parallels between E. coli's life and our own. Zimmer describes the profound insights E. coli has offered about evolution, by changing in real time and by revealing billions of years of history encoded in its genome. E. coli is also the most engineered species on Earth, and as scientists retool this microbe to produce life-saving drugs and clean fuel, they are discovering just how far the definition of life can be stretched.

Microcosm is the first full story of the one species on Earth scientists know best. It is also the story of life itself, of its rules, its mysteries, and its future.

IFLA 2008 Satellite Conference: Science Policies and Science Portals

2008-05-09T14:54:00.002-04:00

Via Julia Gelfand:

The 2008 IFLA World Library and Information Congress Annual Meeting will be held in Quebec City, August 10-14, 2008. Information about the programs and conference are on the IFLA website at http://www.ifla.org/IV/ifla74/index.htm. The Science and Technology Section is co-hosting a satellite pre-conference in Montreal at the Polytechnique Montreal on Friday, August 8 on "Science Policies and Science Portals: Progress and Activity From Around the World."

Registration is open at http://lib.tkk.fi/ifla/IFLA_Science_Portals/registration.html and the cost is 40 Euros.

This one-day program will address the ways in which national governments and organizations are dealing with the issues and challenges in disseminating scientific information created in the public sphere to meet the needs of the global community. The various portals that have been implemented and the policies that have been put in place will support the roles of the science and technology librarians around the world. The portals affect their ability to provide efficient and comprehensive access to important sources of scientific information.

Keynote speakers include:

Dr. Howard Alper. Chair, Canada Science, Technology and Innovation Council
Mr. Thomas Lahr. Chief Biologist for Information, United States Geological Survey Biological Informatics Office and Co-Chair, Science.gov Alliance.
Wrap-Up: Mr. Richard Akerman. Technology Architect, Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (CISTI).

The program is sponsored by the IFLA Science and Technology Libraries Section (STS) and the Government Information & Official Publications Section (GIOPS).

If you have any questions, please contact Julia Gelfand (jgelfand@uci.edu), Applied Sciences & Engineering Librarian, UC Irvine

Space and beyond: Science Rendezvous at York

2008-05-09T14:15:00.000-04:00

Post updated: Science Rendezvous is tomorrow!

Once again, if you're in Toronto on Saturday May 10th, there's a whole bunch of science-y events at various institutions, including York. The York events will be concentrating on Space Science & Engineering. The event is called Science Rendezvous. The York events are at the Keele campus Lots of info in today's Y-File article.

York University will throw open the doors of its space science and engineering facilities to hundreds of future astronauts on Saturday, May 10. York is participating in Science Rendezvous, a new full day event that is free and open to the public. During Science Rendezvous, leading science and technology institutes, including York, will offer free tours, events, demonstrations and lectures. Participants can register for the day and pick up a program in the lobby of the Computer Science & Engineering Building. Registration opens at 12:30pm.

"York University's event will be very unique," says Elissa Strome, research officer for the Faculty of Science & Engineering. "We are opening the doors to our world-renowned space science and engineering facilites to showcase them to Canada's future astronauts and space scientists."

York-specific information here.

More-or-less cross posted from the CSE blog.

One Big Library registrations: Get 'em while they're hot!

2008-05-07T15:02:00.003-04:00

Just an FYI for the undecideds out there. As of right now we're at 84 registered attendees. We'll be implementing a waiting list once we get beyond 90.

We're genuinely sorry to have to do that, but it's really because of space limitations at our venue. We really had no idea that registration would fill up so fast.

Blog about a classic (computer) science paper

2008-05-07T14:20:00.003-04:00

Via Bora Zivkovic, Skulls in the Stars is challenging science bloggers to pick a classic paper in their fields and blog about it:

My “challenge”, for those sciencebloggers who choose to accept it, is this: read and research an old, classic scientific paper and write a blog post about it. I recommend choosing something pre- World War II, as that was the era of hand-crafted, “in your basement”-style science. There’s a lot to learn not only about the ingenuity of researchers in an era when materials were not readily available, but also about the problems and concerns of scientists of that era, often things we take for granted now!

Now, SitS specifies pre-WWII which probably won't work so well for disciplines like computer science so I'm sure people in new disciplines can just improvise with a foundational paper from a more recent time frame.

I'm hoping that some of the computer scientists out there can take this challenge and talk about some of the important papers from their fields. In particular, I can see this as being a useful classroom exercise as well.

In any case, to get the creative juices flowing, I'd like to point out that Wikipedia has a List of Important Publications in Computer Science page.

A couple that jump out at me that would be fun to see blogged:

A mathematical theory of communication by Claude E. Shannon
Go To Statement Considered Harmful by E.W. Dijkstra
The UNIX Time-Sharing System by Dennis M. Ritchie and Ken Thompson
A relational model for large shared data banks by E. F. Codd (not OA)
Treatise on the Enigma by Alan Turing
Computing machinery and intelligence by Alan Turing
A Protocol for Packet Network Interconnection by by Vint Cerf, Bob Kahn
As We May Think by Vannevar Bush
The FORTRAN Automatic Coding System by John Backus et al.

Update: In the comments, Bora points out that SitS has updated the challenge:

Now that I’ve actually written my “classic science” blog post, I realized I didn’t plan any way to compile all the entries in the end! If you accept the “challenge” (I keep putting the word in quotes because I don’t want to sound like I’m trying to be confrontational), and post an entry, send me an email! I’ve put together a permanent page to compile all the entries together in one easy to find spot.

(I think I didn’t plan ahead because I didn’t think anyone was actually reading my blog!) :)

One final note: Just to have an end date associated with the challenge, let’s mark the end of May as the official end date; I’ll do a summary post at the end about everyone’s entries.

Reseach questions on Open Access

2008-05-06T16:39:00.003-04:00

Via the indefatigable Peter Suber, check out the brand new Open Access Directory Wiki, which has lists on everything you could possibly want to know OA:

Welcome to the Open Access Directory (OAD), a compendium of simple factual lists about open access (OA) to science and scholarship, maintained by the OA community at large. By bringing many OA-related lists together in one place, OAD will make it easier for users, especially newcomers, to discover them and use them for reference. The easier they are to maintain and discover, the more effectively they can spread useful, accurate information about OA.

The goal is for the OA community itself to enlarge and correct the lists with little intervention from the editors or editorial board. For quality control, we limit editing privileges to registered users. We welcome your contributions to our lists, ideas for new lists, and comments to help us improve OAD. Please contact us or use the discussion tab. We expect a lot of traffic during our launch phase and please understand if we cannot get to all of the messages right away.

A great and worthy project, one which I support completely. If you know something worth sharing in the wiki, please contribute!

The thing I most wanted to draw attention to today is the list of OA Research Questions that need people to work on them. There's a ton of them, enough to keep us all working for a very long time.

To give a taste, here's the very first one in the list, in the Access category:

Publishers often assert that all or most of those who need access to peer-reviewed journal literature already have access. Who doesn't have access? What kinds of people don't have access and how well can we measure their numbers?
It's important to separate lay readers without access from professional researchers (in the academy, industry, and the professions) without access. Among professional researchers without access, it would help to classify by country and field.

It's also important to distinguish demand for access from people without access. Some of those without access may not care to have it. How well can we measure the demand for access among those who don't currently have it?

Can we redo the estimates annually in order to have a moving measurement of our progress in closing the access gap and meeting the unmet demand?

There's also a companion list of Research in Progress, which is a bit sparse right now. If you're doing OA-related research, it would be a great idea to share what you're doing with colleagues.

Chapman, Matthew. 40 Days and 40 Nights. New York: Collins, 2007. 288pp.

2008-05-04T23:05:00.000-04:00

Full title: 40 Days and 40 Nights: Darwin, Intelligent Design, God, Oxycontin, and Other Oddities on Trial in Pennsylvania. (Post title field isn't big enough.)

This is a loosely connected sequel to Matthew Chapman's previous book, Trials of the monkey: An accidental memoir in which he revisited the famous Scopes Monkey Trial of the 1920s. That was a great book, interweaving as it did Chapman's own colourful life story with the story of the trial as well as his visit to the original Tennessee town where it took place, Dayton.

40 Days and 40 Nights, on the other hand, is Chapman's chronicle of the latest battle between creationists and the reality-based community in the US -- the Dover, PA trial of 2005.

Chapman uses some of the same strategies in the Dover as he did in the first book on the Scopes Trial. He tells the story of the trial as a story about people: the lawyers, the defendants, the townspeople, the media. And a colourful lot they were, making those aspects of the book very entertaining and compelling. The weakness of the book is related to those colourful characters -- the chronicle of the trial itself never really seemed to come alive for me in the same way that his telling of the Scopes trial did.

It was also a bit of a disjointed narrative, switching back and forth between more character-based sections and trial description that just didn't work for me as well as the first book. Perhaps the thing that I missed the most was Chapman's own story. In the Scopes book, Chapman was everywhere, it was his story as much as Dayton's or William Jennings Bryan's or Clarence Darrow's. 40 Days and 40 Nights needed to be more of a personal story, to engage me on a personal rather level rather than just as a spectator at at a car crash.

Overall, however, it is a pretty good book, one that I would recommend for any public library and any academic library that collects popular science.

One Big Library Unconference: Filling up fast!

2008-05-03T11:46:00.006-04:00

Sitting here at my computer at around noon on Saturday, May 3rd the registration for the One Big Library stands at 61. We're planning to cap it at around 80, due to the size of our venue. Overall, I have to say that I'm pleasantly surprised by the speed that the registrations have been flowing it. It shows that there's a terrific interest in our concept.

The variety of people that have registered is also gratifying. We have people coming from a good cross section of Ontario post-secondary institutions as well as from public, school and other libraries. Not to mention a good number of recent grads from various library schools. We also have a few of people from outside the library world too.

The breadth of topics and sessions that have been proposed is also very encouraging for the event itself. As is the reaction so far around the web.

Which brings me to Walt Crawford's post.

And there’s something about it that bothers me. Namely, the premise as stated in that first paragraph.

Sorry, but I don’t buy it as a reality or as a desirable future. I don’t think of Harvard College Library as a branch of The ARL Library, much less Mountain View Public Library, Harvard College Library, NYPL, Hewlett-Packard Corporate Libraries and the Poy Sippi Public Library as all being branches of One Big Library.

I think of all these as distinctive and distinctly local institutions–institutions which, being libraries, are really good at sharing and should get even better at it. But sharing is quite different than being a branch of a whole.

Reading Walt's comments and re-reading our goals I can see how it's possible to see our aims as homogenizing rather than unifying and I guess we could have been more explicit. Please read the comments on Walt's post where Laura Crossett, David Fiander, Connie Crosby and John Miedema all seem to have a pretty good idea of what we're trying to do: focus on co-operation and collaboration among libraries and librarians in meeting the needs of our patrons. But there will always be tension between centralizing and decentralizing forces in any organization or consortium of organizations, a tension that can be negative but that can also be constructive and creative.

As wary as I am to post on the York institutional and/or the Ontario/Scholars Portal contexts, I can say that both of those come equipped with a some small portion of the centralizing and homogenizing impulses that are in a creative tension with intensely local patron needs. And both contexts also have librarians and staff that want to build something together while at the same time being loyal to their local patron communities. We want to collectively and collaboratively build something wonderful and terrific for the benefit of everybody as well as maintain our individual identities. Maybe the One Big Library it's just in the air here. And if some of that tension comes out at the conference, well, that's healthy too.

Morville, Peter. Ambient findability. Sebastopol: O'Reilly, 2005. 188pp.

2008-05-02T16:35:00.001-04:00

Ambient findability describes a fast emerging world where we can find anyone or anything from anywhere at anytime. We're not there yet, but we're headed in the right direction. Information is in the air, literally. And it changes our minds, physically. Most importantly, findability invests freedom in the individual. (p. 6-7)

This is a very good book. If you're interested in the way the web works, you would be hard pressed to find a better book to help you in your researches.

Peter Morville is perhaps best known as the co-author of Information Architecture for the World Wide Web, one of the true classics in the web design/development/architecture field. Morville is also a librarian and has great sympathy for libraries as institutions and the problems we face in adapting ourselves to a new information landscape.

So, what's this new book all about? It's basically about how to design your web presence so that people can find your stuff when they're looking for it, even if they didn't know it was your stuff they were looking for. Sound relevant for libraries? You betcha.

The opening chapters deal with definitional issues such as information literacy, wayfinding and information retrieval and interaction. The book goes on to discuss "interwingling" as an important concept -- the idea that everything is everywhere, all bunched up together. But how to find interwingled stuff? Push or pull? Maybe the semantic web has the answers? How do we make informed decisions in a complex, networked culture? What are our sources of inspiration? According to Morville, we will find the clues to these questions in an ambiently findable information landscape. But, interestingly enough, he's not really that fond of a totally miscellaneous world, being quite fond of classifications and controlled vocabularies to help make things more findable. (p. 129) Being one of the tribe, he also has a high regard for the work librarians do and for our efforts in promoting information literacy. (p. 172)

Morville is a great writer -- the writer of the kind of book that stops you in your tracks and makes you re-think

On attention:

We love our cell phones but not the disruption. We love our email but not the spam. Our enthusiasm for ubiquitous computing will undoubtedly be tempered by reality. Our future will be at least as messy as our present. (p. 97)

This book is a classic in the making. It's well worth reading and re-reading as the problems and issues it discusses are both eternal and of immediate and vital importance.

What's an education for, anyways

2008-05-01T14:46:00.002-04:00

A good question. It seems to me that the purpose of an education is not to confirm the student's pre-existing habits and prejudices, but to help them to explore new ways of doing things. In higher education, part of that is going to be to expand their horizons from the stuff they learned in high school, to learn how to use new tools for self-expression (ie. for someone who has never created a web page, that would be a good thing to learn), to learn how to use old tools for self-expression (ie. for someone who has never written a literature review paper, that would be a good thing to learn) and even to learn how the scholarly landscape operates in the discipline they are studying.

Let's see what some other people have had to say on this recently.

First up, sociologist Eszter Hargittai, in an interview at Wired Campus talks about how web savvy students really are as opposed to how savvy everyone assumes they are. Or hopes that they are.

Q. What are the challenges for colleges that hope to better educate students about Web use?

A. How do you fit this into the curriculum? Is it supposed to be an academic department, or through libraries? How can you legitimately stand in front of a classroom when the students have an assumption that they know more about technology than you? At the beginning of my classes, I tell my students, “I know you don’t think I know as much as you because I’m older. I assure you, I know way more than you guys about this.” And they sort of smile, but by the end of the class they realize I’m right.

That's really one of the great challenges of libraries going forward: convincing students that we have something to offer to them, that we know something that they don't, that old fogies can be web savvy.

As far as learning to be a scholar, Wayne Bivens-Tatum points out that the way the humanities are studied really hasn't changed. Our obsession with being "innovative" in the way we deliver collections and services to humanities scholars is, beyond a certain point, kind of delusional:

The humanities are about reading and thinking through language and texts. We can’t assume that they inhabit a “visual culture” and there’s an end on it. There’s almost no visual culture in the humanities outside of art or film criticism. Humanistic scholars read, write, discuss, argue. They don’t make collages or Youtube videos, at least not as a central part of their scholarship. They might record a lecture, but that’s usually much more boring than reading an essay. I don’t know why we sometimes assume that the newest generation is somehow too slow or shallow to be able to adapt themselves to this scholarly tradition. They play video games, and they read books. They make videos, and they write essays. The liberal arts, the studies proper to free and rational human beings, are alive and well. That they aren’t the stuff of reality TV or celebrity websites means nothing, because they have always been the domain of the relative few who seek to question or reflect upon the world around them. Higher education in America gives us the opportunity to expand the benefits of the humanities, not assume that such study is irrelevant to the desires of today’s youth while we desperately flail around trying to seem relevant.

Now, I don't think what Wayne is saying applies to the sciences in quite the same way. After all, the escience computational revolution is radically changing the way that scientific data, information and knowledge themselves are being generated. And the way science is being communicated. But on the other hand, it really does help to know where you've been to be able to figure out where you're going. In that sense, new scientists can truly benefit from diving into all those old books and journals mouldering on the shelves and understanding how science was generated and communicated in the past.

The next bit is from an actually rather distasteful little article whose main point seems to be, "I'm a visual arts scholar, so the art I like is intrinsically better than the art you like." As someone who appreciates both Black Sabbath and Miles Davis, I find it rather condescending. But, if you change the the phrases around the word "taste" for "intellectual habits" or "searching skills" or "confidence with technology" I think there's something valid:

Freshmen arrive on campus with their own taste in everything from music to clothes, food, and electronic equipment. Consciously or not, they also have developed certain tastes in art. Taste being what it is, and young people being what they are, freshmen usually arrive with either no taste or very bad taste — not just in art, but in everything — but in either case, they’re very comfortable with their tastes. They don’t expect or want to change them. The paradox is that it just so happens that their taste, which they consider to be something that’s very particular and individual, is, in most important respects, exactly the same as that of most other college freshmen.

So, what's an education for? It seems to me that it's about changing the way you see things, not confirming or pandering to easy habits or ideas.

Life changing books

2008-04-30T15:50:00.003-04:00

Via BoingBoing, New Scientist has posted some recommendations of life-changing books from 17 scientists. They're all very interesting.

Farthest North - Steve Jones, geneticist
The Art of the Soluble - V. S. Ramachandran, neuroscientist
Animal Liberation - Jane Goodall, primatologist
The Foundation trilogy - Michio Kaku, theoretical physicist
Alice in Wonderland - Alison Gopnik, developmental psychologist
One, Two, Three... Infinity - Sean Carroll, theoretical physicist
The Idea of a Social Science - Harry Collins, sociologist of science
Handbook of Mathematical Functions - Peter Atkins, chemist
The Mind of a Mnemonist - Oliver Sacks, neurologist
A Mathematician’s Apology - Marcus du Sautoy, mathematician
The Leopard - Susan Greenfield, neurophysiologist
Darwin and the Emergence of Evolutionary Theories of Mind and Behavior - Frans de Waal, psychologist and ethologist
Catch-22 / The First Three Minutes - Lawrence Krauss, physicist
William James, Writings 1878-1910 - Daniel Everett, linguist
Do Androids Dream of Electric Sheep - Chris Frith, neuroscientist
The Naked Ape - Elaine Morgan, author of The Aquatic Ape Hypothesis
King Solomon's Ring - Marion Stamp Dawkins, Zoologist

An interesting mix of fiction and non-fiction which shows that scientists are certainly not the narrow specialists that the stereotype makes them out to be.

Myself, for me the life-changing book as a software developer has to have been Programmers at Work by Susan Lammers. For a fiction work, it's a lot harder for me to decide on one particular book. However, some particularly important authors to me when I was in the 18 to 22 time frame would have been Harlan Ellison, Philip K. Dick, Norman Spinrad, H.P. Lovecraft and Samuel R. Delany.

One Big Library Unconference

2008-04-28T23:39:00.003-04:00

Announcing the One Big Library Unconference

http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

E-mail: onebig@yorku.ca

When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Where: The Centre for Social Innovation,
215 Spadina Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

"It seems like there are lot of different kinds of libraries: public
libraries, school libraries, university libraries, college libraries,
law libraries, medical libraries, corporate libraries, special
libraries, private libraries. But really there's just One Big Library,
with branches all over the world."

The One Big Library Unconference is a one-day gathering of librarians,
technologists, and other interested people, talking about the present
and future of libraries.

It's organized and sponsored by York University Libraries and members
of the YUL Emerging Technologies Interest Group: Stacy Allison-Cassin,
William Denton, and John Dupuis.

In an interconnected world, all physical and virtual libraries can
really be thought of as branches of One Big Library. We would like to
get together and explore that concept. Areas of interest:

The future of libraries
Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
Uses of social software in libraries
Tools to support and extend the One Big Library

Our goals are:

Bringing people interested in the future of libraries together with the hope of sparking collaboration and cooperation
Starting conversations between people in different kinds of libraries, and people inside and outside libraries
Intellectual stimulation and fun!

Find out more, sign up, and suggest a topic for a talk, on the wiki:

http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

A couple more on being famous

2008-04-28T11:10:00.003-04:00

A Surprise Ending is in store sometimes. Carving out a niche in the reputation economy can really work!

...Meredith Farkas has just published real advice on how to achieve real success, and I suppose I’ve managed to do some of the things she wrote about, though for me it’s mostly been a matter of stumbling uninvited into committee meetings and writing about things that interest me.

Fortunately, that seems to have been enough. While getting your first full-time library job can be tough, other sorts of opportunities seem all but limitless, even for new librarians. I’ve had a chance to meet dozens of people I consider role models, and probably hundreds more I admire. Incredible people have agreed to let me visit their libraries, allowed me to publish and make presentations, invited me to join them on committees and boards, and have agreed to work on thorny, long-term projects with me.

Which is a long way of not writing that a funny thing happened on my way to my first full-time job at an academic library: as of May 1, I’ll be director of the Collingswood (NJ) Public Library.

David Weinberger has a couple of posts on web fame which I think are worth excerpting. Web fame is what building reputation seems to be all about these days. The old methods of building scholarly clout seem to be on the way out, as the immediacy of blogs and other online channels push out the serene contemplation of slower forms of communication like books or journal articles. Is that a good thing or a bad thing? Yes.

Outside of the broadcast system, fame looks different. This is a type of do-it-yourself fame, not only in that we often want human fingerprints on the shiny surfaces we’re watching, but also because we create fame through passing around links … occasionally for mean and nasty reasons. Kids sitting around watching YouTubes with one another are like kids telling jokes: That reminds me of this one; if you liked that one, you’ll love this one. And the content itself fuels public conversations in multiple media. This is P2P fame.

There’s a long tail of fame, although I suspect the elbow isn’t quite as sharp as in the classic Shirky power law curve for links to blogs. At the top of the head of the curve, fame operates much as it does in the broadcast media, although frequently there’s some postmodern irony involved. In the long tail, though, you can be famous to a few people. Sure, much of it’s crap, but the point about an age of abundance is that we get an abundance of crap and of goodness. We get fame in every variety, including anonymous fame, fame that mimics broadcast fame, fame that mocks, fame that does both, fame for what is stupid, brilliant, nonce, eternal, clever, ignorant, blunt, nuanced, amateur, professional, mean, noble … just like us. It’s more of everything.

*snip*

One of the differences between broadcast and Web fame is that in making someone famous on the Web, we are putting a little bit of our social standing at risk. We’ve got a stake in it.

For example, during the wonderful, impromptu videofest blogged by (and, to a large degree, led by) the wonderful and impromptu Ethan Zuckerman, during Fellows Hour at the Berkman Center last week, everyone was pointing to the next great video to play. In the midst of this, I lost the thread and pointed to a video that, when projected to the group, was out of place and not even very interesting. People shuffled uncomfortably, trying to figure out why I would suggest such a clunker. I was embarrassed. (At least the video was short.)

Wishlist for a cool website for scientists

2008-04-25T15:38:00.004-04:00

A very interesting conversation going on in the Nature Network SciBarCamp forum. Corie Lok asked the question:

[W]at kind of website do you wish there was that would help you with your work? What sorts of tools and features would it have? What parts of your work/job would be greatly helped by a well designed website?

So far there have been quite a few interesting comments and suggestions. A consensus is forming that the ideal would be a platform where scientists could pick and choose a bunch of interoperable services and mash up all the resulting data and results. Oddly, a vision of grafting those types of services on the Nature Network platform would be sort of like the way FaceBook applications are grafted on Fb. (Obviously, with a vastly higher "useful to junk ratio" that those damn Facebook apps. And without the constant crashing too.)

To recap my own comment on the thread, it would be interesting to see Nature integrate their own peripheral services into NN more tightly -- such as Connotea, Precedings, PostGenomic/Scintilla and Second Life. Added to that, some other services I'd like to see added/made interoperable would be citation-oriented (ie. Zotero or CiteULike) and document preparation (ie. Zoho or Google Docs) and data analysis (ie. Mathematica web services). Some other services would be data repositories, multimedia authoring and wiki lab notebooks tools.

Check it out. If you're not already a member of NN, join up and put in your own 2 cents worth.

Rockstardom, notoriety, influence

2008-04-24T15:13:00.001-04:00

In a reputation economy, our personal levels of fame and influence are extremely important. It's what gets us jobs, in the front of the line for plum speaking gigs, interesting/influential committee appointments and the best freebies and perqs. It's how you know who the opinion leaders and gatekeepers are. In other words, it opens doors that wouldn't otherwise be open to us. Go to a conference for the first time and you should be able to tell with some certainty who plays those roles in the community you're dropping in to. Go to the same conference several times, and the names of the gatekeepers will scream out at you -- because those are the ones you'll see in the best speaking spots and on all the right committees year after year. This is neither a good thing nor a bad thing; it's just how these types of communities form.

Academia is a reputation economy, as are most professions. They always have been. More and more, every economy is becoming a reputation economy as the emphasis goes from selling stuff to selling performance, experience and lifestyle.

It seems that a lot of people are thinking about what it means to be an Important Person these days, two examples from within the library world and one from outside.

First of all, I guess everyone wants to know how to become an important person, from Meredith Farkas:

Every few months, I get an email from someone in library school or a new librarian basically asking me how I’ve accomplished all that I have in this profession in three years and how they can do the same...

And time is what all this takes. Read the profiles of Movers and Shakers in Library Journal and read about a lot of the big name librarian bloggers and you will see a lot of people who are really passionate about what they do. Many of us spend lots of time outside of work on these projects. We spend our free time writing, speaking, and networking online with folks who have similar professional interests. We often spend our own money to go to conferences in our areas of interest. The woman who wrote me last week mentioned that she doesn’t get many opportunities to publish or contribute to the profession. I don’t know about anyone else, but I’ve mostly made my own opportunities and I’ve done all of it on my own time. Sometimes you just need to do something and hope for the best; you can’t sit around waiting for someone to drop opportunities into your lap.

Of course, sometimes we can even undervalue our own fame quite seriously, thinking ourselves to be a American Idol dropout when in fact we're just a step or two off the Rolling Stones, maybe like the Doobie Brothers. Rockstardom isn't everything, after all. Dorothea Salo makes a good point.

Look, folks, rockstardom isn’t the only face of success. In spite of my bulldog’s face, in spite of my snark, in spite of everything, I am quite as successful as I need or want to be. I found work in my heart’s home. When I need to say something serious about what I do, I can get it said and hearkened to, here or even (to my own surprise) in The Literature. (I could do considerably more, even, if I were a more fluent writer than I am.) In spite of the people I’ve alienated (and they are not few), I have my own network of well-loved colleagues and friends; I’ve never been lonely in this marvelous profession. If rockstardom got dumped in my lap, I’m honestly not entirely sure what I would do, but I lean toward “running and hiding,” because I have serious being-around-hordes and travel-hassle limits, and rockstardom would stomp all over them....

Most of all, I have the luxury of defining success for myself. I fully and freely acknowledge that non-tenure-track academic librarianship has its discontents, but they pale to insignificance beside the phenomenal freedom of picking my own goalposts.

But again, it can be hard to judge just where we are on the totem poll.

Several kindly librarians of my acquaintance tried to convince me yesterday that indeed I am a rockstar. Evidence clearly shows otherwise, but thanks to them anyway.

One told me (paraphrased), “I wouldn’t know anything much about open access if not for you.”

But clearly, a reputation economy also has potential for inequalities just like any other. What if people who deserve to get fame and influence are denied it just because of their gender? What if you were a physicist and all the men were given the plum assignments when they clearly don't deserve it? It seems that the gatekeepers of a community can use their influence unfairly.

I think the essence of what determines your long-term success as a scientist is your ability to influence the scientific discussion. When you’re at a point in your career when people pay attention to your work, and want to know “What does think about this?”, you are on a near certain path to a stable position as a research scientist. Instead, if no one is reading your papers (to the extent that you’ve published them at all), or wants to hear what you say at conferences, or calls you up to ask you about your area of expertise, then you’re in danger of drifting out of the field....

A former particle-physics postdoc (and current grad student in statistics) carried out a very detailed analysis of the productivity of postdocs on the Run II Dzero experiment, and how that translated into giving conference presentations, and being hired into faculty positions. The paper found that the postdocs’ success in eventually landing faculty jobs were highly correlated to productivity (as measured by internal papers), to conference presentations (which were awarded by the leadership of the project), and to the degree of “physics socialization”....

The jaw-dropping aspect of the paper is that the awarding of conference presentations was grossly gender biased (as was the fraction of service work assigned to the women). The female postdocs had drastically higher levels of productivity (indeed, half the men were less productive than the least productive woman), but were allocated far fewer conference presentations than men with comparable productivity....

In this exercise, we see the influence game writ large. You need to be productive and visible. If some sort of bias (against women, or shy people, or people from state schools, or whomever) is present that conspires to make you less visible, you’re going to have to be even more productive. It’s not fair, and people in positions to fight against the bias in their institution should do so. But, at least it’s something that you have a chance of controlling.

Read Sherry Towers's jaw-dropping paper A Case Study of Gender Bias at the Postdoctoral Level in Physics, and its Resulting Impact on the Academic Career Advancement of Females. Oddly, it seems that reputation can acrue to someone for being discriminated against, hopefully to raise awareness and make things better.

Me? I've no illusions about being in the Led Zeppelin or Rolling Stones category of rock star, or even mid-range like Genesis or The Doobie Brothers. It's fine for me having a niche, a small core audience, like Walter Rossi or Frank Marino. I'm afraid I'm just not that interested in (or necessarily good at) the kind of driven self-promotion it takes. And I think what modest level of fame I do have is split between the science and library domains, giving me more modest levels in two communities rather than a larger share in one (ie. Rossi + Marino = Bob Seger), which I actually think is pretty cool and which suits my interests just fine.

Books I'd like to read

2008-04-21T15:17:00.001-04:00

A bunch more, this time some of them in paperback reprint:

The Canon by Natalie Angier

THE CANON is vital reading for anyone who wants to understand the great issues of our time—from stem cells and bird flu to evolution and global warming. And it's for every parent who has ever panicked when a child asked how the earth was formed or how electricity works. Angier's sparkling prose and memorable metaphors bring the science to life, reigniting our own childhood delight in discovering how the world works. "Of course you should know about science," writes Angier, "for the same reason Dr. Seuss counsels his readers to sing with a Ying or play Ring the Gack: These things are fun and fun is good."

The Wealth of Networks: How Social Production Transforms Markets and Freedom by Yochai Benkler

With the radical changes in information production that the Internet has introduced, we stand at an important moment of transition, says Yochai Benkler in this thought-provoking book. The phenomenon he describes as social production is reshaping markets, while at the same time offering new opportunities to enhance individual freedom, cultural diversity, political discourse, and justice. But these results are by no means inevitable: a systematic campaign to protect the entrenched industrial information economy of the last century threatens the promise of today’s emerging networked information environment.

In this comprehensive social theory of the Internet and the networked information economy, Benkler describes how patterns of information, knowledge, and cultural production are changing—and shows that the way information and knowledge are made available can either limit or enlarge the ways people can create and express themselves. He describes the range of legal and policy choices that confront us and maintains that there is much to be gained—or lost—by the decisions we make today.

Not Even Wrong: The Failure of String Theory and the Search for Unity in Physical Law for Unity in Physical Law by Peter Woit

At what point does theory depart the realm of testable hypothesis and come to resemble something like aesthetic speculation, or even theology? The legendary physicist Wolfgang Pauli had a phrase for such ideas: He would describe them as "not even wrong," meaning that they were so incomplete that they could not even be used to make predictions to compare with observations to see whether they were wrong or not. In Peter Woit's view, superstring theory is just such an idea. In Not Even Wrong, he shows that what many physicists call superstring "theory" is not a theory at all. It makes no predictions, even wrong ones, and this very lack of falsifiability is what has allowed the subject to survive and flourish. Not Even Wrong explains why the mathematical conditions for progress in physics are entirely absent from superstring theory today and shows that judgments about scientific statements, which should be based on the logical consistency of argument and experimental evidence, are instead based on the eminence of those claiming to know the truth. In the face of many books from enthusiasts for string theory, this book presents the other side of the story.

The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing edited by Richard Dawkins

Boasting almost one hundred pieces, The Oxford Book of Modern Science Writing is a breathtaking celebration of the finest writing by scientists--the best such collection in print--packed with scintillating essays on everything from "the discovery of Lucy" to "the terror and vastness of the universe." Edited by best-selling author and renowned scientist Richard Dawkins, this sterling collection brings together exhilarating pieces by a who's who of scientists and science writers, including Stephen Pinker, Stephen Jay Gould, Martin Gardner, Albert Einstein, Julian Huxley, and many dozens more.

True Enough: Learning to Live in a Post-Fact Society by Farhad Manjoo

In True Enough, Manjoo presents findings from psychology, sociology, political science, and economics to show how new technologies are prompting the cultural ascendancy of belief over fact. In an age of talk radio, cable TV, and the Internet—the blog- and YouTube-addled million-channel media universe—it is no longer necessary for any of us to confront notions that contradict what we "know" to be true. Stephen Colbert calls this "truthiness"—when something feels true without any evidence that it is. Here Manjoo probes the cognitive basis of truthiness, exploring how biases push both liberals and conservatives to select and interpret news in a way that accords with their personal versions of "reality."

Why has punditry lately overtaken news, with so many media outlets pushing partisan agendas instead of information? Why do lies seem to linger so long in the cultural subconscious even after they've been thoroughly discredited? And why, when more people than ever before are documenting the truth with laptops and digital cameras, does fact-free spin and propaganda seem to work so well? True Enough explores leading controversies of national politics, foreign affairs, science, and business, explaining how Americans have begun to organize themselves into echo chambers that harbor diametrically different facts—not merely opinions—from those of the larger culture. We meet people who espouse far-out interpretations of reality—about everything from the history of John Kerry's time in Vietnam to the integrity of the 2004 election to the truth about 9/11—and dig into the mechanism by which they came to hold those beliefs.

(Why, you ask, do I list far more books that I'd like to read that I would ever possibly get a chance to actually read? Well, you know the old saying, "He who dies with the most books wins!"

FWIW, I try and read one science/net culture book per month, aiming for about 15 per year.)