Another nail in the coffin...

...for traditional A&I services? Or at least a wake-up call to the more farseeing of them. Time to scramble, add value, innovate, make a difference. Justify your cost to your customers.

Google has just announced their new customizable search engine product. The idea is that you can create an engine that searches a select number of sites and nothing else. This, of course, eliminates the tons of false hits you get from most searches because you're searching non-related sites. Essentially, I could create my own Computer Science Google Scholar (in fact, I just might do that...) and to heck with all the other engines.

This is an incredible opportunity to both scholars and libraries. It allow us to harness our own expertise to create fast and efficient research tools.

The downsides? Of course with great power comes great responsibility. The big problem I see right away is that you have to know the best sites to select for your engine. It allows you to search the entire web along with your selected sites, but that seems to limit the power of being selective. So, if I'm a CS grad student creating my own engine and I'm not bothering to consult with my advisor and/or librarian, maybe I'll just select a few tech report sites or something. Will I know to add IEEE or ACM or Elsevier? Even if I'm somewhat sophisticated, will I know how useful the SIAM journals could be to me? Even if I know that I want to add all those digital collections to my engine, am I sure I know what URL to add to make sure the proper metadata is searched? Do publishers have to do something special? Same with services like arXiv or NCSRTL. You really have to know what you want to make this work well. Great for knowledgable power users but probably worse than full Google if you don't know what to choose.

So, some first impressions. An exciting product with lots of possibilities but still some potential liabilities.

Communications of the ACM, Nov 2006

As usual, some interesting stuff from the latest CACM, v49i11. In particular, there's a special section on what they call "Entertainment Networking" which includes some articles that may be relevant to those interested in the educational aspects of gaming.

• How sensitive are online gamers to network quality? by Kuan-Ta Chen, Polly Huang, Chin-Laung Lei
  
• Anyone can broadcast video over the internet by Reza Rejaie
  
• Critical risks in outsourced IT projects: the intractable and the unforeseen by Hazel Taylor
  
• A uniform code of ethics: business and IT professional ethics by Dinah Payne, Brett J.L. Landry

Space, the final frontier

What are some of the kinds of physical spaces scitech students need on campus?

• Classrooms
  
• Labs
  
• Informal indoor space, such as common rooms, pubs, restaurants, lounges, cafes. This is a very important kind of space, as it's where a lot of the actual learning happens. So much of what we take from our educational experiences we learn from our fellow students and these spaces are where students gather to just hang out and talk. A lot of the collaboration and team work that is so important takes place in these spaces.
  
• Informal outdoor spaces, such as parks, fields, walks, benches. Ditto with the above. On a nice campus, these spaces can really add to the experience of being at school. Relaxing and collaborative at the same time.
  
• Computer labs. Places where students can work on online research and on preparing their assignments. We always think of students as being hyper-connected, but lots (more than we think) still don't have off-campus access to good computers. They're definitely expected to hand in or perform work (presentations, media, papers) that is generated on computers and institutions of higher education must provide access to these tools.
  
• Quiet space. Often forgotten. Students, especially science students, need quiet space to read, study and absorb the complex material they have to master. Whether they are reading books, paper journals, printouts or off a screen, they need quiet. This is still true in our online world. To do assignments, to think and reflect.
  
• Formal collaborative space. Also very important. Science and engineering are almost by definition collaborative these days, both in industry and academia. Students need to have spaces that will model the kind of work they will be doing later in their careers. To work on projects, to study together, to have informal tutorial/bull sessions. These spaces need to have good access to computers and software suites that meet the students' needs. Black/white boards, cork boards, all that stuff is still relevant.
  
• And of course, lots of other spaces too, that will vary from place to place, like departmental lounges, faculty offices, drop in centres, student services, etc.
  
• I'm not forgetting virtual spaces, like blogs, wikis, virtual communities, gaming environments and so on.

So, what kinds of spaces should libraries be in the business of providing to students?

A tough question, but one that is vitally important to the future of academic libraries. As content becomes less and less dependent on physical space, I believe our roles will become much more tied to the kinds of physical spaces we can provide to supplement and enhance the student's experiences. We have to use our physical spaces to provide services to students that they find valuable, that they will come back to, that they will recommend to their friends, that they will remember fondly later in life when the fundraisers come calling. We need to care enough about them to provide them with the spaces nobody else will.

To me, the most neglected one of those spaces is quiet study space. Sure, it's important for us to provide computer labs, group study space, relaxing space and classrooms. And to provide the staff to support and assist students in the activities they engage in in those spaces.

What falls through the cracks? Quiet.

At my library, whenever the ambient noise levels would rise too much, we would start getting complaints. All the staff work hard to make sure that we balance the need to collaborate with the need for quiet. It's hard in a relatively small space, but students need it and want it and they complain bitterly when they don't get it.

The challenge? Using our limited physical spaces, often in older buildings, with limited renovation budgets, to find a balance between those competing space needs. It's not going to be easy.

(For those that are interested, it was reading A Place to Read By Terry Caesar over at InsideHigherEd that got me thinking about these issues.)

(Update: I swear, this posting was totally not inspired by this article from York's student newspaper, Excalibur, about the noise levels in one of the other libraries in the York system, Scott Library. But the article is also a perfect example of the kinds of space that students want us to provide. )

I was a professional COBOL programmer

Via the O'Reilly Radar, a Computerworld article on the computer language that will not die.

Cobol, that mainstay of business programming throughout the 1960s, ’70s and ’80s, is not going away anytime soon. In a Computerworld survey early this year of IT managers at 352 companies, 62% of the respondents reported that they actively use Cobol. Of those, three quarters said they use it “a lot” and 58% said they’re using it to develop new applications.

Nevertheless, with a few exceptions, companies aren’t enthusiastically expanding their use of Cobol. In the survey, of those who use Cobol, 36% said they are “gradually migrating away” from it, 16% said they will replace it “every chance we get,” and 25% said they’d like to replace Cobol with something else but have found that too difficult or too expensive.

The persistence of Cobol — welcome or not — presents a dilemma for many companies. Their legacy code will require significant resources for years to come, yet younger software developers often don’t want to work with Cobol, and in most cases, they’re no longer learning it in school. And while there are thousands of Cobol coders still in the workplace, a large percentage of them are nearing retirement age.

*snip*

For years, pundits have said that the way to avoid the headaches of maintaining Cobol — and mainframes, green screens and other legacy paraphernalia — is to replace them. But that hasn’t happened, even in the massive Y2k remediation effort.

Indeed, Cobol promises to be around for many more years, challenging the IT managers who must support it. “A lot of people have said they were going to get rid of the mainframe, but that hasn’t happened,” says Mark Washik, a consultant at Schneider Electric SA in Palatine, Ill. “And for us, all that code is working. There’s no sense in rewriting it.”

A very interesting article on a growing niche job market. Maintaining old code. It's interesting, because we certainly don't train new programmers/developers/SEs to maintain old code or to re-engineer old systems, but that's often what they end up working on at the beginning of their careers. And schools certainly don't teach COBOL anymore. Fortunately it's easy to learn. I took two courses in it way back in my CS days at Concordia and even they I realized that the second, advanced course, in COBOL programming was a waste of time. I really wanted it to be a advanced database/systems course, but it was just plain old COBOL. A wasted opportunity from the prof (whose name I still remember), who was just calling it in for a course that I'm sure was viewed as low priority by the school.

Of course, a small chunk of that old code out there may very well be mine. For 5 or 6 years, I did a lot of COBOL coding as part of the Wang PACE 4GL system. It was the back-end language for the PACE UI and data dictionary functionality. You also had to do any really tricky reports involving specialized calculations in COBOL.

My first, and favourite, programming language was FORTRAN.

On physics conferences

Chad Orzel of Uncertain Principles gives some thoughts/musings/advice on attending and presenting at physics conferences.

• Preparing a talk

  One of the biggest misconceptions about science and engineering is that scientists and engineers don't need to be able to write well, or speak well. The popular image of a scientist is a sort of socially retarded obsessive, thoroughly enraptured by odd details of science, but shy and mumbling and inarticulate when talking to other people. There's a little bit of truth to this, mostly in the "obsessive" part, but the reality is that communication skills are at least as important in science as in other disciplines. You can have Nobel Prize-worthy data, but if you can't explain the results, in print and in person, well enough to convince other people of their worth, you'll never shake hands with the King of Sweden. There's a lot of writing involved in science, and a lot of public speaking, though not the same sort of public speaking done by people giving oral reports to their high-school English class.

  
  
• Compared to non-science fields

  The other key difference between science meeting and humanities meetings is in the area of visual aids. Absolutely every talk at a scientific meeting will have some sort of visuals associated with it-- mostly PowerPoint these days, though overhead transparencies used to be the rule-- even if they're just pretty pictures put up on the screen while the speaker natters on about something else. Scientists expect pictures. If you're a humanist asked to give a presentation to scientists, bring some pictures. They don't even have to be all that relevant, but the audience will get very antsy if you don't put something on the screen or chalkboard.

  Good stuff to know. I like these kinds of stories as it helps me understand the people I see at work, the grad students and faculty, and get a glimpse into their work lives.

Spinning A Web of Libraries + computing in physics courses

From What's New @ IEEE in Computing, October 2006, v7i10:

2. SPINNING A WEB OF LIBRARIES
The growth of digital, personal libraries is examined in the latest issue of the "IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering" magazine. Obstacles for these digital libraries still include working out how to pay royalties to publishers, the question of how to scan the books into an OCR program without ruining any physical aspects, which is especially important for older and rarer books, and cost issues, which could run into the millions. It is speculated that once these obstacles are overcome, e-books will likely be downloaded onto devices smaller than those that run portable video games. Because the text is searchable via metatags, online libraries will improve both research and sales drastically, making it easier for people to find what they are looking for. They may even pave the way for online programs that store all sorts of works, from paintings to songs to sculptures, that could be reproduced with startling accuracy into real life objects. Read more, including information on how the IEEE community is involved in these efforts:
LInk Here.

The issue is IEEE Computing in Science and Engineering, v8i5.

While we're at it, there are some other very interesting artciles in that issue related to the use of computing in physics courses.

• Numerical Computations in US Undergraduate Physics Courses by Fuller, R.G.
  
• Computational Physics: A Better Model for Physics Education? by Landau, R.
  
• Using Computational Methods to Reinvigorate an Undergraduate Physics Curriculum by Taylor, J.R.; King, B.A., III
  
• My Computational Education by Day, C.

Robert Wright interviews Edward O. Wilson.

An hour-long interview with biologist Edward O. Wilson here. The topics he covers include Being good without God, Consciousness, Death, Emergence, Free will, Intelligent Design, Passion, Science and religion and The biology of religion.

Other intreviews available via the Meaning of Life site: Daniel Dennett, Freeman Dyson, Francis Fukuyama, Owen Gingerich, Ursula Goodenough, Steven Pinker and others. Many of the speakers answer similar questions. via BookSlut.

Two on Computer Science

Are there going to be any computer scientists in the future? And if so, how are they going to communicate their research?

• Universities see sharp drop in computer science majors.via Topix.

  Computer science majors make some of the country's highest starting salaries for college graduates, at nearly $50,000 a year. Computer science and computer engineering jobs are some of the fastest-growing occupations in the nation, according to the U.S. Department of Labor.
  
  Despite that, universities all across the country are watching enrollments drop in their computer science programs - at almost the exact time employers are saying they can't find enough qualified candidates.

  
  
• What Happened to Departmental Tech Reports?

  Imagine back to the early 90's before we had a world-wide web. You had a new result, a nice result but not so important that you would do a mass email. You wanted to mark the result with a time-stamp and make it available to the public so you created a departmental technical report, basically handing a copy of the paper to a secretary. You would get a report number and every now and then a list of reports was sent out to other universities who could request a copy of any or all of the reports. Eventually the paper would go to some conference and journal but the technical report made the paper "official" right away.
  
  As the web developed CS departments started putting their tech reports online. But why should you have to go to individual department web sites to track down each report? So people developed aggregators like NCSTRL that collected pointers to the individual paper and let you search among all of them. CiteSeer went a step further, automatically searching and parsing technical reports and matching citations.
  
  But why have technical reports divided by departments? We each live in two communities—our university and our research field. It's the latter that cares about the content of our papers. So now we see tech report systems by research area, either area specific systems like ECCC or very broad report systems like arXiv that maintain specific lists in individual subareas that bypass the department completely.
  
  What's next? Maybe I won't submit a tech report at all letting search engines like Google Scholar or tagging systems like CiteULike organize the papers. Departmental tech reports still exist but don't play the role they once did and who can predict how we will publish our new results even five or ten years down the road.

  Interesting that he blows off the whole concept of institutional repositories in one sentence. Probably too harsh on Fortnow's part, but perhaps an insight into why it's hard to get profs to deposit into IRs.

Friday Fun, a day late

Some Saturday fun:

• KKRRRRrrrrrramnik Wins! Finally, the craziness is all over and we have an undisputed world chess champion, Vladimir Kramnik of, you guessed it, Russia. I have to admit, all the disgusting shenanigans of the Topalov team turned me from someone who was mostly rooting for the Bulgarian but still appreciative of Kramnik's play into someone who was definately rooting for Kramnik and disgusted with Topalov and his "handlers." In any case, the play on the board was tense and exciting, lots of good chess for us addicts. If you're interested in the story, here's a link to all the ChessBase stories and to the excellent coverage on Wikipedia.
  
• Amateurs versus the pros jalapeno eating contest
  
• Black Sabbath News: Heaven & Hell Rising in 2007? Now this would be great news!
  
• Search and Research: A comic strip about a Research Library by Eli Moody and his friends.
  
• Biology in Science Fiction blog. via SF Signal.

The Ongoing Struggle of Free vs. Fee

So, how to make "kids today" recognize that some information is worth paying for rather than being happy to find just anything "good enough" on the free web?

Over at Search Engine Watch, a two part special report from the ASIDIC Fall Meeting. Part two here.

Some of the questions the articles ask:

Does information really want to be free? If so, how can traditional information publishers and aggregators deal with shifting value propositions and revenue models of premium content and survive in the era of free web content?...How can traditional information industry companies survive in the world of free web content? How can they appeal to "digital natives" who question the value of paying for information?

Some very important questions. Let's see some more of the articles. I'm going to exerpt a good chunk of each article here, but really the whole thing is very much worth reading as it has a lot of implications for the scholarly world.

Over the course of the two-day conference, an attendee mentioned that they thought the fear of change in the industry came from Stewart Brand's often-quoted statement "information wants to be free." Understandably, such a statement would be intimidating to a long established industry that has based its entire existence on the model of selling information.

This fear isn't paranoid: New business and revenue models based on new distribution methodology are arising almost daily. The value proposition has been shifted from information itself to the organization, credibility and trust of information. Information itself may want to be free—but an overabundance of free information is causing a shift in the value proposition associated with content. Content is king, but it seems that everyone is now a newly crowned monarch. It is no longer valuable to be a king—value now comes from organizing, and reviewing which content is most credible, has the least bias, and offers the most value to its' specifically targeted user segment. These fundamentals will be critical to the new monetization of content.

*snip*

One of the other very heavily discussed topics of the conference was the idea of digital natives and digital emigrants presented by Matthew Hong of Thomson Gale publishing, expanding on ideas originally developed by visionary/futurist Mark Prensky.

According to Hong, digital immigrant are individuals who were not born into the digital world, but have emigrated to it. Digital natives, by contrast, were born into technology. These groups of people, including "Generation Y," "Millennials," and the "MyPod Generation" are individuals born between 1978 and 1998, and number approximately 76 million in the U.S.

The discussion of transitioning between the two age demographics of digital immigrants vs. natives seemed to be a key component to the strategies of these large publishing companies will use that will ultimately determine whether they will survive or not.

The key takeaway here is that there is a rapidly growing disconnect between traditional information solutions, which tend to cater to digital immigrants, and user behavior of digital natives. While digital immigrants are willing to purchase traditional information services, the internet is clearly the primary research tool of digital natives. Over 71% of students reported using the internet as the major source of information for recent school projects, with 73% reporting using the Internet more frequently than the library.

*snip*

Content may be king, but accessibility to that content and finding new models for the monetization of information will be the only things that keep it from being free. Some content (how to bandage a wound) needs only to be "good enough", where other content (how to perform open heart surgery) must be very precise. Expertise, credibility, and organization is what separates "good enough" from premium content.

The prevalence of "good enough" information has shaken the premium content industry to its core, but also serves t increase the overall value of expert information and reducing the overall noise level. There is a fundamental need for traditional information providers to shift to more creative revenue models embodied by the new distribution channel of the web as it reaches mass adoption.

The articles also discuss the implications of the "long tail," federated & metasearching and other topics. Stimulating reading, stuff that's been floating around in all our heads for a while but this is a very good summary & discussion of the main issues.

In the scholarly world, for-fee information may be better than for-free information, but if nobody cares enough to cough up the cash, does it really matter? Or more precisely, if we build expensive collections of for-fee information that will be less and less used over time, are we allocating our limited resources properly?

Does fee-based information have a future? In the short and medium term future, sure, no question. In the long term, looking 10+ years into the future, I'm not so sure. The challenge to really add value to something comparable that is free will keep on getting harder and harder. The kids that are late-teens/early 20s right now will be the gatekeepers of scholarly information in 20-30 years -- will they continue to place the importance on scholarly, subscription-based, peer-reviewed journals and databases that their predecessors did? I doubt it. I think that they already are chomping at the bit, unable to understand why Wikipedia and Google aren't better than good enough. The explanations we give in our IL classes will only get more and more strained as time goes by. We can't make them care about the same things we do. How about the millions we pay in acquisition and licensing fees for our content? If usage steadily declines over the next decades, will we just loose that money or will we just reorganize our priorities? What does this mean for scholarly societies and publishers? Evolution.

Review of Voodoo Science by Robert Park

From the other blog:

This year, during my sabbatical, I'm really trying to read a lot of science non-fiction, as opposed to my usual diet of science fiction. And so far, it's been great.

Full review here.

So Where Are The Academic Librarian Bloggers

Steven Bell reminds us to add our academic librarain blogs to the Academic Blog Portal section for University Librarians. Unless there are some I don't recognize, I seem to be the only scitech one in the list so far.

Scalzi on the Big Post

Admit it, we're all at least somewhat obsessed by our hit and subsciption statistics. I am, you are, we all are. Science fiction writer John Scalzi is obsessed too, and a little while back he had a great post on The Big Post. You know, getting Slashdotted or BoingBoinged, driving up your stats by several orders of magnitude for a day or two.

Scalzi starts with a couple of ideas about things we can do to increase our traffic

1. Update frequency: Updating daily matters in terms of readership.
2. Enabling comments: People who comment feel attached to the site; people who don't comment get updated content when they click through.
3. Quality of content: Putting in interesting stuff so people have a reason to click into the site daily.

Which is nice but pretty basic; I've certainly made an effort to post a bit more regularly the last month or so and the numbers have gone up a bit in high-post weeks. Next he talks about, in great length, about those things that we can't control that can boost our traffic, the Big Post.

A big post, very simply, is a post that more than the usual number of people link to, thus bringing in an entirely different audience of readers. Most of these readers will be one-time readers -- they click through to the link, see it, and click out, never to return -- but some small proportion will root around, enjoy what they see (due to you working on the factors you can control), and put you on their daily reading list. Bang, you've got new readers.

Big posts can happen when one or more of the following conditions exist:

1. You write or create something unusually well-written about a current news event or other hot topic.
2. You do something unusually stupid and/or funny on your site.
3. You are linked to by one or more high-traffic sites (Fark, Slashdot, Digg, Boing Boing, Instapundit, Daily Kos, etc).

He talks a lot about some of his own big posts, ranging from sincere posts about his own life that became popular to obvious gag posts (ie. taping bacon to his cat) that must have been at least somewhat calculated to try and generate a big post.

This is a really interesting post on a generally excellent blog, with lots of good points on different types of Big Post, gaming the system and turing Big Post traffic into regular traffic. What are the lessons for our own scitech library blog community? Hard to know, we're already a small tidal pool in an already small pond of library-related blogs. Scalzi's cat bacon post generated 67,000 hits in one day, several times more hits that the last few years of this blog put together. Personally, I think you just have to concentrate on your core mission and let the traffic stuff work itself out, doing lots of gimmicky stuff has to be a bad idea. If the Big Post comes, so be it. If not, presumably we're not in this for publicity anyway but to contribute to our profession and if we do good work on our blogs, the readers will find us.

My own Big Post? The closest I've come was when I was mentioned in the Internet Resources Newsletter a few years ago, and that generated about 250-300 hits. The "My Job in 10 Years" series was fairly popular, causing small spikes (yes, I will finish it one day). The summer reading poll, 100+ hits, but I didn't really publicise it that much on sf-related sites that might have generated more visits.

Some suggestions related to my own experiences:

• Put the most important information about what your blog is about in the blog title. This blog is about being a science librarian, and I get lots of hits on just that search term.
  
• Have the word "confessions" in your blog title. I get a lot of hits from people just searching on the word "confessions." Not a great strategy long term, as most people who get here via that search are probably pretty disappointed. But hey, a hit is a hit.
  
• Link to the Official Google Blog, as that's a really high traffic site and anything that shows up in the "links to this post" is bound to generate a few hits. I found this out with a couple of recent links to that blog. Let's see how this link to the post of their word processing/spreadsheet apps does...
  
• Misspell an actor's name in a common way. A couple of years back I mentioned The Librarian: Quest for the Spear with Noah Wylie. And spelled his name "Wiley," you know, like the publisher. Believe it or not, that generated a few hundred hits by other people that can't spell. Of course, it's hard to know if spelling his name properly would have generated more or fewer hits.
  
• That Academic Blogs Wiki is already generating a steady trickle, so getting in any kind of relevant directory or listing is a good idea.

Added extra: read about Chad Orzel's experience getting Slashdotted.

Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing

Jane was at the Grace Hopper Conference and posts her impressions here:

• Day One
  
• Day Two
  
• Day Three

Some other related links for the conference:

• Other posts via Technorati
  
• Program & proceedings
  
• List of volunteer bloggers -- good source for blogs by women in computing
  
• Notes Exchange wiki/blog postings on all the sessions

Friday Fun, Ig Nobel Edition

The Ig Nobel prizes (Wiki) were awarded last night and, as usual, there's lots of very funny stuff this year.

My two favourites (and really, how do you choose a favourite for one of these?):

PEACE: Howard Stapleton of Merthyr Tydfil, Wales, for inventing an electromechanical teenager repellant -- a device that makes annoying noise designed to be audible to teenagers but not to adults; and for later using that same technology to make telephone ringtones that are audible to teenagers but not to their teachers.
REFERENCE: http://www.compoundsecurity.co.uk

PHYSICS: Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch of the Université Pierre et Marie Curie, in Paris, for their insights into why, when you bend dry spaghetti, it often breaks into more than two pieces.
REFERENCE: "Fragmentation of Rods by Cascading Cracks: Why Spaghetti Does Not Break in Half," Basile Audoly and Sebastien Neukirch, Physical Review Letters, vol. 95, no. 9, August 26, 2005, pp. 95505-1 to 95505-1.
REFERENCE: video and other details at <http://www.lmm.jussieu.fr/spaghetti/index.html>

I also wanted to choose the hiccups one, but I really don't want to get the keyword search hits that one would probably bring. The mind boggles.

Google & Source Code

On the GoogleBlog, there's a post on More developer love with Google Code Search. Google Code Search is a search engine for all the open source code they can find on the net. (FAQ)

This is a great idea that I'm sure will make a lot of developers' lives easier. Searches on "prime number", "differential equation" and "climate modelling" all give big hit counts. (Even "library catalog circulation") The sharing of knowledge for solving scientific problems is always a good thing.

A couple of potential problems, of course. First of all, the hit counts on these kinds of searches are huge, making it tough to separate the wheat from the chaff. A typical Google complaint is, of course, that they don't give a list of the major code repositories they crawl, so we really don't know what is (and isn't) in there. You can specify which package you want to search but that's going to be a lot less useful to neophytes without more information. I can see how useful it might be in the future to allow people to connect articles in Google Scholar with the relevant open source code via Code Search.

Plagiarism of programming assignments will be a big academic issue for this search engine, both making it easier for students to find programs to copy and for profs to detect that plagiarism. In that sense, I would be a bit leary of putting this resource in one of my CS pathfinders without first checking with the profs involved.

Academic Blog Portal

Via ACRLog, there's a new wiki out there that keeps keeps track of academic blogs, just like the LISWiki keeps track of all library blogs.

The Academic Blog Portal has section for academic librarians, library science scholars, scientists in all their diversity, information technology and engineering as well as a bunch of other sections. Still not that much in there yet, but certainly worth checking out and, for those of us who are academic bloggers of one sort or another, adding our own blogs to the list.

Note to ISI: Please, dear god, stop trying to predict the Nobels

First, the facts related to the science Nobels:

Physics

ISI Predictions

• Guth/Linde/Steinhardt
  
• Fert/Gruenberg
  
• Desurvire/Nakazawa/Payne

Actual Winner: Mather & Smoot


Medicine or Physiology

ISI Predictions

• Chambon/Evans/Jensen
  
• Jefferys
  
• Capecchi/Evans/Smithies

Actual Winner: Fire & Mello

Chemistry

ISI Predictions

• Marks
  
• Evans/Ley
  
• Crabtree/Scheiber

Actual Winner: Kornberg

Update: Economics

ISI Predictions

• Bhagwati/Dixit/Krugman
  
• Hart/Holmstrom/Williamson
  
• Jorgenson

Actual Winner: Phelps


So, they got every single one completely wrong (Including the economics prize, not initially part of my post). Now, I don't think they do this bad every year with their predictions, but hopefull their completely, ridiculously, stupidly, ignorantly, shamefully awful performance this year will convince them that the science Nobels aren't awarded on the basis of citation analysis. The main point is that influence is not necessarily reflected in raw citation counts. Different fields and subfields can have varying scholarly communication & citation patterns that make it foolish to try and compare different scholars purely on the basis of citation counts. Citation counts do not equal impact. In the same way that librarians would not just use journal impact factors to make journal subscription decisions, I am sure that citation counts play next to no role in the Nobel Committees' decisions.

Please, please, bibliometrics is a good and useful pursuit that can tell us many things. Don't try and tell us that it's any good at measuring true research impact (or true research quality, anymore than the literature prize should be decided by book sales), you only damage your own credibility.

Review of David Suzuki: An Autobiography

From the other blog:

This is a great book, moving and impassioned, and yet still very human. Suzuki is clearly not overly impressed with himself, not caught up with his own celebrity and this makes his memoirs so engaging. There's lots of gentle humour here, often at his own expense. He also balances the story of his public life with the story of his private life. He gives enough insight into his personal to give us a good feeling of who he is without so much that it feels intrusive or exploitative.

Full review here.

Remote labs

From ACM Computing Surveys, v38i3, Hands-on, simulated, and remote laboratories: A comparative literature review by Jing Ma and Jeffrey V. Nickerson:

Laboratory-based courses play a critical role in scientific education. Automation is changing the nature of these laboratories, and there is a long-running debate about the value of hands-on versus simulated laboratories. In addition, the introduction of remote laboratories adds a third category to the debate. Through a review of the literature related to these labs in education, the authors draw several conclusions about the state of current research. The debate over different technologies is confounded by the use of different educational objectives as criteria for judging the laboratories: Hands-on advocates emphasize design skills, while remote lab advocates focus on conceptual understanding. We observe that the boundaries among the three labs are blurred in the sense that most laboratories are mediated by computers, and that the psychology of presence may be as important as technology. We also discuss areas for future research.

I've posted about this topic before here. This is a very interesting area to me as it seems to be a way to truly bring so much of the possibilities of science education to people who, for whatever reason, can't make it too a real lab. Think of the possibilities.

Audio/Visual

I must admit to getting addicted to all the A/V stuff going on out there in the science-y web. Nothing better than kicking back and watching or listening to an interesting lecture on a subject that I'm into.

Some of the ones I've dipped into lately:

• Via The Daily Transcript, Jonathan Miller's BBC series A Brief History of Disbelief and The Atheist Tapes. The first is a three-parter totally three hours. The second includes 5 of the 6 shows that included interview sessions not used in the main series. The interviewees include Colin McGinn, Steven Weinberg, Denys Turner, Daniel Dennett and Richard Dawkins.
  
• An audio of a talk by Bruce Schneier on privacy and security in the internet age. Basically, he says that we shouldn't have to trade privacy for security, that we should be able to have both. Great stuff. via BoingBoing.
  
• Another audio, this time by Bruce Sterling. This is a fantastic talk by Sterling, about being an author in the modern age. How to get compensated for your work these days is a challenge that Sterling takes up with gusto -- and no pat answers either. via BoingBoing
  
• Finally, a video of Bruce Sterling on The Spime Meme Map at Ubicomp 2006. via BoingBoing
  
• UPDATE: Just this morning I watched a presentation by Al Gore from the Technology Education Design conference in February 2006. Although the presentation was before An Inconvenient Truth came out, he actually follows up on the themes in the film and talks about a bunch of things ordinary people can do to make the climate crisis better. Good stuff. Al's actually quite funny at the beginning. Also, check the drop down on the page and try a couple of the other presentations from the TED conference, including Jimmy Wales, Daniel Dennett, Nicholas Negroponte, Richard Dawkins and others. via Scientific Indian.
  

As well, Curious Cat has a couple of recent posts pointing to other video lectures here and here.

Libraries & Librarians

Chet Raymo in his excellent Science Musings blog quotes the inscription on the facade of one of the Boston Public Library buildings:"The commonwealth requires the education of the people as the safeguard of order and liberty." A nice sentiment, highlighting our roles as educators and also of education itself as a fundamental requirement for a free and open society. Raymo goes on to say, "So hopeful, so liberal, was the generous spirit evinced by the embellishments of the building that I was almost moved to tears. How proud to be part of that tradition, even as a spectator." Now, as a Professor Emeritus at Stonehill College, Raymo is probably being a bit modest counting himself as a mere spectator in that tradition, and I hope that we as librarians see ourselves as more that just spectators in the educational process. We must make sure we continue to work in that tradition and to find our role as the traditional means and methods of education change. At the same time, we must always put our values of public service to the forefront of what we do.

In that spirit, I was struck by a job ad brought to my attention by one of my colleagues at York, Mark Robertson. Chief Librarian, Detainee Library, Guantanamo Bay, Cuba:

In managing the Detainee Library, the Chief Librarian is responsible for providing, maintaining and developing library services and operations using reading, recreational games and puzzles, music, or electronic media. The Chief Librarian is responsible for selecting and maintaining a range of reading and recreational materials to reflect the needs of the patrons in terms of languages and appropriate/approved topics.

*snip*

To be successful in this job, the Chief Librarian will need to be creative, adaptable, ambitious and resourceful.

I guess librarians end up in a lot of different places, doing a lot of different jobs. Given the current situation, I find myself at a complete loss to form any rational thought about the posting. Doing a librarian's job in such a situation seems impossible, yet the detainees certainly deserve to have the service available.

It's also worth noting that it's ALA's Banned Books Week. Libraries, of course, have a roll in making sure that their patrons have free and open access to their collections, without outside interference.

BBW celebrates the freedom to choose or the freedom to express one’s opinion even if that opinion might be considered unorthodox or unpopular and stresses the importance of ensuring the availability of those unorthodox or unpopular viewpoints to all who wish to read them. After all, intellectual freedom can exist only where these two essential conditions are met.

Google, of course, was quite active in promoting BBW, quite ironic considering their China policies. We should all try and watch out for our own biases, wrong-headed compromises and hypocracies and remember that our primary mission is to serve our patrons.

The 800 pound gorilla in the room

It's hard to deny that Google is the Colossus bestriding the info world these days (in fact, I just used it to make sure Colossus has 1 L & 2 Ss). As such it behoves all of us to make sure that we know where they stand on various issues, such as censorship (generally not good) and copyright. When you're a mouse sleeping beside and elephant, it pays to monitor the elephant's nocturnal rustlings. Thankfully Google has usually been rather upfront about where they stand on issues.

From a recent post in their official blog, Our Approach to Content:

The Internet has broken down many of the barriers that exist between people and information –- effectively democratizing access to human knowledge. By typing just a few keywords into a computer you can learn about almost any subject. Google is one of many organizations that work to make this possible.

But today only a fraction of the world’s information is available online. Our aim to help organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful means working with a lot of information – newspaper articles (many written over a century ago), books (of which there are millions), images, videos (including all of the new footage users are creating), websites, important financial information and much, much more.

Because we don’t own this content, over the years we’ve come up with three primary principles to ensure that we respect content owners and protect their rights:

• we respect copyright;
  
• we let owners choose whether we index their content in our products;
  
• we try to bring benefit back to content owners by partnering with them.

The much more detail in the post on each of the principles, so I won't go into it here in detail. I'm just glad we know.

Communications of the ACM, October 2006

A couple worth checking out from v49i10:

• Building objects out of Plato: applying philosophy, symbolism, and analogy to software design by Ray Giguette
  
• What makes a good programmer? by Casey G. Cegielski, Dianne J. Hall

The one size fits all approach to computer science just isn’t working anymore

This is a quote by Richard A. DeMillo, dean of the College of Computing at Georgia Tech, from today's Inside Higher Ed story New 'Threads' for Computer Science by Scott Jaschik. The idea is that with declining enrollments in CS, something has to be done. Well, what Greorgia Tech has done is completely revision their computing curriculum, removing the mandatory core courses and replacing them with two main components. First of all, is an application area component, such as intelligence or media. The second component is the role component, for example programmer, entrepreneur or innovator. Students pick two application areas and one role. This is a very interesting idea, which has already seen an increase in Georgia Tech's enrollments. The relevant GT site is here.

To give a bit of the flavour of the program, I'll list the applications areas (Threads, as they call them) and the roles.

Threads:

1. Computation modelling (computational science)
   
2. Embodiment (embedded systems)
   
3. Foundations (theoretical CS)
   
4. Information internetworks
   
5. Intelligence
   
6. Media (multimedia, interactive systems)
   
7. People (HCI)
   
8. Platforms (hardware)

Roles:

1. Master Practitioner (programmer)
   
2. Entrepreneur
   
3. Innovator (research)
   
4. Communicator (tech writer)

This is a very exciting way to approach computer science education, one which is probably transferable to most other disciplines as well. When you think about it, the roles are fairly universal, with on the content of "master practitioner" changing with the field. The application areas are also relevant to most fields where people can study different sub-areas.

Review of Bill Bryson's A short history of nearly everything

Over on the other blog.

I'm a bit of two minds on this book. Really, I almost consider it two different books that I could review separately. The first, a book I really like, that I think is an important contribution to efforts to improve scientific literacy amongst the general population. The second, a book that subtly undermines efforts to improve scientific literacy among the general public by essentially portraying most scientists as lying, egocentric freakazoids...

2007 Triangle Science Blogging Conference

Announced by coturnix on Blog Around the Clock, this looks incredibly cool. Aimed at the North Carolina science blogging community (but I assume everyone is welcome), its aim is to

address a variety of issues and perspectives on science communication, including science literacy, the popularization of science, science in classrooms and in homes, debunking pseudoscience, using blogs as tools for presenting scientific research, writing about science, and health and medicine.

The date is Saturday January 20, 2007 in Chapel, North Carolina. The conference wiki is here, with the program here and list of currently registered attendees here. Registration is free of charge. I'm really tempted to hop on a plane to NC for this one and fly the flag for science librarian blogging.

sciencebloggingconference

Friday Fun

Back by popular demand (ok, so maybe not so popular demand):

• Let's get ready to RRRRRRRRrrrrrrrrrrumble!!! Topalov v. Kramnik for the World Chess Championship. Round 1 tomorrow!!!!!
  
• A List of Celebrity Baby Names
  
• Still Waiting to Be Consulted -- I know this is supposed to be light-hearted and gently humourous and all, but to me it mostly comes off as arrogant and stupid, but in a funny way. Oh yeah, it's a humanist p-o'd that nobody consulted them about Pluto's demotion from planetary status. The author makes a couple of really bad science bloopers that totally undermine her thesis.
  
• You May Have Been YouTubed. Ok, there's something very, very wrong about students secretly videoing their profs tantrums and foibles and then posting the results on YouTube without the profs knowledge. And something very, very funny. The web is both the best thing ever and the worst thing ever.
  
• The Biology of B-Movie Monsters. total /. crazyness.
  
• 6 Steps To Writing A Fantasy Blockbuster, via SF Signal.
  
• Organizing Bookshelves. OK, this one is soooo me.
  
• Black Bean Salad. Good stuff. Tried it last night.
  
• Escher’s “Relativity” in Legos
  
• How physics killed Spiderman's girlfriend on YouTube, here.

On Computer Science

It's been a while since I did a CS-related round-up (and still more catching up on stuff that came out while I was on vacation.):

• Congratulations, Luis von Ahn -- one of the 2006 McArthur Genius awards goes to a computer scientist.
  
• Language Wars By Joel Spolsky about which language to choose for which project, always a controversial issue when you get a bunch of programmers together. Spolsky has an interesting take on the issue -- you don't know until it's too late.
  
• Also from Joel on Software, The Guerrilla Guide to Hiring. It's a series of articles on hiring software developers. They're pretty interesting, revealing a lot about the culture. Interestingly, many of the same ideas are relevant for hiring librarians, especially those with specialized skillsets.
  
  
  • Finding Great Developers
    
  • Field Guide to Developers
    
  • Sorting Resumes
  
  
• Offshoring Implications: Innovate to Succeed -- the U.S. General Accounting Office released a report on offshoring in US semiconductor and softwares industries. The ACM published a similar report on the software industry.
  
• The Tenure Gender Gap in computing. Highlights two recent articles in the mainstream media describing the recent National Academies report on women in science.
  
• Position Opening: IT "Image" Strategist -- how bad is the image of your field when you have to hire an image strategist? Yep, that bad.
  
• The Grace Hopper Celebration of Women in Computing. Jane'll be there. Have fun & I can't wait to hear about the conference. (My b-day is actually Oct. 6th. 44!) UPDATE: via Topix, the Silicon Valley Watcher on the conference.
  
• Electrical Engineering Future -- what EE's do and why you'd want to be one, here.
  

So, you wanna be a teacher?

Looking at my referrer logs this morning, I'm struck by the following google search that led someone here: Most Inexpensive Fastest way get Master's Degree Education from an Accredited school Pennsylvania Quickest Be Teacher.

Would you want this person teaching your children? Let me count the ways.

Women in Science

A few recent interesting items on this issue:

• The Real Barriers for Women in Science by Doug Lederman covers a recent report by the Committee on Maximizing the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering, the reportt being Beyond Bias and Barriers: Fulfilling the Potential of Women in Academic Science and Engineering. The gist of the report is that women face a lot of unintention (as well as intentional) biases in trying to forge a scientific career. From the report:

  The fact that women are capable of contributing to the nation’s scientific and engineering enterprise but are impeded in doing so because of gender and racial/ethnic bias and outmoded ‘rules’ governing academic success is deeply troubling and embarrassing,” the report concludes. “It is also a call to action."

  
  
• Bias or Interest? by Scott Jaschik in today's IHE follows up in the same vein. Apparently, most profs in science are still clueless on the issue and place most of the blame for the lack of women on women's choices not the inflluence of biases (both intentional and unintentional).
  


• And to round it all up, I point to a case study in the above theories -- the recent dust-up between Chad Orzel and Zuska on the ScienceBlogs site. The discussion revolved around the pipeline issue in physics -- why do so few women end of studying physics at the university level and where do they drop out of the pipeline. Orzel starts it here, Zuska continues here, here and here while Janet Stemwedel separates the combatants here. All the various posts have lots of stimulating discussion in the comments, including quite a bit by Zuska and Chad.

Chris Mooney: The Republican War on Science

A couple of videos on YouTube featuring Chris Mooney, author of The Republican War on Science, talking about the use & abuse of science for political purposes. An interesting commentary on the current situation in the USA and a cautionary tale for those of us in Canada. I've watched the first one, below. The second one is here; I haven't watched all of that one yet. They're both about 30 minutes.



I haven't read the book yet either but plan to read and review it on the other blog fairly soon. For some reason the book isn't on the shelves yet in Canadian bookstores. via The Intesection.

Who benefits from science blogging? Everybody!

Via Tara C. Smith at Aetiology, a great article describing the science blogosphere by Eva Amsen (of the fine science blog EasternBlot) published in the most recent Hypothesis: Journal for the discussion of science. The article is titled Who Benefits from Science Blogging and features interviews with several notable science bloggers, inlcuding The above mentioned Smith as well as PZ Myers of Pharyngula. A nice quote from the end:

So who benefits from science blogging? As the above would suggest...everyone!

Blogging researchers have a chance to expand their casual science-related conversations world-wide, possibly meet other scientists and enhance their teaching skills, while blog-reading scientists can informally communicate with their peers through comments. Blog reading non-scientists have access to science stories they might otherwise have missed. Blogging science writers and journalists can use their blogs as a playpen for new ideas, meanwhile giving the rest of the world a well-written piece on an interesting topic. Finally, blogging journal editors can get reader feedback on articles, and read other articles for ideas.

I couldn't have said it better myself. A nod to blogging science librarians would have been nice, but that's probably asking too much. I'm happy enough that a journal aimed at scientists will let them all know about what the possibilities are out there.

Hypothesis is a new journal to me. Published at the University of Toronto, it's mostly original science articles aimed at working scientists, but there is quite a bit of commentary that's interesting to a wider community including librarians and Science Studies. Some examples:

• As of yet, not all doors are Open Access by P. Stogios, K. Badger
  
• Awareness in action: MBP students help sexual violence survivors in DRC by C. Nangini, B. MacIntosh
  
• So Many Departments, So Many Misleading Names by K. Zhou
  
• Academic Freedom, Scientific Integrity, and Conflicts of Interest: Lessons Learned from the U. of Toronto by N. Olivieri
  
• LaTeX: A Genuinely Better Way to Prepare Scientific Documents by N. Shah
  
• The Faculty of 1000 Biology Factor Will Revolutionize Scientific Evaluation and Publishing by K. Badger
  
• Beyond bells and whistles: the role of the science centre in science communication by M.E. Lafrance
  
• The role of science in international politics: A tour of modern history in scientific journals by E. Amsen

And lots more. A very interesting journal that I look forward to seeing a lot more from.

Carnival of the InfoScience #53: Naked Reference

As usual, lots of good stuff at this week's Carnival.

The link that caught my eye this time around was a from Steve Backs from Blog about Libraries about a new thing that his institution is trying: Naked reference. Not reference with no clothes on, but reference with no distractions. The idea is that when someone sits at the ref desk they are not to bring any other work with them: no journals, no documents to touch up, no emails to send. A very interesting idea on a topic that has long interested me. How to maximize the our perceived availability at the desk. We've all had students come to the desk while we're doing something and saying, "Sorry to bother you, but..." How many potential reference transactions are never started because the students are too shy to bother us? On the other hand, there are certainly times of the day and periods of the school year when there just isn't a whole lot of interacting going on; it seems a bit of a waste of time to sit there and just be bored waiting for the 2 or 3 questions you're going to get in an hour.

No doubt, a controversial project and I look forward to hearing more about the results. To get an idea of the controversy, I quote the first two comments from the post:

This is an excellent initiative, Steve! Have you also thought about asking staff to jot down a few thoughts/observations/notes after each shift that you could talk about as a group after the end of "Naked Reference"? I wonder if by writing thoughts down so they're not forgotten, you'll uncover some interesting service opportunities. Sounds like great marketing research of sorts and I look forward to reading about your results (oh, and I'm going to participate too!) :-)
# posted by Jill : 5:06 PM

this idea is anti-intellectual, managerial crap. steve, you sit at the desk doing nothing, but with some dumbass smile on your face, waiting for the next blessed patron. i'm not selling tickets to the show. i'm an information provider. i'm a librarian. i develop my skills by reading and poking around, and doing whatever work i believe i need to do. the reference desk is the perfect place for this activity. i will never work for or with you.
# posted by Anonymous : 1:32 PM

Diametrically opposed, yet both have valid points. It would be an interesting experiment to try. (Once again, easy for me to muse about interesting public service experiments while on sabbatical.)

We are programmers, and this is our manifesto

So, wanna know what it's like to be a real programmer? Check out Peter Wright's Strange new worlds, and programming languages...!

I love this post:

In a handful of bedrooms, dens, studies, and coffee shops binary artists created computer code with the depth, intricacy, subtlety and elegance of a DaVinci masterpiece. Tens of lines of code are reduced to one with an ornate refactoring built out of experience and experimentation. Like a small army of ground breaking scientists we discover new solutions to old problems, better solutions, faster solutions and better ways of working.

It really captures the mindset of the headsdown, no-holds-barred, hardcore coder to a tea. I know, I aspired to be this guy, and I certainly knew a lot of them during my university and industry career. And certainly, my institution is filled with them. These are the kids that check out all the books and drive up the Safari usage numbers. (Or are they? Do the keenest use the library the most or the least? Maybe these are the kids we need to reach?) Read the whole post, it's worth it! This is one of Blogger's current Notable Blogs.

The State of Science & Technology in Canada

Via The Star, a new report from The Council of Canadian Academies entitled The State of Science & Technology in Canada. From the press release:

Overall, Canada is strong in research, generally well-equipped technologically, but lagging in translation of research strength to innovation strength, according to a new study released today by the Council of Canadian Academies.

*snip*

The report highlights four principal clusters of prominent Canadian S&T strengths as judged against international standards of excellence:
- the natural resource sector
- information and communications technologies
- health and related life sciences and technologies
- environmental science and technology

*snip*

The view of Canada's strength overall in science and technology is somewhat more pessimistic than the survey respondents' opinion of S&T strengths in specific areas of research, technology application, and infrastructure. Fewer than half of respondents to the opinion survey ranked Canada strong overall in S&T and roughly a quarter believe we are weak relative to the average of other economically-advanced countries. The perception of the overall trend is rather pessimistic - about 40% believe Canada is losing ground. Only 28% see Canada gaining while 32% believe we are holding steady.

Looking ahead, most authorities concur on where the main action in S&T will be in the coming years:

- information and communications technologies
- biosciences and technologies
- materials sciences and technologies
- "nano" technologies applied broadly

Survey respondents identified energy technologies - and particularly 'clean energy' - as the area where Canada was best positioned to develop prominent strength in the future. On the other hand, the survey also contained evidence that Canada is currently not particularly strong in many of the relevant clean energy technologies.

*snip*

The report identifies infrastructure that supports "knowledge production" as a particular Canadian strength. Survey respondents gave high marks to the Canada Foundation for Innovation, the Canada Research Chairs program, research hospitals, universities and the research granting agencies of the federal government, particularly the Canadian Institutes for Health Research (CIHR) and the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC).

I'll certainly be taking a closer look at the report itself (it's 228 pages, the "summary" is 51 pages), but it is quite interesting that "pure" research is ranked relatively highly while actually getting around to doing something useful with the research is an area that is lacking. On the other hand, from what I could tell, the committee that prepared the docuement only had 3 of 10 members who were working scientists in Canada. The rest were industry, government or other stakeholders.

What's New @ IEEE for Students, September 2006

Some interesting bits from the latest issue:

1. EXPLORE SPACE EDUCATION IN NEW ISSUE OF IEEE MAGAZINE
The current issue of the "IEEE Aerospace and Electronic Systems Magazine" (v. 21, no. 7) explores the evolving field of space education. Papers in this issue discuss the "pioneering role of the International Space University," as well as programs at worldwide university programs which focus on spacecraft design and construction projects by student teams. Abstracts for all articles in the issue can be found through the IEEE Xplore digital library, where subscribers have full-text access to the publication. Visit:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=35467


4. FIVE ARTICLES BY MANAGEMENT GURU PETER F. DRUCKER FEATURED IN NEW ISSUE OF IEEE MAGAZINE
The new issue of the "IEEE Engineering Management Review" (v. 34, no. 2) features five articles by management guru Peter F. Drucker, who is regarded by experts in the business world as the founding father of the study of management. Articles include "Management: The Problems of Success" and "Knowledge-Worker Productivity: The Biggest Challenge." Abstracts for all articles in the issue can be found in the IEEE Xplore digital library, where subscribers will have full-text access to the publication. Visit:
http://ieeexplore.ieee.org/xpl/tocresult.jsp?isnumber=35313

8. RESEARCHERS TEST SOCIAL COMPUTING NETWORK BELIEF
In an effort to evaluate the social network belief that everyone is separated by only six connections from everyone else, computer scientists have created an experiment that tests standard network theories. To achieve this end, the researchers collected 38 students at the University of Pennsylvania (USA) to play a game of color selection on networked computers. After changing the patterns of the networked connections, the researchers performed a number of trials based on each model, creating a framework they can use to identify how social network structure sways human performance. Read more:
http://www.iwr.co.uk/information-world-review/news/2162945/computer-scientists-test-social

Cory Doctorow on How Copyright Broke

Cory Doctorow gives some sensible commentary on copyright in the latest Locus magazine, reprinted on the Locus website.

If I may quote a largish chunk:

But customers understand property — you bought it, you own it — and they don't understand copyright. Practically no one understands copyright. I know editors at multibillion-dollar publishing houses who don't know the difference between copyright and trademark (if you've ever heard someone say, "You need to defend a copyright or you lose it," you've found one of these people who confuse copyright and trademark; what's more, this statement isn't particularly true of trademark, either). I once got into an argument with a senior Disney TV exec who truly believed that if you re-broadcasted an old program, it was automatically re-copyrighted and got another 95 years of exclusive use (that's wrong).

So this is where copyright breaks: When copyright lawyers try to treat readers and listeners and viewers as if they were (weak and unlucky) corporations who could be strong-armed into license agreements you wouldn't wish on a dog. There's no conceivable world in which people are going to tiptoe around the property they've bought and paid for, re-checking their licenses to make sure that they're abiding by the terms of an agreement they doubtless never read. Why read something if it's non-negotiable, anyway?

The answer is simple: treat your readers' property as property. What readers do with their own equipment, as private, noncommercial actors, is not a fit subject for copyright regulation or oversight. The Securities Exchange Commission doesn't impose rules on you when you loan a friend five bucks for lunch. Anti-gambling laws aren't triggered when you bet your kids an ice-cream cone that you'll bicycle home before them. Copyright shouldn't come between an end-user of a creative work and her property.

Of course, this approach is made even simpler by the fact that practically every customer for copyrighted works already operates on this assumption. Which is not to say that this might make some business-models more difficult to pursue. Obviously, if there was some way to ensure that a given publisher was the only source for a copyrighted work, that publisher could hike up its prices, devote less money to service, and still sell its wares. Having to compete with free copies handed from user to user makes life harder — hasn't it always?

In other words, copyright should balance the needs of creators and consumers, without tipping on the creators' side. If anything, consumers should get the benefit of the doubt. Does this make it harder for creators to earn a living from their works? I guess so, and this is where I may be a little less libertarian than Doctorow, but the reality of the situation is that the tech won't go away. The creators that make the most money on their works in the will be the ones that adapt the fastest and the best. Another area we may diverge: I really do still think that creators should be the ones who choose to make their works freely available. Ethical consumers won't make the choice for them.

Wikipedia & John Dupuis, again

So, it seems my little Wikipedia problem is mostly solved. My friend and science-fictional collaborator Mark Shainblum (Wiki) set up an entry for me based on the book we edited together -- I believe totally unrelated to my original posting. For what it's worth, there is now a John Dupuis(Canadian science fiction editor and critic) entry on Wikipedia.

Over the next little while I'll probably add a few things to the entry & re-point some of the links to that other guy that should be to me.

Diagrams illustrating scientific communications processes

Coturnix kindly points to a series of diagrams by Rob Loftis, a philosophy prof at St. Lawrence University. These diagrams can be used to explain scientific comminications processes to students, both in terms of scientists communicating among themselves and how scientific information gets communicated to the public.

I use a similar diagram already when I do IL classes, but I find that one is a little too conceptual and detailed for non-science students (ie. when I do IL for students taking a breadth course) but perfect for senior undergrad & grad students who are ready to learn about the scholarly communications processes in their discipline.

(Rob updates his diagram here, but I don't think this version is as useful.)

Update: I think I should be more explicit in my debt to Jim Parrott of the University of Waterloo for the diagram I link to in the second paragraph.

About as nerdy as I thought

Via Scienceblogs:



It's quite interesting, most of the ScienceBloggers have tried it. Pointers to many of them here.

Blogorama

It's been a while since I reported on what's newish in my bloglines subs:

• ScienceBlogs -- now up to 49 blogs, I get the feed that aggregates them all. Often over 100 posts a day, it's both overwhelming and indispensible. The range and variety of commentary on both scientific and other issues is stupendous. The only problem is that I really don't have as much of a fix on the personality of the individual blogs as I normally would. Some of the newer ones are still only very vaguely imprinted on my consciousness.
  
• Schneier on Security -- great blog covering security & IP issues.
  
• Cosmic Variance -- "Cosmic Variance is a group blog by five people who, coincidentally or not, all happen to be physicists and astrophysicists." Good blog covering a very wide range of scitech & other topics. Always something worth reading.
  
• Rationally Speaking by Massimo Pigliucci is a philosophy of science blog, covering a wide range of non-science topics too. Seems like a natural for the next wave of ScienceBlogs migrations.
  
• Curious Cat Science and Engineering Blog -- "Science and Engineering: Innovation, Research, Education and Economics." Wide-ranging blog, always covering interesting stuff.
  
• Applied Abstractions -- "Technology, strategy, IT management and miscellany." Good links & commentary, like Why Professors Should Blog.
  
• O'Reilly Radar -- I've tried for a while to find a good feed from O'Reilly. They all seem to crap out after a while. This one has lots of good posts from various staffers, including Tim O'Reilly himself. One of Tim's recent ones is Quality of Book Digitization.
  
• Rants of a feminist engineer and Absinthe -- two good blogs by women in scitech fields.
  
• The Laughing Librarian and A Librarian's Guide to Etiquette -- because we all need a good laugh.
  
• The Linda Hall Library Weblog -- not that much activity yet, but potentially interesting.
  
• CRITICAL MASS -- "the blog of the national book critics circle board of directors." Coverage of the publishing industry, with the occasional highly relevant post such as Using Books to Get Women Into Science
  
• Galleycat.com: a blog about books and publishing. Similar to Critical Mass but more light-hearted with more coverage of genre fiction.

It's notable that I haven't added too many new library links in the last several months. Mostly this is because I'm pretty well covered with those and wanted to beef up my scitech blog list. There's a lot of the A-List library blogs I don't read regularly, so I should probably look to adding a few of those. As well, I really haven't taken the time yet to go through Walt's big list of the Great Middle to see what catches my fancy.

Update: Added link to O'Reilly Radar.

I Know The Material - I Just Don't Do Well on Exams

In the back-to-school spirit, via John Scalzi, a list of Top Ten No Sympathy Lines (Plus a Few Extra) by Steven Dutch, Natural and Applied Sciences, University of Wisconsin - Green Bay.

• This Course Covered Too Much Material...
  
• The Expected Grade Just for Coming to Class is a B
  
• I Disagreed With the Professor's Stand on ----
  
• Some Topics in Class Weren't on the Exams
  
• Do You Give Out a Study Guide?
  
• I Studied for Hours
  
• I Know The Material - I Just Don't Do Well on Exams
  
• I Don't Have Time For All This
  
• But you don't understand. I have a job
  
• Students Are Customers
  
• Do I Need to Know This?
  
• There Was Too Much Memorization
  
• This Course Wasn't Relevant
  
• Exams Don't Reflect Real Life
  
• I Paid Good Money for This Course and I Deserve a Good Grade
  
• All I Want is the Diploma

I'm always torn by these kinds of super-cynical lists. On the one hand, I can chuckle at the cynicism. Really, students haven't changed that much over the years, I don't think. I'm sure profs 10, 20, 30, 40 years ago could have come up with a similar list. But still, human nature (ie. laziness, dishonesty, arrogance of youth) is always a worth a good laugh. And lord knows, I've chuckled at students attitudes & behaviors a few times over the years.

On the other hand, I sort of feel that if we (as librarians and educators) let our cynicism get the best of us, we risk damaging our relationship with our students. Our cynicism becomes a self-fulfilling prophesy, our sincerity the only weapon to combat it. Smile at a student today! (Of course, it's easy for me to say, being on sabbatical and all.)

To end on a cynical note, I checked my search engine referrers a little while ago and one of them was a Google search for "science fair projects for cheaters."

Wikipedia & John Dupuis

So, I'm ego surfing the other day, and, lo and behold, there's actually a Wikipedia article for John Dupuis! Wow, I must be really famous if someone out there went to the trouble of creating a Wikipedia article on little old me. Of course, the kicker is that it's not about me, but some other John Dupuis out there. (The article actually seems a little on the vanity side, but who am I to complain.)

That's all well and good, I can live with that. But, looking at the pages that link to that other guy's page, I see that a couple of Wikipedia references to me (the real me, that is) actually link to this other guy. The real me references are on pages such as my friend Mark Shainblum's page where he mentions the SF book we edited together; the Aurora Awards page where the award for that book is listed; a published alternate histories page refering to that book; and a list of people who've won literary awards but don't have a Wikipedia page.

So, what to do? First of all, I guess that I should go to the above mentioned pages and remove the links to this other guy's page that are about me. But can I have a no-page-exists link for a page that does exist, even if it's the wrong one? Can I make the other guy "John_Dupuis_(Musician)" when no other John Dupuis exists in the Wikipedia? Will someone else reestablish the links even if I do remove them?

I appeal to the collective wisdom of the biblioblogosphere to help me sort this one out. suggestions, anyone? Hey, John, if you're out there doing your own ego surfing, do you have any suggestions?

I'm back...

But I probably won't resume regular blogging for a few more days. When we returned from vacation Sunday afternoon, we discovered a bit of flooding in the basement due to a burst hot water heater. We're currently up to our elbows in various replacement & remediation crews. Thank god for insurance. When I do return to blogging, we'll just have to wait and see how my current state of sabbaticality affects the frequency and contents of my posting. Aside from a couple of longish thematic posts I have in mind, there is no plan.

The vaction itself was great. We spent a bit more than 3 weeks in a cottagy place in Magog, Quebec (Wikipedia), in spitting distance of a beach Lac Memphrémagog. It was great. Very restful, very quiet, with go-carting, mini-put and bowling breaks to keep the younger set happy. We saw two movies, the kiddy oriented Asterix et les Vikings which was pretty good (not sure if there's an English version yet) and the absolutely hilariously fantastic Bon Cop, Bad Cop. For my Canuck readers out there, this movie is an absolutely must-see. It's a perfectly bilingual Anglo/Franco take on the mismatched cop buddy film that hits a lot of Canadian stereotypes perfectly, and very fairly, while still having a pretty good thriller plot. Non-Canadians would probably also enjoy the film, even if some of the Anglo vs. Franco bits are a bit mystifying. I believe the English-Canadian version opens this Friday. That's the version with the French dialogue subtitled. We saw the one with the English dialogue subtitled.

Vacation thanks go to the very fine (and very busy) Memphrémagog Public Library where we checked our email on a weekly basis and to the Casablanca B&B where we spent the night in Kingston on the way back. Very friendly, great breakfast.

Update: I just posted the write-up on my cottage reading contest winners on the other blog.

Summer blogging break

It's that time again, a time for rest and relaxation. I don't expect to post again until mid-August, at which point I will be beginning my sabbatical. I'm not sure if or how my sabbatical will affect posting frequency or topic choice, but I guess we'll find out together.

Thanks to all who voted in my reading poll, it's been fun. I probably should have picked slightly less obscure novels, and may I'll have a somewhat more mainstream selection if I try this next year. The winners are:

• Old Man's War by John Scalzi
  
• River of Gods by Ian McDonald
  
• Passage by Connie Willis
  
• Homeward Bound by Harry Turtledove

I'll be reporting on my impressions of my reading material on the other blog. Have a good summer everyone!