Like everyone else these days, Scientific American has a new podcast. I listened to the first one and it was pretty good, with items on the Korean stem cell controversy, the National Inventor's Hall of Fame, Eugenie Scott on the Dover case and a funny little bit on the "reality" of the CSI series. I hope they maintain the humourous bits, as that distinguishes them from a lot of the other scitech podcasts out there.
A bunch of vaguely science-related fun items from around the blogosphere:
Inspired by Adventures in Ethics and Science and Stranger Fruit...
So, how does a person go from being a software developer to being a science librarian?
A couple of great posts over at ScienceBlogs about how a couple of history/philosophy of science scholars started out on pure science careers but then switched over to the other side.
The first is by Janet D. Stemwedel at Adventures in Ethics and Science, Changing career paths, about her transition from a chemist to a philosopher. A follow-up post with more details is here.
The second is by John Lynch at Stranger Fruit, What a long strange trip ..., about his transition from biology to history.
Interestingly, neither of them has made much of a buzz in the blogosphere that I can tell from Technorati. You often hear about scientists who have made the transition to novelist or artist or whatever, and these are just two more examples of how the training scientists get can be useful in other fields of endeavor (or perhaps something else ;-). It would also be interesting to hear of cases where people start careers in the arts, humanities or social sciences and end up in science or technical careers -- there must be quite a few former artists who make their living as web developers, for example.
Any bloggers out there reading this who have made similar career transitions? I'd be happy to link to posts about your experiences!
A couple of cool things via the Make blog:
interactions (v13i1) has a nice issue on prototyping with lots of interesting looking articles, good stuff for you programmers & developers out there. However, I'd also like to draw attention to a couple of articles about HCI as a field:
There's lots of jargon and acromym-speak out there in the tech world and sometimes it can be hard to wade through it all, especially when something new and hot appears on your radar and you want ot get a handle on it. Well, for the last year or so O'Reilly has been publishing a series of "What is..." articles their web site. They are meaty, substantial and very high quality, especially good at placing the technology or trend in context. Of course, this is to be expected from a company with the reputation of O'Reilly, but it is always nice to see reality match reputation.
There are over 50 of the articles available and needless to say many of them are highly relevant to the library world. So, if you want to do a little catch-up, here are some of the highlights (and another link to the main page):
A rather interesting section on gaming, with many resonances with educational applications for gaming (v4i1 Jan 2006):
Speaking of alternate reality games, sf/fantasy novelist & game writer Sean Stewart has this to say:
Right now, this art form is more exciting than novels. If I had to choose, I’d do this...
I think that every means of communication carries within itself the potential for a form of art. Once the printing press was built, novels were going to happen. It took the novel a little while to figure out exactly what it was going to be, but once the press was there, something was going to occur. Once motion picture cameras were around, the movies—in some format or another—were going to happen.
I modestly or immodestly think that we got some things fundamentally right about the way the web and the internet want to tell stories in a way that not everyone had gotten quite when we lucked into it. What people do on the web is they look for things and they gossip. We found a way of storytelling that has a lot to do with looking for things and gossiping about them.
Perfect for a Friday, I get to combine my usual focus on science & technology with my occasional focus on science fiction! Check out the site LabLit: The culture of science in fact & fiction for a bunch of fun and stimulating feature articles and resources. Or, as they put it, stuff about:
a small but growing genre of fiction in which central scientific characters, activities and themes are portrayed in a realistic manner, in a realistic (as opposed to futuristic or speculative) world. Lab lit, furthermore, encompasses all stories in which scientist characters are shown carrying out their scientific endeavors in a way that is integral to the plot. (I am always happy to see realistic minor scientist characters in literature of other genres, but I would not classify these books as 'lab lit' unless science was mostly the point of the novel. The boundaries are not always cut and dry, however.)While they're a bit coy about the whole sf thing, quite a few of the novels, films and other works they cite as just "novels" are, in fact, science fiction. They should just come clean and admit that sf about scientists doing science is really LabLit too, even if it's in the future. In any case, there's lots of very interesting things to check out on their site.
Lab lit is not synonymous with science fiction, although of course there can some overlap. Science fiction is removed from reality by definition and will have an element of fantasy – it will be set in the future, say, or in an alternative universe. No matter how realistically crafted these fantasy scientists and their world are, or how closely they parallel actual science culture, it will not be a scene that you and I could easily encounter were we to walk into a research institute, field station or any other place where scientists are doing what they do. Science fiction has and will continue to give us true-to-life protrayals of scientists in many cases, but the genre itself is a different beast.
Jane has posted what seems to be the last in her series on teaching various levels of CS courses:
Recent journal articles of interest:
Via BoingBoing, it seems that Seed magazine is hosting a bunch of science-related blogs:
Roddy McLeod has an article on Engineering: the changing information landscape in the most recent FreePint. Roddy provides a solid summary of the current situation and some speculation about where we are headed. Recommended.
If you're wondering what it's all about (and the whole L2 business hasn't made as much of a splash in the academic library world as in public libraries), Walt Crawford has a special issue of C&I to explain it all.
The core concept? To me it seems that the L2 advocates are saying the we should pay more attention to what our patrons really want from us, not just what we think they should want or what we've always given them in the past. The core assumption seems to me to be that our patrons needs and expectations are changing faster than we're adjusting to serve them. Is this the case? Probably yes, but at the same time the speed with which our patrons are changing (and expecting us to change) isn't uniform. Yes, even the millennials aren't uniformly permaconnected or addicted to googlization. Can we figure out a way to change faster while still serving a wide range of expectations? Probably. Is it easy? No. It's always dangerous to assume that all of our patrons want the same thing from us all the time.
Lately I've been thinking of a kind of taxonomy of our community. Working from the core assumption that the library has something valuable to offer to our students, I see our community broken down in the following way:
Via ELDnet-l, a website for the above mentioned committee. The Committee also has a Scholarly Communication in Engineering blog which doesn't have much yet but will certainly be worth watching. Welcome!
OK, so the family is doing Madlibs after supper last night and one of the ones that comes up is titled Albert Einstein. The bold terms are the ones we filled in:
Albert Einstein was born in Ulm, Germany, in 1879, the son of Pee Wee Herman and Janet Jackson. In 1902 he had a job as assistant lampshade in the Swiss patent office and attended the University of Zurich. There he began studying atoms, molecules, and poodles. He developed his famous theory of gory relativity, which expanded the phenomena of sub-atomic pogo sticks and minty fresh magnetism. In 1921, he won the Nobel Prize for jalapeno peppers and was director of theoretical physics at the Kaiser Wilhelm SUV in Berlin. In 1933, when Hitler became Chancellor of Mars, Eistein came to America to take a post at Princeton Institute for tooth picks, where his theories helped American devise the first atomic bar stool. There is no doubt about it: Einstein was one of the most brilliant cooks of our time.
Joel Spolsky has a very thought provoking article on his Blog, Joel on Software. It's basically about what the main teaching language of CS programs should be, C or Java:
Therein lies the debate. Years of whinging by lazy CS undergrads like me, combined with complaints from industry about how few CS majors are graduating from American universities, have taken a toll, and in the last decade a large number of otherwise perfectly good schools have gone 100% Java. It's hip, the recruiters who use "grep" to evaluate resumes seem to like it, and, best of all, there's nothing hard enough about Java to really weed out the programmers without the part of the brain that does pointers or recursion, so the drop-out rates are lower, and the computer science departments have more students, and bigger budgets, and all is well.
A potpourri of bookmarks sitting around my desktop, many only vaguely related to our core mission here:
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