Man vs. machine! What could be better than that? Garry Kasparov and Deep Junior face off over the next couple of weeks in NYC. Check out this CNN report on the match. The first game was won handily by Kasparov, check out this report at Chessbase. Chessbase is the best place to follow the match -- take a look at their media page. A brilliant addition to the popular literature on artificial intelligence is Feng-hsiung Hsu's Behind Deep Blue: Building the Computer that Defeated the World Chess Champion, a behind the scenes account of the last time Kasparov faced a computer in public. Computer chess is a topic that really interests me and I've been reading a lot lately on the topic. A big post of various resources is coming soon. And guess what? Yep, there is a Claude Shannon connection.

Am I obsessed with Google? If you're an academic librarian these days and you're not displaying at least some degree of Google anxiety, you're probably not paying attention. Has Google won? is an interview with Steven J. Bell at The Chronicle of Higher Education. It raises some interesting issues, especially about our assumption that full text databases are the best weapon in our arsenal to get students to use something other than Google in their research. His suggestion? Quality not quantity. From Lisnews.

Stephen Wolfram is the "wild and crazy science pundit" du jour these days. Of course, that doesn't mean what he has to say isn't weird, stimulating and thought provoking, as is this interview at the O'Reilly Network on bioinformatics.

David Hartwell is one of the secret masters of science fiction, editor at Tor, publisher of The New York Review of Science Fiction and editor or too many anthologies to mention. By definition, being a secret master means that he might be a little less well known than he deserves -- for example, you rarely see interviews with him. This recent interview in SF Revu should change that a bit. The connection to our mandate here? His most recent anthology (with Kathryn Cramer) is The Hard SF Renaissance. Hard sf being, of course, the most scientifically minded branch of the genre. From Locusmag.

One of the most valuable research skills it is possible to have is the ability to dig up obscure and forgotten knowledge. This skill may not be as important in the sciences as in journalism or history, although it should not be undervalued. Physicists, mathematicians, botanists and many others often use dusty old tomes as part of their research. Unfortunately, most new students refuse to believe that anything not on the Web could be important or useful. The Web may be transforming how research is done forever, but I don't think we need to throw out the baby with the bath water. One of our Science & Technology Studies profs, Ernst Hamm, pointed out this wonderful little article to me about journalism students. I think it is just as relevant to virtually every other field, highlighting some of the "old-fashioned" research skills such as persistence, imagination and hard work.

Following up on the Salon article about the Jan Hendrik Schön fraud controversy, the APS has decided to retract serveral articles co-authored by Schön. Fortunately, they have decided to leave the articles online with clear statements of retraction.

I've been reading about Claude Shannon and information theory quite a bit lately so I thought I'd share some of things I've seen, both on the free Web and in journals & conferences:

• The best place to start is Robert G. Gallager's "Claude E. Shannon: A retrospective on his life, work and impact" from the IEEE transactions on information theory. 47(7): 2681-2695.
  
• From the 1994 IEEE Security Technology conference, "Claude Shannon's cryptography research during World War II and the mathematical theory of communication," by Everett M. Rogers.
  
• From the AIP's 21st International Workshop on Bayesian Inference and Maximum Entropy in Science and Engineering, "The information revolution in yet to come (A homage to Claude E. Shannon)," by Alberto Solana-Ortega. This is a kind of expansion and rethinking of Shannon's ideas and is therefore quite interesting.
  
• Another good Shannon bio, taken from his collected works. This one's by N.J.A. Sloane and A.D. Wyner, the editors of that book.
  
• Speaking of the collected works, here it is. If your math/engineering/computer science collection doesn't have this book, it should. I know we didn't so I just ordered it myself.
  

No one seems to know whether the Bogdanov Affair is a case of a Sokal-type hoax, a fraud or just a case of how theoretical physics is becoming an awful lot like Olympic figure skating -- very difficult to judge. John Baez's essay is a very good explanation of the case without the hype or finger-pointing.

Open source biology? Read this fascinating interview with bioinformatics pioneer Jim Kent. Also note O'Reilly's Bioinformatics Resource Center.

Sauron the good guy? Hmmm. This essay by science fiction author David Brin is particularly interesting (and relevant to us) because it takes a critical look at the way we romanticize the past and demonize science and technology and how those ideas are reflected in Tolkein's books and the movies. BTW, I'm a big fan and can't wait to see The Two Towers.

Some not-very-surprising reports from the latest dlib. First of all, as shown in King & Montgomery's "After Migration to an Electronic Journal Collection:Impact on Faculty and Doctoral Students," electronic formats are quicker and easier for faculty to use. Similarly, as shown in Rudner & Gellmann's "Who is reading on-line education journals? Why? And what are they reading?" if you build it online, they will definately come and read. An interesting question: why would any scholar in her right mind publish in a print-only journal? Given the option, wouldn't she naturally prefer a free, online journal?

O'Reilly is my favourite publisher of compter books, bar none. And I think that has a lot to do with how sensible and intelligent Tim O'Reilly is. Take a look at this discussion of the whole Internet piracy/file sharing controversy and you'll see what I mean. Too bad he doesn't run some of the record companies, too. From Lisnews.

Indexing and abstracting services, BEWARE! In fact, as the thrust of this article from MSNBC indicates, everyone who's job is involved with sorting, classifying and providing access to information needs to know how the landscape is shifting beneath our feet. We think libraries and librarians are more important than ever in the brave new googlized world, but does anyone else? (BTW, I just checked Google to see if I was the first to coin the term googlized, googleization or googlization, and I'm not. Sigh.) From Lisnews.

Absolutely terrific article in the new Issues in Science & Technology Librarianship by Ibironke Lawal called "Scholarly Communication: The Use and Non-Use of E-Print Archives for the Dissemination of Scientific Information." It uses a very well done survey to explore the scholarly communication patterns of various disciplines with respect to e-prints. As expected, physics & astronomy come out on top and just as interestingly, chemistry comes out on bottom. This article brings together in a concrete way a lot of the threads running throught the science librarian community these days about free online scholarship, the Web and the role of institutional repositories versus discipline-based resources. Highly recommended.

After a bit of a silence due to a rather busy term, a bit of a reminder about why we all do this kind of thing. And I don't mean just for tenure, although since I'm tenure stream I can't pretend to say it doesn't influence my desire to maintain this blog. I know I do this also to be able to share my ideas and concerns with other academic (science) librarians who are in a similar position. And if doing this helps my tenure chances, well, I have to say that that's great too. The blog that most influenced me to start this up was the Scholarly Electronic Publishing Weblog, which I think is by far the best current awareness site on the web for librarians interested in the future of scholarly publishing.

And while I'm pointing to Ex Libris and talking about the future of scholarly publishing, take a look at this article from a couple of years ago. It really highlights for me the challenge of reference service these days. We're straddling two worlds, one print and one electronic. Our students want to be 100% electronic but we know that so much of what is useful for them is still in print and it can be a bit of a struggle to get them to look at print resources. But, how to get to that 100% electronic world, and who will pay for it. It should be very interesting to see where we end up in even 10 years from now.

Another installment of "popular science watch." First up is an article from Scientific American on the developer of information theory, Claude Shannon. It is a very understandable outline of what information theory is all about as well as some interesting insight in Shannon himself. There are also links to more about information theory, including an online version of Shannon's original paper.

Next up is a posting from the CBC about the physics of stone skipping, including links to the research. Who knew?

An article pointed out to me by the chair of the Math & Stats department here at York: "Mathematicians and the Mathematics Library: A Librarian's Perspective." It's by Sara Rutter and it's in the Notices of the AMS, volume 49, number 9, pages 1078-1081. It is based on Ranganathan's Five Laws and relates each of them to being a math librarian. The most appropriate is that the library is a growing organism, changing and evolving to meet the needs of its users -- something very important in this time of change in scholarly publishing.

This article reminded me of a few other older ones from Notices of the AMS. "Mathematics Research Libraries at the End of the Twentieth Century" from volume 44, number 11 and "Twenty Centuries of Mathematics: Digitizing and Disseminating the Past Mathematical Literature" from volume 49, number 7.

Going back to my October 4th posting, the full document is online. The title is "Dimensions and Use of the Scholarly Information Environment," which is quite a mouthful. A telling quote from the conclusion: "Library directors and college and university administrators face an increasingly complex institutional and informational environment. The population they serve is far from homogeneous in its level of sophistication, information needs and infrastructure requirements." No kidding. I think this is quite an important document because is starts to give us an idea of how scholars are adapting to the web and more importantly, how the scholars of the future -- today's undergrads -- are being shaped by it. The ideas and expectations that they develope in their formative years will drive the scholarly information landscape for decades to come. Or should I say the landscape that replaces the one we are familiar with from the past and which is clearly in transition.

One thing you have to say about Google -- it's really made combatting plariarism the hottest thing on university campuses these days. York has recently subscribed to turnitin.com and I know that there are other services out there. It also seems that every libray is coming up with good ant-plariarism sites, like these: 1, 2, 3. Google, ironically, also has a very good directory entry. This whole topic started percolating around in my mind when I read this article by Bill Savage called: "Get Caught Plagiarizing: Thinking About Cheating? Think Again, Moron." It takes an interesting tack: why do students plagiarize: ignorance, fear, arrogrance and all the rest. It's funny and vicious -- what could be better? Article from lisnews.

d-lib is an ejournal I check out on a regular basis. This month's issue has two articles of note for us here today. First of all, "Comparing Library and User Related Costs of Print and Electronic Journal Collections: A First Step Towards a Comprehensive Analysis" more or less confirms what seems to me to be fairly obvious: that a library's total cost of managing journal subscriptions is less for ejournals than for print journals. The study also indicates that faculty and students make heavy use of ejournals, especially in terms of reading a wider range of journals than they would have before. Like I said, this seems obvious, but it's nice when reality works out like it should. I can certainly say that my experience with my own research-related work tells me that I much prefer using ejournals to print journals, almost to the point where I won't use a journal if I don't have access to the electronic version. At York, most of the library science print journals are at the humanities/social sciences library, about a five minute walk from my branch. The idea that I should have to get up and walk five minutes, find the location in the stacks of the journal I want, find a free photocopier and actually stand around photocopying the thing flashes me back to my old MLIS days at McGill. It seems so studenty. I have to say, I understand why faculty prefer ejournals because I do too.

The other interesting article is "Open Citation Linking: The Way Forward," about which I have no accompanying rant but is still well worth the attention of anyone interesting in the whole Open Archives movement.