Friday Fun

The web is a very weird place:

• Homo aspergerus: Evolution Stumbles Forward by Gary Westfahl. This a strangely fascinating essay where the author basically self-diagnoses himself with Asperger's Syndrome and then goes on to conjecture that sufferers of Asperger's are a higher form of human being. Those familiar with scifi fandom will recognize the self-agrandizement as par t of a long history of "fans are slans" rallying cries. Not very convincing.
  
• Hat of p**p (and what a fetching hat of p**p it is). Usually I try to keep these Friday Fun posts a least a little relevant to our core mission here, but this struck me as so bizarre I had to include it. BTW, the "**" aren't due to coyness, but due to not wanting to attract weird search engine queries.
  
• Fresh children arrive from space to replace roboticized Earthlings
  
• News: Cocoa Linked to Lower Risk of Disease
  
• A Quick Survey of the Blog Manifestos
  
• 2006 James Beard nominees
  
• Free Hugo Award Nominated Novels for those eligable to vote
  
• Best SciFi concept albums via SF Signal

Numerical Analysis Review Article

A good review article by Lloyd N. Trefethen is here. It's slated to appear in the Princeton Companion to Mathematics. You can find numerous other preprints of chapters that are forthcoming just by googling the title. In any case, the Trefethen article is well worth checking out for anyone interested in what NA is all about these days.

Also on Trefethen's site are a number of other good reads:

• The definition of numerical analysis
  
• Maxims about numerical mathematics, computers, science, and life
  
• Predictions for scientific computing 50 years from now
  
• Numerical Software Tools and Information Sources
  
• Classic papers of numerical analysis (and most of the papers themselves)
  

Via NA-Digest.

CAUT 2006 Almanac of Post-Secondary Education

The Canadian Association of University Teachers has just released their 2006 Almanac of Post-Secondary Education, a treasure trove of statistics about higher ed in Canada in 2006: finances, academic staff (including librarians), libraries, students, research and a bunch of other categories.

What's up with that?

I'm sitting at the ref desk as I type this. I was just helping someone with a PubMed question. His cellphone rings while I'm explaining something. He answers it and starts talking to his buddy on the other end. I wish that this didn't happen so often.

Recent reading

• The Applied Mathematics and Computer Science Schism by Kowalik, J. in Computer v39i3. So, do computer scientists know enough math? You'd think so, but Janusz Kowalik begs to differ, and makes some very good points. His idea is that the basis of computing is applied math and that the most important scientific, commercial and other appplications for computing on the horizon are highly mathematically. So, it would make a lot of sense if CS programs give their graduates a very strong background in mathematical techniques. A bit rough and cynical too, Kowalik doesn't mince words, when talking about the average North American Joe:

  Yes, contemporary America has great inventors, scientists, and entrepreneurs, but the average Joe is increasingly illiterate and numerically challenged. Joe likes to have fun, and he leaves the hard thinking to the young immigrants who win spelling bees, play chess, and use the Internet to find proofs of the 2,000-year-old Pythagorean theorem.

  
  
• Portrayals of engineers in "science times" by Clark, F.; Illman, D.L. in IEEE Technology and Society Magazine v25i1. One of the factors influencing declining enrollments in engineering and other scitech fields is the generally non-existent-to-negative portrayal of engineers and engineering in the popular media. This article describes a study of the New York Times's Science Times feature to guage the popular perception of engineers and engineering. Not surprising, it's pretty bad, mostly just that engineers (and in particular, women engineers) are invisible.

Mi Lab Es Su Lab

From InsideHigherEd, an article on how MIT has set up some of their electrical engineering labs so that they can be controled remotely, and how students from all over the world are able to take advantage of their facilities.

Thanks to software developed and distributed by the institute, students can control MIT’s cutting edge equipment while eating cereal at their laptop in a Cambridge dorm, or from another continent. Students from Singapore to Sweden have logged in to run experiments on MIT’s equipment in the last few years. Now, thanks to a grant from the Carnegie Corporation of New York, MIT is getting African universities, which would not otherwise have access to top-of-the-line equipment, into the “iLabs.”

I reviewed a book on this topic, Lab on the Web: Running Real Electronics Experiments via the Internet, edited by Tor A. Fjeldly, Michael S. Shur for E-Streams.

Reasons to take math in high school

Via Boing Boing, Reasons to take math in high school:

• Choose math because it makes you smarter
  
• Choose math because you will make more money
  
• Choose math because you will lose less money
  
• Choose math to get an easier time at college and university
  
• Choose math because you will live in a global world
  
• Choose math because you will live in a world of constant change
  
• Choose math because it doesn't close any doors
  
• Choose math because it is interesting in itself
  
• Choose math because you will meet it more and more in the future
  
• Choose math so you can get through, not just into college
  
• Choose math because it is creative

And, my favourite:

• Choose math because it is cool. You have permission to be smart, you have permission to do what your peers do not. Choose math so you don't have to, for the rest of your life, talk about how math is "hard" or "cold". Choose math so you don't have to joke away your inability to do simple calculations or lack of understanding of what you are doing. Besides, math will get you a job in the cool companies, those that need brains.

Overall, maybe it overstates the case a bit, but it is a useful contrast to the other side of the argument.

Scientists R Us

A couple of interesting threads at ScienceBlogs:

• The Best and Worst parts of the Scientific Life, by Alex Palazzo in The Daily Transcript. I find this really interesting, first of all, because there are 10 worsts and only 3 bests. The bests revolve around the intellectual rewards of the scientific life: discovery, discussion and creativity. The worsts around the impact of those bests on the emotional and lifestyle health of the scientist: being scooped, begging for money, having a family, tenure and other milestones and other things. I think it's useful to keep some of these things in mind when we do our liaison work, to try and concentrate on making the best things easier for our patrons to accomplish (of all levels -- a lot of the same pressures and joys affect grad & ugrad students too) and to moderate the effects of the worst things where we can.
  
• Taxonomies of scientists, first life scientists (with a comment on how real life rarely matches taxonomies exactly) and then physicists, with a overall comment. Two things that attracted me to this thread. First of all, I always appreciate anything that will help me fill in the gaps of my own imperfect understanding of all these various fields. Second, It made me think a bit about how we classify librarians, both externally and amongst ourselves. It seems to me that there are three main classification schemes, one by the institution where we work (public, academic, corporate, etc), one by the subject we support (science, engineering, business, etc) and the other by what we do (collections, reference, cataloguing, systems, etc). We all get slotted in multiple locations in at least two of these domains -- for example I'm an academic science and engineering reference, collections and liaison librarian.
  
  Update: Afarensis has a couple of posts on anthropologists, although these are more silly than the lighthearted but useful nature of the earlier posts. Just so you know.
  

Friday Fun

From around the web:

• Get your profile lathed into a dowel, become an Escher print
  
• Top 10 strangest LEGO creations
  
• Frink Tank -- scientifically humourous and humourously scientific
  
• HardSF.net -- good site, I didn't post when it was first publicised because there wasn't too much content yet. There's quite a bit now for those interested in the more scientifically rigorous brand of sf.

Update: I wanted to include a couple of cool videos from Google & YouTube but forgot. Here they are:

• Tears of the Dragon by Bruce Dickinson, unplugged. Great video of Dickinson's best song. Beware. You will get completely addicted to YouTube.
  
• Viktor the Terrible vs. ? -- absolutly hilarious commercial, especially if you know a bit of chess history, but it's still great even if you're chessophobic. Info on Viktor here. via ChessBase.

Happy St. Patrick's Day

You Are Guinness

You know beer well, and you'll only drink the best beers in the world. Watered down beers disgust you, as do the people who drink them. When you drink, you tend to become a bit of a know it all - especially about subjects you don't know well. But your friends tolerate your drunken ways, because you introduce them to the best beers around.

What's Your Beer Personality?

via Respectful Insolence.

Spychips, bluesphere, fabjects, everyware, spime

Essays and speeches by Bruce Sterling (and here)can be surreal, bizarre and stimulating, but never dull. A noted futurist and design prof, check out his speech from the recent O'Reilly Emerging Tech conference here.

A taste:

At the moment, we're eagerly debating the proper terminology for a future internet of things. This is a rather literary, language-centric speech tonight – as tech gigs go, anyway. Very wordy. If you want to talk Web 2.0, you can at least say, you know: "FlickR, " "Wikipedia." You might even meet Jimmy Wales or Caterina Fake, who are not futurists, but actual working web technologists. Web 2.0 is kind of a loose grab-bag of concepts, but Jimmy Wales isn't a loose grab-bag, Jimmy Wales physically exists. In the case of an Internet of Things or ubiquitous computation, the top guru in the field, Marc Weiser of Xerox PARC, has been dead for several years now. In the Internet of Things debate, people are still trying to find the loose verbal grab-bag just to put the concepts into. So I would argue that this work is basically a literary endeavour. When it comes to remote technical eventualities, you don't want to freeze the language too early. Instead, you need some empirical evidence on the ground, some working prototypes, something commercial, governmental, academic or military.... Otherwise you are trying to freeze an emergent technology into the shape of today's verbal descriptions. This prejudices people. It is bad attention economics. It limits their ability to find and understand the intrinsic advantages of the technology.

His novels are pretty good, too. via BoingBoing.

A bit of collection development

A couple of book lists that are worth checking: (via SF Signal)

• 100 or so Books that shaped a Century of Science by Philip Morrison and Phylis Morrison
  
• Longlist for Aventis Prize for Science Books

Peer learning in Science

Great article by David Epstein at InsideHigherEd on how some profs have moved beyond dry lectures and made their classrooms more participatory and, it seems, even more fun for themselves as well.

I was dragged out of my ivory tower,” Mazur said. “The gain [after taking the intro class] was abysmal. It was clear I was not doing a good job teaching physics.” Mazur realized that the students had become quite adept at solving problems by rote, but not at applying concepts. So the next time he taught the course, he took some class time to explain some of the misconceptions exposed by the test.

“I turned and looked at them, 80 students or so, and they looked totally confused,” he said, “as if my explanation had made them more confused. They were silent, so confused they couldn’t even formulate a question.” From the test results, Mazur knew that about half of the students understood the concept he was trying to explain. “On a whim, I said ‘why don’t you turn to your neighbor and convince them of your answer,’ ” he said. “The whole room burst into chaos.”

The students were suddenly so eager to talk physics that Mazur said he figured, “I have to formalize this.” Such was the birth of “peer instruction,” a method of teaching that now has thousands of science faculty members bagging the traditional back-to-the-class lecture.

International Women's Day

To mark the occasion, a nice post on women in science from Tara C. Smith at Aetiology.

Update: A few more related posts: Jane, Adventures in Ethics and Science, and Radioactive Banana.

Lightman, Alan, ed. The best American science writing 2005. New York: Harper Perennial, 2005. 300pp.
Weiner, Jonathan, ed. The best American science and nature writing 2005. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 2005. 304pp.

These two book series are definately self-recommending. If you like science, if you like good writing, if you have long boring commutes on busses or trains, you owe it to yourself to buy and read these books. Or, buy/suggest these books for your library and read them. Both these books have basically the same aim: to collect popular science and nature writing and present them to an interested public, hopefully from a wide and varied selection of sources. Also, they can easily function as a current awareness tool in the sciences -- you can use the books to spot trends, to keep abreast of recent developments in important areas, to monitor public reaction scientific controversies, disputes or cutting edge advances. So, good books for scitech librarians.

Do these particular editions of their respective series meet these high expectations? Mostly, yes, with a few reservations.

The Lightman books has a good selection of stories from a good selection of disciplines: physics, chemistry, biology, astronomy, genetics, information technology, medicine, some nature writing, a couple of profiles or memoir-type pieces. The particular hightlights for me are Oliver Sacks' "Greetings from the Island of Stability" on discovering new elements and David Quammen's "Darwin or Not" which looks carefully at the arguments in favour of evolution and darwinism and definately comes out on the side of reason and science. A significant lowlight in this collection? I can't for the life of me figure out what possesed Lightman to inlude the essay "On the Origins of the Mind" by David Berlinski. For those not in the know, Berlinski is a member of the Discovery Institute and therefore a card-carrying creationist. Coming right after the Quammen article in the table of contents, the Berlinski article completely undermines Quammen (and in a sense, the whole book). Where Quammen gives a rational, fact-based account of reality, Berlinski, when faced with unanswered questions about the origin and nature of human consciousness, says, "The rest is darkness, mystery and magic." It doesn't take too much intelligence to figure out that these are code-words for god -- if we don't know the answer, then there is no answer we can know, only supernatural intervention. Alan Lightman, what were you thinking?

On average, the Weiner book is a bit better, with no articles I was really disappointed in. A good selection of topics (anthropology, aerospace, psychology, engineering and technology), if maybe a little heavy on medical reporting and book reviews. Real highlights for me are easy to spot: Natalie Angier's "My God Problem -- and Theirs" on the place of religion in public debate in science, Jared Diamond's "Twilight at Easter" on what we can learn from Easter Island and Jerome Groopman's "The Grief Industry" about how maybe people are a lot more resilient in the face of hardship than we give them credit for. This might be the one must-read from this book. Quibbles -- and really, my problems with this book really are just quibbles. First of all, there really isn't any nature writing, despite the presence of word in the title of the book. The Easter Island story is the closest. The second is that the editor needs to get out more. Of the 25 articles in the book, 13 were from The New Yorker, The New York Times or The New York Review of Books. Not to mention, one more has The New York Times in it's title ("The Homeless Hacker vs. The New York Times") and another has The New York Review of Books in the first sentence ("The Man or the Moment"). Not that it would be easy to choose which articles to leave out, but the narrowness of sources and points of view is a bit problematic for me.

One more thing. Natalie Angier has an article in each of these collections and both are excellent. (From the Lightman book, I didn't mention "Scientist at Work: Jacqueline Barton," a terrific portrait of a female scientist.) To all you giants of the publishing industry out there in blogland, why doesn't this woman have at least a couple of essay collections already? She has to be one of the best science writers working today, probably the best without a published collection. What's taking so long?

(From the Other Blog)

My perfect major...

You scored as Engineering. You should be an Engineering major! Biology 100% Engineering 100% Mathematics 100% Psychology 75% Philosophy 67% Chemistry 67% Journalism 67% Sociology 58% Theater 58% Anthropology 58% Linguistics 50% Art 42% English 42% Dance 33% What is your Perfect Major? (PLEASE RATE ME!!<3) created with QuizFarm.com

I guess the combo of math and engineering works out to computer science, but not sure how biology or psychology got in there. via Living the Scientific Life and No Se Nada.

My final word on Algebra

Jason Rosenhouse over at EvolutionBlog does a thorough demolishing of the original Richard Cohen article, probably the most complete I've seen.

Friday fun, Part Deux: Cthulhu does not pay for anything.

For Lovecraftians only, this is pretty funny. via Bookslut

Recently in CACM

From recent issues, lots of interesting stuff:

March 2006 (v49i3)

• Practical programmer: Is the crouching tiger a threat? by Robert L. Glass about China's coming prominance as IT superpower and if all the worry is over-reaction.
  
• Reviving your favorite CS books by David A. Patterson. Really cool. Top 25 out of print classic CS texts from a poll.
  
• President's letter: Computer science education in the 21st century by David A. Patterson. Reinvigorating the CS curriculum for the present, rather than clinging to the past.
  
• Applications quest: computing diversity by Juan E. Gilbert. Strategies for increasing diversity in CS programs.
  
• Women in computer science: no shortage here! by Mazliza Othman, Rodziah Latih. In Malaysia, there are actually more women is CS than men. What's up with that?

February 2006 (v49i2)

• Technology strategy and management: Where does Russia fit into the global software industry? by Michael A. Cusumano
  
• President's letter: Offshoring: finally facts vs. folklore by David A. Patterson. Looking at the facts, not the hype, it's not so bad as everyone fears.
  
• Principles for digital preservation by H. M. Gladney. Take the user/customer's perspective when designing archives, not internal, institutional imperatives.
  
• Making computer science minority-friendly by Roli Varma. Some good ideas of how to attract and retain students.

January 2006 (v49i1)

• Ethnocomputing: ICT in cultural and social context by Matti Tedre, Erkki Sutinen, Esko Kähkönen, Piet Kommers. Taking culture in account when designing systems.
  
• Technical opinion: The first 10 years of the ECCC digital library by Christoph Meinel, Volker Klotz. About the Electronic Colloquium on Computational Complexity, something I wasn't familiar with but which look very useful.
  
• Inside risks: Software and higher education by John C. Knight, Nancy G. Leveson. Maybe software would be better is developers were a little more like real engineers, ie more software engineering and less computer science. Or something.

Friday Fun: Subway Anagram Maps

Tons more of those subway anagram maps have been created, all documented at BoingBoing. There are two (1, 2) for Montreal: my stop while living in Montreal itself was Down Son or Nods Now, depending. Stops frequented in my youth include Here Lurk Lost Unenvied Bourgeoisie (although the name was shorter back then: Unglue Oil), Bone Vaunter or Be a Overt Nun.

Information Literacy: Food for Thought

Via C&I, Marylaine Block has some interesting ideas on questions to pose at the beginning of an IL session to get some discussion going.

Some examples:

• Who puts information onto the net?
  
• What costs are involved in putting it there and keeping it there?
  
• What laws might prevent some information from being posted on the net?

As usual, Cites & Insights is well worth checking out, for those that might not know about it. Walt has a number of other good reading suggestions in this issue including 10 ways to make the internet a better place.

Wikipedia vs. Britannica

Another long article comparing Wikipedia to Britannica, this time at Information Today.

In this author’s opinion, the flap over Wikipedia was significantly overblown, but contained a silver lining: People are becoming more aware of the perils of accepting information at face value. They have learned not to consult just one source. They know that authors and editors may be biased and/or harbor hidden agendas. And, because of Wikipedia’s known methodology and vulnerabilities, it provides opportunities to teach (and learn) critical thinking.

... Britannica is a different animal. Flawed, yes. Behind the times with regard to non-Western and minority leadership, sure. Indispensable? You betcha.

Another nice bit on how and why chemists are using Wikipedia at Chemistry World.

The online encyclopaedia Wikipedia could become the main source of chemical information in 5–10 years, according to a professional chemist who contributes to the site.

...‘A general rule on Wikipedia is that an article that has been heavily edited and around for a long time is usually pretty good,’ Walker told Chemistry World, ‘if it hasn’t, it may be flawed.’

The accuracy of Wikipedia’s entries will continue to improve as contributors begin to organise themselves and take responsibility for certain subjects, he said. Chemistry content on the site is coordinated through two so-called ‘wikiprojects’, said Walker: chemistry and chemicals.

both via OAN.

Update: As Eric H points out in the comments, Wikipedia has just added its One Millionth article! Thanks, Eric.

National Engineering Week

It's National Engineering Week here in Canada this week. The Ontario Engineering Week site is here. There was a snazzy insert in one of the national newspapers (The Globe and Mail) last week with stories on building disaster-proof houses, alternative fuels, women in engineering and others. The insert isn't online yet, but the last two year's editions are completely online here, featuring articles on Engineers Without Borders, accrediting newcomers, Mission to Mars and many others.

Update: The 2006 newspaper supplement is now online. A nice quote from the article on women in engineering: "Engineering is a caring profession, that is very much the reality, but people don't always see that initially."

The Play's the Thing: Games, Gamers and Gaming Cultures

The most recent issue of the ejournal Reconstruction: Studies in Contemporary Culture (v6i1) is on gaming. Of course, numerous articles are on video gaming, of which this is a very small selection:

• Multi-Player Computer Gaming: ‘Better than playing (PC Games) with yourself’ by Melanie Swalwell
  
• More Than Girlfriends, Geekettes, and Gladiatixes: Women, Feminism, and Fantasy Role-Playing Games by Rebecca Borah and Inez Schaechterle
  
• Shooters to the Left of Us, Shooters to the Right: First Person Arcade Shooter Video Games, the Violence Debate, and the Legacy of Militarism by Karen J. Hall
  
• The Game's Afoot: Games, Science Fiction and Heterotopias by Marc R. Zaldivar

via SFRA-L.

What's math for, yet again

For some reason, my "What's math For" post about the Cohen article in the LA Times has disappeared from the blog. It's still somewhere in the ether, because I can link to it (in the previous post, for example or in Google Cache) but doesn't appear in the main listing. It's kinda scary to think that there may be other posts that I've made over the years that have just vanished. So, in the spirit of putting things right, here's the post again:

As has been reported a fair bit in the scienceblogosphere, The Washington Post's Richard cohen has a rather bizarre post on whether or not everyone needs to know algebra.

Almost 20 years ago, I wrote a similar column about algebra. Math teachers struck back with a vengeance. They made so many claims for algebra's intrinsic worth that I felt, as I once had in class, like a dummy. Once again, I just didn't get it. Still, in the two decades since, I have lived a pretty full life and never, ever used -- or wanted to use -- algebra. I was lucky, though. I had graduated from high school and gone on to college. It's different for you, Gabriela. Algebra ruined many a day for me. Now it could ruin your life.

I always find these mathophobic posts rather interesting. Can anyone think of any other field of intellectual attainment that supposedly educated people would practically brag about being bad at or ignorant of? Literature? History? Film? Geography? Don't think so. Math & science? Hey, ignorance is a badge of honour. Does everyone need to know about math in their everyday lives? Probably not. But the same could be said for all those other subjects too. Knowing who Sir John A. was has never once made my life even a bit easier. Really, the very existence of a whole lot of people who have bothered to learn about those arcane math & science subjects and have built up our very technological society has made it pretty easy for the unknowing to get along pretty well in their ignorance. That's fine, I guess. But at least Mr. Cohen and his ilk could demonstate a little appreciation rather than scorn.

Some other, probably better, fiskings can be found at ScienceBlogs here, here and here, plus some more comments via Technorati.

OK, everybody, let's take the test

If we're going to complaing about the Richard Cohen's of the world, we should put our test scores where our mouths are. See, math is good for taking silly web-based quizzes!

You Passed 8th Grade Math

Congratulations, you got 10/10 correct!

Could You Pass 8th Grade Math?

via Pharygula.

Lots o' Friday Fun

It's just getting weirder and weirder out there:

• Bikini Calculus. This may be the strangest thing I have ever linked to here. Jaw-droppingly strange. Basically two women give a short calculus lecture while wearing nothing but bikinis. This is work-safe, but just barely. Definately not reference desk safe. You can go straight to the Google Video page.
  
• A bunch of BoingBoing links about transit system anagram maps: London, Toronto, Vienna and various. I live near the No Tingle station in Toronto.
  
• Mechanical Computer Kit now available.
  
• Jurassic "Beaver" Is Largest Early Mammal Yet
  
• A suggestion for getting chess into the olympics -- "chess is like curling on a board"
  
• Haven't tried Chipotle Meatballs yet, but the Chicken Curry Salad was a huge hit last weekend.
  

Free SciTech ebooks/etexts

A round-up of ones I noticed relatively recently, some of current value, some historical:

• Open Access Bibliography by Charles Bailey (OAN).
  
• Scholarly Communication, the Information Chain and Technology: Analyses and Reflexions by Neil Jacobs
  
• Unified mathematical treatment of complex cascaded bipartite networks: The case of collections of journal papers by Steven A. Morris
  
• A Short Introduction to Operating Systems
  
• Understanding Algebra by James Brennan
  
• Programming Languages by Scott F. Smith
  
• Oracle Grid Computing Glossary
  
• Introduction to Matrix Algebra by Autar K. Kaw
  
• Getting the most out of vacuum tubes and over a dozen other historical technical books (MAKE).
  
• Dictionary of Algorithms and Data Structures (Topix).

Textbook Revolution is a good aggregator site (OAN).

Blogga Blogga Song

Check out the absolutely hilarious Blogga Blogga Song at the Laughing Librarian. The logo for this humble blog appears a little over half way, just after a couple of blogs that go by too fast for me to make out clearly. I'm not sure what this honour means, but it sure is fun anyway. Not sure if anyone has actually tried to list all the blogs that make an appearance, but it would be appreciated as there are several I haven't heard of before. Via WaR.

Stop the Presses!

I am a librarian, working in an academic library. It's reading week, 6:45 p.m. so the place is generally pretty quiet. Right now I'm in the middle of a 3-hour reference shift which during which I have actually answered about a dozen questions, some simple, some more complex, but I have actually helped some students do their course-related research. What a concept.

Poke in the eye

Over at Science Library Pad, Richard Akerman starts an argument: "To put it more concisely, either your research library becomes part of the E-Science Cyberinfrastructure, or it gets paved over."

The post is here. The end of the article also links to a bunch of his other recent provocative posts. The whole set of posts and the associated comments on the main post are very nteresting, more or less a challenge to academic and research libraries to change or disappear.

Now, a lot of what he says I agree with and have published views on over the years. Online is the way to go, it's inevitable, it's what everyone wants, but to say that libraries and librarians have, over the years, been nothing but glorified storage closets for print journals is to me a little insulting. I'm not sure why he feels the need to use a phrase so guaranteed to raise hackles and piss people off as "paved over." I just wonder. These posts scream the "I don't use libraries, everyone must be just like me, so no needs to use libraries, pave'em over" type of attitude that is so prevalent among the less subtle posters on places like /. and other factions of the hardcore techie community (I know, remember, I grew up there) which can be so off-putting. It speaks of a massive chip on the shoulder.

Not sure if Akerman is a librarian or if he's ever actually been in one (as far as I know, neither is a prerequisite for working at CISTI), but he seems to have a very narrow definition of what libraries can and should do. He also seems to be a bit unaware that, yes, academic and research libraries are facing a huge challenge to redefine ourselves but we're trying and we think we're going to succeed. And oddly enough, our "brand" as a place (physical and, in the future, virual) to facilate conversation and collaboration is going to be it.

Google book search

And speaking of BoingBoing, Cory Doctorow has a very long post on why Google Book Search is a very good thing for both books and publishers. Now, I often don't agree with many of Doctorow's pollyannaish posts on the great technogeekrapture that awaits us all if only we were smart like him, but on this issue he is dead on. It mystifies me why publishers and authors wouldn't beg to be indexed by google as much as humanly possible. If you want to sell your books, the very best way to do that is if people can find them. Only then can they decide to buy the darn thing. If a little snippet of the text can help them to make the purchase decision, so be it. Is there some possibility that Google's system could be hacked and some people could get access to the full text? Could Google's corporate status change and the full text fall into the hands of owners that weren't as concerned about copyright? Sure, both these could happen but that's no reason to prevent something terrific from happening. As Doctorow and many others proclaim, obscurity not piracy is the author's real enemy.

History of Supercomputers

Via Make Blog, a nice little photo spread of supercomputers. On the same general topic, BoingBoing has a link to an interview with J. Presper Eckert, co-inventor of the ENIAC where he debunks a bunch of commonly held misconceptions about the ENIAC.

Carnival of the Infosciences #24

My recent Confessions of a Science Librarian post was featured at the latest Carnival, #24:

Confessions of a Science Librarian details the path to the dark side of science librarianship from a mild-mannered software developer. Science Fiction leads to Fortran which leads to doing bonus assignments of matrix multiplication! You have to read it to believe it!

Thanks, Grumpator! The next Carnival is at …the thoughts are broken…

SciAm podcast

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.

Friday Fun

A bunch of vaguely science-related fun items from around the blogosphere:

• 100 reasons why kirk is better than Picard via SF
  Signal.
  
• The science of Gilligan's Island. Ok, not really about Gilligan's Island directly but how can you resist a title like that. It's actually a review of Curious Minds: How a Child Becomes a Scientist by John Brockman.
  
• Corn whiskey still demonstration on Saturday in LA.
  
• Difference Engine mechanical computer made from legos.
  
• National Inventors Hall of Fame 2006 inductees.

Confessions of a Science Librarian

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?

• From a very young age, always read a lot of books, magazines, comic books and whatever else is lying around, mostly science fiction and fantasy but a lot of other stuff too.
  
• Also from a young age, related to an interest in science fiction, also read a lot and exhibit a lot of interest in science and math. Math is always the best subject at school, by far.
  
• Source of much pocket money during college and university -- tutoring math (especially geometry, always loved geometry) and other subjects at former high school.
  
• At middle of college career (college in Quebec where I grew up is a two year pre-university institution, equivalent to grades 12 and 13) in 1982 get a tour of a computing centre where a cousin worked and think, "hey, this is kinda cool."
  
• Take Fortran course in second year. Life is changed. Even do bonus extra assignment on matrix multiplications. Using computers to solve mathematical problems is a revelation (although this thread is sorta never followed up on).
  
• Apply to Computer Science at Concordia University. Pursue General Business Option and end up taking a lot of accounting, finance, marketing, etc, along with Fortran, Pascal, data structures, operating systems and all the rest. Do really well in stats and numerical analysis courses. Except for this one stats course we won't really talk about.
  
• Along with tutoring, get a job as Programmer on Duty at Concordia Computer Centre. Involves sitting at desk or roving around helping students debug their programs or get the systems to work. Challenging but lots of fun. Remarkably like reference desk, but never make the connection.
  
• After graduation (1986), get job at multinational insurance broker doing database development in FoxPro, later in Wang Pace and Powerbuilder. Work there for 12+ years. Best part about the job? Working mostly with the finance and accounting functions, helping people find the information they need to get their job done. Remarkably like research consultations, never make the connection. Like working with people and crunching premium and commission numbers.
  
• Eventually tire of the constant retraining to new technologies, fed up of unstable mergers/aquisitions situation at company for several years, contemplate leaving job and getting a new one. However, since in the middle of a large, multiyear project, don't want to leave until that is mostly put to bed.
  
• Have lots of time to think, "Do I want a new job or a new career?" Examples of librarians among friends and family. Research indicates that libraries seem to be rather computer-oriented these days. This is about 1996-97. Start to make some of those connections. Start to make plans.
  
• Quit job and go to Library School full time at McGill. This is fall 1998.
  
• Figure I'll end up working at a library vendor until, at the end of the first year, a student in the second year (Thanks, Larry!) recruits me to do a practicum placement at the Physical Sciences and Engineering Library. End up doing some volunteer reference work in the fall of the second year, 144 hour practicum in the winter and 3 week contract in the spring.
  
• Get acquainted with serving a scitech clientelle as a science librarian and think, "Hey, this is great! I wouldn't mind doing this!" (Thanks, Darlene, Marika and Liz).
  
• Coincidentally, while looking for a job during the spring of second year, see a posting on notice board for a science librarian job at York University. Even though it's in Toronto and I'm in Montreal and we don't really want to move, apply anyway.
  
• Get job. Start in August 2000. Rest is history.
  
• Much sadness about old place of work.
  
• Really like buying books on numerical analysis and scientific computing.
  

You wouldn't believe how often I get asked why I switched from a techie career to librarianship. Now we all know. I encourage more stories.

Philosophically speaking

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!

Make your own fun

A couple of cool things via the Make blog:

• How Products Are Made is an online version of Gale's 7 volume reference set. It seems to be complete. The print is a great set that I often recommend to engineering and other students who need basic background info on a product or class of products. Having it online is just fantastic -- I hope the publishers can make a go of this based on advertising revenue.
  
• Centuri Model Rocket Designers Manual from 1971 and a whole lot of other model rocketry plans too. Basically how to scratch-build model rockets.
  

For those who don't know, Make is a modern-day do-it-yourself magazine published by the fine folks at O'Reilly. Five issues have come out with more on the way. You can even buy the issues indiviually as monographs.

ACM interactions

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:

• People: the way I see it: Interaction design is still an art form: ergonomics is real engineering by Donald A. Norman
  
• Rewind: Is HCI homeless?: in search of inter-disciplinary status by Jonathan Grudin

What is...

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):

• What Is .NET by James Avery
  
• What Is a BlackBerry by Dave Mabe
  
• What Is Bluetooth by Michael Juntao Yuan
  
• What Is C# by Jesse Liberty
  
• What Is Flickr (and Hot Tips for Using It) by Giles Turnbull
  
• What Is On-Demand Computing by Stephen B. Morris
  
• What Is Phishing (Or, How to Fight Phishing at the User-Interface Level) by Lorrie Faith Cranor, Simson Garfinkel
  
• What Is Podcasting by Phillip Torrone
  
• What Is Skype by James E. Gaskin
  
• What Is Web 2.0 by Tim O'Reilly

From the ACM's Computers in Entertainment

A rather interesting section on gaming, with many resonances with educational applications for gaming (v4i1 Jan 2006):

• Extending cyberspace: location based games using cellular phones by Omer Rashid, Ian Mullins, Paul Coulton, Reuben Edwards
  
• Computer game-flow design by M. J. Taylor, D. Gresty, M. Baskett
  
• Turing's test and believable AI in games by Daniel Livingstone
  
• Learning through game modding by Magy Seif El-Nasr, Brian K. Smith. This one in particular is interesting in that it discusses "the use of modifying, or modding, existing games as a means to learn computer science, mathematics, physics, and aesthetic principles."

Alternate reality games

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.

Giving a sense of where "kids today" will be getting their entertainment and information in the future is always a useful way to start thinking about how we will have to meet them there. Read the whole interview, it's quite provocative. via BoingBoing

Friday Fun: LabLit

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.)

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.

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.

Some examples of the features they have:

• An unkind literature: Why has the novel shortchanged science? by Lewis Wolpert
  
• The Lab Reporters: What it is that ‘science communicators’ do? by Alom Shaha
  
• Beyond science fiction: Writers experimenting with reality need to be more daring by Bill Hanage
  
• Bad cop: On the joys of science quackery: an interview with the Guardian's Ben Goldacre
  
• LabLit Forums
  

A few pointers? First of all, it would be nice if the article blurbs on the front page actually matched the titles of the articles inside. Also, they should probably design their front page to be a bit less cluttered, only showing the most recent couple of articles in each category and making it a bit clearer how to get to the older items in that category.via Locusmag.

Jane on teaching

Jane has posted what seems to be the last in her series on teaching various levels of CS courses:

• The upper-level electives
  
• The mid-tier courses
  
• The intro courses, part 2
  
• The intro courses

Recently, at the IEEE

Recent journal articles of interest:

• NASA's Exploration Agenda and Capability Engineering by Cooke, D.E.; Barry, M.; Lowry, M.; Green, C. Computer, v39i1, January 2006.
  
• Good Ideas, through the Looking Glass by Wirth, N. Computer, v39i1, January 2006. Yes, it is by Niklaus Wirth.
  
• The Unspoken Revolution in Software Engineering by Meyer, B. Computer, v39i1, January 2006.
  
• Ethical Values of IT Professionals: Evidence From Hong Kong by Davison, R.M.; Martinsons, M.G.; Lo, H.W.H.; Kam, C.S.P. IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, v53i1
  
• Books Engineers Should Read by Colwell, B. Computer, v38i11. November 2005. Great suggestions for books on general engineering topics.
  
• Creating the ultimate research assistant by Hoskinson, A. Computer, v38i11. November 2005. Seriously misguided article by someone who apparently has never used a bibliographic database, been inside a technical library or even spent any time with the IEEE's own "research assistant" products. Basically a transparent attempt to market his own product. Sheesh.
  

More Science Blogs

Via BoingBoing, it seems that Seed magazine is hosting a bunch of science-related blogs:

• Adventures in Ethics and Science
• Aetiology
• Afarensis
• Cognitive Daily
• Deltoid
• Dispatches from the Culture Wars
• Evolgen
• Gene Expression
• The Intersection
• Living the Scientific Life
• No Se Nada Commentary
• Pharyngula
• Stranger Fruit
• Uncertain Principles

A nice variety of interesting topics, many (all?) are cases of Seed hosting a previously active blog. Each blog has its own feed, or you can subscribe to a single feed combining all the blogs.

FreePint article on Engineering Information

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.

Around the blogosphere

• The latest Tangled Bank carnival on science blogging. Not forgetting our very own Carnival of the inforsciences, of course.
  
• Confessions of a Teenage Science Illiterate from the SciAm blog is pretty interesting. I like this quote: "Perhaps if more people understood just some of such basic principles of science, we would be ready to make informed decisions about the medical potential of stem cells, global warming and other vast science-based conundrums facing ... the world today. At the very least, we should educate our children to understand them, since they will have to deal with the consequences of the decisions that are made today in an apparent fog of ignorance." Amen.
  
• Blogging about teaching: The miniseries by Jane. The first episode is up, and it's about The Intro Courses. Jane has some great ideas about teaching intro programming courses. As I recall my own first programming (Fortran, natch) course back around 1982, it's what really got me interested in CS. It was great fun, I even did the bonus assignment on matrix multiplication. I'm pretty sure there weren't any blowhards in the class. It was such early days for teaching programming to anybody, that I think we were all pretty much at the same level.
  
• The Wrong Side of History, via InsideHigherEd, is an interesting commentary on women in science and how many male faculty members are still in denial.
  
• Kitzmiller v. Dover Area School District, 'cause, you know, you just can't make the point enough. And because it demonstrates the strenghts of the Wikipedia.
  
• Generation Disengaged from ACRLog. Are students less intellectually engaged in their educations today than in the past. We always seem to assume "Kids Today" are somehow fundamentally inferior in commitment that we were back in the good old days. Personally, I think we're all just remembering our own undergrad education with rose-coloured glasses. That, and people who become profs or librarians might also have been a little keener than average.
  
• Via E3, a new blog Physics Information Fluency by Pat Viele.

Library 2.0

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:

1. People that know about and use our resources. This is obviously the group we tend to focus our energies on. We see and interact with them so when we are contemplating change, we can often fall into the trap of focussing too much of our energy on them.
   
2. People that would use our resources but don't know about them. At academic libraries, this is a hugely important group. We know we can help them and we know that once they see what we have to offer they will be happy to take advantage of our resources. This group basically includes all first year students. The challenge? How to reach them, how to breakthrough the fog of other distractions and get the message to them. Outreach to this group is obviously a key component of most IL programs. Changing to engage these students is a difficult but very important challenge, one that I'm sure needs to embrace a lot of the technology that L2 advocates embrace, such as social software, but also other way to draw them into our physical space and touch them that way.
   
3. People that know about our resources but don't use them. The Googlers. They know about the library, know what we have, but either can't be bothered or are dismissive of our resources. These people often turn up at the reference desk at the last minute, frustrated and with chip on their shoulders. Often these students are the bane of their prof's existences as well. Their preconceived notions about the library make it hard for us to convince them that we have something to offer. Usually easy to spot at the back of the room in IL sessions. Very gratifying to be able to bring one into the fold. A difficult group for us to come to grips with when we contemplate change, and in some ways the focus of L2 discussions. We have to find a way to convince them that we have something to offer.
   
4. People that don't know about our resources and wouldn't use them even if they did. Arggh. The toughest group of all to reach. Again, many first year students fall into this catagory. We always hope that we can somehow reach every student at the institution at some point, but I think that there's a significant portion that we really do miss. I certainly know that there are significant numbers who almost make it through without coming to the library. Rarely does a term go by when I don't see a 4th year student coming to the desk without a library card, asking how to find a reserve book. I'm always tempted to say, "Almost made it through, didn't ya!" Changing, finding a way to reach everybody, finding a way to engage and enlighted them, finding a way to turn these #4s into #3s, is a difficult challenge, one that will certainly involve a lot of new strategies.
   

Hmmm. This post went on a lot longer than I thought it would. In any case, change is a constant. I think it's a lot less stressful to embrace it than to resist it, or a least to figure out what parts of the change process you can embrace without going crazy. I like to think my modest (and still not finished) My Job in 10 Years series is my way of figuring out what it'll be like working in L2 (or by then, L4 or L5).

ELD Scholarly Communication Committee

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!

Friday Follies: Albert Einstein Madlib

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.

Another funny physics madlib.

Javaschools

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.

As you can see, he takes no prisoners. His idea is an interesting one, central to the whole idea of what a CS education (or any education, for that matter) should be about: getting a job or learning how to think. Spolsky definately comes down on the learning how to think side, drop out ratio and enrollment numbers be damned.

As we can all imagine, there's been plenty of buzz about this on the compsciblogosphere and that's a very good thing. Personally, I think CS programs have to find a balance. Yes, hard topics need to be covered and those not cut out for the field need to be gently culled, but students also need to get some marketable skills to get them that all-important first job. Another thing that needs to be pointed out is that there is really no longer one kind of "computer science," but really a whole range of paths including systems, software engineering, databases, communications, applications areas and a whole lot more. It's probably no longer such a good idea to think of CS and CS education as a monolith.

I plan on forwarding the article to the members of my comp sci faculty, hoping they will get something out of the debate. One other essay on Spolky's very interesting site is his definition of a good developer. A detailed description of how some people are just way better at creating software than other people and how is really worth getting those people to work for you.

As for your truly, when I took my CS degree, back when dinosaurs roamed the earth, Pascal was the main teaching language with C only just starting to gain popularity. Fortran (the first language I learned) still had a lot of adherents rather than its current status as a niche language. I did learn C, but as part of an elective rather than a compulsory part of the program. I also learned COBOL. via Topix CS.

Here & There

A potpourri of bookmarks sitting around my desktop, many only vaguely related to our core mission here:

• Free Science Fiction Calendar for 2006
  
• Another View on ‘The Access Principle’ By Thomas Bacher from InsideHigherEd
  
• Straight Flushed on student gambling
  
• Cool Alien Monster Made Out of LEGOs
  
• 20 best food books of the year
  
• Wil McCarthy's wonderful "Hacking Matter" as a free download
  
• Chess-set made from nuts and bolts
  
• 100 greatest gadgets of the past 50 years
  
• Essay contest: What is humanity's worst invention?
  
• Print your own Monopoly money
  
• Nature's website has a comic strip about synthetic biology
  
• Soviet public-domain maps
  
• Top Science Stories of 2005
  
• Bread Pudding
  
• Ambient Findability Bibliography
  
• FemaleCSGradStudent
  

A holiday break

We all deserve a nice holiday break, a chance to read some books for fun for a change. I hope to do plenty of that (Yay!) and to catch up on the considerable posting backlog for the other blog. See you all in the new year.

Women in computing

A bunch of posts on women in computing, mostly about how the numbers have actually declined recently:

• Women in CS: the dance remix version from Jane.
  
• Open Letter to Dr. Phil from FemaleCSGradStudent (Great blog, btw)
  
• In computer science, a growing gender gap is the original article that prompted many of the links that follow
  
• Gender Gap in Computer Science Growing (via Topix CS)
  
• Cultural factors impact growth of big gender gap in computer science (via Topix CS)
  
• Women Shun Computer Science (via Topix CS)
  
• 'Gorgeous geeks' get some exposure -- yes, a calendar. (via Topix CS)
  
• Attracting females into computer science (via Topix CS)

Dover, PA

Great news. The decision (1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6) in the Dover case on teaching evolution in the classroom has been released and the judge basically called the supporters of ID a bunch of liars:

The citizens of the Dover area were poorly served by the members of the Board who voted for the ID Policy. It is ironic that several of these individuals, who so staunchly and proudly touted their religious convictions in public, would time and again lie to cover their tracks and disguise the real purpose behind the ID Policy

I haven't read a lot of legal decisions in my time, but this is certainly going to be one of them. Solid coverage at Wikipedia, of course.

Update: Via EvolutionBlog, a very good summary of the decision by Jason Rosenhouse.

Your resume says you're some kind of intermediate species

A very funny Dilbert cartoon.

Google Librarian Newsletter

The first Google librarian newsletter is out, with a feature article on How does Google collect and rank results? with some nice info on their crawling and relevance ranking techniques.

The Access Principle

A nice interview (with discussion in the comments) with John Willinsky, author of The Access Principle: The Case for Open Access to Research and Scholarship.

A taste:

Q: Many publishers argue that journals and materials for which one must pay are somehow by definition of higher quality than various open models. How do you respond?

A: The empirical evidence argues otherwise: For example, the Public Library of Science (PLoS) Biology, a relatively new open access journal that operates on author fees, has the highest “impact factor” (number of times articles are cited) by a considerable margin among biology journals indexed by the ISI Web of Science. But that is only part of the quality story. The majority of journals now allow their authors to “self archive” their published articles in open access institutional repositories (usually located in the author’s university library). But note that in all cases, someone pays, though it is not necessarily the reader, and these alternatives are greatly increasing access to this knowledge.

In defence of Wikipedia

The Wikipedia/Britannica comparison in Nature has been much in the blogospheric news lately (here for example), and Will Richardson points to a very nice summary of the main issues by Danah Boyd. I'll quote the paragraph before Richardson quotes:

I am worried about how academics are treating Wikipedia and i think that it comes from a point of naivety. Wikipedia should never be the sole source for information. It will never have the depth of original sources. It will also always contain bias because society is inherently biased, although its efforts towards neutrality are commendable. These are just realizations we must acknowledge and support. But what it does have is a huge repository of information that is the most accessible for most people. Most of the information is more accurate than found in a typical encyclopedia and yet, we value encyclopedias as a initial point of information gathering. It is also more updated, more inclusive and more in-depth. Plus, it's searchable and in the hands of everyone with digital access (a much larger population than those with encyclopedias in their homes). It also exists in hundreds of languages and is available to populations who can't even imagine what a library looks like. Yes, it is open. This means that people can contribute what they do know and that others who know something about that area will try to improve it. Over time, articles with a lot of attention begin to be inclusive and approximating neutral. The more people who contribute, the stronger and more valuable the resource. Boycotting Wikipedia doesn't make it go away, but it doesn't make it any better either.

I must admit I'm on the Wikipedia side for this one. No reference source is perfect, the all have some bias, some inaccuracies. It seems to me if all the world's experts actually contributed to Wikipedia instead of complaining that it isn't any good...

The Patent Librarian

Via Eldnet-l, Michael White of Queens University has started up a blog, The Patent Librarian, for academic librarians who use patent information:

I'm still tweaking the format, but the content is aimed at academic librarians who work with patent information. My hope is to create a forum for exchanging ideas and information related to patent data and documentation, search tools and techniques, free and commercial databases, patent statistics, training tips, USPTO information dissemination policy, and other related topics.

Yet another scitech librarian blog by a Canadian...must be something in the water.

New blog: the Blog Section of the IT Division of SLA

Via Christina, The Blogging Section of the IT Division has a new blog. It's run by Catherine Lavallée-Welch, chair of the Section.