I've just added a comments feature to this blog, so please feel free to add your thoughts to this (hopefully) ongoing conversation. You know who you are! Haloscan was very simple to set up and seems to be working (so far), so I would recommend it.

Just what at the most desirable skills for the new engineering undergraduate? It will come as no surprise that employers are valueing communication and people skills more and more for what have in the past been mostly "back office" functions like engineering. The latest ASEE Prism Magazine has a good discussion of recent trends in engineering recruitment: "The Graduate" by Kerry Hannon (v12 i9 May/June 2003). I'm very sure that the same trends also apply to computer science grads and probably most other science & applied science grads.

Salon seems to be doing a lot more interesting science-related articles lately (or, more accurately, interesting to me). "GOTO considered joyful" By Rachel Chalmers is a wonderful tribute to famous computer scientist Edsger W. Dijkstra, mostly talking about the Dijkstra archive available at the University of Texas.
I had a very wierd flashback to my undergrad cs days when we used to endlessly debate whether or not using goto statements in fortran or pascal was a cosmically good thing or bad thing. I wonder what cs undergrads debate today with that same messianic fervor? Linux/unix vs. windows, no doubt!

A newish blog on information literacy, run by Sheila Weber, Bill Johnston and Stuart Boon. I really appreciate its international focus. From Informtation Resources Newsletter.

"Is Math a Young Man's Game? No. Not every mathematician is washed up at 30." by Jordan Ellenberg, from Slate in May 2003. I guess that should be "Young Person's Game." Interesting: it now takes such lengthy study to get to the frontiers of your field (and math isn't the only field where this is true, by far), that no one has the chance to be a prodigy until they get into their 30's & 40's.

From an IEEE online support email anouncement: "Google to index IEEE Xplore (IEEE to announce when Google indexing is complete)." This leads to an interesting thought. What if all STM journal publishers did the same thing? Would anyone bother subscribing to any A&I services anymore? Would they all just disappear? Certainly those that don't add a huge amount of value to the raw data (i.e. SciFinder) would quickly seem rather useless. At the same time, Google could also make a misstep by not realizing that it's dangerous to mix too much of the stuff on the open web with the scholarly content -- getting even more fantastically overwhelmingly huge search results will not endear them to serious researchers or even to impatient undergrads.

Salon again: "The free research movement" by Farhad Manjoo. It's a very good article about the Public Library of Science which makes some compelling arguments for open access. As usual, you need to use a day pass to access the full text.

Thanks to Doug Holton for pointing out that the Lisfeeds RSS feed wasn't working and for suggesting this one.

Speaking of Salon, they often have very good popular science articles (older ones are free, newer you will have to take advantage of a day pass):

• "The fish are ok" by Katharine Mieszkowski is about the state of the world's fisheries.
  
• "Artificial stupidity part 1" & part 2 by John Sundman is about intelligent bots.
  
• "Is there hope for Java?" By Farhad Manjoo is about the future of Java.
  
• "Data-mining life on earth" by Katharine Mieszkowski is about the online Tree of Life project.

The Google backlash is pretty well documented out there. A couple of recent entries include an article at Salon, entitled, you guessed it: "The Google Backlash." (Salon's not free anymore, but they almost always have someone sponsoring day passes.) Another is from the BBC and is about the word Google and its trademarkability. Googling "google backlash" is quite revealing. BBC story from Lisnews.

Today's Astronomy Picture of the Day is kinda funny. Can you say "Divine editorial comment?" APOD is one of my favourite sites -- I almost always have one of their images as the wallpaper on my workstation.

A day in the life of a super-spammer.

The Urban Legends Reference Pages is a hoot. It even has sections on computers, medicine and science. It may even come in handy at the reference desk. How about: "Is it true that the average person swallows eight spiders per year?" No! From SciFi Weekly.

Celebrating Einstein with dance? The purpose is to celebrate the centenary Einstein's miracle year of 1905. Quote from IoP managing director Jerry Cowhig: "Dance is an expressive medium and it will be ideal for abstract concepts like the theories of Einstein on everything from tiny atoms to the dynamics of the whole cosmos."

A couple of readings suggested by one of my colleagues in the Computer Science Department:

• "Teaching reviewing to graduate students" by Jens Palsberg and Scott J. Baxter in Communications of the ACM, v45 i12, Dec 2002. A quote: "researchers usually learn the principles and practices of reviewing with little to no practical training because such training is generally not a part of a Ph.D. education. Despite this fact, we believe teaching the review process should be part of a Ph.D. education, and that such training can be integrated smoothly and inexpensively as part of existing coursework rather than be added as an additional course." Of course, the article is written about CS grad students, but I see no reason why the same argument couldn't be applied to any discipline. And, of course, part of any good review is a search of the appropriate literature. And, the grad student asks, how do I do that? Very interesting -- the article is written by CS faculty, not librarians.
  
• The Sept 2002 issue of CACM (v45 i9) has a special section on search engines called, "The consumer side of search" with several very interesting articles. The one I would most like to draw attention to is "Bias on the Web" by Abbe Mowshowitz and Akira Kawaguchi. The main idea is that the web is full of biased information, largely trying to sell stuff, and that the best way to combat the bias is to have a variety of engines to search for the same information. They suggest that it's a good thing to have a variety of intermediaries between the user and the information to try and evaluate or filter the data. Unfortunately, they neglect to mention libraries & librarians as possible intermediaries. The even take a bit of a shot at us in the beginning: 'Your refrigerator starts making unusual noises; you figure it is time to replace it. ... Unwilling to take the time to head for the local library and browse consumer magazines for "refrigerators," you decide to search the Web for information about this home appliance.'

An RSS feed for this blog is now available here. Lisfeeds seems to work just fine for Blogger (also assuming I set everything up properly), but if anyone has any problems or suggestions, please let me know. One problem: I wasn't able to figure out how to get my blog title into the feed, possible solutions appreciated at jdupuis (at) yorku.ca. I greatly appreciated some of the links suggested by Lisfeeds, particularly this one (a good link & resources collection) and this one (a tutorial).

School libraries are a very important factor in the overall success of students. Read the report from the Canadian Coalition for School Libraries and available on the People for Education site. This has been reported quite widely, but I think the results are important enough to post here as well. The Globe and Mail's John Allemang has a good article about the report. Some quotes from the article (and the report, via the article): "Given the concern about education today, it seems surprising that an existing resource like the library should be so undernourished and undervalued" and "middle and high-school students have surprisingly low levels of success using the Web as a search tool, despite their stated confidence in using the Internet." From The Globe and Mail and Lisnews.

The June D-Lib is out and is, as usual, full of interesting articles. The two I'd like to highlight are:

• "Google Meets eBay: What Academic Librarians Can Learn from Alternative Information Providers" by Anne R. Kenney, Nancy Y. McGovern, Ida T. Martinez, and Lance J. Heidig. This is a very interesting and perhaps even important article. It does a comparason between the answers given by academic reference librarians to the researchers on the Google Answers service. Guess what? The results are mixed. The methodology employed is rather simplistic and the conclusions (more than) a bit controversial but it's certainly worth taking a close look at this article.
  
• "Trends in Use of Electronic Journals in Higher Education in the UK - Views of Academic Staff and Students"by Karen Bonthron and 12 others. From the abstract: "Results indicate that academic staff incorporate electronic journal usage into their working patterns in different ways than students and that these differences may affect attitudes towards support services (library Web pages, Virtual Learning Environments) designed to promote electronic journal usage. Disciplinary differences also need to be considered." Well worth reading.

A couple from the latest Internet Scout Report for Math, Engineering and Technology (v2 i12):

• Computer History Museum: Timeline of Computer History. This is basic, but it is well done and covers all the high points from 1945 to 1990.
  
• Is Software Engineering Training Enough for Software Engineers? In which the radical idea that software engineers are actually engineers is discussed.

As EEVL Manager Roddy MacLeod has helpfully pointed out to me, the EEVL catalogue has passed its 10,000th record. EEVL is now the Internet Guide to Engineering; it used to be the Edinburgh Engineering Virtual Library. It has always been a terrific source for resources in engineering, mathematics and computing.