Those of us with a few grey hairs have always been shocked (and always have and will be) by the attitudes and frame of reference of callow youth. From lisnews.

Relevant here, both because it's inherently interesting and because It would come under the remote sensing/photogrammetry/geomatics umbrella, is the Aerial Reconnaisance Archives. It was announced a while back but the server was swampled. You can finally get in! What the archive is is recon photos from WWII. From their site: "During World War II, photgraphic reconnaissance played a major part in the intelligence war. The advanced photographic techniques developed, gave intelligence officers the ability to view the enemies activities in 3D, and make highly accurate assessments. Discover a new way of looking at our history, and our future at evidenceincamera." From lisnews.

The arxiv eprint archive has a new section on qualitative biology here, including sections on Biomolecules, Cell Behavior, Genomics, Molecular Networks, Neurons and Cognition, Populations and Evolution, Quantitative Methods and others. There's not much there yet, but this is a very positive development for a growing field. More information here. From George S. Porter via STS-L

Although I have generally and heroically (I hope) resisted the tempation to blog about blogging (Frodo's struggles may be relevant here), this one from the Blogger home page was just too amusing (in a delusion-of-grandeur sort of way). It's about how to squeeze a mega book deal out of your blogging addiction.

Guess what? Engineers work in offices, too, not just in labs or in the field. If engineers understand how offices work, they will be happier and healthier in those environments. An interesting and enlightening exploration of office culture for engineers is in the latest IEEE Spectrum, (v41i1 jan 2004). It is: "Anatomy of the Office - Newly minted engineers will get a leg up if they understand the complex dynamics of the workplace." by Carl Selinger. Spectrum kindly maintains a careers website for young engineers here. The Selinger article is part of the Career Strategies section, archived here.

Lucius Shepard's review of LOTR: ROTK has to be the most sensible I've seen, especially in terms of his esthetic approach to the trilogy as an operatic epic. From Locusmag.

IEEE Software has a special issue (v21i1 jan/feb 2004) on Open Source software with many interesting articles.

The most recent IEEE Spectrum (v40i12 Dec 2003) has a great article with a ridiculously long title: "5 Commandments Some technology laws and rules of thumb have stood the test of time, but not all. Spectrum looks at five to see how they have fared, starting with the grandaddy of them all--Moore's Law." It basically goes through five common "rules of thumb" about how the tech world works and looks at how it compares with reality. They are:

• Moore's Law: The number of transistors on a chip doubles annually.
• Rock's Law: The cost of semiconductor tools doubles every four years.
• Machrone's Law: The PC you want to buy always will be $5000.
• Metcalfe's Law: A network's value grows proportionately to the number of users squared.
• Wirth's Law: Software is slowing faster than hardware is accelerating.

I've been a member of the Electronic Resources in Libraries (ERIL) list for quite some time. It always has good information and discussions. Here's a good list of open access journal collections, part of their very comprehensive resource page.

Let's just say that this one had me checking the calendar to see if it's really April 1st. Digital revolution leaves Google feeling quite flush is an article about Google installing digital toilets. Insert your own toilet joke here. Via ResourceShelf.

"The expert user is dead" by Leo Robert Klein is such a terrific article it's like it smacked me right between the eyes with a two-by-four. We all like seeing articles that agree with our basic assumptions, and I'm no exception. Klein's thesis is basically that the modern user (ie. average undergrad and 90% of grad & faculty) really don't care about the thesaurus or other controlled vocabulary. They rarely, if ever, use advanced search features. They almost never want everything on a topic or even the best information on a topic. The want good enough, fast enough as easy as Google. However, we as librarians usually assume that the users are just like us and want to use all the bells and whistles, that they are being comprehensive, that they enjoy poking around in odd corners of a database. Not! The point being, we should design our websites, out databases, our webguides, our instruction, our reference interviews for who our users are, not who we would like them to be. Sure, there are highly specialized users that are the exception (chemistry & SciFinder comes to mind), but I really think the Google paradigm is the rule. Every librarian, every vendor should take a look at this article. You may not agree, but you will be challenged. Via various sources.

The latest issue of b/ITE (v20i6 Nov/Dec 2003), the newsletter of the SLA IT division, has just been posted. It's a special issue on RSS with interesting articles by Marie C. Kaddell, Greg Kaplan and Stephen M. Cohen. Well worth taking a look at, as are all issues of this newsletter.

The latest portal: Libraries and the Academy is out with, as usual, several very interesting articles for academic librarians. A small sample:

• "Tragedy of the Commons Revisited: Librarians, Publishers, Faculty and the Demise of a Public Resource"
  
• "Assessment with Rubrics: An Efficient and Objective Means of Assessing Student Outcomes in an Information Resources Class"
  
• "Librarians and Link Rot: A Comparative Analysis with Some Methodological Considerations" is on everyone's favourite topic: web guides.
  
• "Social Sciences Literature and Electronic Information"

This is a terrific issue. Virtually every article would have a broad interest for academic librarians.

It's nice to know that medical researchers have a sense of humour, too. Or perhaps this is just a ploy to win an IgNobel? The article, "Head injuries in nursery rhymes: evidence of a dangerous subtext in children's literature " by Sarah M. Giles and Sarah Shea is a hoot. via Google News.

For those of us interested in the Philosophy of Science, there is an eprint server up and running. Looks interesting but not too many documents yet. Come on, you philosphers, get with the open access program. From Robert Michaelson via slapam-l.

Library Bloggers of the world unite! Or at least write about it for The Reference Librarian. This is something I totally support. Blogging is such a new phenom that I think we owe ourselves the opportunity to think deeply about what we do. Do I take my own advice? Let's wait and see. Via Commons-blog.

If you write book reviews as part of your professional persona, here's a survey being conducted on just that topic. via H. Robert Malinowsky.

When an undergrad asks me how to tell if a scientific article is primary or not, I always ask them, "Can you understand the title?" If they answer "no," then I say, "Bingo!" It's simplistic, probably overly so, but my follow-up explanation goes into how the audience for primary articles is other specialists in the same field, so it uses highly specialized language that the non-PhD will probably not understand yet. This seems to work. In the LIS field, I rarely get that feeling, of seeing such highly specialized terminology that I'm not sure what the darn thing is about. This is one of the closest so far: "Using MPEG-21 DIDL to Represent Complex Digital Objects in the Los Alamos National Laboratory Digital Library" from the lastest D-Lib. Every so often, D-Lib publishes something that probably doesn't belong there, more likely in the ACM/IEEE Conference on DLs -- this is a case in point.

What to do if your mom finds out about your blog? From blogger home page.

The Master of EEVL, Roddy MacLeod, has informed me of two new highly EEVL services, OneStep Jobs and OneStep Industry News. Read full details at the press release here. Both are available via RSS feeds, making them as convenient as they are valuable. I certainly plan on subscribing to the Industry News one myself. It's interesting that the name my fingers wanted to type was "OneStop," which, when you think about it, is also a pretty good description of the service.