Well, the BOINC-supported SETI@home is working out well for me. I’ve noticed that the work units are smaller with BOINC, taking my laptop about 2 hours to process per. I still don’t like the screensaver graphics as much as the Classic, but oh well. There are some cool plugins for the BOINC software that didn’t exist for Classic: the one I especially like is the sky map that shows the.. Read More
I’ve just passed 2,000 work units processed for SETI@home. Actually, appropriately enough, I’m currently at 2,001. I’ve been doing this for about 5½ years now and I’ve been running this software on, I don’t know, at least 5 different computers over the years. According to my user profile, I process approximately 1 work unit per 8½ hours, and I’ve devoted nearly 2 years of CPU time. I’m sure my average.. Read More
Only for those who are really really confident of their touch-typing ability: Das Keyboard is an enhanced 104-key USB PC keyboard equiped with 100% blank keys…
Google Answers Complaints About Project to Scan Millions of Books, but Publishers Are Not Won Over, from the Chronicle It is perhaps unfortunate that this headline starts with “Google Answers,” since that’s not at all what this is about, but maybe I’m being nitpicky. Responding to concerns from several academic and commercial publishers, Google has made minor adjustments to its vast project to scan library books, and Google officials say.. Read More
Yvonne & I finished reading Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince last week. And as we’re no doubt the last 2 people in the English-speaking world to have finished it, I have no qualms about engaging in spoilers. But first let me just say, you can have all of those One Book community reading programs: those only engage a single town or city or state. And you can definitely have.. Read More
First International Conference on e-Social Science The vision of the ‘Grid’ first emerged as a solution to the highly specialised computing infrastructure requirements of particle physics. The past five years, however, have seen the Grid’s potential recognised by the wider scientific research community and the emergence of new forms of research practice now encapsulated in the notion of ‘e-Science’. Now, members of the social science research community in the UK.. Read More
In the July issue of C&RL, Thomas Nisonger & Charles Davis have a paper titled “The Perception of Library and Information Science Journals by LIS Education Deans and ARL Library Directors: A Replication of the Kohl-Davis Study.” This is, well, a replication of the 1985 Kohl-Davis study, which ranked LIS journals based on the perceptions of LIS school deans and research library directors. Mostly because I was just curious (and.. Read More
In this week’s exciting installment of Library Journal Academic Newswire, are these two articles: ALPSP joins Google Print battle, issues strong statement, and Google supporters plead their case. Here’s the Association for Learned Professional and Society Publishers’ “strong statement”: Google Print for Libraries — ALPSP position statement. Strong like noxious, I would suggest. Permitting publishers to ‘opt out’ is not an acceptable substitute for proper licensing in the first place….. Read More
I recently reread Paul Ginsparg’s article First Steps towards Electronic Research Communication, about the establishment of the physics e-print archive. I reread it partly because I’ve been thinking about institutional repositories lately, & partly because it’s 10 years old recently (the article is dated 19 April 1995). In it, Ginsparg writes: This “e-print archive” began as an experimental means of circumventing recognized inadequacies of research journals… This system provides a.. Read More
Students Whose Phony Paper Brought a Conference Invitation Are Stars of Their Own Video, from the Chronicle Conference officials objected when the students distributed fliers encouraging conference attendees to come to what the students billed as a “technical session” that had its own randomly-generated title, “The 6th Annual North American Symposium on Methodologies, Theory, and Information.” The officials asked the hotel to make the students remove all references to the.. Read More