This one is for all of you ibiblites in the audience: The First International Conference on Open Source Systems is currently underway, in Genova Italy. (Thanks, James, for telling me about this.) The entire proceedings is online too, all 377 PDFed pages of it.
For all you Jared Diamond-heads out there, news: PBS has made a 3-part series out of Guns, Germs, & Steel, hosted by Diamond himself. Premieres tomorrow (Monday) night, 10 pm.
Paul has already written about orphaned works. Yesterday this got posted to the Dig_Ref list: The Copyright Office will hold public roundtable discussions regarding orphan works in Washington, D.C., on July 26-27, and in Berkeley, California, on August 2. The Office has identified several general topic areas for discussion during the roundtables, and has organized a preliminary agenda according to these issue areas. Persons wishing to participate in the roundtables.. Read More
Bloggers Need Not Apply, from the Chronicle We’ve seen the hapless job seekers who destroy the good thing they’ve got going on paper by being so irritating in person that we can’t wait to put them back on a plane. Our blogger applicants came off reasonably well at the initial interview, but once we hung up the phone and called up their blogs, we got to know “the real them”.. Read More
Thanks to Rebecca for sending an email around about this: the brand-spanking new LISWiki. From the About page: LISWiki was established to give the library community a chance to explore the usefulness of Wikis. It is not intended to replace or detract from the Wikipedia Library and information science articles (or those in the printed LIS encyclopedias for that matter), but exist as a niche encyclopedia covering library-related issues. I’ve.. Read More
From PollingReport, a Harris Poll on the Origin of Human Life. This is an object lesson for all students who ever plan to use a survey or an interview to collect data: this is precisely why the phrasing of a question is vitally important. I’m not even referring to the religious or political issues involved here. What we have here is essentially the same question asked 3 times, with wildly.. Read More
I recently read the original 1968 article The Tragedy of the Commons, by Garrett Hardin, that article that coined that phrase. I had never read this before, despite the fact that that phrase is used all the time. I’d always thought of it as a seminal work in economics, but it isn’t about that at all. One of the biggest surprises for me was that it’s not really about commonses;.. Read More
This is almost as cool as the MacQuarium: the Wood iPod. Made from African Padauk.
I recently served on a review panel for an NSF program. We were asked not to say which one. But this is my first time doing this, & it was quite an education. When I first accepted, I had some moments of doubt & guilt over the seriousness of what I was being asked to do: tell, or at least suggest to the federal government how to spend taxpayer money… Read More
This is wicked funny: a spoof ad for the iPod Flea.