MIT Media Lab’s 4-Year-Old Irish Offshoot Is Running Out of Money and Plans to Close, from the Chronicle But really, who wouldn’t want to work in an old Guinness brewery in Dublin?
Blind reviewing, not so much
My friend and colleague Scott‘s blog is at least partially concerned with the trials and tribulations of the tenure trail, so it occurs to me that I ought to at least write some about that myself. (You like how I just slipped that in? A lot of alliteration from anxious anchors placed in powerful posts!) I got an email a couple of days ago from one of the top journals.. Read More
ETS information literacy test
According to this story from the NY Times, the Educational Testing Service has developed a standardized test to assess information literacy. According to this story, the test, called the Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, …can assess students’ ability to make good critical evaluations of the vast amount of material available to them. …is intended to measure students’ ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and.. Read More
Apple: ThinkSecret
Apple sues Mac rumor Website, from CNN This is a strange story: Apple is suing ThinkSecret for posting information about the Mac mini, before its release. Apple claims that the information posted …could only have been obtained by someone who had signed a confidentiality agreement with Apple. But apparently none of the ThinkSecret people actually had signed a confidentiality agreement with Apple. Instead, Apple’s claim is that ThinkSecret had induced.. Read More
Huygens, a major success
I love that I live in an age when I can be sitting at home on the sofa and looking at a photograph taken on another planet. Okay, so Titan is actually a moon. But it’s still wicked cool. Huygens landed on Titan today, and it was a huge success. Apparently it broadcast for way longer than anyone had expected. CNN’s story reports that scientists were weeping with joy. NASA’s.. Read More
Getting in touch with my elitist side
Yvonne pointed out to me that Despair, Inc. has produced some new poster designs. And since I wrote about elitism recently, I thought I’d just go with it: Here are a few other faves: Maybe we can use this one to inspire PhD students. Or undergrads. For the technological determinist in your life.
The Catalogue of Ships
A few months ago we watched Battlestar Galactica on the SciFi Channel, and I’m really looking forward to the series, which premieres tonight. I’m a sucker for space opera. And honestly, the SciFi miniseries was so way better than the show from the ’70s. It cracks me up though that the SciFi Channel has the catalogue of ships from the show, here. I will tell the captains of the ships.. Read More
Speak up, I can’t hear you over the Big Bang
Our corner of the universe is apparently very loud. Who knew? Vestiges of Big Bang Waves Are Reported, from the NY Times Astronomers reported on Tuesday that they had convincingly seen, in the patterns of galaxies scattered across the night sky, the vestiges of sound waves that rumbled through the universe after the Big Bang. Stars and galaxies tended to form along the ripples of the sound waves where matter.. Read More
Wikipedia, tempest in a teapot?
According to this post to the Dig_Ref listserv, there’s been discussion about Wikipedia on the MEDIEV-L listserv. The chain of posts is confusing, but the Dig_Ref post discusses a post made to MEDIEV-L and reposted on NetGold. The most interesting thing to me about the Dig_Ref post is that someone in the thread calls for a boycott of Wikipedia: Certainly if we maintain a strict diet of research and peer.. Read More
Piedmont Ecoregion
Jane and Evelyn and I are working on a grant proposal in collaboration with folks from the Herbarium and the Botanical Garden. In the course of our email conversations about this project, the question came up, What are the boundaries of our local ecoregion? So one of the botanists sent this map around, from The Nature Conservancy. It’s just so cool that I had to include it here. Click image.. Read More