If Google Was Your Roommate–The Web Series

Actually, I'd call it funny and scary...

If Google Was Your Roommate–The Web Series: "
Funny web series about two guys living with Google as a roommate. After you watch episode one above, move onto episode two and three. [via Asian Angel]

Penn State Live - Did You Know? Musical Notes from the Penn State Laureate

Penn State Live - Did You Know? Musical Notes from the Penn State Laureate

This article about musical performers is completely off-topic, but it wins my vote for the best subtitle:

Whoops, I broke my “G” String … and other hazards of playing concerts.

Catching ZZZZs

Really? - The Claim - Daylight Saving Time Can Affect Your Health - Question - NYTimes.com

I have a sudden urge to sleep in...

2002 was a very good year....

The Centered Librarian: Diagram Prize for Oddest Title of the Year

Let's hope no one has this on their "Bucket List"

Lick a Librarian | Library Stuff

FOXNews.com - Women Use More of Their Brain Than Men - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News

FOXNews.com - Women Use More of Their Brain Than Men - Science News | Science & Technology | Technology News

No comment needed.

To quote or not to quote?

Most bloggers think that quoting part of an article they are recommending/linking is fair use.

Since clicks are often tied to advertising revenue, some content providers are taking issue.

We need to keep an eye on this litigation.

Copyright Holders Challenge Sites That Scrape Content - NYTimes.com

Gaussian copula what? (Economic Literacy)

Have you seen the latest culprit for the economic breakdown?




via
Infocult: Information, Culture, Policy, Education: The world catastrophe formula

Brrrr. That's more than I wanted to know...

Are you a social underachiever?

via LibraryBytes: How big is your social circle?

Apparently the average Facebook user has 120 friends - I thought I was doing well when I broke 50...

:0(

Downsizing vehicles

Cow Transportation Fail � FAIL Blog: Pictures and Videos of Owned, Pwnd and Fail Moments

I know we're supposed to downsize our vehicles to be green, but this is ridiculous!

Web 3.0 - The Semantic Web Cometh | 21st Century Connections

Web 3.0 - The Semantic Web Cometh | 21st Century Connections

For anyone just starting to think about the semantic web, this is a good overview...

Flash-Mob Cataloging Party

LibraryThing: Flash-Mob Cataloging Party: Rhode Island Audubon Society

I had to post this for the title alone. I never thought I'd hear cataloging and flash-mob in the same sentence. It reminds me of one of my favorite NancyButtons:

Librarian Terrorist--get out of my way or I'll catalog you

How to predict gadget success | Business Tech - CNET News

How to predict gadget success | Business Tech - CNET News

I think the reasoning here also applies to our library catalogs...

Author's Guild Claims Kindle 2 Copyright Infringement | LISNews

This is just plain nuts.

Author's Guild Claims Kindle 2 Copyright Infringement | LISNews

Early Reviewers | LibraryThing

Early Reviewers | LibraryThing

This is a wild example of crowdsourcing! LibraryThing users are signing up for the chance to receive early copies of books and post their reviews on LibraryThing. The publishers typically provide LibraryThing with about 30 copies of a new book. For each title there can be anywhere from 100 to over 1,200 interested LibraryThing reviewers!

HotStuff 2.0

HotStuff 2.0

Dave Pattern has taken a really cool approach to analyzing library buzz. He's taken feeds from over 800 library blogs and crunched words in them to uncover new/hot topics. He also includes a word wheel graphic to show how the new topic links to other keywords.

For a more detail explanation of how he's doing it, check here.

AltSearchEngines � Blog Archive � The Search Race is over! And the winner is….

AltSearchEngines � Blog Archive � The Search Race is over! And the winner is….

Dang. How did I miss iSeek ? This faceted search tool is awesome. Check out the rest of the list too!

You Need To See This Video (1981 TV Report On Birth Of Internet News)

What a hoot! This is the year I graduated from high school. I hadn't even touched my first computer back then!

You Need To See This Video (1981 TV Report On Birth Of Internet News)

Pipl.com: People Search Engine So Good, It Will Scare Your Pants Off

Fortunately I was wearing a belt when I tested this site...

Pipl.com: People Search Engine So Good, It Will Scare Your Pants Off

The Economy According To Mint

I was simultaneously fascinated and creeped out by this article. I know the composite information is anonymous, but still...

The Economy According To Mint

Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0 - BizTech - Technology

Brittanica with user updates? Wikipedia must really have them against the wall...

Watch out Wikipedia, here comes Britannica 2.0 - BizTech - Technology

Today's award for unintentional irony...

Strangely enough, this lecture about lecture capture systems wasn't captured. Just the PowerPoint is posted! Should we take that to mean that the answer was no? :-)

Lecture Capture Systems: Are They Worth It? | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

The New Atlantis � People of the Screen

The New Atlantis � People of the Screen

A very thoughtful essay about the possible societal impacts of moving from print reading to digital reading.

7 Things You Should Know About Alternate Reality Games | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

7 Things You Should Know About Alternate Reality Games | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

Creating an ARG for our Information Literacy class would be an interesting idea, but wow, how much work....

A Digital Humanities Manifesto � A Digital Humanities Manifesto

A Digital Humanities Manifesto � A Digital Humanities Manifesto

Hmm. What would we put in a Library Manifesto? Worth pondering.

Copyright Balance and Fair Use in Networked Learning: Lessons from Creators' Codes of Best Practices | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

Copyright Balance and Fair Use in Networked Learning: Lessons from Creators' Codes of Best Practices | EDUCAUSE CONNECT

I've only had a chance to look at the PowerPoint so far, but I'm planning to go back and listen to the recording. Fair use is always a sticky area.

Recommended Read: Why Science?

While I'm on a roll, I'd also like to recommend Why Science? by James Trefil. Trefil focuses on the current state of scientific (il-)literacy in the U.S. and makes recommendations for reforming science education.

Trefil defines scientific literacy as "the matrix of knowledge neede to understand enough about the phyusical univers to deal with issues that come across our horizon, in the news or elsewhere." (p. 28)

Many of his arguments bear an uncanny resemblance to the debates that librarians hold about information literacy. He says that scientific literacy isn't about the math (Boolean?), doing the science, or technical competencies (keystrokes?). He argues that the goal of many science professors at the college level is to turn students into miniature scientists. (p. 154)

The emphasis on advanced mathematics, laboratory exercises, and disciplinary silos works well for students majoring in the sciences, but it rarely meets the scientific literacy needs of non-science majors. Indeed, Trefil suggests that the current approach to science education is lacking even for science professionals:
"...PH.D. scientists themselves are usually scientifically illiterate in all fields except their areas of specialty." (p. 156)

What Trefil advocates instead is a general education based on the "Great Ideas" of science. (p. 176-191) He spells them out as:

• The universe is regular and predictable.
• The energy of a closed system is conserved.
• Heat will not flow spontaneously from a cold to a hot body.
• Maxwell's equations govern electricity and magnetism.
• Matter is made from atoms.
• The properties of materials depend on the identity, arrangement, and binding of the atoms of which they are made.
• In the quantum world you cannot measure an object without changing it.
• The laws of nature are the same in all frames of reference.
• There is a great deal of energy in the atomic nucleus.
• The nucleus is made of particles, which are made of quarks...
• Stars live and die like everything else.
• The universe began in a hot, dense state about 14 billion years ago and has been expanding ever since.
• The surface of the Earth is constantly changing.
• The Earth works in cycles.
• Life is based on chemistry.
• The behavior of molecules in living systems depends on their shape.
• Life's chemistry is coded in DNA.
• All living things share the same genetic code.
• Life evolved through the process of natural selection.

What may be Trefil's most contentious belief is his conviction that non-science majors shouldn't be required to take labs. He argues that the students' level of knowledge and experience, combined with the expense of equipping labs, limits experiments to the level of those performed by scientists in earlier centuries. He describes the effect as "Training for Galileo in the World of Craig Venter." (p. 161)

After reading this book, I'm tempted to buy his college textbook and go back for all the sciences I missed!

Recommended Read: Planet Google

It takes me a while to get to things on pulp rather than in bytes, but I finally had a chance to read Randall Stross' Planet Google. It provides some fascinating insights - did you know that they taught Google's machine translator by feeding it pairs of documents prepared by the UN for training its human translators? (p. 82) By allowing the machine to analyze larger patterns rather than just individual words, the translations are an improvement over earlier machine-based translations. The more matched documents fed to the machine translator, the better it is able to translate.

Google's search algorithm also gets smarter as more documents are indexed. Stross describes the Google maxim as "More data equals better data." (p. 87) It explains why Google has moved into indexing, and sometimes digitizing, so many different types of information, books, news, forums, email, etc.

Stross also recounts Eric Schmidt's 2005 estimate that only 2-3% of the world's information currently is in digital, indexable form. Schmidt said that company estimated that it would take 300 years to digitize and index the rest! (p. 200)

This book gave me a greater appreciation for how much Google has actually accomplished in 10 short years. It also made it clear why our vendor search tools are unlikely to catch up without access to an equivalent datastore...

eLearn: Predictions for 2009

eLearn: Predictions for 2009

This is a series of brief predictions from eLearning experts. It will be of interested to anyone involved in higher education.

[Fwd: Capitol Words: What Your Congress Person Really Talks About]

Information visualization is a trend that I watch.  Here's an interesting application...

 

 

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Capitol Words: What Your Congress Person Really Talks About

via ReadWriteWeb by Marshall Kirkpatrick on 12/19/08

The Sunlight Foundation's mashup site Capitol Words relaunched this week and now offers a very handy way to see what keywords are being used in the US Congress in general and by particular congress members. If you pay only passing attention to politics, Capitol Words is a great way to familiarize yourself with politicians in a hurry. It's a mashup of several different ways to search the Congressional Record and it's fun to use.

Sponsor

There's also a lot of interesting little tidbits that can be discovered using the site. Did you know that Republicans talk about Google far more often in Congress than Democrats do? That Oregon Republican Gordon Smith uses the word "hate" more than almost any other word?

As you can see from the images below, there are some shortcomings to the system. It only parses single words (hate is presumably connected to crime, for example) and you can't click on those words to see the context they were used in. For a much more full-featured service regarding congress, see our coverage of the Sunlight Foundation's fantastic site OpenCongress. See also Sunlight's lab project, Capitol Tweets (embedded, right), which consultant to the Foundation Nancy Watzman wrote about here. Check out the new CapitalWords.org.

Cute old guy photo CC via Flickr user aflcio2008.

Discuss

--  Vickie L. Kline 		vkline@ycp.edu Systems Librarian 		Phone: 717-815-1459 Associate Professor 		FAX: 717-849-1608  York College of PA - Schmidt Library York, PA 17405-7199  "If we knew what it was we were doing, it would not be called research, would it?"  -Albert Einstein  

Time to review your email reference policies

I went back and looked at my library's policy.   Not as bad as many below, but still could use a second look...

 

 

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Ask-a-Librarian Services Need a Reboot

via David Lee King by davidleeking on 1/6/09

What would you say if I told you that some libraries discriminate against a certain type of customer? That some customers, because of the way they asked a question, were purposefully pushed to the back of the line, told to wait 2-3 days for an answer, and that they couldn’t get an answer to some of their burning questions … because they’re “that kind” of customer?

You’d be furious, right?

Well … believe it or not, many libraries are doing that RIGHT NOW - today, in fact. Take a peek at these email and chat reference policies for a sec, then come back and let’s talk:

• Note - not picking on any particular library - there are MANY MORE examples out there…
• New York Public Library: “We will make every effort to respond to your question within two working days“
• San Francisco Public Library: “In depth questions will be forwarded in e-mail format to subject specialists, who will try to get back to you within 2 days.” Their IM service - “The IM reference service works best for answering brief, factual questions.”
• Hennepin County Library: “We can provide brief answers to questions or suggest locations and sources to answer your question. We will respond within 48 hours.”
• San Diego Public Library: “If you are in a Library building, we highly recommend working with Library staff before using these online services” … “Library staff is able to provide short, factual answers.”
• County of Los Angeles Public Library: “Send us an email or fill out the form below. Reference staff will respond to your question within 48 hours (excluding weekends and holidays).
• Houston Public Library: “You should get a response to your e-mail within 48-72 hours, excluding weekends and holidays … If you are working against a deadline, you may get a faster response by visiting or calling your local library …”
• Carnegie Library of Pittsburgh: “Every reasonable attempt will be made by library staff to respond to reference questions within 48 hours.” … E-mail Reference Questions should be limited to those that have concise, factual answers … Individuals are limited to three Electronic Mail Reference Questions each week.” (check out this update)
• Kansas City Public Library: “Questions sent to the Library by using this form will be answered by e-mail within 48 hours excluding holidays and weekends.” Their chat service - “AskNow! is a live, online reference service for questions that require only short, factual answers that can be found in online resources.”

Ouch! Now, let me ask you this. If I walked into any of these libraries and asked the same question in person:

• Would I have to wait 48-72 hours for a response? No.
• Could I ask the same question on a weekend? Most likely, assuming the library was open.
• Would they limit my questions to THREE A WEEK??? I sure hope not!
• Would I be limited to asking ONLY questions “that require only short, factual answers that can be found in online resources” as KCPL mentions? No.

Is this REALLY how you want to treat your customers? Especially that growing group of customers who are already using your digital branch and are taking advantage of your digital services? Please don’t tell me that you can somehow only serve those customers who actually walk into the library and up to your physical reference desk, but can’t get to the customers who call or email or IM or txt you in a timely fashion. I’m not buying that.

The problem isn’t the volume or the format of the question, but the way your reference services are arranged. Rearrange it. Now. Please.

In essence, you ARE discriminating. Discriminating against a growing, younger, web-savvy customer base. Customers who *almost* have all the tools in place to simply ignore you and your grad-degreed, professional information-retrieval services. Especially if they are treated like second class customers when they ask a question using their preferred, and handy, means of communication.

Does this make sense? Do you really want to be “that guy?” I think not. The libraries I mention above all want to do a great job, I’m sure, as do you. So let’s work on improving our online services … like now already!

******

To be fair, I checked out my library’s ask page too (and crossed my fingers, and said a little prayer before I clicked :-). We did great! Here’s what we do:

• We mention how good we are (”provide quick, accurate answers”)
• We mention that the phone is the fastest way to get a response, rather than forcing customers to visit in-person (”If you want to talk with someone immediately about a question you can call us…”)
• Instead of giving some outlandish timeframe for a response (i.e., 24-48-72 hours), we say “We will help you as quickly as we can.”

And my personal favorite - for more complex questions, we direct customers … not to the physical desk, but to email! We don’t even mention the desk or having to visit the library in person on our Ask Us page.

Why? Because those customers are already in the library, using our Digital Branch. They need to get the same treatment as any other customer with any other question.

photo by Neubie

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Death by Committee

For some reason this video reminds me of web design by committee. ;-)

 

 

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Death by Committee

via The Shifted Librarian by jenny on 1/3/09

What would happen if the STOP sign was invented in 2008?

Tell a friend - Watch more free videos

[via Public Sector Marketing 2.0]

No Tags

 

 

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Top 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating in 2009

I have to watch out for #1 and #6. Which ones are hampering you?

 

 

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Top 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating in 2009

via Stephen's Lighthouse by stephen on 1/7/09

At the Heart of Innovation blog:

The Top 100 Lamest Excuses for Not Innovating in 2009

1. I don't have the time.
2. I can't get the funding.
3. My boss will never go for it.
4. Were not in the kind of business likely to innovate.
5. We won't be able to get it past legal.
6. I've got too much on my plate.
7. I'll be punished if I fail.
8. I'm just not not the creative type.
9. I'm already juggling way too many projects.
10. I'm too new around here.
11. I'm not good at presenting my ideas.
12. No one, besides me, really cares about innovation.
13. There's too much bureaucracy here to get anything done.
14. Our customers aren't asking for it.
15. We're a risk averse culture. Always will be.
16. We don't have an innovation process.
17. We don't have a culture of innovation.
18. They don't pay me enough to take on this kind of project.
19. My boss will get all the credit.
20. My career path will be jeopardized if this doesn't fly.

and 80 more after the link.

There's an upside. He gives a strategy at the end for turning these excuses into reasons and then focusing on success and positive results.

Stephen

 

 

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Telephones will hurt churches

Stephen Abram posted a great blast from the past...

 

 

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Telephones will hurt churches

via Stephen's Lighthouse by stephen on 1/9/09

OMG, Don't you just love this?:

Source: The Sky is Falling!

Yep, the telephone will destroy churches and concert halls - but no worries - it'll lose out to phonographs!

Why do predictions never foresee peaceful co-existence?

Stephen

 

 

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LifestreamBackup: Keeping a Copy of Your Posts, Tweets, Photos, and More

The thought of having a lifetime archive of keystrokes is both horrifying and fascinating. It reminds me of the Robin William's movie Final Cut.

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LifestreamBackup: Keeping a Copy of Your Posts, Tweets, Photos, and More

via ReadWriteWeb by Rick Turoczy on 1/16/09

Anyone who has ever crashed a computer without a backup knows the painful and arduous process required to restore the machine to its previous state. As such, many of us keep regular backups of the data on our systems, just in case.

But there's another vast set of data many of us are creating on a daily basis that has little to no backup at all - beyond the services that host that content: our lifestreams. Now, a new service - named appropriately enough, LifestreamBackup - aims to provide the peace of mind that your lifestream data will always be just as accessible as the backup of your machine.

Sponsor

Is losing this data really a problem? If it's not now, it soon will be.

The most obvious example of this loss of access to lifestream data? The inability to access anything beyond beyond page 162 on Twitter. No matter how many times you've posted, you cannot go back any further than 3240 tweets. So, every new public message you send removes one from your history. (To see this in action, simply add "?page=162" to the end of any Twitter user's default URL.) Those who had seen Twitter as a journal of sorts for recording fleeting moments for posterity, suddenly found those moments just as fleeting online.

That's just one example. There are thousands of others: blogs crashing, videos being taken down, companies shutting down services. The list goes on and on.

The point being: saving the content you are producing elsewhere so that you always have access to it is going to become a bigger and bigger problem as time goes on - especially as more and more people move into the social Web. For that reason, LifestreamBackup seems to be ahead of the game with this proposed offering.

While not yet available, LifestreamBackup proposes to launch in the coming weeks. For a small fee, the service will take your various feeds and back them up on Amazon S3 - either your account or theirs. Current pricing is set at $6.95 per month for 10G of data.

"We will launch with the ability to backup Flickr and a blog (via RSS feed). Google Docs, Twitter feeds, Youtube and Facebook backup are all in the works and will come shortly after launch. If it has an API that allows us to pull data, we are happy to back it up for you."

The cloud provides a cost-effective resource for storage. Still, one has to wonder, given the concerns with availability, is saving to the cloud the best place to back things up? The cloud for all its benefits is not a perfect place. Apparently, the more cautious among us will still be pulling a backup of that backup - which we'll house offsite somewhere.

For more, Lifestream Blog points us to a video from "Somewhat Frank" Gruber where a number of people - for the first few minutes - chat about the pros and cons of the concept.

Suffice it to say, it's a start. And, a step in the right direction. LifestreamBackup isn't likely to take the market by storm. But it's important to consider it, nonetheless, because it's definitely addressing a growing need.

We're still very early in this version of the Web. There's no doubt that saving the things that are important to us - our social interactions and our historical references - for future reference will become a very important business indeed.

(Image "Lifestream-Seaform" courtesy jemsweb. Used under Creative Commons.)

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“Oh, and You Have a Degree, Too?”

Another article from the back log. This opinion piece and the one it cites from the New York Times are must reads for anyone involved in general education and the undergraduate experience.

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“Oh, and You Have a Degree, Too?”

via Weblogg-ed by Will Richardson on 12/29/08

I know I've been on this "do my kids really have to go to college?" bender for a while now, but yesterday's New York Times column by Charles Murray has added some new fuel to the fire. In "Should the Obama Generation Drop Out?" Murray basically makes the case that a) a bachelor's degree should not be the prime determiner of employment as an adult and b) for most kids, the bachelor's is a credential that is "beyond their reach" yet we spend countless hours and dollars in preparation and pursuit anyway.

Let me just say, once again, I am not anti college or anti-intellectual. What I am is anti the treadmill that we've set up for many kids in primarily upper middle class suburban schools that streamlines them into a very narrow track to a four year degree right out of high school. The treadmill my kids are going to be encouraged to climb on in the very near future. The one my wife and kids and I are going to have to decide whether we want them on. The statistics are pretty compelling: only about one in four Americans have a bachelor's degree, and college dropout rates are over 50%. As Murray says,

For most of the nation's youths, making the bachelor's degree a job qualification means demanding a credential that is beyond their reach. It is a truth that politicians and educators cannot bring themselves to say out loud: A large majority of young people do not have the intellectual ability to do genuine college-level work…[And] Many young people who have the intellectual ability to succeed in rigorous liberal arts courses don't want to. For these students, the distribution requirements of the college degree do not open up new horizons. They are bothersome time-wasters.

Now that doesn't mean I don't think my kids can't succeed at college. And it doesn't mean that I don't fully appreciate the advantages my kids have in growing up in a white, upper middle class home where both parents are educated by the traditional means and (hopefully) intellectually curious enough to motivate their kids to learn. And it doesn't mean that I don't know the economic benefits of a college degree. But I can't help but think that my kids have opportunities to learn what they need to know to be successful in ways that I didn't, ways that in some measure may have been there all along and that maybe I didn't take advantage of, but ways that are also brand new and game-changers. This is not a suggestion that we replace a bachelor's with a blog, btw, but it is an open question as to whether or not my kids have more ways to acquire the knowledge and skills they need to be successful and show what they can do on an unprecedented scale. And if so, it's a challenge to move them off of a college treadmill and onto a learning treadmill where the system's job is not necessarily to raise it's college acceptance rates but to prepare all kids for a variety of choices and scenarios upon which they can create their futures.

More and more, all I want from my kids' school is to help me identify what they love, what their strengths are, and then help them create their own paths to mastery of their passions. Stop spending so much time focusing on subjects or courses that "they need for college" but don't interest them in the least. Help them become learners who will be able to find and make good use of the knowledge that they need when they need it, whether that means finding an answer online or taking a college course to deepen their understanding. And finally, prepare them to create their own credentials that will powerfully display their capabilities, passions and potentials. (And I know that my more immediate challenge right now is to figure out whether or not my kids' public school system can do that and, if not, what to do about it. More on that later.)

Maybe I'm dreaming. Or maybe it's because the last seven years have turned me into an "alternate route" learner and passion-based professional, and intellectually I've just loved this SO much more than when I went to college (though college did have its moments…just not usually in the classroom.) Either way, it just feels like there's going to be some shift happening here in the next few years as well, and I, at least, have to start thinking about it sooner rather than later.

(Photo "Stairway to learning" by Point-Shoot-Edit.)

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Teaching by Lying: Professor Unveils 'Last Pirate' Hoax

Somehow I missed this the first time around. It might be an interesting exercise for an information literacy class.

 

 

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Teaching by Lying: Professor Unveils 'Last Pirate' Hoax

via Chronicle.com - Today's News on 12/19/08

A history professor at George Mason University asked his students to develop a fake story online to show them how to do historical research and how to tell a good source from a bad one.

 

 

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Emperor Workstation Priced at $40,000 [Workstation]

Somehow I don't think our furniture budget line would cover this...

 

 

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Emperor Workstation Priced at $40,000 [Workstation]

via Gizmodo by Sean Fallon on 1/15/09

It's has been quite a while since we last heard about the Emperor Workstation, and everyone had to wonder how much this thing was going to cost. Well, try $40,000.

If that figure sent a shudder through your spine, I'm assuming, like most of us, that you could in no way afford this. For everyone else, this three-headed beast with THX 5.1 surround sound, air filtering, light therapy and touchscreen controls is available now. [NovelQuest via Gizmag]

 

 

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