Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking “superorganisms,” highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and…
The San Francisco-based Breast Cancer (news – web sites) Action (BCA) group is counter-attacking this onslaught of commercialism with its campaign “Think Before you Pink.” The group decries the lack of coordination and transparency among federal agencies, private foundations and pharmaceutical companies funding research on breast cancer. “No one knows exactly how much money is…
Derrida’s prolific writings, criticised by some as obscure and nihilist, argue that in literature — but also in fields such as art, music, architecture — there are multiple meanings not necessarily intended or even understood by the creator of the work. —French philosopher Derrida, father of deconstruction, dies at 74 Interesting… this is filed under…
Information Literacy: One Faculty View (Moveable Types of Information Literacy) My interest in information literacy, as a teacher: The credulity with which students accept what they read online. Their uncritical use of the Google search engine. Their over-reliance upon online sources of questionable value. I lead the program in New Media Journalism at Seton Hill University…
Whispering the News to Marian: Libraries on Fire (Moveable Types of Information Literacy) Librarians get furious when someone from the outside tries to suppress a text. A library must have order. A patron reshelve a book? Never! “Heaven help us, if the library caught on fire,” sings Harold Hill “and the volunteer hose brigademen / Had…
Specificity vs. Abstraction: The Library as Mediator of Humanities and Technology Values (Moveable Types of Information Literacy) While deconstruction and postmodernism have challenged the traditional dusty-tome humanities methodology that aims to construct a specific “correct” text, by continuing to react against the ideal text, contemporary humanities scholarship reveals its dependency upon the central ideal. That ideal…
Postmodern Peer Review and Emerging Genres (Moveable Types of Information Literacy) We find it quaint that Vannevar Bush would try to do hypertext with an automated, user-writeable microfiche. It is similarly quaint that a library database be optimized to deliver PDF documents or other facsimiles of the printed page. Native electronic journals offer cutting-edge, peer-reviewed scholarship,…
Moveable Types of Information Literacy: Emerging Genres and the Deconstruction of Peer Review (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Presented Oct 9, at the Georgia Conference on Information Literacy Information Literacy: One Faculty View Whispering the News to Marian: Libraries on Fire Specificity vs. Abstraction: The Library as Mediator of Humanities and Technology Values Postmodern Peer Review and Emerging…
Children as young as two are the target audience of a new software that will enable toddlers to both surf and send e-mails safely without help from their parents. —New software lets toddlers e-mail and surf (BBC) So… who’s going to develop the blogging plug-in? Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary.
Heft vs. Googlehole: Scholarship and the Print Pit (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I love the heft and feel of a book. So do academic tenure and promotion committees, I am told. In “The Book as the Gold Standard for Tenure and Promotion in the Humanistic Disciplines,” Estabrook notes that only in history departments do a majority of…
Use it or Lose It: The MLA Bibliography Database (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) In “Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing,” Cathy N. Davidson makes the case for preserving traditional university presses. If scholarly publication was financially lucrative, she points out, then there wouldn’t be university presses to subsidize the cost of producing monographs. She sees the…
From the Call for Papers: [W]orkshops and presentations that address the following themes and issues: Strategies for teaching information literacy to students and/or faculty across the curriculum Empirical studies on the effect of information literacy initiatives on student retention and/or learning Learning communities and information literacy Creating teaching partnerships between reference librarians and instructors What…
“As soon as he was shot, he started talking his head off,” Holder said. “He began to have a conversation with the robot, telling it, ‘Hey little buddy,’ and then began talking to us through the robot.” —Holed-up suspect talks to robot for five hours, then gives up (Kentucky.com) Those Kentucky robots sure are amazing.
The floodwaters carried silt, debris, sewage, and diesel fuel. Every pinball machine was submerged at least up to the backglass, and every surface within five feet of the ground, including playfields and inside cabinets, has been coated in the floodwater sludge. The sludge is a sanitary hazard and will have already destroyed sensitive materials… Two…
My Alternate Life (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My colleague Lee McClain recently published My Alternate Life, a young adult book that features an amazing computer game that lets adopted children live the life they lost when their birth mothers gave them up for adoption. If you pass by my office door this time of year, you might…
“What,” I asked, “are we to make of Plato’s attempts to define justice?” A chill descended. Noses burrowed into The Republic. One student hesitantly volunteered a comment; another offered a passing observation. Something resembling a discussion followed, but most of the remarks betrayed the superficiality of the students’ engagement. They were eager to discuss their…
Examples of systemic bias: Because so many Wikipedians do their research on line, topics not already well covered on the Internet tend to be under-covered in Wikipedia. Because so many English-language Wikipedians live in a very small number of countries, topics pertaining strongly to those countries are disproportionately covered. Because so many Wikipedians are interested…
Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far…
SpaceShipOne needed to reach 100 kilometers, or about 62.5 miles, twice within a two-week window to take the X Prize. The other principal requirement was to carry a pilot and either two passengers or their weight equivalent in ballast. —Dan Brekke —SpaceShipOne Wins the X Prize (Wired)
High-school student Jillian Clarke investigated the scientific validity of the “5-second rule” during her apprenticeship in Hans Blaschek’s University of Illinois lab this summer. You know the rule: If food falls to the floor and it’s in contact with the floor for fewer than 5 seconds, it’s safe to pick it up and eat it.…