November 2011
2 posts
Richard Smith: A woeful tale of the uselessness of... →
Richard Smith argues for doing away with pre-publication peer review. He makes some sound observations, but needs data to make his case. Perhaps his paper would have been published more quickly if he had sent it to a more topical journal instead of more general journals like the BMJ and PLoS One.
Ultimately, I think we need to do away with journals entirely. Let’s just have databases.
September 2011
1 post
August 2011
1 post
Kuhn's Structure of Scientific Revolutions
Since it’s initial publication in 1962, Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions has been cited 48,341 times. That’s about once every 9 hrs for 49 yrs.
June 2011
4 posts
advisor vs adviser
When I was a child and my family went out to eat, a common game was to race to find the first typo in the menu. In high school, when a student made a grammatical mistake in an announcement at assembly (e.g., using ‘i.e.’ when he or she should have used ‘e.g.’, or, more commonly, using ‘myself’ instead of ‘me’), the meeting would stop and the...
3 tags
sushi haiku
Dear Delicious Day-Old Sushi,
Please do not kill me.
Thanks.
Love,
Alex
8 tags
What percent of the population holds a PhD?
Simple question, tricky answer.
According to the US census, 1,754,331 citizens ages 25 and up have doctorates.
This Answer.com Answer states that roughly 1% of Americans ages 25 and up have research doctorates and that, if we were to include “people with professional degrees who are normally referred to with Dr title like physicians, dentists, etc (MD, DDS, etc)”, the number would...
10 tags
Cell phones and cancer →
In case you want to read the original report (instead of reports on the report by people who may have not read the original themselves), here is a PDF of the World Health Organization’s International Agency for Research on Cancer’s report on how radiofrequency electromagnetic fields may be carcinogenic.
May 2011
3 posts
Are biology PhDs the unhappiest? →
yosoybibliotecario asked: Congrats on getting into your first choice PhD program! Ok, so most of your readers are probably American, but as a Canadian I have to say. That is very very very very GREAT!
It's the BEST SCHOOL IN CANADA!
You are far more modest that I am...I would have included the Maclean's Ranking.
:)
It's the BEST SCHOOL IN CANADA!
You are far more modest that I am...I would have included the Maclean's Ranking.
:)
Portal included in college required reading list →
April 2011
1 post
8bitlibrary →
@justinlibrarian of the 8bitlibrary was super awesome and updated his video game collection development post from last year with great new advice and reflections. Thanks, Justin!
March 2011
1 post
update
Since I last updated this blog, I graduated from library school with my Masters of Science and got accepted to my first choice PhD program. I’ve just started a 3-month substitute librarian position at a public library in central Massachusetts, and I’ll be moving to Canada to start my doctorate shortly after that.
October 2010
3 posts
nature middle east
Nature, the premier scientific journal, has announced the creation of Nature Middle East, a new journal from Nature Publishing Group, designed to publish “emerging science in the Arab world.”
subtle error in wikipedia
Here’s a good example of a subtle error in Wikipedia. Nature is listed as publishing interdisciplinary work. That may occasionally be true, but what the author meant to say was that Nature publishes work on many scientific disciplines. Wikipedia entries for Science and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences get it right.
June 2010
8 posts
Your Life Work - Librarian →
This is an incredible video. So amazingly outdated in some aspects. So still relevant in some others. Will post more extensively later.
return of the BLS
Recently, I wrote a post about whether or not librarians needed masters degrees. I concluded that although some form of training was necessary, a masters degree was not.
I would like to add on to that conclusion by suggesting a return to the accredited undergraduate library science degree. I majored in philosophy; I was required to take 10 courses of varying levels, 3 of which were specifically...
library school age
Because of a new student who just graduated from college, I am no longer the youngest student in my program! I’m not sure if I ever officially had the title, but my management class is the first class I’ve taken where I’m not the youngest.
open in new window or open in same window?
Careful readers (of which I’m pretty sure there is only one, me) may have noticed that I have started setting my links to open in the same window instead of opening in a new window, like I used to. I’ve done this because I was trying to open a link from my phone’s browser and couldn’t, because it was set to open in a new window and my phone can only have one window open at...
library and information center management
Tomorrow, I will be starting a course on library and information center management. It is one of five courses my library school requires all MS students to take. The other four are information organization, technology for information professionals, evaluation of information services, and reference. When I signed up for management, I did not have high hopes for enjoying it. I imagined lectures...
May 2010
1 post
do librarians need masters degrees?
I went to a party last week where a former classmate asked me how library school was going. After I gave a somewhat noncommittal reply, he, a former student worker in Yale’s libraries, asked about my opinion on the question of whether those masters degrees are necessary (it was a wild party, lemmy tell ya).I didn’t give a very good answer at the time and, although I’m positive he...
April 2010
5 posts
bird cops
This is amazing and terrifying. Stanford has developed a way for small predator-like drones to land on the side of buildings and then take off again. And now the government is funding three teams to make little drones even more birdlike, for use in manhunts and other military operations.
At some point, we entered the future. Did anyone notice when?
I’m really excited to see them in a...
Library of Pristina University, Kosovo →
Brutalist architecture and covered with something like chain mail. The reasons behind these choices are likely tied to the wars, but I haven’t looked into that yet.
learn how to use twitter
Okay, so I would put this on Twitter, but people who follow me are the criminals in this story. Two things: (1) Only abbreviate when you have to! If your whole post is 50 characters long, go ahead and write “you are”. (2) Abbreviate intelligently! “Convinc’d” is a crazy way to abbreviate “convinced.” Why? Because ‘, while not a LETTER, is...
advantages to dating librarians, by Randall Monroe →
WatchThere was a nuclear disarmament walk in Northampton, Massachusetts today.