Group items tagged

The memes are great! I think we need some MOBIUS memes for next year's conference--so start brainstorming!

An Australian announcement of a study about the cultural impact and relevance of libraries, due in May 2014.

An interesting about scientists deliberately holding back information on a new Botulism toxin, which still raises issues on censorship--other researchers who may have a valid need for this research won't have all of it, and where is the line drawn between dangerous information and only potentially so?

The social worth of libraries and the need for reading and inspiration is examined, in particular I found it interesting how the private prison industry determined it's future cell needs by the percentage of the population that was illiterate.

A cautionary story about something that has come up before, namely relying so strongly in machines that when a human needs to intervene they either don't know what to do or end up making what should be a fixable situation into a disaster. Examples given include airline pilots who respond wrongly to a warning from the airplane, and hunters who had a GPS fail and don't know how to find their way home without it.

What sounds like a cautionary tale about keeping libraries open in a time of slashed budgets and electronic resources becomes a concerning episode of institutional decline of libraries in the Philadelphia school system as some "libraries" have operated for years without staff and functioning as essentially a store room.

A brief article that raises some questions about the utility of training and "reskilling" as many people take classes and courses to demonstrate value to an employer rather than to learn or use the skills from the training. The result is wasted time and training that poorly fits the user or their job.