MOBIUS Libraries

Scholr.ly looks like a very interesting tool. They describe it as "Making Academic Search Social". Here is a description of the search engine: "Undergraduate physicists and comparative literature postdocs have very different search needs. We're building an academic search engine that takes these individual differences into account. The more we know about what you do, the better we can tailor our results to fit your needs. Sometimes, though, it's good to look at a problem from another perspective. Maybe you're doing research in an area you aren't familiar with and want an insider's view. Maybe you're doing interdisciplinary work, or want to better understand your colleague's work. To address these cases, Scholr.ly offers you the opportunity to search as another author- literally. You can search as your professor, a famous linguist, or the highly cited scholar in the department next door- and get the same results they would." It's a very interesting idea...

Ok...so we do a lot of these things in most meetings, but I really appreciate #4, #7, an #8.

Google has a new site called Google Search Education with different lesson plans for picking the right search terms, understanding search results, narrowing a search, and evaluating credibility of sources.

The chart in this article shows an interesting anomaly. Initially it appears that print ads only take up a small amount of a user's attention, yet the money spent on those ads is considerably more than all other media. However, another chart shows the revenue per user for newspapers is almost 10 times that of Google and 50-100 times that of several websites, so there's a convincing argument that advertisers still see print as a viable medium.

This is an interesting article about a course called "Lying About the Past" run by T. Mills Kelly at George Mason University. He encourages his students to make fictitious stories up to show how readily people will accept things as the truth, such as a lost pirate or a lost recipe for a historic beer. This angers some people but shows how quickly wrong information can spread and be accepted. In particular the article notes the one website that caught the false stories was Reddit, where a centralized exchange of information is encouraged and once doubts were voiced the material was verified by several people, as opposed to Wikipedia where the material is controlled by a minority of editors and most users are passive readers.

The Transparency Report is a report Google has recently made available that shows requests to remove copyrighted material from Google's search results but also requests from governments to remove information and inquiries from governments about Google's users. Unsurprisingly the U.S., is first in user data requests, but oddly followed by India and France.

Librarians may find this paragraph interesting: The new divide is such a cause of concern for the Federal Communications Commission that it is considering a proposal to spend $200 million to create a digital literacy corps. This group of hundreds, even thousands, of trainers would fan out to schools and libraries to teach productive uses of computers for parents, students and job seekers.

Interesting news from Overdrive.

Interesting-- this is a very simple sharing site with a Yahoo! Answers/ message board (at least that's what old people who came of age in the 90s like me call it) sort of feel, but I like it. It's straightforward and easy to navigate.

Review of Google's new Knowledge Graph search.

I think this is a cool and worthwhile improvement, but where the article makes a comparison to Wolfram Alpha I have to disagree. Google's knowledge engine is exactly the type of thing you get to do with the semantic web - and it's awesome - but it's not a *computational* knowledge engine like WA. If you google "The moon" you get some useful information about it including it's distance. But the distance there is just some number pulled from some resource. WA /calculates/ the distance to the moon at the exact moment of your search. Not to say WA is better - it's just different. WA has an entry for Leonardo da Vinci, and has a lot of the same facts as Google does - but it doesn't really have much of a capacity to show you anything related to him. Anyway, cool new feature that I'd noticed and used already but hadn't actually heard mention of. One of those things that Google just kinda slipped in that works.

What's really cool about this thing is the level of analysis that it does of the password. Most "password strength meters" are just looking at length and inclusion of things like lowercase/uppercase special characters. This thing does so much more and rather than just saying "weak", "very strong" it tells you how long it'd take to crack it. Even cooler is that you can choose 'Show Options' and change the hardware of the imaginary attacker and the type of encryption your password is stored as. This is via: http://nakedsecurity.sophos.com/2012/05/25/how-long-would-it-take-to-crack-your-password/ Worth reading as it also calls into question the idea of regularly changing your passwords. Obviously it's much better to just use separate passwords for everything and only change them if you have a reason to think your password was compromised.

Way to go Yahoo! At a time when most people have already forgotten your company still exists... release a security problem. Any press is good press, right?

Suck it Oracle.

WE LIVE IN THE FUTURE!

A really interesting way to define librarianship. He says that librarians provide expertise in making accessible, navigating and making sense of the social transcript. Do you agree?

A federal judge released a 350 page ruling that largely vindicated Georgia State University's use of materials in an Electronic Reserves system called ERES. at issue was how full chapters of books were made available among other material. In 74 cases of alleged infringement only 5 were proven valid as GSU did not place any limit on the amount copied or provided guidance to professors. Provided the ruling stands and is not appealed this could be a landmark decision in fair use. I found it interesting the suit was financially backed by not only the Association of American Publisher but also the Copyright Clearance Center, which provides authorization to use copyrighted materials in electronic reserves, among other things.

The link for the prototype of the SNAC database.

The Social Networks and Archival Context Project (SNAC) is a project that aims to bring together online resources and archival materials on historical person, to basically allow a researcher to know where all the records are to understand a person. What I found in the prototype is that it resembled a catalog of sophisticated authority records. This could be useful for someone needing quick information or seeing how a historical figure fits in context, but I question if in the end it doesn't repeat information found almost as readily in other resources such as Wikipedia.

One of the largest publishers files for bankruptcy, although the reason may be because of long term debt from a previous merger. The bankruptcy is intended to eliminate $3 billion in debt, although the company has struggled with debt since Houghton Mifflin was bought in 2006 and Harcourt in 2007 by Irish investor Barry O'Callaghan. While the banktruptcy is not due to the changes brought about by electronic publishing, the company's corporate credit was cut by Moody's to Ca, the second lowest rating, and can affect the company's attempts to innovate and produce.

Basically, with git, every merge is a conflict, which leaves you with an index that contains three versions of each file, the versions from each branch and the base. On this index, various resolvers are run, which can decide for each individual file how to resolve the matter.