March 2012
19 posts
February 2012
26 posts
“The internet’s not broken.
So then why are there so many attempts to regulate...”
– Jeff Jarvis
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The Meta-Story: How Wired Published Its GitHub... →
500 Words before 8am →
Clay Johnson:
Starting your day as a producer means that your information consumption has meaning: the rest of the day means consuming information that is relevant to what it is that you’re producing. Waking up as a producer frames the rest of your habits. You’re not mindlessly grazing on everyone’s facebook’s statuses. You’re out getting what it is you need to...
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Potential Crisis May Be Brewing in Preservation of... →
The Digital Shift:
A recently released study of e-journal preservation at Columbia and Cornell universities revealed that only about 15 percent of e-journals are being preserved and that the responsibility for preservation is diffuse at best.
Even as electronic materials now account for around 60 percent of collection expenditures (and print dwindles in importance), the report, Preservation...
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“The paper describing the double-helix model shape of DNA was not peer reviewed,...”
– The Future of Science Publishing : We Beasties
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E-books Can’t Burn →
Tim Parks:
The e-book, by eliminating all variations in the appearance and weight of the material object we hold in our hand and by discouraging anything but our focus on where we are in the sequence of words (the page once read disappears, the page to come has yet to appear) would seem to bring us closer than the paper book to the essence of the literary experience.
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Three Hidden Ways Wheat Makes You Fat →
Mark Hyman:
Yes, gluten is a real problem. But the problem is not just gluten. In fact, there are three major hidden reasons that wheat products, not just gluten (along with sugar in all its forms) is a major contributor to obesity, diabetes, heart disease, cancer, dementia, depression and so many other modern ills.
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The U.N. Threat to Internet Freedom →
Robert McDowell:
On Feb. 27, a diplomatic process will begin in Geneva that could result in a new treaty giving the United Nations unprecedented powers over the Internet. Dozens of countries, including Russia and China, are pushing hard to reach this goal by year’s end.
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The False Novelty of Making Reading 'Social' →
Alan Jacobs:
So what is it that sites like Findings and Readmill do? I would say that they enable asynchronous interactive digital commentary. That’s a mouthful; it’s a lot easier to say that they “make reading social.” But easier in this case is definitely not better. All these digital possibilities are turning the old and familiar experience of reading on its head,...
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A New Kind of Review for a New Kind of Book →
Carl Zimmer:
Walk into a book store and look at the science section. Most of the books are between about 200 and 400 pages. Most are created by large publishing houses. There’s nothing fundamentally wrong about a 50-page book, of course. It just doesn’t fit comfortably into the publishing business—a business that has to contend with costs for printing books, storing them in...
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Google Privacy policies →
A Gmail user says Google deleted MP3s from his email because of copyright.
Despite Walmart and Starbucks, divided we stand →
Portland Press Herald:
America’s most essential and abiding divisions are not between red states and blue states, conservatives and liberals, capital and labor, blacks and whites, the faithful and the secular. Rather, our divisions stem from this fact: The United States is a federation composed of the whole or part of 11 regional nations, some of which truly do not see eye to eye with...
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Trouble for Elsevier, the Leading Academic... →
On the Media:
Late last month, a Cambridge Mathematician wrote a blog post that launched a massive boycott of the largest publisher of academic journals in the world. The boycott, now more than 6,000 academics strong, has ignited a discussion over the cost of, and access to, information published by academics. Rick Karr reports on rising discontent with the current academic publishing model.
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“Lessen your choices and your actions will quicken as well. You will not have to...”
– Patrick Rhone
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I.B.M.: Big Data, Bigger Patterns - NYTimes.com →
New York Times:
In the last five years, I.B.M. has spent some $14 billion purchasing analytics companies, in the service of its Big Data initiative. “We look for adjacencies” between one business and another, said Mr. Mills. “If we can’t get an adjacency, we’ll never get a return.”
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Curing Diabetes: How Type 2 Became an Accepted... →
The Atlantic:
Reframing type 2 diabetes — and the obesity and sedentary lifestyle that most often triggers it — as potentially deadly but almost entirely preventable is a good beginning. Offering factual information to someone diagnosed with diabetes about how to possibly reverse their disease is every bit as important as writing prescriptions for medications and blood glucose test...
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Big Data’s Impact in the World →
New York Times:
Welcome to the Age of Big Data. The new megarich of Silicon Valley, first at Google and now Facebook, are masters at harnessing the data of the Web — online searches, posts and messages — with Internet advertising. At the World Economic Forum last month in Davos, Switzerland, Big Data was a marquee topic. A report by the forum, “Big Data, Big Impact,” declared data a new class...
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Iran begins blocking access to Gmail, other sites... →
Washington Post:
When Thomas Erdbrink, The Washington Post’s correspondent in Tehran, logs on to the Internet in Iran, he never knows whether Gmail and Google Reader, The Post or Facebook will open for him. Increasingly, this is the error message he sees instead of the page he was trying to reach:
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