Pew has released a new report detailing the behaviors and references of internet search users. One thing that surprised me and others:
Nearly half of searchers use a search engines no more than a few times a week, and two-thirds say they could walk away from search engines without upsetting their lives very much.
Other interesting […]
Yesterday’s Astronomy Picture of the Day was a page from the Voynich Manuscript, a mysterious manuscript currently held in Yale’s Bienecke Rare Book & Manuscript Library. As Wikipedia’s extensive entry explains,
The Voynich manuscript is a mysterious illustrated book of unknown contents, written some 500 years ago by an anonymous author in an unidentified alphabet […]
This interesting OS X application indexes and allows you to search bookmarks, browser caches and histories. I haven’t tried it out yet, but the idea is very similar to a project I worked on this past fall at the request of a librarian emerita.
This is totally old, but it’s pretty interesting if you haven’t seen it. It’s basically a summary of a talk given by Marissa Mayer, Product Manager for Google, and details some interesting facts about Google. Among other things:
1. The prime reason the Google home page is so bare is due to the fact […]
Via BB, Cory Doctorow has an interesting response to a recent announcement by Sony, Philips, Matsushita and Samsung that they are developing a common DRM system. He makes a concise argument explaining how DRM systems punish normal consumers rather than actual pirates.
Not one of these systems has ever prevented piracy or illegal copying. […]
Perhaps more for the programmers…
wordlist.sourceforge.net
Interesting discussion at slashdot.
Ren Bucholz thinks we might see a year where file sharing becomes mature and profitable, as he outlines in this San Francisco Bay Guardian editorial.
From Boing Boing
Next time you have a book that you want others to read but aren’t sure what to do with it, you might try BookCrossing. Register a book, release it into the wild and track its travels.
According to Orin Kerr at the Volokh Conspiracy, the FBI’s retired Carnivore electronic surveillance tool was actually a privacy-protective alternative to less precise commercially available options. It was dubbed “Carnivore” because it only got the meat sought by the court order and not the extra, irrelevant data. Once commercial options caught up, about […]
Three University of Wisconsin-Madison professors are saying that they believe video games may be better at teaching than textbooks.
I can’t say I argue with them at all. Certainly those of us that grew up along with video game technology recognize that video games are far more detailed and useful than the Pong stereotype and […]
Stanford has put up an FAQ page on the the library project.
From Mad Librarian
The Feb ‘04 Scientific American has an article, Seeking Better Web Searches, on the many forms that web search is taking. It’s a pretty interesting overview on some of the options and experiments, including efforts to search 3D models and audio. The article itself is only available online at the restricted Scientific American […]
California legislator Kevin Murray has introduced a bill that would essentially ban the internet.
As EFF explains:
The bill, introduced in the Senate last week, would make a criminal of anyone who sells or distributes software that allows users to transmit files over a network, if the seller/distributor fails to exercise “reasonable care in preventing use of […]
Like Battelle, I have mixed feelings on Google providing a tag to block links in comments or forums. In the article, it says Typepad will automatically have the tags in place. Does this mean no option for them? It will certainly help with comment spam, but at a price. Since comments […]
See anything similar between these two?
Wikipedia swatika entry
BBC swastika article
The BBC article is just a condensed version of the Wikipedia entry. Some lines are copied verbatim, like “The British author Rudyard Kipling, who was strongly influenced by Indian culture, had a swastika on the dust jackets of all his books until the rise of […]
From the Washington Post:
An ambitious proposal to make the results of federally funded medical research available to the public quickly and for free has been scaled back by the National Institutes of Health under pressure from scientific publishers, who argued that the plan would eat into their profits and harm the scientific enterprise they support.
The […]
The Electonic Frontier Foundation has filed a FOIA request (PDF) for documents revealing whether the FBI has been tracking web browsing without warrants. Full story from EFF. LibraryLaw Blog links to a good article on how USA PATRIOT electronic survelliance affects libraries. (PDF)
From Scholars’ Panel Explores Digital Scholarship Needs by David Seaman in CLIR:
A basic problem for scholars who use digital resources is the lack of persistent identifiers—permanent and trusted Internet addresses—for online objects … Another barrier to digital scholarship is the failure of faculty promotion and rewards structures to accommodate the shift from a print-based to […]
Radical Reference (radicalreference.info):
Mission Statement: Radical Reference is a collective of volunteer library workers who believe in social justice and equality. We support activist communities, progressive organizations, and independent journalists by providing professional research support, education and access to information. We work in a collaborative virtual setting and are dedicated to information activism to foster a […]