LISNews: Librarian News

The book Making Jack Falcone: An Undercover FBI Agent Takes Down a Mafia Family (Touchstone Books) is being released October 13.

60 Minutes did a piece
on the book.

Gov. Sarah Palin abused the powers of her office by pressuring subordinates to try to get her former brother-in-law, a state trooper, fired, an investigation by the Alaska Legislature has concluded. The inquiry found, however, that she was within her right to dismiss her public safety commissioner, Walt Monegan, who was the trooper’s boss.

Full article in the NYT.

Debt could ultimately unseat the United States as the world’s superpower.

Article here.

One group of researchers thinks headline-grabbing scientific reports are the most likely to turn out to be wrong

See: http://nonstopbooks.blogspot.com/2008/10/publish-and-be-wrong.html

The Snowball: Warren Buffett and the Business of Life

Book review in the Washington Post:

The Oracle of Omaha (Full Book Review)

Excerpt: "Manual labor is for the birds," Warren Buffett decided somewhere around the 8th grade. At this precocious age the Nebraska native had also already discovered his extraordinary facility with facts and figures, the very attribute that would transform a socially awkward misfit into "the Oracle of Omaha," the most successful investor of modern times, the world's richest man and most generous philanthropist. This quintessentially American tale about the ultimate self-made man -- and in some ways the least changed -- unfolds for the first time with Buffett's full cooperation in Alice Schroeder's gargantuan authorized biography, The Snowball. -- Read More

Palin is in Omaha giving a speech as I write this. I did not attend the speech but I did go over to see the circus outside the civic center. There were several thousand people in line to see the speech. Across the street there were around a dozen Obama supporters with signs. I thought they would have a more robust showing but in the big picture there was not much point to being there at all. Anybody in line at a Palin event is unlikely to be swayed by someone across the street with a sign. One sign read "Welcome to Obamaha". Another read "I wear lipstick but I will never vote for you". I was hoping someone was going to have a "Golly gee I am not voting for you" or "Gosh darn I a voting for Obama" sign.

Here are some of the pictures:
People in line
Obama supporters
Obama supporter close-up
Other side of building. The line went around the building.

I was hoping that McCain would pick Ms. South Carolina as his running mate.

On "Weekend America", a public radio program, there was a story called, "Everyday Sidewalk Poetry" that is about a city run project to put poetry in sidewalks when new concrete is poured.

You can listen to the story here.

Near the end of the piece there was a mention about a kid that liked the poetry is his neighborhood.

Excerpt:

Daijon thinks the sidewalk poems bring a lot to his neighborhood. He likes how some of them share wisdom or lay out a path to follow. He even protected one as it was drying. "When it was wet cement my friend almost stepped on this, and I said 'Don't step on that 'cause that is beautiful work that people worked on a lot,'" he explains.

This made me smile. The world has plenty of hope in it when there are kids like Daijon.

On the radio program "The Story" there was an interview with Max Hardberger.

Pirates are demanding $20 million ransom for a ship they've seized off the coast of Somalia. They say they're prepared to fight to the death. Max Hardberger has direct experience of high seas piracy. His job is to take back ships that have been pirated, many of them worth millions of dollars, and return them to their rightful owners.

Max has worked all over the Caribbean and Latin America - sometimes employing voodoo priests to help him, and at other times using blow torches by moonlight to cut anchor chains. As he tells Dick Gordon, Max enjoys out-pirating the pirates - even when it means occasionally stepping over the legal line himself.

Here is the MP3 that contains the entire interview. (Best thing to do is to right click on link and select "save link as")

One of Max's books: Freighter Captain

From Max's website:

June 2, 2008 — The Broadway Books Imprint of Random House Acquires Max Hardberger's Memoirs

With the working title of "The Good Pirate", Max Hardberger's latest book will take readers on a journey through the hellhole ports of the world -- Read More

Blog entry at the NYT:

Snip! Nearly One-Fifth of Homes Have No Landline

By the end of the year one in five American households may well not have a home phone line. That’s the conclusion of a new report by Nielsen, which says that already 17 percent of homes rely entirely on cellphones.

This trend has of course been brewing for a while, but the tough economy is pushing more people to snip the cord.

Indeed, the effect of the growing number of people without home phones is starting to ripple through various corners of society. Of course, the phone companies need to confront a declining base of income to support their century old web of copper wires. And the trend is causing trouble for political pollsters, aluminum-siding salesmen and the other banes of the dinner hour.

Full blog entry here.

I have a patron that gave me a description of a publication but does not know the name. Wanted to run this by you guys and see if anyone had any ideas.

Patron said that he has seen in the past a publication that gathers together editorials from around the world on current event. So for this week it would have a page about the Olympics and then display a list of quotes from editorials around the world about the Olympics. There would then probably also be a page about the war in Georgia and pages on other major events of the week.

Anyone familiar with this resource?

If I can't find the reseource I can use some full-text news databases that I have access to to basically create that type of publication on the fly but if I can find out what publication he was referring to I would like to know.

Thanks.

Foreign Affairs Professional Reading List

In June, the Under Secretary of State for Political Affairs, in conjunction with the president of the American Foreign Service Association, announced the creation of a “Foreign Affairs Professional Reading List,” and there’s not a Grisham novel anywhere in sight.

See here.

I was with a friend and he is using his laptop. He then pulls out this little box that is half to a fourth the size of a paperback book and he hooks it to his computer with a USB cable. I ask him what it is. He says that it is a 250gb hard drive. In addition to the small size the cool feature was that it did not need to be plugged into anything but the USB drive for power. I also have a 250gb external hard drive but it is the size of a hardback book and requires a power adapter as well as a USB connection. The drive my friend had was almost small enough to slip into a pocket. After I saw the drive he had I was thinking why carry around a 2,4, or 8gb thumb drive when you can have 250gb at your disposal.

Here is a picture of the drive beside some car keys to show scale.

250gb version
320gb version
160gb version

The book "Before the Storm" that is a 2001 book on Barry Goldwater and the rise of the conservative movement is commanding prices around $130 on Amazon.com. Read additional details here.

Captain Kirk wishes he had decided to become a librarian in the TAS episode "Bem". Spock, as always, responds by speaking the truth.

See:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2Cv2INuu9eo&feature=related

New technology has made it possible, using tiny cameras, to gather details about people looking at billboard ads, such as their age or gender.

Article here.

Some cable systems are starting to complain that too many of the programs they pay for are being given away on the Web for free.

Story in the NYT:
http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2008/05/29/the-real-fight-over-fake-news/index.html?ref=techno...

NPR has a series called "This I Believe". Hear Kenneth Feinberg discuss what he believes.

Article in Wired.com:

Ditching your gas guzzler is a great way to reduce your carbon footprint, but if you really want to do something about global warming, get a used car. You'll be putting less carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.

As Matt Power notes in this month's issue of Wired, hybrids get great gas mileage but it takes 113 million BTUs of energy to make a Toyota Prius. Because there are about 113,000 BTUs of energy in a gallon of gasoline, the Prius has consumed the equivalent of 1,000 gallons of gasoline before it reaches the showroom. Think of it as a carbon debt -- one you won't pay off until the Prius has turned over 46,000 miles or so.

There's an easy way to avoid that debt -- buy a used car. The debt has already been paid. But not just any used car will do.

http://blog.wired.com/cars/2008/05/the-ultimate-pr.html

“…A slightly larger iPod Touch linked to eBooks distributed via the iTunes store would match and raise the game with Amazon. At that point, Amazon would be competing with the iTunes distribution channel, but with Amazon hardware that looks and feels like it was designed in Soviet-era Russia.”

More at Teleread:
http://www.teleread.org/blog/2008/05/18/how-apple-could-respond-to-the-kindle/

It has been a rough few weeks for “The NewsHour with Jim Lehrer” on PBS.

Jim Lehrer said he expects to return to his nightly newscast toward the end of June after aortic valve replacement surgery.

In late April, Mr. Lehrer, who turns 74 on Monday, had aortic valve replacement surgery. He said he was recovering nicely and expects to be back on the air toward the end of June. But the nightly newscast’s funding situation could take longer to heal.

In its 25 years on the air, “NewsHour” has had fallow budget periods, but none that equal the current one, Mr. Lehrer acknowledged. The financial squeeze was precipitated last summer when Archer Daniels Midland ended its 14-year sponsorship of the program. That sponsorship provided nearly $4 million (and some years as much as $7 million) of the program’s yearly budget, which varies from $26 million to $28 million.

Full story here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2008/05/19/business/media/19newshour.html?em&ex=1211342400&en=f866e73...