April 2003

Campaign Starts to Help Iraq Rebuild Cultural Institutions

Here’s A NYTimes Article on announce a campaign to rebuild as much as possible the plundered cultural institutions of Iraq.

Experts from the Louvre in Paris, New York City’s Metropolitan Museum of Art, Berlin’s State Museum and Russia’s Hermitage unveiled a plan to inventory within six months the losses in a wave of looting at the National Museum in Baghdad, the National Library and other museums and sites. They also pledged to provide assistance to their beleaguered Iraqi colleagues in restoring damaged antiquities. The meeting included archaeologists from leading Western universities and officials of Unesco and the British government.

Simple Science Fairs Go the Way of the Dinosaurs

Jen Young noticed a NYTimes Article on the crazy competition in science fairs.

The simple fair of times past, when parents wielding encyclopedias turned the kitchen sink into a makeshift laboratory to help their children, has become a research extravaganza in which students armed with computers, electron microscopes and other powerful instruments explore ever more ambitious terrain.

U.S.: Most Spam Contains False Claims

The Federal Trade Commission said Tuesday that spam e-mails involving investment and business opportunities are especially dubious, with an estimated 96 percent containing information that probably is false or misleading. The FTC studied a random sample of 1,000 unsolicited e-mails taken from a pool of more than 11 million pieces of spam it has collected. The agency looked for deceptive claims in a message’s text or the “from” or “subject” lines.


Full Story

Florence Fights To Save Precious Books

Gary D. Price, MLIS, and ResourceShelf Guy spotted Florence Fights To Save Precious Books.

They look at a small group of restorers working through a mountain of 35,500 precious books dating back to the 17th century, wrecked by a flood way back in 1966.

The National Library and the Uffizi Gallery – treasure houses of priceless works of art, including Botticelli’s “La Primavera” – were hit hardest by the flood as they sit on the banks of the river.

Young Minds Force-Fed With Indigestible Texts

Jen Young points us to This NYTimes Article on Diane Ravitch’s fiercely argued new book, “The Language Police,” that points out just some of the things students aren’t supposed to find in their textbooks or tests.

They say the commissars of political correctness on the left and the fundamentalist sentries of morality on the right have clamped down on the education system, more and more subjects, words and ideas have become taboo.