Businesspundit Says, The creation of the Web has also been a double edged sword. It provides vast opportunity to acquire knowledge, connect with friends, and do all kinds of good and noble things, but it also provides easier access to all the bad things that previous social constraints may have kept us from perusing. Mix that with anonymity and you get a bad result.
December 2007
Polymer Vision announces rollable displays are in production
Engadget has been looking at wacky prototypes of rollable displays for so long that it’s hard to believe they could ever get real. Polymer Vision, a Philips spin out, has just announced that it has its production facilities up and running and its first rollable displays have made it off the assembly line. And they’re not leaving it at that. Polymer Vision’s first product, the 3G-enabled Readius, is supposed to be available before the end of the year.
What most people don’t understand about the long tail
However digital networks, epitomized by the Internet, are scale-free, because there is no limit to the number of connections that nodes (webpages) can have. Media has become effectively a scale-free network, not so much because the top end is unbounded, as because production and distribution costs have become negligible and now many nodes (media producers) have very few connections (audience).
Anonymity and the Netflix Dataset
Very intersting post by Bruce Schneier on anonymous data.
Like everything else in security, anonymity systems shouldn’t be fielded before being subjected to adversarial attacks. We all know that it’s folly to implement a cryptographic system before it’s rigorously attacked; why should we expect anonymity systems to be any different? And, like everything else in security, anonymity is a trade-off. There are benefits, and there are corresponding risks.
Top 10 British out of print books of 2007
Bookfinder Has Posted the first results from BookFinder.com’s analysis of British out-of-print book demand trends.
According to their research, here are the top 4 most sought-after out-of-print books in the UK in 2007:
The Forests of England (1976) by Peter J. Neville Havins
Walker’s Pitch: A Selection of Articles from the Angling Times (1959) by Richard Walker
The Widow Makers (2005) by Jean Mead
Sex (1992) by Madonna
A 2.0 story that doesn’t really involve libraries but does involve saving $12 and a car trip
I like This Quote By Jessamyn West:
Working on the web isn’t just about collecting real and/or imaginary friends and new interactive ways of sharing photos of your cat, it’s also about saving real time and real money so that you can do real things in your offline world.
MA children’s librarian fired; community asks why
Odd Story out of MA where The termination of Connie Marr as Children’s Librarian at the Osterville Free Library has library patrons asking why.According to a timeline provided by Marr’s supporters, the termination came Nov. 13 after she was asked to resign her position by members of the board of trustees.
Most sought-after out-of-print books in America
Bookfinder.com has just released their 2007 report of the most sought-after out-of-print books in America.
Two of the books are The Principles of Knitting and Madonna’s Sex. These are not two books you would expect in the same top ten list.
Indiana Library director needs to hit books
By the end of next year, the state will require the director of the Gary Public Library to earn a degree in library sciences, otherwise the system could lose certification.
Jim Corridan, associate director of the Indiana State Library, said the board that oversees all libraries in the state granted a waiver to the Gary library system last week.
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