That’s a perfect metaphor for presidential libraries, which memorialize our leaders — and their often-monumental egos — in brick, concrete and stone. Like the ancients, presidents start planning these shrines before their rule comes to an end. So early this year, President Barack Obama will decree whether his own library will be in Chicago, New York or Hawaii.
From Presidential libraries are a costly scam | Tampa Bay Times
This never-ever-before-seen picture book by Dr. Seuss about making up one’s mind is the literary equivalent of buried treasure! What happens when a brother and sister visit a pet store to pick a pet? Naturally, they can’t choose just one! The tale captures a classic childhood moment—choosing a pet—and uses it to illuminate a life lesson: that it is hard to make up your mind, but sometimes you just have to do it!
From The New York Times Arts Blog:
LONDON — At a moment when libraries and archives in the Middle East face threats of damage and destruction from war and ideology, the British Library has announced that it has now made four million images from its Endangered Archives program available online.
The initiative, established in 2004 and supported by the Arcadia Fund, has so far financed 246 projects in 78 countries, attempting to preserve manuscripts, records, newspapers, photographs, sound archives and even rock inscriptions that are at risk of loss or deterioration.
“What’s at stake is what beliefs and biases will shape the way history is told,” Holland Cotter wrote in The New York Times in a 2012 article about the Great Mosque in Djenné, Mali, and the Endangered Archives program’s attempt to preserve and digitize the thousands of Arabic manuscripts housed in the mosque and in the city.
New YouGov research reveals that the most desired jobs in Britain are not what you might expect; they are not even the most reliably well paid ones. Instead of actors and musicians, it seems that an aura of prestige still surrounds the quiet, intellectual life enjoyed by authors, librarians and academics.
From YouGov | Bookish Britain: literary jobs are the most desirable
In Is Google making the web stupid?, Seth Godin suggests that the declining prominence of organic results in Google searches is significantly to blame:
If you want traffic, Google’s arc makes clear to publishers, you’re going to have to pay for it.
Which is their right, of course, but that means that the ad tactics on every other site have to get ever more aggressive, because search traffic is harder to earn with good content. And even more germane to my headline, it means that content publishers are moving toward social and viral traffic, because they can no longer count on search to work for them. It’s this addiction to social that makes the web dumber. If you want tonnage, lower your standards.
(Don’t miss the cited Aaron Wall article as well.)
This new wiki is composed of a server and a client written in CoffeeScript. The server is a minimal persistence engine that’s designed for scenarios ranging from laboratory control systems to academic server farms. The pages it stores contain only JSON, rendered by the client, which does most of the work. Two JSON objects comprise a page: the story (a set of items) and the journal (which remembers how items were added, edited, moved, or deleted). You add items to the page by means of plug-ins that inject paragraphs of plain text, HTML, or markdown, as well as images, video, equations, raw data, charts, and computations.
From Wiki creator reinvents collaboration, again | InfoWorld
It’s their very detachment, what you might call the cold-bloodedness of science, that makes science the killer app. It’s the way science tells us the truth rather than what we’d like the truth to be. Scientists can be as dogmatic as anyone else — but their dogma is always wilting in the hot glare of new research. In science it’s not a sin to change your mind when the evidence demands it. For some people, the tribe is more important than the truth; for the best scientists, the truth is more important than the tribe.
From Why science is so hard to believe – The Washington Post
Google Research, Google’s portal to the academic world, is making major investments right now, building up an innovation and research program dedicated to the nascent collection of products and technologies collectively known as the Internet of Things (IoT). It’s created a research grant program called Open Web of Things to attract talent to the company, as well as to fund and give technical support to promising research groups in academia. The application process is now closed, and Google will choose the recipients by this spring.
Data breaches increased 49% with almost 1 billion data records compromised in 1,500 attacks in 2014 – a 78% increase in the number of data records either lost or stolen in 2013, a new report by digital security firm Gemalto said. The Netherlands-based firm said about 575 million records were compromised in 2013.
Identity theft was by far the largest type of attack, with 54% of the breaches involving the theft of personal data, up from 23% in 2013.
http://blogs.wsj.com/digits/2015/02/12/1-billion-data-records-stolen-in-2014-says-gemalto/
I went on to teach Shakespeare’s Othello, Emerson’s Self-Reliance, and other classics with the same fervor. Although James didn’t always seem engaged, many of my students were. So when you are determining what to teach this Black History Month, by all means, teach Baldwin and Wright and Ellison and Hurston and Walker and Hughes and Morrison and Brooks and Angelou—but don’t do so in isolation. Teach Lincoln on his birthday this February, and read from Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama this President’s Day. Black history, after all, is American and world history.
I went on to teach Shakespeare’s Othello, Emerson’s Self-Reliance, and other classics with the same fervor. Although James didn’t always seem engaged, many of my students were. So when you are determining what to teach this Black History Month, by all means, teach Baldwin and Wright and Ellison and Hurston and Walker and Hughes and Morrison and Brooks and Angelou—but don’t do so in isolation. Teach Lincoln on his birthday this February, and read from Lyndon B. Johnson, John F. Kennedy, and Barack Obama this President’s Day. Black history, after all, is American and world history. Teach it in the context of the human condition all year round.
From Why to Teach Dead White Authors, Even During Black History Month – The Atlantic
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