September 2016

To honor the centenary of his birth this month, the Oxford English Dictionary has updated its latest edition today (Sept. 12) with six new words connected to Dahl’s writing, and revisions to six other phrases popularized by Dahl’s evocative stories. In May, the Oxford University Press also published a Roald Dahl Dictionary complete with 8,000 words coined or popularized by the author.

From Six of Roald Dahl’s made-up words have been added to the Oxford English Dictionary to celebrate his centenary — Quartz

On Monday morning, a Dallas City Council committee signed off on a proposal that would limit the size and location of community book exchanges that have taken root in some two dozen Dallas residents’ front yards.  As far as city officials can tell, if the full council gives its blessing, Dallas will become one of the only cities in the country to specifically regulate the take-a-book, leave-a-book boxes, which, in the past, have been subject to building laws and zoning codes.

From Dallas on path to becoming one of the few U.S. cities to regulate Little Free Libraries | Dallas Morning News

Yet, I suspect these kinds of situations are relatively rare. Having been involved in enough papers, and, yes, being party to papers where I didn’t catch something in the review or editorial process, I have the ultimate answer:

Reviewers, editors, and authors are human.

What I mean by this is that scientific papers are complex beasts. A single manuscript may weave together disparate groups of organisms, unfamiliar pieces of anatomy, far-flung reaches of the globe, and multiple statistical techniques. A typical paper is usually seen by a single editor and two to four reviewers. It is extremely unlikely that every facet of the paper will be seen by an appropriate expert on that given facet. How likely is it that every error will be caught and addressed?

From How Did That Make It Through Peer Review? | PLOS Paleo Community

A group of researchers from MIT and Georgia Tech have built a device that can see through paper and distinguish ink from blank paper to determine what is written on the sheets. The prototype successfully identified letters printed on the top nine sheets of a stack of paper, and eventually the researchers hope to develop a system that can read closed books that have actual covers.

“The Metropolitan Museum in New York showed a lot of interest in this, because they want to, for example, look into some antique books that they don’t even want to touch,” said Barmak Heshmat, a research scientist at the MIT Media Lab and author on the new paper, published today in Nature Communications.

From MIT’s New Toy Can Read Closed Books Using Terahertz Radiation

The Paper has a catchy title: Terahertz time-gated spectral imaging for content extraction through layered structures

Thanks to Ender for another great link!

The same qualities that make libraries ideal for studying and reading – unfettered public access, quiet corners and nooks, minimal interaction with other people – also make them appealing places to shoot up heroin, librarians are finding.

From Libraries becoming popular places for drug users to shoot up – CBS News

In a decision that is already controversial, the Court of Justice of the European Union (CJEU) has ruled in favor of copyright owners and against hyperlinks. The CJEU decision, though qualified, raises the strong possibility that publishers linking to infringing third party sites will also be liable for infringement.

From European court says linking to illegal content is copyright infringement

D.C. will hide once-banned books throughout the city this month
The D.C. public library system is hiding several hundred copies of books — which were once banned or challenged — in private businesses throughout all eight wards to celebrate Banned Books Week. The “UNCENSORED banned books” scavenger hunt kicked off Sept. 6 and will run through the month.

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/local/wp/2016/09/08/banned-books-will-be-hidden-all-over-d-c-this-month/

http://www.motherjones.com/media/2016/08/diversity-childrens-books-slavery-twitter

Writers and scholars have bemoaned the whiteness of children’s books for decades, but the topic took on new life in 2014, when the influential black author Walter Dean Myers and his son, the author and illustrator Christopher Myers, wrote companion pieces in the New York Times’ Sunday Review asking, “Where are the people of color in children’s books?” A month later, unwittingly twisting the knife, the industry convention BookCon featured an all-white, all-male panel of “superstar” children’s book authors. Novelist Ellen Oh and like-minded literary types responded with a Twitter campaign—#WeNeedDiverseBooks—that spawned more than 100,000 tweets.

Trends in visiting public libraries have steadied, and many Americans have high expectations for what their local libraries should offer

From Libraries 2016 | Pew Research Center

Trends in visiting public libraries have steadied, and many Americans have high expectations for what their local libraries should offer

From Libraries 2016 | Pew Research Center

The research suggests a radically different view, in which learning of a child’s first language does not rely on an innate grammar module. Instead the new research shows that young children use various types of thinking that may not be specific to language at all—such as the ability to classify the world into categories (people or objects, for instance) and to understand the relations among things. These capabilities, coupled with a unique hu­­­man ability to grasp what others intend to communicate, allow language to happen. The new findings indicate that if researchers truly want to understand how children, and others, learn languages, they need to look outside of Chomsky’s theory for guidance.

From Evidence Rebuts Chomsky’s Theory of Language Learning – Scientific American