X-Rated at the Library
The New York Public Library’s erotica collection (yes, it has one) includes seedy Times Square ephemera, early transgender magazines and copies of Playboy.
Blake
w3id.org – Permanent Identifiers for the Web
The purpose of this website is to provide a secure, permanent URL re-direction service for Web applications. This service is run by the W3C Permanent Identifier Community Group.
Web applications that deal with Linked Data often need to specify and use URLs that are very stable. They utilize services such as this one to ensure that applications using their URLs will always be re-directed to a working website. This website operates like a switchboard, connecting requests for information with the true location of the information on the Web. The switchboard can be reconfigured to point to a new location if the old location stops working.
There are a growing group of organizations that have pledged responsibility to ensure the operation of this website. These organizations are: Digital Bazaar, 3 Round Stones, OpenLink Software, Applied Testing and Technology, Openspring, and Bosatsu Consulting. They are responsible for all administrative tasks associated with operating the service. The social contract between these organizations gives each of them full access to all information required to maintain and operate the website. The agreement is setup such that a number of these companies could fail, lose interest, or become unavailable for long periods of time without negatively affecting the operation of the site.
How the books we read shape our lives
On the other hand, the sociological questions that lie behind what might be called the origins of the literary sensibility are a great deal less easy to answer. How do people learn to read? How do they fashion their own individual tastes? How do they establish why they prefer one type of book to another type? Where do they acquire the information that enables them to make these selections, and, having acquired it, what do they do with it? After all, there are no hard-and-fast rules about aesthetic choice and how it operates: it was Anthony Powell who, presented by an admirer of his novel sequence A Dance to the Music of Time with an ornamental clock on which the names of Poussin and Proust had been engraved, truly remarked that books “have odd effects on different people”.
From How the books we read shape our lives | Features | Culture | The Independent
Bill Gates: The Billionaire Book Critic
For years, Mr. Gates, the co-founder of Microsoft who now focuses on the philanthropic work of the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation, had been scribbling notes in the margins of books he was reading and then emailing recommendations to friends and colleagues.
Then he began to post these recommendations and critiques on the blog. “A few years ago I started thinking it would be fun to share some of these notes with the public,” Mr. Gates wrote in a recent email interview. “I have always loved reading and learning, so it is great if people see a book review and feel encouraged to read and share what they think online or with their friends.”
From Bill Gates: The Billionaire Book Critic – The New York Times
EMW Drink Salon: Libraries – Next Thursday!
EMW’s Drink Salon on Tech and Ethics brings together a community and a supportive space to spark challenging discussions on the role of technology in our everyday lives. Each month, we invite featured speakers to lead a conversation. We encourage salon guests to make new connections and to think critically about how technology relates to some of the most important questions we ask humanity.
How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline
Open collaboration systems like Wikipedia need to maintain a pool of volunteer contributors in order to remain relevant. Wikipedia was created through a tremendous number of contributions by millions of contributors. However, recent research has shown that the number of active contributors in Wikipedia has been declining steadily for years, and suggests that a sharp decline in the retention of newcomers is the cause. This paper presents data that show that several changes the Wikipedia community made to manage quality and consistency in the face
of a massive growth in participation have ironically crippled the very growth they were designed to manage. Specifically, the restrictiveness of the encyclopedia’s primary quality control mechanism and the algorithmic tools used to reject contributions are implicated as key causes of decreased newcomer retention. Further, the community’s formal mechanisms for norm articulation are shown to have calcified against changes – especially changes proposed by newer editors.
From [PDF]How Wikipedia’s reaction to popularity is causing its decline
How the Internet changed the way we read
One silver lining is that the technological democratization of social media has effectively deconstructed the one-sided power of the Big Bad Media in general and influential writing in particular, which in theory makes this era freer and more decentralized than ever. One downside to technological democratization is that it hasn’t lead to a thriving marketplace of ideas, but a greater retreat into the Platonic cave of self-identification with the shadow world. We have never needed a safer and quieter place to collect our thoughts from the collective din of couch quarterbacking than we do now, which is why it’s so easy to preemptively categorize the articles we read before we actually read them to save ourselves the heartache and the controversy.
American Panorama
About the Project
American Panorama is created by the Digital Scholarship Lab at the University of Richmond. Robert K. Nelson and Edward L. Ayers serve as editors, Scott Nesbit as an associate editor. Justin Madron manages the project’s spatial data. Nathaniel Ayers leads the design work.
The Andrew W. Mellon Foundation and the University of Richmond have generously provided funding for American Panorama. Stamen Design developed the software for this project.
From American Panorama
I read 164 books in 2015 and tracked them all in a spreadsheet. Here’s what I learned.
At the end of every book I loved, I felt transformed. I wanted to tell everyone about it, if not read it again right away. The other books, the ones I didn’t care about, I read because I thought they would make me better in some way — more well-read, perhaps, or even more interesting. But reading books I wasn’t invested in just made me bored and disengaged; I would have been better off doing something else.
I became a librarian because talking about books is one of the only things I like as much as reading them
From I read 164 books in 2015 and tracked them all in a spreadsheet. Here’s what I learned. – Vox
Wikipedia fails as an encyclopedia, to science’s detriment
Most entries, but not all. Disturbingly, all of the worst entries I have ever read have been in the sciences. Wander off the big ideas in the sciences, and you’re likely to run into entries that are excessively technical and provide almost no context, making them effectively incomprehensible.
This failure is a minor problem for Wikipedia, as most of the entries people rely on are fine. But I’d argue that it’s a significant problem for science. The problematic entries reinforce the popular impression that science is impossible to understand and isn’t for most people—they make science seem elitist. And that’s an impression that we as a society really can’t afford.
From Editorial: Wikipedia fails as an encyclopedia, to science’s detriment | Ars Technica
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