Pete

The indispensible Lifehacker on one aspect of what makes a leader great.

“Note how many business titans are or have been avid readers. According to The New York Times, Steve Jobs had an “inexhaustible interest” in William Blake; Nike founder Phil Knight so reveres his library that in it you have to take off your shoes and bow; and Harman Industries founder Sidney Harman called poets “the original systems thinkers,” quoting freely from Shakespeare and Tennyson. In Passion & Purpose, David Gergen notes that Carlyle Group founder David Rubenstein reads dozens of books each week.”

From tech site <a href=”http://www.theverge.com/2012/8/15/3244003/watch-this-kids-1995-internet-PSA”>The Verge</a> Back in the early-to-mid 90s a lot of people remained unconvinced by the internet’s potential — perhaps not surprising, given the spartan nature of early web pages. The fifth-grade students at Ray Bjork Elementary School in Helena, Montana knew better, though, and put together this PSA that not only details the internet’s many uses in 1995 but also predicts its future.

A fun Flickr collection of 1960’s Library Posters.

What do copyright law, baseball, Wikipedia and Google have in common? Read on:

Everyone knows that the flow of information is complex and tangled in society today — so thank goodness for copyright law! Truly, no part of our national policy is as coherent, in the interest of the public or as updated for the Internet age as that gleaming tome in the US Code.

Not.

But one MIT economist, who recently presented his work recently at Wikimania, has found a way to test how the copyright law affects one online community — Wikipedia — and how digitized, public domain works dramatically affect the quality of knowledge.

A 451 Internet error code? Digital Trends has the details:

“Government-imposed online censorship has become increasingly prevalent over the past few years…When censorship does happen, we need a sign that clearly tells us that that’s the reason for a site’s inaccessibility.

Enter Tim Bray, a software developer at Google who has proposed a solution: a “451? error code that displays anytime you visit a site blocked by the government. The number 451 is in honor of late author Ray Bradbury, whose science fiction classic Fahrenheit 451, first published in 1950, warned of a dystopian world defined by government-imposed censorship (in the form of burning any house that contains books).”

From The Verge,
“As the publication world is dragged, kicking and screaming, into the digital world, a lot of complex issues come up. One of the most important, especially for librarians and archivists (not to mention students of history looking to the future), is the question of preservation…The problem, says Barbara Galletly reporting for Digital Book World, is that the foundation for such a transition has not been properly laid, digital preservation is a largely chaotic, random affair right now, and the metadata itself is unstable.”

Over at Technology Review, a look at whether a true digital public library can ever become a reality.

“Google’s ambitious book-scanning program is foundering in the courts. Now a Harvard-led group is launching its own sweeping effort to put our literary heritage online. Will the Ivy League succeed where Silicon Valley failed?”

More interesting than the beta launch of a news aggregator called Wavii, is the recap of of such things in Science Fiction novels and stories of the past at Technovelgy.com
“This same idea was first explored in science fiction decades ago. In his 1978 novel The Fountains of Paradise. Arthur C. Clarke described the personal interest profile that could be used to gather all relevant items of information from news feeds.”

How do the bestsellers of March 1966 match up to the bestselling fiction and nonfiction books today? Newsweek compared the New York Times bestseller lists to see what people read then and what they read now, and declared a winner. Has anyone done something like this in their library?

The next time you’re working at the reference desk and someone wants to know what kind of computer was used in the classic 1973 movie “Invasion of the Bee Girls,” well, now you have a place to turn. ” The Verge directs your attention to the Starring the Computer which describes itself as, “…a website dedicated to the use of computers in film and television. Each appearance is catalogued and rated on its importance (ie. how important it is to the plot), realism (how close its appearance and capabilities are to the real thing) and visibility (how good a look does one get of it). Fictional computers don’t count (unless they are built out of bits of real computer), so no HAL9000 – sorry.”