Knowbodies

The Research Works [For Publishers] Act

2012-01-13T02:50:00.000-08:00

NY Times op-ed about "the latest salvo in a continuing battle between the publishers of biomedical research journals like Cell, Science and The New England Journal of Medicine, which are seeking to protect a valuable franchise, and researchers, librarians and patient advocacy groups seeking to provide open access to publicly funded research"

Congratulations boys and girls!

2012-01-12T14:24:00.000-08:00

Asimov on libraries....see story at Byzantium's Shores

Lisa Hanawalt

2012-01-10T22:42:00.000-08:00

Lisa Hanawalt's illustrated review of Spielberg's War Horse sets a new standard for reviews of any kind. See her work at thehairpin.com

Animated Joy of Books

2012-01-10T11:58:00.000-08:00

Happy New Year, myriad readers!
Here's a really cool video about the joy of books, from Type bookstore in Toronto.

Print and pdf options in Wikipedia

2011-12-09T07:53:00.000-08:00

The wonders of Wikipedia never cease to amaze me. Only today do I discover these print and pdf options

that will turn an article that looks like this:

into a nice printable pdf like this:

Huffington Post on libraries in crisis

2011-12-02T01:18:00.000-08:00

Universities under attack

2011-11-30T01:45:00.000-08:00

Fritt Ord, the London Review, and the New York Review of Books jointly sponsored a conference last week about the current plight of universities, "Universities Under Attack." You can read Keith Thomas's remarks from the conference at the LRB website. See also Our Universities: Why are they Failing?, Anthony Grafton's review 8 recent books on this topic in the New York Review of Books.

Future of libraries stuff

2011-11-13T00:39:00.000-08:00

The future library could be a "fab-lab" - like the one taking shape at the Fayettville Free Library - or it could be something else, depending on the findings of a newly inaugurated Pew study on the Changing Role of Public Libraries and Library Users in the Digital Age .

LIbrarians as "open source officers"

2011-11-12T01:51:00.000-08:00

This NPR story suggests that the Onion was not too far off on its take on CIA's fbook program. And note that there are great opportunities here for social media savvy librarians!

A two bit player

2011-10-21T00:42:00.000-07:00

Here's my Twitter character...not real impressive, doesn't even have shoes. Generate your own Twitter infographic at visual.ly

The Public Debate

2011-10-18T00:25:00.000-07:00

Google books

2011-10-13T00:40:00.000-07:00

What get's digitized?

2011-10-13T00:34:00.000-07:00

An editorial in the NYT on the "curious contents of the digital library" alerted me to manybooks.net where all sorts of treasures are to be found, and to the amazing app from the British Library, the British Library 19th Century Collection. How extraordinary to be able to read something like Disraeli's Curiosities of Literature on one's iPad or Kindle!

The allure of country living

2011-10-05T13:38:00.001-07:00

Top ten books lost to time (Smithsonian)

2011-10-01T12:26:00.000-07:00

Stolen childhood

2011-09-29T03:07:00.000-07:00

A heartbreaking picture..but such brave lads!

2011-09-22T00:36:00.000-07:00

From the New Yorker

Old Russia in Color

2011-09-13T12:32:00.000-07:00

See extraordinary color photographs by Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky at the fascinating "A Journey Through Slavic Culture" blog. The owner of the blog (whose identity is not readily apparent)writes:
"For those who don’t know yet, Sergei Mikhailovich Prokudin-Gorsky was a photographer who’s experience in chemistry created one of the earliest techniques of color photography, which he used to document the scope of the Russian empire prior to the revolution, giving us a glimpse into the lives and cultures of the time."

Chimp feedr

2011-08-19T14:46:00.000-07:00

Chimp feedr is a feed aggregator that combines as many rss feeds as you like into a single feed.

A beautiful bicycle film

2011-08-19T14:27:00.000-07:00

2011-07-24T14:55:00.001-07:00

Good old days

2011-07-22T02:57:00.000-07:00

Some day, public libraries will be regarded with that far greater reverence we reserve for things we once had. Alan Bennett gets us off to a wonderful start , and has a nice parting shot:

It’s hard not to think that like other Tory policies privatising the libraries has been lying dormant for 15 years, just waiting for a convenient crisis to smuggle it through. Libraries are, after all, as another think tank clown opined a few weeks ago, ‘a valuable retail outlet’.

Books as fetish objects

2011-07-17T03:23:00.000-07:00

Sad times for bibliophiles; the book, writes James Gleick, "is like the coffin at a funeral. It deserves to be honored, but the soul has moved on."

Death of the expert, or birth of the expert?

2011-07-15T06:46:00.000-07:00

Sven Birkerts has a bone to pick with Maria Bustillos' article Wikipedia and the Death of the Expert. Sven has been windmill-tilting indefatigably ever since the Gutenberg Elegies (1994!), and you can't help admire the poor sod - not only for his pluck, but also for his beautiful and perceptive writing. And for providing such inspiring examples of what both he and I cherish; non-instrumental thinking and writing. Bustillos responds here, but methinks "Wikipedia and the birth of the expert" would have been a better title for her article....

Useless stereotypes (aren't they all?)

2011-07-15T03:13:00.000-07:00

Introducing the Mechanic Muse

2011-07-15T02:55:00.000-07:00

(excerpt) In this week’s issue, the Book Review inaugurates a new column, The Mechanic Muse, that will examine different aspects of this techno-literary complex. This week, Kathryn Schulz takes a virtual trip to the Stanford Literary Lab, where literary scholars are mutating into computer scientists, and vice versa. Can a computer recognize a literary genre or help us see the plot of “Hamlet” anew? Should it? Read the column to decide for yourself.

I say Hardwick, this sure is an impressive library

2011-07-13T05:34:00.000-07:00

Thanks Pat!

Swede dreams.... (Daily Show)

2011-07-01T07:47:00.001-07:00

The Daily Show With Jon Stewart

Mon - Thurs 11p / 10c

Swede Dreams

www.thedailyshow.com

Daily Show Full Episodes

Political Humor & Satire Blog

The Daily Show on Facebook

Andrew Motion on plans to staff libraries with volunteers

2011-06-28T04:16:00.000-07:00

Former UK poet laureate on importance of libraries (The Guardian)

Another gem from DVDP

2011-06-22T01:21:00.000-07:00

The Guardian's list of 100 greatest non-fiction books

2011-06-16T03:25:00.001-07:00

60 seconds of internet

2011-06-16T03:04:00.000-07:00

20 facts about US inequality

2011-06-06T13:06:00.000-07:00

20 Facts About US Inequality That Everyone Should Know (With An Update On The Uber-Wealthy And Global Wealth Inequality)
From zerohedge.com, infographics from many different sources about many different kinds of inequality in the US - for example,

Poet Charles Simic's tribute to libraries

2011-05-19T01:23:00.000-07:00

The Stockholm Syndrome Theory of Long Novels

2011-05-18T23:23:00.000-07:00

A long but captivating article by Mark OConnnell about the "no pain no gain" reading experience.

Buzz Aldrin, Poynter Sisters, Little Richard, and Tip O'Neill visit Stevie

2011-05-13T10:14:00.000-07:00

Narrowing your horizons

2011-05-13T10:10:00.000-07:00

The internet's potential for personalizing your information and network of contacts, or, to put it another way, narrowing your horizons, is vast. Surfers will do this well enough on their own by simply following their preferences, but when technology aids and abets by filtering information on the basis of your browsing history...that way lies trouble, according to Eli Pariser's The Filter Bubble

CIA's "Facebook" program dramatically cuts agency costs

2011-05-03T07:16:00.000-07:00

Libraries have nothing at all to do with silence

2011-05-01T11:37:00.000-07:00

Nice piece by Bella Bathurst in the Guaradian on the "Secret life of libraries"

excerpts:
"In London during the Second World War, some authorities established small collections of books in air-raid shelters. The unused Tube station at Bethnal Green had a library of 4,000 volumes and a nightly clientele of 6,000 people."

"The libraries' most powerful asset is the conversation they provide – between books and readers, between children and parents, between individuals and the collective world. Take them away and those voices turn inwards or vanish. Turns out that libraries have nothing at all to do with silence."

This is fun

2011-04-30T03:19:00.000-07:00

For all who find that coming up with new passwords brings mental functions to an immediate halt and is uncannily, perversely difficult (kind of like remembering jokes), this article about multi-word passwords is a relief.

Quaint libraries

2011-04-27T06:21:00.000-07:00

CNET editor Brian Cooley has rattled librarians' cages with some ill considered words about the "quaintness" of libraries, aired during a segment about Kindle's new library services on the April 20, 2011 "Buzz Out Loud" podcast. He clarifies his position here. But is quaintness such a bad thing?

Nice poem by a Fulbrighter

2011-04-15T11:16:00.000-07:00

In a field

I am the absence

of field.

This is

always the case.

Wherever I am

I am what is missing.

When I walk

I part the air

and always

the air moves in

to fill the spaces

where my body’s been.

We all have reasons

for moving.

I move

to keep things whole.

Get real!

2011-04-07T00:43:00.000-07:00

So I'm an old fogey, but to me the old 1960s exhortation, "Get real!" sounds so much better than the 2011 one, "Cartoonify yourself!"

Fast food

2011-04-06T00:07:00.000-07:00

A very useful service from Google labs for identifying and addressing page speed issues.....fortunately, never much of a line in front of Knowbodies.

The Noun Project

2011-04-05T06:37:00.000-07:00

The noun project has symbols for everything, including tango

"The Noun Project collects, organizes and adds to the highly recognizable symbols that form the world's visual language, so we may share them in a fun and meaningful way. "

Google forges ahead....

2011-04-01T01:19:00.000-07:00

Google has been working with experts in semiotics and kinesiology to develop Gmail Motion. Pretty amazing!

Photographer Christer Strømholm

2011-03-30T01:05:00.000-07:00

Consensus cloud of the books everyone should read

2011-03-29T07:34:00.000-07:00

Another depressing example of libraries failing to change with the times

2011-03-29T01:58:00.000-07:00

Arab spring: interactive timeline of Middle East protests

2011-03-25T09:33:00.000-07:00

Very cool interactive graphic from the Guardian. It doesn't show where the "path of protest" is leading, but perhaps time will tell.

A digital library better than Google's

2011-03-24T00:05:00.000-07:00

Harvard library director Robert Darnton applauds rejection of Google settlement earlier this week and calls for a public digital library.

In a nutshell:
This decision is a victory for the public good, preventing one company from monopolizing access to our common cultural heritage. Nonetheless, we should not abandon Google’s dream of making all the books in the world available to everyone. Instead, we should build a digital public library, which would provide these digital copies free of charge to readers.

Ski champ Petter Northug plays one of my favorites, Paderewski's Nocturne. Beautiful!

2011-03-19T05:21:00.000-07:00

PETTER NORTHUG PLAYS PADEREWSKI'S NOCTURNE

Freeman Dyson on Science and Wikipedia

2011-03-14T03:57:00.000-07:00

In the NYRB, Freeman Dyson says Wikipedia is totally unreliable, and surprisingly accurate. And science is more like Wikipedia than Encyclopedia Britannica.

Science is the sum total of a great multitude of mysteries. It is an unending argument between a great multitude of voices. It resembles Wikipedia much more than it resembles the Encyclopaedia Britannica.

10 best American poems, according to the Guardian

2011-03-14T03:48:00.000-07:00

Bad reviews III

2011-03-12T01:17:00.000-08:00

I've previousl confessed with shame, that I can delight in a a good, bad review. Emily St. John Mandel Post writes less despicably On Bad Reviews at the Millions (also has an interesting comment thread)

Europe sorted out

2011-03-12T00:56:00.000-08:00

Reader's block

2011-02-16T12:36:00.000-08:00

Wonderful essay by Geoff Dyer on reader's block. Didn't get through all of it, will finish later.

Correspondent Rowley Birkin on the events in Cairo

2011-02-11T10:56:00.000-08:00

Keen strikes again

2011-02-10T00:59:00.000-08:00

Andrew Keen, author of the much ridiculed and reviled - in blogger circles - "The Cult of the Amateur" (I thought it was good, though) will publish Digital Vertigo: An Anti-Social Manifesto in 2012. For a preview, see his essay Your Life Torn Open in this month's Wired(UK).

I think he's mostly right...but what's the point.

A survey of books about the obsolescence of books

2011-02-08T22:52:00.000-08:00

NYT on spate of Q&A sites

2011-02-08T00:13:00.001-08:00

Are libraries finished? 5 arguments pro and con

2011-02-06T02:51:00.001-08:00

Better World Flux

2011-02-06T01:59:00.000-08:00

Another impressive data visualization tool (see also this 2009 post for a review of some others):

Better World Flux was created as an entry for the World Bank Apps for Development competition. The site aims to raise awareness for the UN Millennium Development Goals by letting users visualize and share stories that are hidden in the World Bank Open Data.

Better World Flux is a tool that could be used to:

build an ideal composite of what you think matters in life by selecting the indicators
track the progress of countries and the world over the years and find interesting trends and patterns
save and share your most compelling visualization and discover what others are sharing and have a conversation
see which countries need the most help and find the ideal country to live in based on your preferences
see which countries need the most help
find the ideal country to live in based on your preferences
explore and easily navigate the raw data for each country

Wartime library propaganda

2011-02-05T07:05:00.000-08:00

War Against Ignorance propaganda posters

What's worth saving

2011-02-01T23:58:00.000-08:00

Here's a nice passage from Ingrid Rowland's post Saving Alexandria about Egyptians surrounding the Alexandrine library to protect it against vandalism:
Blind rage cannot understand anything as complex or beautiful as Rome, or a library, or even a person, an animal, a book, a tree, a work of art—but blind rage can make these intricate systems stop, and the ability to make things stop has served many of our kind since time immemorial as a fine substitute for learning, experience, scientific method, artistic creation, philosophy.

Nazis, and then DDR commies, commandeer Jewish condom empire

2011-01-31T23:50:00.000-08:00

This is an interesting book review in the Berlin Review of Books, and an opportunity for a blog post title that will appeal to search engines.

Fromms: Wie der jüdische Kondomfabrikant Julius F. unter die deutschen Räuber fiel The Great Rubber Robbery: How Julius Fromm’s Condom Empire Fell to the Nazis

Pullman's defense of libraries makes NYT editorial!!!

2011-01-31T23:21:00.001-08:00

Reading list on technology criticism

2011-01-28T05:57:00.000-08:00

Critical perspectives on science and technology - a reading list.

Interactive map: American adults with college degrees

2011-01-28T05:42:00.000-08:00

A cautionary tale for overeager weeders

2011-01-27T23:30:00.000-08:00

A rousing defense of libraries by Philip Pullman led me (via the comments) to this post at I love Franklin Ave. blog
It may well be apocryphal, but it's a charming tale that makes a point nonetheless.

Library City

2011-01-26T07:48:00.000-08:00

LibraryCity

Toward a universal national digital library system with public governance - blog with lots of interesting stuff! The introductory post explains what it's all about.

Vive la différence

2011-01-20T07:31:00.000-08:00

A glossary by Schott (he of Schott's Miscellany) of "arcane national caricatures from writers curiously fascinated with difference."

Great "books on wheels" accessory

2011-01-14T06:39:00.000-08:00

Nothing warms the heart of a librarian like an invention - however primitive - that encourages people to read more. Pics of item in use here.

Internet gains on TV as main news source

2011-01-06T01:26:00.000-08:00

from PEW

Detroit in ruins - extraordinary photographs

2011-01-04T04:55:00.000-08:00

Detroit in ruins: the photographs of Yves Marchand and Romain Meffre

Gallery

A thing or two about N.American dialects

2011-01-04T00:27:00.001-08:00

Philip Zimbardo on how perspectives of time affect work, health, relationships and well-being.

2011-01-03T23:58:00.000-08:00

10 well-spent minutes: Philip Zimbardo on how perspectives of time affect work, health, relationships and well-being.

2011 book preview

2011-01-03T07:24:00.000-08:00

From The Millions, a month by month preview of books in the year to come. I look forward to David Bezmozgis's first novel.

Culturomics

2010-12-23T00:36:00.000-08:00

The Google Labs N-gram Viewer is the first tool of its kind, capable of precisely and rapidly quantifying cultural trends based on massive quantities of data. It is a gateway to culturomics! The browser is designed to enable you to examine the frequency of words (banana) or phrases ('United States of America') in books over time. You'll be searching through over 5.2 million books: ~4% of all books ever published! (see users guide)

An outstanding Christmas decoration!

2010-12-23T00:30:00.000-08:00

A truly outstanding Christmas decoration! And testimony by the anonymous prankster about the response to his lifesize yuletide ornament (read it at Traveling Librarian) inspires faith in the goodness of mankind! (I posted this in 2009 also, but the best decorations come out every year)

"A brand is like a sack on a sleigh of belief"

2010-12-23T00:01:00.000-08:00

The Santa Brand Book elucidates the science of branding. Very clever.

Google's intergenerational tech support

2010-12-22T14:50:00.000-08:00

http://www.teachparentstech.org/

The future of reading on the ipad

2010-12-08T11:59:00.000-08:00

A while back, when vooks were introduced (what an outdated concept!), I was expressing doubts about how boring old text would survive when competing with multimedia on the same reading/viewing/listening device. David Eagleman's "Why the Net Matters" is a boo... a package of information produced exclusively as an iPad app. He demonstrates it here (of course, the demonstration itself could just as well have been part of the iPad package...), and it really makes me to wonder - again - what value text adds when audio, video and text converge in the same medium. (and here is another demo without narration)

The future of the universities

2010-12-07T00:25:00.000-08:00

Stefan Collini's review in the London Review of Books about tuition fees and the Report of the Independent Review of Higher Education Funding and Student Finance raises questions about market-driven education that should also be asked about market-driven libraries.

A more just distribution of land

2010-12-06T13:17:00.000-08:00

I was unable to find Norway here....

A picture is worth a thousand words

2010-12-05T13:44:00.000-08:00

What a wonderful thing the Internet is - was about to describe an earwig to a non-English speaker when I happily stumbled upon this picture

Irrational Exuberance

2010-12-05T11:52:00.000-08:00

In LRB, a cool assessment of USG's public diplomacy 2.0 and its "irrational exuberance" about social media.

Go team

2010-12-03T01:40:00.000-08:00

David Gewanter in the Times Higher Education supplement writes about U.S. football teams sporting their very own universities.

Web2PDF

2010-11-11T08:34:00.000-08:00

Web2PDF accepts a url and generates a pdf file from the webpage. The pdf retains the layout of the page and also its hyperlinks. If you have access to email, say through a cell phone, but not a webbrowser, you can send the url via email to submit@web2pdfconvert.com, and Web2PDF will send you the pdf as a mail attachment. See also "10 email addresses that are useful when you have no internet access" is an extremely useful weThe converted PDFs not only retain the layout but also the hyperlinks and thus you may fetch other internal pages as well using email itself. All this stuff courtesy of Digital Inspiration, Amit Agarwal's useful blog.

Satsifying the needs of both writers and readers

2010-11-04T13:29:00.000-07:00

It's an often overlooked fact that writers and readers have very different language needs. The ingenious tool Plain English - created by Slate's Jeremy Singer-Vine - goes a long way toward satisfying the needs of both; just use the "start over" and "convert all" buttons to toggle between writer and reader mode. Here is an example of language - for both writers and readers - from the Fed.

The mother of multitasking...and the beginning of the end

2010-11-02T01:37:00.000-07:00

Worldometers

2010-11-01T07:54:00.000-07:00

Real-time world statistics that give pause.

Alexei Sayle, dancer extraordinaire

2010-11-01T07:51:00.000-07:00

Some of the best dancing ever...Alexei Sayle in 1986 and - unbelievably - 1982!!! (below - and what a groove, who's in that band?)

Midterm election search trends

2010-10-28T00:48:00.001-07:00

Google introduces Place Search

2010-10-28T00:47:00.000-07:00

From the Google blog: Place Search is rolling out now and will be available globally in more than 40 languages in the next few days. During the roll-out process you can use this special link to preview the new results. Our goal is to help you feel like a local everywhere you go!

Slang

2010-10-28T00:14:00.000-07:00

Latest! Knowbodies has been flattered by a visit from the author himself, Jonathon Green. He comments:

My thanks for the mention of GDoS. Might I, as author, make two small amendments: the book is actually published by Chambers in the UK. OUP / US are distributing it in N. America.
Perhaps more important is the fact that my book deals not merely 'English' English slang, but the entire range of 500 years of anglophone slangs, including US / UK / Eire / Australia / New Zealand / Caribbean / S. Africa.

I wish the book every success, and hope it gets reviewed by Nicholson Baker!

J.E. Lighter's ambitious Random House Historical Dictionary of American Slang foundered after 2 volumes, and was taken over by Oxford University Press in 2003 which intended to publish 2 fina l volumes. We're still waiting for those. (more on the history of the project here). Next month Oxford will release Jonathon Green's three-volume Green's Dictionary of Slang (English slang, that is), which by the looks of it is a worthy successor to Eric Partridge. There's a review here that has some interesting tidbits, including the claim that there is no agreed etymology of the word "slang" itself. (I wonder if it is related to the Norwegian word "slang", which derives from English seaman's usage for "to fool or cheat", and in common parlance means filching fruit from gardens, as in "epleslang" ie. snitching apples) I do hope this major new publication doesn't mean Oxford has given up on completing the American dictionary...I will ask, and share the response with my myriad readers here.

Too much stuff

2010-10-27T01:13:00.000-07:00

Like many librarians, I'm an incorrigible collector, and have to get rid of things from time to time. I'm currently taking bids on my good as new bucket-wheel excavator.

Strange Maps blog

2010-10-10T01:48:00.000-07:00

The post Great European Shouting Match at Frank Jacob's Strange Maps blog features maps from Yanko Tsvetkov's Mapping Stereotypes project, and ties them together with an interesting narrative. (Strange Maps is one of many interesting things at Big Think - Lea Carpenter's literature blog Think, See, Feel is another)

Tynt

2010-10-09T12:25:00.000-07:00

That cool bit of technology I mentioned in my post about the New Yorker below is called "Tynt", and I've now implemented it on this site. Cut some text from Knowbodies and paste it somewhere else, and you'll see how it works. Neat!

On dithering and doing

2010-10-09T12:13:00.000-07:00

Is there something you should be doing? Then I suggest you read JamesSurowiecki's fascinating article about procrastination, Later....right now. Many nuggets of wisdom about you and me like "we often procrastinate not by doing fun tasks but by doing jobs whose only allure is that they aren’t what we should be doing"

Incidentally, the New Yorker seems to have implemented a cool bit of technology I hadn't seen before that automatically adds a "Read more at: [URL]" to any snippet of text that you copy and paste from it, like this:

Some years ago, the economist George Akerlof found himself faced with a simple task: mailing a box of clothes from India, where he was living, to the United States.

Read more http://www.newyorker.com/arts/critics/books/2010/10/11/101011crbo_books_surowiecki?currentPage=all#ixzz14om80FfS