The New York Times reports that Google has unveiled a new search trick, allowing users on Google to search within a specific site and generate results without visiting that site. Google sells ads against this additional captive traffic, sometimes for […]
The Association of College & Research Libraries, the Association of Research Libraries, and the Scholarly Publishing & Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC) have created a short video designed to familiarize researchers with some of the issues around author rights. A slide […]
It’s the weekend, so let’s have some fun. Games are educational, and probably always have been. For instance, chess teaches a lot. Now, one of the nation’s largest retailers is mixing experimental games into apparel marketing. According to Boing-Bong.net, Target […]
Two weeks ago, Elsevier and MIT announced a deal allowing MIT’s OpenCourseWare (OCW) project free use of a limited amount of images and text from Elsevier journals, all under a Creative Commons license. The limits are up to 3 figures […]
The New Scientist recently reported that a group of physicists and the American Physical Society (APS) are having a disagreement over inclusion of derivative materials on Wikipedia and other, more specialized wikis. Peter Suber has a good analysis of the […]
A fascinating study from Oikos: The Journal of Ecology finds that research output and number of citations (aggregate and per-paper) are inversely correlated with per-capita beer consumption. That is, where beer consumption rises, research productivity falls, as measured by papers […]
The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention in the US (the CDC) has always been a network. It’s role is important and impressive. But can disease surveillance be accomplished in new ways? An interesting site is http://www.whoissick.org, where people stricken […]
According to TechCrunch, Charlie Rose, the unflappable interviewer, apparently chose a face-plant over risking damage to his newly purchased MacBook Air. Walking down a street in New York City and tripping, he ended up looking like this, and his computer […]
CrossRef recently announced a plugin for WordPress, the popular blogging platform (and the one this blog uses), showing yet again that citations are not vestiges from a bygone print age but are part and parcel of the permanent Web. CrossRef […]
It’s from August 2007, but a paper in the online peer-reviewed journal First Monday caught my attention just now. It’s about the phenomenon the authors term “Infomania,” but which can also be called Attention Deficit Trait (ADT). ADT was first […]