Science Library Pad

tracking your carbon

2008-05-03T07:51:38-04:00

Data helps decisions. Humans are visual. There are a couple services that will help you visualise your carbon emissions:

TheCarbonAccount aims to show a complete picture of all your emissions.

The above graph is from my profile at http://www.thecarbonaccount.com/people/rakerman/

Dopplr has added a carbon profile feature in partnership with AMEE to track carbon from your travels (since Dopplr is a travel site).

Both of them make a lot of assumptions. For example in Dopplr everything is air travel by default, you have to go in and manually edit each trip one-by-one if you want to change the travel mode, and the only other options are train and car.

In TheCarbonAccount I can't tell it that I buy green power from Bullfrog, or that I offset emissions, or that I take the bus to work.

This is an obvious killer app for Web Services. For one thing, I should be able to send from Dopplr to TheCarbonAccount. For that matter, my power consumption data from Bullfrog should also automatically feed TheCarbonAccount. Individuals should be able to build their own end-to-end carbon footprint chain, using SOA.

The heck with FriendFeed, where's my CarbonFeed?

(I'm pretty sure I Twittered this idea a while back, but I can never find anything in my Twitter stream again.)

Previously:
January 18, 2008 carbon labelling

Canadian microsat to look for near-earth asteroids

2008-05-02T14:05:21-04:00

Canada is preparing to launch the first space mission ever to search for asteroids between Earth and the sun -- the type of asteroid most likely to slam into our planet.

Fittingly for this country, the Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite is not a Hubble-sized monster. It's a 60-kilogram microsatellite, costing a mere $10 million, yet able to deliver science results never seen before.

NEOSSat will search for asteroids that are closer to the sun than Earth. These are nearly impossible to see from our planet's surface -- there's too much atmosphere and sunshine -- but easier to spot from space.

canada.com - Canada space mission targets asteroids - May 02, 2008

Since newspaper science articles are notoriously bad at accurately explaining things, you can also read

The Near Earth Object Surveillance Satellite (NEOSSat) Mission Enables an Efficient Space-Based Survey (NESS Project) of Interior-to-Earth-Orbit (IEO) Asteroids (PDF)
by
Hildebrand A.R., Tedesco E.F., Carroll K.A., Cardinal R.D., Matthews J.M., Kuschnig R., Walker G.A.H., Gladman, B., Kaiser, N.R., Brown P.G., Larson S.M., Worden, S.P., Wallace, B.J., Cho-das P.W., Muinonen K., Cheng A., Gural P.
from Lunar and Planetary Science XXXVIII (2007)

I couldn't find a Wikipedia article for it, so I made one.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Near_Earth_Object_Surveillance_Satellite

Obscure historical sidebar: B. Gladman was also a student of my grad astrophysics supervisor. A much, much better student.

2008 Canadian BioTalent

2008-05-01T04:37:04-04:00

Teenage scientists are gathering this week at the Canada Science and Technology Museum for the Eastern Ontario regional competition in biotechnology. Eleven student projects will be displayed and presented to the judging panel, composed of local researchers and leaders in the field of biotechnology.

The Sanofi-Aventis BioTalent Challenge (SABC) introduces students to the real world of biotechnology by carrying out research projects of their own design. Each student team works with a mentor, who provides expert advice and access to equipment and supplies.

The Canada Science and Technology Museum donates an award to the project team demonstrating the highest calibre of scientific interpretation. Other prizes include scholarships at local institutions and summer jobs at the National Research Council. Nearly $10,000 in prizes will be given out at the ceremony on April 30 [2008].

Canada Science and Technology Museum - News Releases - Ottawa’s top biotechnology students compete in regional competition

In 2008, with increased support from BioTalent Canada the competition will be face-to-face where 14 regional winners will compete for the National title in Ottawa. The top 2 winners of the National SABC Competition will be able to compete in the sanofi-aventis International BioGENEius Challenge at the Biotechnology Industry Organization’s (BIO) Annual International Convention.

THE 2008 NATIONAL COMPETITION: May 6th [2008]
2008 AWARDS CEREMONY: May 7th [2008]
LOCATION: THE NATIONAL RESEARCH COUNCIL CANADA IN OTTAWA

http://sanofibiotalentchallenge.ca/national-competition/

The Canada Science and Technology Museum will be having an accompanying Biotechnology Lecture Series on May 6 & 7, 2008. A couple examples from their schedule:

May 6 - 11:15 a.m.
Dr. John Bell
“Using Viruses to Kill Cancer Cells”

May 7 - 1:00 p.m.
Dr. Mads Kaern and students from University of Ottawa
“Genetically engineered machines: Their scientific and economic potential”

the de-zoned BL struggles with its popularity

2008-04-30T07:25:08-04:00

Would that we all had such problems with our reading rooms.

in 1998 the library moved to a modern red-brick building on Euston Road, and four years ago it liberalized its admission policy. It opened its new reading rooms not only to writers and academics who depend on material from its singular collection, but also to “anyone who has a relevant research need,” a spokeswoman said.

Which is all fine. But “anyone” includes college undergraduates, and the problem with them, at least in the eyes of the older researchers, is that they tend to behave like the teenagers that many of them are.

...

Researchers have been grousing about the boisterous atmosphere and crowded conditions at the British Library for years. But the dispute — a philosophical battle, really, over who should be allowed access to a great national library — spilled out in public last week when The Times of London published an article quoting various distinguished figures complaining about the out-of-control mood over spring break.

New York Times - Shh! In British Library Reading Rooms, Flirting and Even Giggling - April 28, 2008

Although there are 1,480 seats in the library, the author Christopher Hawtree was last week forced to perch on a windowsill while the historians Lady Antonia Fraser and Claire Tomalin have swapped horror stories of interminable queues. Library users complain that the line to enter the new building in St Pancras, central London, has recently been extending across its enormous courtyard.

Speaking to The Times yesterday, Lady Antonia said: “I had to queue for 20 minutes to get in, in freezing weather. Then I queued to leave my coat for 20 minutes [at the compulsory check-in]. Then half an hour to get my books and another 15 minutes to get my coat. I’m told it’s due to students having access now. Why can’t they go to their university libraries?”

Of particular irritation is the notion that many undergraduates now come to the library to relax, meet and text friends, and play on laptops, rather than to read books. “It’s become a social gathering,” Lady Antonia said.

The Times - Frustration for authors as students hog British Library reading rooms - April 21, 2008

One Big Library Unconference - Toronto - June 27 2008

2008-04-29T14:32:56-04:00

John Dupuis announces

the One Big Library Unconference

http://onebiglibrary.yorku.ca/

E-mail: onebig@yorku.ca

When: Friday 27 June 2008, 9:00 am to 5:00 pm.

Where: The Centre for Social Innovation,
215 Spadina Avenue,
Toronto, Ontario, Canada

Areas of interest:

* The future of libraries
* Collaboration on building One Big Library collections and services
* Uses of social software in libraries
* Tools to support and extend the One Big Library

Looks really interesting, it's great to see more experimentation with the unconference format.

the end of cognitive zoning

2008-04-29T13:30:27-04:00

Lots of buzz around Shirky's cognitive surplus post.
To me the idea is very similar to my assertion that peer production happens mostly in the bright areas of the world at night map, in the places where we have the leisure time to do these things. (See where in the world are users generating?)

Shirky's idea is presented as reclaiming the time that was lost for generations to television, but I think of it as more like cognitive re-zoning.

We still live in the echo of the Industrial Age. And the Industrial Age gave us efficiency, Taylorism, and as part of that, zoning.

How our space is organized has a deep relationship with how our lives are organized, which in turn shapes the possibilities for the lives we can lead.

Think about old houses, each small room for its specific purpose, the kitchen, the dining room, the front reception room (closed, for guest visits only). Now think of new, unzoned designs, the flowing great rooms that are now preferred, kitchen into dining room into living room.

Zoning permeated, and still permeates, our lives. There are 9-5 weekdays, where you PRODUCE (or if a student, LEARN), and 5-11 weekdays and all day weekends, when you CONSUME.

Drive into the city work zone to PRODUCE, drive out to the suburbs to CONSUME.

All nice tidy zones. And zones which made sense in the industrial age, since to live next to where you worked at that time was to be next to a giant smoking clanking factory. And if you're doing physical work all day, you really do need downtime just so your body doesn't collapse.

The problem with zoning in the post-industrial age is that it's an epic disaster. A disaster of urban planning, and a disaster of social engagement. PRODUCE and CONSUME excludes a lot of desirable things. Like say, Think, Reflect, Eat, Discuss, Discover, Continue to Learn... basically, most of the things that make life worth living.

And in the unzoned life in the unzoned city, all of these things can flow naturally together. Not in a destructive way, in which PRODUCE expands into your downtime so that you are always working, but in an organic way, so that you are able to mix working, learning, thinking, relaxing...

Sometimes people say to me about blogging, isn't it a waste of time, where will people find the time, which is nonsense. All old-style PRODUCE does is define a tiny set of things: meetings, emails, legacy inefficient processes, as "work", and anything else as non-work. So you end up in a time of constant change when you've literally defined learning and planning out of your work day. It's no wonder people can't adapt to change.

Lorcan has a great quote from the Economist in his blog, which he is using to discuss mobility, but which I will use to talk about the death of zoning

“a huge rise in demand for semi-public spaces that can be informally appropriated to ad-hoc workspaces”

I think the language is interesting: "ad-hoc workspaces". Because a workspace should be what - fixed? Established? Serious? I would put it another way: there is no work zone and home zone. There is only place and context. Today the coffeshop is a place to sit in the sun and chat with friends, tomorrow you're writing a report there on your laptop. Today your computer room is for playing World of Warcraft, tomorrow you're filling in a spreadsheet.

Think about your spaces and your cognitive activities in an unzoned world. How do things change? We've already seen great progress in libraries on this, as they accept food and noise and gaming and more. And I think we're also starting to see progress in some organizations as people's work activities and groups are unzoned, so the we can cross silos and we can mix blog reading and writing in with Very Serious Business Meetings.

As well, as luck would have it, we already have some models that we can draw upon, as most of the world's great cities give us examples of mixed, zoneless life, where you can move from work to shopping to eating to an art gallery to a park, all within the space of a few blocks.

In case you're wondering why I uppercased producer and consumer, it's to highlight how these roles are reintegrating, or dezoning, back into prosumer, as envisioned notably by Toffler.

Previously:
December 18, 2006 the Internet, it's made of people

availability, discovery, and delivery - redux

2008-04-28T03:30:58-04:00

Availability does not equal accessibility: researchers’ top concern about scholarly communication is that they cannot access all the content they wish to access

Researchers tend to use tried-and-tested discovery tools, or those which their library specifically trains them to use. Google and other web search engines remain the most-used search tools for work-related information. The main problem with discovery is coming up against an access barrier

Researchers do not always know how to seek out a freely-available copy of an article that they want and which they have discovered behind a toll barrier

Key concerns within the scholarly communication process: report to the JISC Scholarly Communication Group, March 2008 [Word document]

via Lorcan Dempsey

I find it interesting that the focus of concerns is around delivery, not discovery (perhaps this is how the questions were framed).

I think the academic library faces two challenges:

Ensure that your researchers can always get from their chosen discovery environment easily to

Get to your licensed resources
Get to free copies, if licensed versions aren't available
Get to purchase options, if free copies aren't available

Ensure that as many of your resources as possible can actually be discovered

I'm not convinced that we're doing a particularly good job of addressing these fundamental challenges even after years of working on proxies, federated search, link resolvers, and "live in your environment" plugins and external website settings.

It seems to me that librarians were so focused on trying to control the discovery experience, trying to make people discover resources "properly", following established librarian search protocols, that the simple challenges above were not addressed.

I think we need to spend a lot of time with researchers letting them search however they want, and seeing whether they dead-end either by not being able to get to a resource at all, or by landing at a paywall for a resource we license or can get to for free. Fix that first.

And I'm not entirely convinced we have all the tools we need to fix that problem right now.

Then once you have addressed consistent delivery, work on improving discovery. I think discovery is much harder to fix. And to some extent, there should be vendor pushback. I don't care how rich or comprehensive a licensed resource is, if my users can never discover it, then the message to the vendor should be "enable easy ways for my user to discover your resources within their preferred discovery environments, or next year we're not licensing your content".

Previously:
Lorcan and I had a bit of a back-and-forth about discovery and delivery in 2006.

August 08, 2006 Discovery and disclosure - Lorcan Dempsey
August 09, 2006 online library role in discovering and delivering - Science Library Pad

Facebook Mini-Feed wants to be your Life-Feed

2008-04-26T08:39:52-04:00

Facebook launched some "lifestream" integration features on April 15, 2008

The option to import stories from other sites can be found via the small "Import" link at the top of your Mini-Feed. Only a few sites—Flickr, Yelp, Picasa, and del.icio.us [and now Digg]—are available for importing at the moment

Facebook Blog - A new way to share with friends

Sidebar: Facebook also seems to have silently taken away the feature where you could X stuff out of your News Feed, which was supposed to teach it to only show friends items that interested you, over time.

Yahoo - the SearchMonkey cometh

2008-04-25T14:36:39-04:00

Well, as long as it isn't a flying monkey, ok.

Enter the Yahoo Open Strategy (YOS). ...

There’s a massive, latent social network within Yahoo, and we’re going to bring it to the surface. We’re making Yahoo more social, but we’re not building yet another social network. We already have an incredible social network… we just need to unlock it.

...

A first taste of our strategy is SearchMonkey, which will let developers mash up helpful data with our search engine results. ... launch party May 15 [2008]

http://ycorpblog.com/2008/04/24/developer-welcome-mat/
(Exclamations removed because I refuse to put exclamations all over the place, including inside of acronyms.)

SearchMonkey is what I previously described as "semantically-enriched search results".

General story of Yahoo Open Strategy very widely reported, e.g. Globe - Associated Press - Yahoo plans social makeover. SearchMonkey bit via Search Engine Watch blog.

Globe on Lifestreaming

2008-04-25T11:46:28-04:00

Today's Globe and Mail has a good article on lifestreaming, the article is a reasonable combination of skepticism and information.

For every bon mot you leave [online], a breathless news release documents the leaving of the bon mot. Assemble all those press releases together, and you've got a lifestream.

...

A lifestream is just a [Facebook] mini-feed writ large, covering not just the cloistered confines of one site, but stretching across the entire Web, pulling in data from every site that is willing to share it.

Globe and Mail - Billy blogged! Sarah e-mailed! Tell everyone! - April 24, 2008

There is also accompanying audio (presented in a video window, I guess so they can show you an ad first). I like when he describes his worry that full lifestreams will be mostly full of "random detritus" of your web wanderings.

FriendFeed is kind of the canonical application in this space, but to some extent, anything that can aggregate RSS feeds can do a basic job of serving as a lifestream.

Free Public WiFi - the wirus SSID that went round the world

2008-04-24T14:27:14-04:00

So you're out and about, time to upload some photos, check for a hotspot

Hooray, Free Public WiFi.

Everywhere you go - airports, coffee shops, even right now sitting at my desk at work - Free Public WiFi.

Which would be great, except it doesn't work.

It is a profoundly peculiar interaction of human behaviour and a Windows bug. Not helped by systems and people who can't distinguish between infrastructure networks (which commonly connect you to the Internet) and ad-hoc networks (which are for a small group of computers to quickly communicate with each other). Of course, some interfaces, like my N82 above, don't distinguish between the two wireless network types at all.

It looks like the world's greatest social engineering hack - create a wireless virus (a "wirus", if you will) that puts up a network name (an SSID) called Free Public WiFi, and then cheerfully compromise any machine that attaches, and continue to propagate.

In fact, it turns out just to be a bug. The short answer is, Windows does something stupid. The long answer is, Windows will present an SSID (with no intervention from the users) of networks it has previously seen in ad-hoc mode.

It's relatively harmless for now (but don't connect to it).

See more info at

Pogue's Posts - Free Public WiFi - January 29, 2008

and a reasonably clear explanation of it (and how to avoid connecting to ad-hoc networks) at

WLAN Book - “Free Public WiFi” SSID - July 16, 2007

If you want the most technical explanation, read this advisory, which dates back to January 2006

Nomad Mobile Research Centre A D V I S O R Y - 14Jan2006
Microsoft Windows Silent Adhoc Network Advertisement
Severity : High (albeit lame)

Sidebar 1: Posting prompted by a Tweet from Paul Walk about seeing this SSID on the train, and re-prompted by it coming up when I discovered WLAN scanning was running on my Nokia N82 while I was at my desk.

Re-found Tweet through

http://twitter.summize.com/search?q=%22free+public+wifi%22

which shows this problem continues to circulate daily. Owen Stephens provided a quick pointer in response to Paul's query.

Sidebar 2: Shiny screen + trying to take a photo of one (quick to power down to black screen) cellphone with another (quick to power down to inactivity) cellphone was quite a challenge. This shiny screen everywhere trend wreaks havoc on taking photos, unless you want to mirrorshot yourself every time.

CBC Spark Wiki + library tech

2008-04-24T13:40:54-04:00

CBC's radio show Spark has a wiki.

we're really pleased to announce the Spark Wiki. We hope it will complement this blog and the radio show (and podcast). Right now, it's an experiment: a place to collaborate on story ideas, suggest guests, music selections... whatever. It's a many-to-many form of communication, and I'm really excited to learn how we can use it to make more participatory, collaborative radio.

from the Spark Blog - January 09, 2008

You can see a vaguely related discussion from Globe and Mail Video, "CBC's wiki experiment". It seems to me they might have been better off talking to someone directly at Spark.

The wiki itself is at

http://www.socialtext.net/spark/

There is a Spark story proposal up for Libraries and technology but it hasn't had much activity. If you'd like to hear about library tech on Canada's national radio, maybe you might consider adding some ideas or suggestions of people for them to interview.

Second Nature: Science and Science Fiction

2008-04-24T07:43:08-04:00

Title: How Science Drives Fiction and Fiction Drives Science
Speakers: Prof Mark Brake and Rev. Neil Hook, Glamorgan University

Date: Mon 28th April [2008]

Time: 9am SLT, Midday NY time, 4pm GMT, 5pm London time

Location: Second Nature Island

from Nature Network - Joanna Scott's blog

I certainly think a common background of consuming science fiction informs both physics and computer science (the only science areas I've worked in).

the social shotgun: blasting your updates everywhere

2008-04-18T10:41:14-04:00

In the library world we would probably call this something like "federated updating".
With the proliferation of different targets, particularly different social presence sites, people are trying to do one-to-many updates.

We see an example of some infrastructure for this in Yahoo's FireEagle, for collecting and redistributing location updates.

There was also a nice example at the CRIG Repository Challenge, called FileBlast, which allows you to upload a paper (an article) and then send automatic notices with the link to the paper to multiple sources, such as Twitter and your blog. It is build on the FeedForward infrastructure, and you can read more about it (as well as find a link to the code) in the FeedForward blog.

Today, via the Outsell Headlines feed, I find news that TypePad has a new Facebook app called Blog It, which can send a single update to many sources of your choosing, including various blogging platforms (TypePad, Blogger, LJ, Vox, WordPress) and various "statusy" services, including Tumblr, Twitter, and Facebook status itself.

UPDATE: The article Outsell pointed me to, Six Apart Gives Facebook Bloggers Blastability, uses the term "lifestreaming". I wonder if this is where we're headed, from the blog to the lifeblast. ENDUPDATE

I think there's always this tension between decentralisation and centralisation, and these kind of notification federations may be one way that we manage this.

In particular, "article blast" to multiple repositories using SWORD may be a very compelling solution to a lot of ingest and content recruitment issues. (And feel free to contact me if you're interested in SWORD ingest across platforms.) Julie Allinson did a great job of introducing SWORD in her Open Repositories 2008 presentation.

Celebridée – Ottawa - May 2 to 19, 2008 - Chris Anderson, Salman Rushdie, Kunstler...

2008-04-13T15:30:51-04:00

As part of the tulip festival, a collection of thinkers and music and stuff.

In 2008, Celebridée will come into full bloom in the Tulip Festival Mirror Tent headlining Sir Salman Rushdie, one of the world's most celebrated and controversial novelists. Other headliners include Wired Magazine's Chris Anderson and Pulitzer Prize winning author of Guns, Germs and Steel, Jared Diamond.

...

James Howard Kunstler, author of The Long Emergency. Yale University's Amy Chua will present World On Fire: How Exporting Free Market Democracy Breeds Ethnic Hatred and Global Instability, ..., the Perimeter Institute for Theoretical Physics will present The Mystery of Dark Matter, and Richard Florida, author of Who's Your City, will discuss Creative Cities.

Celebridée will also feature several partner events including 1783 – Subject or Citizen? an event on the Treaty of Paris by Library and Archives Canada and musical concerts including two evenings with Angela Hewitt: The Well-Tempered Clavier and Janina Fialkowska & The Chamber Players of Canada, all at St. Andrew's Church.

from http://www.celebridee.com/

Richard Florida's blog is also mirrored at http://www.theglobeandmail.com/blogs/creativeclass

UPDATE: I see Ottawa's own Clive Doucet will also be speaking. I liked his book Urban Meltdown.

UPDATE: Since Colin mentioned he had some trouble finding the actual schedule, it's hidden away at http://www.tulipfestival.ca/en/Celeb_Events/

Vlickr - Flickr adds video

2008-04-08T23:14:58-04:00

The rumours are true and “soon” is now. We’re thrilled to introduce video on Flickr. If you’re a pro member, you can now share videos up to 90 glorious seconds in your photostream.

Flickr Blog - Video on Flickr

also see http://www.flickr.com/help/video/

Unlimited Librarians

2008-04-07T18:29:26-04:00

Unlimited is a relatively new (4th issue) Canadian business magazine, if you scroll down to the second story in their Now See Hear section you'll find this well-written piece about the enduring value of librarians.

Librarians – all 1,300 of us in Alberta, 12,000 in Canada, and 158,000 in the U.S., not to mention the rest of the world – do three things: we buy information, we help you find information, and we loan you information. In my experience, we try to do these things using every useful technological tool at our disposal. We buy e-books, instant-message you through a search, check blog feeds to keep an eye on innovations at other libraries. New technologies have not changed the fundamental function of libraries; they constantly change how libraries approach their core mission.

Open Source - Librarians Embrace the Google Era - by Leah Vanderjagt - Unlimited Magazine

(Obscure sidebar: When transcribing this I first wrote it as "Librarians Emerge in the Internet Era" for some reason.)

OR08 - the presentation layer is destroying our data

2008-04-02T12:48:43-04:00

I have lots of raw notes, but I'll wait to see whether the presentations show up at the Open Repositories 2008 conference repository (for some reason, I keep wanting to spell this "respository").

http://pubs.or08.ecs.soton.ac.uk/

One of the main themes that I've heard in terms of doing science with repositories over the past couple days is that presentation formats, particularly PDF, are destroying the data (e.g. chemical structures and reactions) that we have so carefully assembled. Then we have to make machines work really hard to try to reconstruct this data, which is madness to me (although I accept it may be the only practical solution in the near term).

I would argue that HTML plays a similar role in emphasizing "what looks good" rather than adding to that "and is also usable by machines under the hood".

And in a different way, PowerPoint, with its constraints of display and its style of bullet points, discards our complex ideas and presents them in a lossy, radically oversimplified way (with a dependency of course on the skills of the presenters).

NISO intros new site. Old links: kablooie.

2008-04-01T18:52:18-04:00

You remember that NISO event I attended all of um, 4 days ago?

http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/

Kablooie.
Gone with no redirect.
If you dig around the site, you can make your way to

http://www.niso.org/news/events/niso/past/discovery08/

which is empty.

Why does this always happen on a site redesign? Does no one care about preservation? Persisting URLs?

I don't know if Archive managed to harvest them, they're not showing anything at the moment.

http://web.archive.org/web/*/http://www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/

I guess the best that's possible right now is to look at the Google cache, just to prove I didn't imagine the entire event

http://www.google.com/search?q=cache:www.niso.org/news/events_workshops/discovery08/

I wonder, should Archive provide a link to try Google cache, when it doesn't get a page match in its own DB? How long does Google's cache of lost pages last anyway?