Depraved Librarian

add host TaxAnalysts

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Mon, 28 Dec 2015 20:02:00 +0000

– – –

CELEBRATING
125 YEARS
Join us at 125.nyls.edu

Moving!

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Tue, 12 Jan 2010 03:45:00 +0000

After nearly 5 years, I've decided to move this blog over to Wordpress. You can visit me now at

http://depravedlibrarian.wordpress.com

The new RSS feed address is:

http://depravedlibrarian.wordpress.com/feed/

Palm's presentation at the 2010 CES (Youtube)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 21:38:00 +0000

Palm unveils new phones, new carriers, developer programs, and video capabilities at the 2010 Consumer Electronics Show.

I've been a Palm fan since the very beginning (the Pilot 1000!) and it makes me pretty happy to see these developments.

Palm @ CES

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:37:00 +0000

It's that time of year when the world descends upon Las Vegas for the Consumer Electronics Show, and Palm is announcing some great things:

Today at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas, Palm and Verizon Wireless introduced Palm Pre Plus and Palm Pixi Plus, two new phones combining the power of the Palm webOS platform with several new enhancements. Palm Pre Plus sports a streamlined design that simplifies navigation, 16GB of storage (15GB user available storage), and a Touchstone Back Cover. The incredibly thin and lightweight Palm Pixi Plus adds Wi-Fi along with an optional splash of color, thanks to new Touchstone Back Covers available in pink, blue, green, orange and black for all Palm Pixi phones. Both Verizon Wireless phones will be available January 25.

The companies also introduced Palm mobile hotspot, a Palm webOS app that turns your Palm Pre Plus or Palm Pixi Plus into a mobile Wi-Fi router. The app provides wireless broadband access for up to five Wi-Fi enabled devices. Palm mobile hotspot will be available in the Palm App Catalog for Verizon Wireless customers.

Why Twitter Will Endure (NY Times)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Sat, 09 Jan 2010 20:30:00 +0000

David Carr writes on why Twitter is here to stay:

What could anyone possibly find useful in this cacophony of short-burst communication?
Well, that depends on whom you ask, but more importantly whom you follow. On Twitter, anyone may follow anyone, but there is very little expectation of reciprocity. By carefully curating the people you follow, Twitter becomes an always-on data stream from really bright people in their respective fields, whose tweets are often full of links to incredibly vital, timely information.
The most frequent objection to Twitter is a predictable one: “I don’t need to know someone is eating a donut right now.” But if that someone is a serious user of Twitter, she or he might actually be eating the curmudgeon’s lunch, racing ahead with a clear, up-to-the-second picture of an increasingly connected, busy world. The service has obvious utility for a journalist, but no matter what business you are in, imagine knowing what the thought leaders in your industry were reading and considering. And beyond following specific individuals, Twitter hash tags allow you to go deep into interests and obsession: #rollerderby, #physics, #puppets and #Avatar, to name just a few of many thousands.

Hashing Things Out (NY Times)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Sat, 05 Sep 2009 17:25:00 +0000

...Hashtags are curious words and mashed-together phrases earmarked with a hash symbol (better known, perhaps, as the pound sign). When a hashtag is included in a Twitter post, it signals which topic the tweet is believed to address. It’s shorthand that works sort of like the moment in a conversation when a big talker might say — generously to a newcomer, pointedly to a dummy — “We’re talking about the future of the Democratic Party here.” A hashtag (think #futureofthedemocraticparty) is also a link, so anyone who encounters one on Twitter can instantly search the network for that phrase. (This week’s On Language, on Page 12, has more on the etymology.)
Where library science uses shared, intuitive and (in principle) value-neutral systems for organizing information, Twitter users often classify their tweets in the most condensed, most charged and least transparent way possible. While aiming to draw people in, Twitter users nonetheless strive for unique hashtags (#freeskip instead of #gates, for example) so that searches don’t retrieve off-topic stuff. I can say this from experience: If you urgently want to know about the Gates arrest, you want to dodge tweets about Bill Gates’s quitting Facebook. That nonnews is for #billgates people.

JK Wedding Video

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Sun, 26 Jul 2009 17:02:00 +0000

Yes, it went viral, blah blah. Watch it because it'll make you smile, or bring a tear to your eye. Then read the Today Show story about it: http://tinyurl.com/nwjnu6

John Hodgman at Radio & TV Correspondents' Dinner

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Sat, 20 Jun 2009 17:57:00 +0000

John Hodgman ribs President Obama on his nerd credentials. ;-)

Forget Tom Hanks. Meet the Real Professor Langdon. (Chr. of Higher Ed)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Fri, 29 May 2009 19:15:00 +0000

By SCOTT SMALLWOOD

Tilt your head, squint, look upside down.

No matter how you look at it, it's impossible to see how a typography professor at Drexel University ended up on the red carpet at a movie premiere in the heart of Rome last month. It would take a secret society to pull off something like that.

There was John Langdon, though, with Tom Hanks, the star of Angels & Demons, who plays Professor Robert Langdon, the symbologist at the center of Dan Brown's two best-selling mystery-thrillers. (The Da Vinci Code was written later but turned into a movie first.) Of course, in both of these stories, the star is a Harvard professor. Just think of the lost branding opportunities for Drexel.

The tale of how the real Professor Langdon ended up next to the fake Professor Langdon began more than 15 years ago. That's when a mathematics teacher named Dick Brown picked up Mr. Langdon's book Wordplay, a compendium of typographical designs called ambigrams.

Mr. Langdon, who began making them in the 1970s, is generally known as one of the fathers of ambigrams, which can look like the same or different words when read from multiple viewpoints or orientations.

Link

Technorati Tags: typography, dan+brown, robert+langdon

Remembering Ron Takaki (Asian Week)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Thu, 28 May 2009 15:37:00 +0000

It is with great sadness to announce that Professor Emeritus Ronald Takaki passed away on the evening of May 26th, 2009. He is survived by his wife, Carol Takaki, his three children Dana, Troy, and Todd Takaki, and his grandchildren.

Ron Takaki was one of the most preeminent scholars of our nation’s diversity, and considered “the father” of multicultural studies. As an academic, historian, ethnographer and author, his work helped dispel stereotypes of Asian Americans. In his study of multicultural people’s history in America, Takaki seeked to unite Americans, today and in the future, with each other and with the rest of the world.

He was a professor of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught over 20,000 students during 34 years of teaching.

Link

Technorati Tags: asian american, ron+takaki

Amazon Accused of Removing Gay Books from Rankings (Mashable)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:35:00 +0000

by Pete Cashmore

Some bloggers and social media communities are taking exception today to Amazon’s removal from its sales rankings of gay or lesbian books it considered “adult” in nature.

Mark R. Probst, a gay romance author whose book was included in the action, writes in his LiveJournal blog:

On Amazon.com two days ago, mysteriously, the sales rankings disappeared from two newly-released high profile gay romance books: “Transgressions” by Erastes and “False Colors” by Alex Beecroft. Everybody was perplexed. Was it a glitch of some sort? The very next day HUNDREDS of gay and lesbian books simultaneously lost their sales rankings, including my book “The Filly.” There was buzz, What’s going on? Does Amazon have some sort of campaign to suppress the visibility of gay books?

Probst received the following reply after contacting Amazon through his Amazon Advantage account:

In consideration of our entire customer base, we exclude “adult” material from appearing in some searches and best seller lists. Since these lists are generated using sales ranks, adult materials must also be excluded from that feature.

Probst also notes, however, that Amazon has de-ranked heterosexual romance novels in its erotica section. So the allegation is not so much that Amazon is removing all gay romance (some still remains), but rather questioning whether Amazon’s standards for what constitutes “adult” material are biased against homosexual romance. It should also be noted that Amazon still sells these books: they simply no longer appear in public sales rankings.

Link

Technorati Tags: amazon.com, amazonfail, metadeta

Voice of the Century (New Yorker)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Mon, 13 Apr 2009 15:31:00 +0000

Celebrating Marian Anderson.
by Alex Ross

On Easter Sunday, 1939, the contralto Marian Anderson sang on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial. The Daughters of the American Revolution had refused to let her appear at Constitution Hall, Washington’s largest concert venue, because of the color of her skin. In response, Eleanor Roosevelt resigned from the D.A.R., and President Roosevelt gave permission for a concert on the Mall. Seventy-five thousand people gathered to watch Anderson perform. Harold Ickes, the Secretary of the Interior, introduced her with the words “In this great auditorium under the sky, all of us are free.”

The impact was immediate and immense; one newsreel carried the legend “Nation’s Capital Gets Lesson in Tolerance.” But Anderson herself made no obvious statement. She presented, as she had done countless times before, a mixture of classical selections—“O mio Fernando,” from Donizetti’s “La Favorita,” and Schubert’s “Ave Maria”—and African-American spirituals. Perhaps there was a hint of defiance in her rendition of “My Country, ’Tis of Thee”; perhaps a message of solidarity when she changed the line “Of thee I sing” to “Of thee we sing.” Principally, though, her protest came in the unfurling of her voice—that gently majestic instrument, vast in range and warm in tone. In her early years, Anderson was known as “the colored contralto,” but, by the late thirties, she was the contralto, the supreme representative of her voice category. Arturo Toscanini said that she was the kind of singer who comes along once every hundred years; Jean Sibelius welcomed her to his home saying, “My roof is too low for you.” There was no rational reason for a serious venue to refuse entry to such a phenomenon. No clearer demonstration of prejudice could be found.

Link

Technorati Tags: music, marian+anderson, , african+american

Study recordings

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Tue, 17 Mar 2009 18:46:00 +0000

The Parker Holdouts (Portfolio.com)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Thu, 19 Feb 2009 17:10:00 +0000

Conventional wisdom in the wine industry is that 90 points is the breaking point when it comes to a critic's rating: Over that magic number means you can't keep a wine in stock; under it means you can't give a wine away.

The 100-point rating system is the brainchild of übercritic Robert Parker, who developed the method in the mid-1970s for his newsletter, The Wine Advocate. Parker experimented with other ratings, including letter grades and a 20-point scale developed at the University of California–Davis, but ultimately created his own.

Any American who had gone through grammar school easily understood his system: A 95 is good, while a 75 is not. You get 50 points just for showing up.

Wine Spectator and other publications quickly adopted Parker's system, and today the 100-point scale is ubiquitous. "The entire process of making and selling wine today revolves around the scores," says Tyler Coleman, author of Wine Politics. "Parker has steered people toward finding good wines, but what's gotten lost is that it's just an opinion. When you give a wine a number, it takes on a patina of objectivity."

Occasionally critics seek out a wine to review on their own, but most often, wineries or distributors submit samples for ratings. Despite the system's importance, some winemakers don't send their wines in for review at all. "That's a game we refuse to play," says Pete Hedges, winemaker for Hedges Family Estate in Red Mountain, Washington State's hot new wine-growing region.

(More. . .)

Jennifer 8. Lee: Who was General Tso? and other mysteries of American Chinese food

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Sat, 03 Jan 2009 00:40:00 +0000

Reporter Jennifer 8. Lee talks about her hunt for the origins of familiar Chinese-American dishes -- exploring the hidden spots where these two cultures have (so tastily) combined to form a new cuisine.

TED: Benjamin Zander on music and passion

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Mon, 29 Dec 2008 17:54:00 +0000

Benjamin Zander at TED on music and passion: "Benjamin Zander has two infectious passions: classical music, and helping us all realize our untapped love for it -- and by extension, our untapped love for all new possibilities, new experiences, new connections."

Odetta, Voice of Civil Rights Movement, Dies at 77 (NYT)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:52:00 +0000

By TIM WEINER

Odetta, the singer whose deep voice wove together the strongest songs of American folk music and the civil rights movement, died on Tuesday at Lenox Hill Hospital in Manhattan. She was 77.

The cause was heart disease, said her manager, Doug Yeager. He added that she had been hoping to sing at Barack Obama’s inauguration.

Odetta sang at coffeehouses and at Carnegie Hall, made highly influential recordings of blues and ballads, and became one of the most widely known folk-music artists of the 1950s and ’60s. She was a formative influence on dozens of artists, including Bob Dylan, Joan Baez and Janis Joplin.

Her voice was an accompaniment to the black-and-white images of the freedom marchers who walked the roads of Alabama and Mississippi and the boulevards of Washington in the quest to end racial discrimination.

Rosa Parks, the woman who started the boycott of segregated buses in Montgomery, Ala., was once asked which songs meant the most to her. She replied, “All of the songs Odetta sings.”

Odetta sang at the march on Washington, a pivotal event in the civil rights movement, in August 1963. Her song that day was “O Freedom,” dating to slavery days: “O freedom, O freedom, O freedom over me, And before I’d be a slave, I’d be buried in my grave, And go home to my Lord and be free.” (more . . .)

Technorati Tags: music, Odetta, obituary

R.I.P. Odetta

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Wed, 03 Dec 2008 16:05:00 +0000

Technorati Tags: Odetta, folk+music, music

T-Mobile myFaves Yao's Comfort Food

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Wed, 26 Nov 2008 21:05:00 +0000

Yao says "eat the head!" (but my friend says he's really saying "eat the brains!"

Technorati Tags: humor, yao+min, video

Dead tell a tale China doesn't care to listen to (IHT)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Fri, 21 Nov 2008 17:50:00 +0000

By Edward Wong
Wednesday, November 19, 2008

URUMQI, China: An exhibit on the first floor of the museum here gives the government's unambiguous take on the history of this border region: "Xinjiang has been an inalienable part of the territory of China," says one prominent sign.

But walk upstairs to the second floor, and the ancient corpses on display seem to tell a different story.

One called the Loulan Beauty lies on her back with her shoulder-length hair matted down, her lips pursed in death, her high cheekbones and long nose the most obvious signs that she is not what one thinks of as Chinese.

The Loulan Beauty is one of more than 200 remarkably well-preserved mummies discovered in the western deserts here over the last few decades. The ancient bodies have become protagonists in a very contemporary political dispute over who should control the Xinjiang Uighur Autonomous Region.

. . .

Some foreign scholars say the Chinese government, eager to assert a narrative of longtime Chinese dominance of Xinjiang, is unwilling to face the fact that the mummies provide evidence of heterogeneity throughout the region's history of human settlement.

As a result, they say, the government has been unwilling to give broad access to foreign scientists to conduct genetic tests on the mummies.

"In terms of advanced scientific research on the mummies, it's just not happening," said Victor Mair, a professor of Chinese language and literature at the University of Pennsylvania who has been at the forefront of foreign scholarship of the mummies.

(more. . .)

Technorati Tags: China, archaeology, mummies, Tarim, Uighurs

Book Prizes Awarded With Nod to History

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Thu, 20 Nov 2008 20:03:00 +0000

By MOTOKO RICH

Annette Gordon-Reed won the National Book Award for nonfiction on Wednesday night for “The Hemingses of Monticello: An American Family,” a sweeping, prodigiously researched biography of three generations of a slave family owned by Thomas Jefferson.

Ms. Gordon-Reed, who celebrated her 50th birthday on the night of the awards, was the first African-American author to win the prize for nonfiction since Orlando Patterson won for “Freedom” in 1991. “I can’t say what a wonderful November this has been,” she said. “It’s sort of wonderful to have the book come out at this time. People ask me if I planned it this way; I didn’t. All of America — we’re on a great journey now and I look forward to the years to come.” The book was published by W. W. Norton. (more. . .)

Technorati Tags: books, thomas jefferson, sally hemings, historians, history, annette gordon reed,

Lose the BlackBerry? Yes He Can, Maybe

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Mon, 17 Nov 2008 21:46:00 +0000

By JEFF ZELENY

WASHINGTON — Sorry, Mr. President. Please surrender your BlackBerry.

Those are seven words President-elect Barack Obama is dreading but expecting to hear, friends and advisers say, when he takes office in 65 days.

For years, like legions of other professionals, Mr. Obama has been all but addicted to his BlackBerry. The device has rarely been far from his side — on most days, it was fastened to his belt — to provide a singular conduit to the outside world as the bubble around him grew tighter and tighter throughout his campaign.

“How about that?” Mr. Obama replied to a friend’s congratulatory e-mail message on the night of his victory.

But before he arrives at the White House, he will probably be forced to sign off. In addition to concerns about e-mail security, he faces the Presidential Records Act, which puts his correspondence in the official record and ultimately up for public review, and the threat of subpoenas. A decision has not been made on whether he could become the first e-mailing president, but aides said that seemed doubtful.

For all the perquisites and power afforded the president, the chief executive of the United States is essentially deprived by law and by culture of some of the very tools that other chief executives depend on to survive and to thrive. Mr. Obama, however, seems intent on pulling the office at least partly into the 21st century on that score; aides said he hopes to have a laptop computer on his desk in the Oval Office, making him the first American president to do so. (more . . )

Ed Levine Eats, But Not As Much As You’d Think

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Sun, 16 Nov 2008 20:53:00 +0000

Serious Eats mastermind Ed Levine jokes that his interest in food probably started because “when I came out of the womb I was hungry,” and Ruth Reichl once dubbed him “Missionary of the Delicious,” but Levine’s career didn’t always revolve around food. He wrote about jazz and pop from 1978 through 1986 for Rolling Stone and the Times, and in the early eighties did bookings for a club called Seventh Avenue South before beginning research on the guidebook New York Eats, his first foray into food writing. Today, Levine dedicates his time to extending the Serious Eats blog umbrella, which includes New York, Slice, A Hamburger Today, and dispatches from L.A., Chicago, and other cities Levine hopes will one day have their own URLs. With all the hands-on research that goes into canvassing the city for tasty bites, Levine decided earlier this year that he needed to shed some weight. In this week's New York Diet, he navigates a week of what he refers to as “dangerous” food situations.

(more. . . )

In Florida, an Initiative Intended to End Bias Is Killed

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Thu, 13 Nov 2008 04:09:00 +0000

By DAMIEN CAVE

MIAMI — An obscure ballot initiative in Florida intended to end a legacy of bias against Asian-Americans was defeated Tuesday, apparently because voters incorrectly assumed it would prevent illegal immigrants from owning property.

Had it passed, the initiative, known as Amendment No. 1, would have removed from the state’s Constitution language adopted in 1926 allowing the Legislature to prohibit foreigners who were barred from citizenship — Asian-Americans at the time — from owning land.

No such legislation was ever enacted here, and every other state that had such laws has scrapped them on grounds of equal protection. But on Tuesday, Florida’s effort to delete the provision went down, with 52 percent voting “no” and 48 percent voting “yes.”

Immigrant advocates said they were stunned.

“It’s terribly disappointing,” said Cheryl Little, executive director of the Florida Immigrant Advocacy Center. “At a time when our country has turned away from a history of racism, we have left a racist and anti-immigrant provision in Florida’s Constitution.”

(more. . .)

Mobile Content Pioneer Vindigo Shuts Down, Lays Off 30+ (Silicon Alley Insider)

noreply@blogger.com (Grace Lee) — Wed, 24 Sep 2008 15:35:00 +0000

New York-based Vindigo, a mobile content company with a history that dates back to the first Web boom, is being shut down by its owner, Japan's For-Side. Sources familiar with the company tell us more than 30 people are being laid off. Vindigo was founded in 1999 and was originally supposed to supply city guides for Palm Pilots. It survived the bursting of the first bubble, albeit in severely diminished form, and in 2004 was acquired by For-Side, which was making a foray into mobile content in the U.S. and the U.K. Some of that history is hinted at in the company's corporate bio, but for the best info, we'd suggest visiting Rafat Ali's PaidContent and MocoNews, which have spent a lot of time on the subject. At one point Vindigo also included ringtone company Zingy, but that was shuttered last year, leaving it with a handful of revenue-generating products, namely Vindigo City Guides and MapQuest Mobile.

Link

Technorati Tags: palm, handheld, travel