Science Library Pad

bold new programming opportunities for... public libraries?

When I listened to this talk from Mark Ramsey about public radio, it made me think about the challenges that public libraries and libraries in general have in finding their audiences.

It works best if you (manually) combine listening to the audio with his slides on Slideshare, as he refers to a lot of the visuals.

Via CBC Radio Spark, specifically their Twitter feed, also thanks to Mark Ramsey for letting me know his slides were online.

EDUCAUSE signs letter calling for appointment of US Science Advisor

In a letter sponsored by the American Association for the Advancement of Science and the Association of American Universities, EDUCAUSE joins others in urging the two presidential candidates to appoint a science advisor by the time they are sworn into office. It also asks that they upgrade the status of that advisor, given the importance science plays in many of the challenges facing America.

EDUCAUSE Signs Letter to McCain and Obama Regarding a Science Advisor for the Future Administration

In the US this falls under the Office of Science and Technology Policy

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

While I'm in this political sphere, I should mention that both candidates answered written questions from Science Debate 2008 and that Obama answered written questions from Nature.

Senator Obama's answers can be found as part of http://www.nature.com/news/specials/uselection2008/

Geolocation: 7 things you should know

The latest in the EDUCAUSE "7 Things You Should Know" is the topic of geolocation.

Geolocation, also called geotagging, is the practice of associating a digital resource with a physical location. Location information is typically given in terms of latitude and longitude coordinates, which can pinpoint any place on the planet with a high degree of precision. If a photographer includes the coordinates for where a picture was taken, for instance, the value of the photograph is increased, for both the photographer and others who have access to the photo and its metadata.

7 things you should know about... Geolocation (PDF)

For more info from EDUCAUSE, see

http://connect.educause.edu/Library/ELI/7ThingsYouShouldKnowAbout/47212

NOTE: Cross-posted to my GPS technology blog.

butterfly show at Carleton until Oct 13 2008

The Carleton Biology Department is proud to once again present our annual Butterfly Show.

Dates: October 4 to 13, 2008

Times: 9:00 am to 4:00 pm daily

Place: Nesbitt Biology Building, Carleton University

http://www.carleton.ca/biology/butterfly/

via Carol in Facebook

Google turned up a nice Flickr set - Carleton Butterfly Exhibit

Some more info

Ottawans are invited to share in the magic of butterflies as Carleton University hosts its live butterfly show starting this weekend.

An estimated 10,000 people are expected at the show, which this year features more than 1,000 tropical butterflies of 30 different species.

They were shipped in - still in their chrysalises - from London, England, said Ed Bruggink, the greenhouse manager at Carleton University. “I try to get different species every year because we get repeat visitors,” he said.

An ‘innocent, fragile’ butterfly blitz - Metro Ottawa - October 2, 2008

I wonder what happens to them after the exhibit.

femtosecond measurements and quantum labs - upcoming lectures

A Passion for Precision  

Femtosecond laser optical frequency comb synthesizers have become the established tool for measuring the frequency of light with extreme precision. By permitting phase-coherent comparisons of optical and microwave frequencies, they can serve as the clockwork for ultraprecise optical atomic clocks....

A passion for precision will be presented in English by Professor Theodore W. Hänsch, Nobel Laureate in Physics.  Part of the University of Ottawa New Horizons Lecture Series.

Tuesday October 14, 2008 at 4 p.m.
University of Ottawa, Desmarais Hall,
4th Floor, 55 Laurier Avenue East, Ottawa (Ontario)

I think registration is required.  I don't know if it's supposed to be by invitation only, but it's on the web, so whatever.

Towards a Quantum Laboratory on a Chip

Microfabricated atom chips provide an interface to the quantum world. Magnetic traps, waveguides, and other elements for the manipulation of ultracold atoms can be combined to form a quantum laboratory on a chip. ...

Presented as a Joint NRC – University of Ottawa Scientific Lecture

National Research Council Canada
Auditorium - 100 Sussex Drive, Ottawa
Wednesday, October 15 2008, at 2:00 PM

An informal reception with coffee and refreshments will follow in the library
(RSVP Not Required)

Singapore 2025 science - and novel presentation

This showed up in my FriendFeed

a map of predictions about global science and innovation created at a recent IFTF workshop in Singapore (the interface is a novel service for online presentation called ZuiPrezi

Future of Science on the (ZuiPrezi) map - Freelancing science - September 30, 2008

You can see the presentation, or "prezi" at

http://zuiprezi.com/prezi/297/view/

(It's Flash-based, and may take a while to load fully.)

This is doubly interesting because not only are the ideas themselves useful for thinking about the future of science, but the presentation allows you to move around the ideas like moving around a map.

I've always felt we are very limited by PowerPoint, everything ends up as bullet slides - or at most we try to fight that by having photo slides.  We're on computers that can run video, play audio, show screencasts, and with the Internet, can do anything from (the always risky) live demos to live video.  And yet it's usually

• bullet point
• other bullet point

Zuiprezi is showing some of what is possible when you think outside the PowerPoint box.

If the interface isn't clear, you can click to zoom in, drag around, or use the controls in the lower right to follow the presentation trail and zoom in and out.

Research Libraries - No Brief Candle

I want to highly recommend the CLIR Report

No Brief Candle: Reconceiving Research Libraries for the 21st Century

It's available for free PDF download.
It got quite a wide readership and positive reaction at my organisation.
It does a great job of discussing the challenges, particularly the ways in which scholarly communication is being transformed.

This brief entry doesn't really do it justice, but I am long overdue in mentioning it.

semantic library - planning the training

In the model of Five Weeks to a Social Library, I see in my FriendFeed today a posting from Fiona Bradley about putting together a Semantic Library training program online.  It's still in the initial planning stages, you can have a look at the program outline at

http://semanticlibrary.pbwiki.com/Learning-Program

The wiki is open for people to sign up, you just need to enter the password you'll see at the bottom of the login screen.

For those of us who deal more with academic content, I think semantic concepts and Semantic Web services may become even more important than social networking is right now.

(Whew, I got through all of that without saying "from Library 2.0 to Library 3.0".)

Describing the Semantic Web can be a bit complicated, I think of it as enriching our current text content on the web so that machines are able to do more processing for us - enabling us to build much more powerful scientific search and reasoning systems.

As I said in my presentation Building SkyNet for Science, invoking (and extending) Ranganathan and Noruzi: "every web resource its machine reader" (slide 13).

Previously:
September 08, 2008  semantic search thoughts

library support for open science

A nice overview of the challenges and opportunities for academic libraries as we plan to support 2020 science.

The Future of Research (Science and Technology)

View SlideShare presentation or Upload your own. (tags: library research)

Some calls out to the Microsoft Towards 2020 Science report as well as various open science and science data initiatives.

From a presentation to the British Library Board on an Awayday (a charming term) by Carole Goble.
If the embedded presentation isn't working, you can also try it directly on Slideshare, or download the PowerPoint.

via FriendFeed

Previously:
March 23, 2006  various ideas about the future of science and computing

Talk Science at BL and in SL - Wednesday 24 September 2008

TalkScience@bl.uk is a series of events hosted by the British Library, providing opportunities to inform, engage, debate and network with scientists and all those who use scientific information.

Wednesday 24 September 2008

• Is Web2.0 all about attitudes or technologies?
• What can Web2.0 do for your research?
• As a scientist, are there good reasons for getting involved beyond social ‘not working’?
• Web3.0: another buzzword or a semantic revolution for science on the web?

Timo Hannay is the Publishing Director of Nature.com. ...

Timo will be speaking live in the British Library and the event will be simultaneously screened on Second Nature. Following Timo’s talk, attendees from both the British Library and Second Nature will have the chance to question Timo and discuss the topics raised.

Date: Wednesday 24th September [2008]

Time: 18:00 – 20:30 London time, 10:00 – 12:30 PDT [1300-1530 EDT]

Location: Second Nature Island

Scientific Researchers and Web 2.0: Social 'NotWorking'? - Joanna Scott's blog - September 16, 2008

via FriendFeed

Globe on social networking

The Globe and Mail had a multi-part series on social networking, here are the articles:

Part 1: Faceless no more

Part 2: When widgets attack
    Spammers, phishers and hackers seek personal information that social networks pledge to keep safe

Part 3: kids flock to social networks

Chat Transcript: The perils of social networking

Web 2.0 in government? Yes.

Michel-Adrien Sheppard, reference librarian at the Supreme Court of Canada gives the update on the latest meeting of the Federal Government Librarians Web 2.0 Interest Group.  Some highlights:

# The Industry Canada library has launched an internal wiki and implemented RSS feeds for content
# The Bank of Canada is looking into creating wikis for its economists and for developing guidelines for the use of social networks by its employees
# NSERC, the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada, has been using LinkedIn and Facebook to recruit people to sit on its science grant committees
# The Communications Security Establishment, Canada's electronic intelligence agency, uses wikis, mashups and social bookmarking
# The Privy Council Office is examining the possibility of using wikis and blogs to replace newsletters

More News From Federal Library Web 2.0 Interest Group - Library Boy - September 16, 2008

enabling IR compliance by pre-populating

I wanted to highlight some great work by Mark Leggott and his team at UPEI in building a system that demonstrates how you can connect a bunch of services and technologies together using a good platform, in order to get a powerful combined experience.

In brief (in my understanding), the Repository in a Box takes as input the metadata of your institution's academic output, then based on that metadata creates accounts for individual academics listing all of their papers, and on a per-article-record basis adds information from SHERPA/ROMEO about the policy of the publisher on OA, and an OpenURL link so you get to publisher and other appropriate copies.

So in a case where the policy allows deposit of the post-print PDF from the publisher, you're one click away from depositing that article.  If not, the author has all the metadata needed to find the right version to submit.

I think this is brilliant.

The only thing I've seen that is similar is BibApp (see Code4Lib 2007, and IDEALS@UIUC: BibApp Presentations).  I saw that at Open Repositories 2008.

don't predict the future, create it

Give me a lever and the place to stand, and I shall move the earth.
- Archimedes

See Wikiquote - Archimedes for the Greek and the actual phrase.

In trying to plan for the future, to perform the strategic planning that is a core activity of Enterprise Architecture, you must stand in the right place.

Specifically, you must stand in the future, in the envisioned target state, and look back, to determine the plan.

If you stand in the mire of the current state, and you try to look forward, your boots will never get unstuck.

Hindsight, as they say, is 20/20.

If you stand in the present, and look forward, it's like looking into mirrored one-way glass.  Looking forward from the present, you see only the current state reflected back at you.  Start from your current set of running projects, and all the many many details of your organisation's resources, and tasks and operations, and you will never stride out of that minutiae to reach the future.

But when you stand instead in the future, and look back, you can see right through the one-way glass, you can see all the steps you needed to take to get there.  You have to, therefore, plan by first creating the future, envisioning it in target statements, mockups, use cases, whatever is a meaningful description to you of what your organisation does, in 2012, or 2015, or whenever.

Then look back... in 2015, we're providing semantic search for chemistry, so how did we get there, well we must have created an index of chemistry terms out of the literature, and we must have gotten some semantic search tools to extract and unify this terminology, and a nice user interface so chemists could enter queries... so that means we must have been holding full-text articles and had the rights to index them... and we must have developed a basic search capability... and on back in time until you reach 2008.

This can be done.

The alternative is to stand around in 2008, and say "we're doing a bunch of stuff, and then... um technology changes somehow and... then the entire competitive environment shifts and... then we do a bunch more stuff... and then err, a miracle occurs and then we have semantic search in 2015".  You can't get there from here.  You can't get to the future by speculating forward from the present.

Don't predict the future, create it.^*

* Alan Kay said "The best way to predict the future is to invent it."

a cloud of copyrights?

It seems to me this copyright situation is a tricky thing.

For example at the bottom of Cameron Neylon's presentation Science In The Open: or How I learned to stop worrying and love my blog, which he has made CC-BY with a logo on the first slide, there's © 2008 SlideShare Inc. All Rights Reserved.

On the bottom of Knol, Google's system for providing information pages with clearly identified authors, even on Knols with explicit Creative Commons licenses, there's ©2008 Google

At the bottom of FriendFeed, a service many of my network are using to comment and share, there's ©2008 FriendFeed

I'm no copyright law genius, maybe John Wilbanks or someone can help me out here, but isn't there a conflict between the creator holding the copyright under Berne convention, the service declaring that it is the copyright owner, and content being placed in the Creative Commons?  Who is really the copyright holder here?  What do these copyright notices cover, everything BUT the user's content?  Is the user explicitly surrendering their copyright to the hosting site?

iTunes and classical music

CBC radio says that their show In Tune (Saturday 5:00 p.m.) will be looking at iTunes and its impact on classical music this Saturday (September 13, 2008).

iTunes will be 8 years old this coming January 2009.

Air Canada: wifi yes, cellphone no

Travellers will be able to click their way onto Air Canada's new WiFi service next spring as the carrier teams with Aircell LLC to install a mobile network.

The Montreal-based airline will start with two 120-seat Airbus A319s, charging $12.95 plus tax for each passenger who connects wirelessly to the Internet while flying between Toronto and two destinations in California - Los Angeles and San Francisco.

Air Canada then plans to gradually roll out Aircell's "Gogo" system across its fleet in North America.

...

Air Canada won't be enabling "cellphone voice usage," arguing that the cabin in the sky is one the "last bastions of solitude" away from being bombarded by cell conversations in everyday life.

Internet to take to skies with Air Canada - Globe and Mail - September 10, 2008

National Science & Technology Week 2008

October 17 to 26, 2008

The main site at science.gc.ca - National Science and Technology Week

There will be a variety of events in the National Capital Region, including

Title: Research Lab Tours
Location: National Research Council Canada, Montreal Road Campus [Ottawa]
Target Audience: High school groups (registration required)
Date: Monday, October 20 and Tuesday, October 21, 2008

Senior high school students will have an opportunity to tour NRC facilities and get a close-up look at fascinating research in the field of hydraulics, coastal and offshore engineering, and housing design and technology. This opportunity is especially appropriate for youth interested in pursuing careers in engineering. School groups only; space is limited; registration is required. For more information, contact Kate McLaughlin at kate.mclaughlin@nrc-cnrc.gc.ca

the 2008 Canadian Web 2.0 toolkit

I'm not going to comment about the Canadian election here, but I do think it is useful to survey the web tools they're using, I think we can see a bit of a "2008 consensus" among the parties, not on policy but on how to reach Canadians on the web.

The winners (of Canadian social networking) are two US sites: YouTube and Facebook.
(Facebook is more popular in Canada than MySpace.)

Usual suspects Flickr and Twitter are also prominent, and to my surprise, even FriendFeed is being used.  Flickr was created in Vancouver but is now part of Yahoo (USA), the other two are also in the US.

Just to be clear - this is a quick look at what Web 2.0 / social network sites are prominent on the individual sites, it's not a comprehensive survey.  It's mostly what I could see on the home page or the "social networks" page, if I could find one.  Pretty much all of the parties are on all of these sites, just it's not as obvious with some of them, or it may be an individual candidate rather than an official party presence.

Prime Minister (Conservative Party) - official government of canada site
* YouTube
* Facebook
* Flickr
* Twitter

Conservative Party
* Facebook
* Digg
* Flickr
* Twitter
* YouTube
* FriendFeed
* MySpace

NDP
* YouTube
* Flickr
* Facebook
* Twitter
* FriendFeed

Liberal Party
* YouTube
* Facebook
UPDATE 2008-09-14: Liberal Party Social Networks section now also shows
* Twitter
* Flickr
* MySpace
ENDUPDATE

BQ
* Facebook (but not easy to find)

The BQ seems to have an emphasis on blogs, to the point of "Blogue Québécois" being a big link on their front page.

Green Party
* I wouldn't dare leave out the Green Party, but they seem to only have blogs (although many individual candidates have Facebook pages buried in a list somewhere on the site).

Canada S&T Museum - Cafe scientifique, Iron Science

Should Doping Be Tolerated in Competitive Sports?

Experts say that some drugs used by athletes are undetectable at present. Also, some performance enhancement techniques are already accepted by sports organizations. Is it worth the effort to keep sports "clean"?

This is the subject of the first Café scientifique for the autumn/winter season. Come and join the discussion. Guest experts will be on hand to get the discussion rolling.
Admission is free but you have to pay for your food and drinks.

UPDATE 2008-09-11: Café scientifique provides a forum where adults can explore current issues relating to science, technology and the environment in a relaxed atmosphere where all opinions are welcome. This fall, the Canadian Museum of Nature is pleased to partner with the Canada Science and Technology Museum for a monthly joint Café scientifique series. ENDUPDATE

Tuesday, September 30, 2008: 6:00 p.m.
Location: Fox and Feather Pub, 283 Elgin Street, Ottawa

http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=30902832203

If you want to know more about the concept, there is of course Wikipedia - Café Scientifique.

Iron Science is apparently some science teacher competition they're running on Discovery Channel, the local event will be

Ottawa: Science and Technology Museum (entry deadline Sept 22, 2008, playoffs Oct 24)
http://www.new.facebook.com/event.php?eid=19686864057

and the finals will be Friday, November 21, 2008, University of Calgary.

I don't know if you can find this info on the Canada S&T Museum website, I gave up looking pretty quickly.