Science Library Pad

the blog is quiet

The blog is quiet for a number of reasons, including

* I have moved to using Twitter (@scilib) and FriendFeed a lot more for sharing information
* I have a new iPhone and as I discussed in my Twitter modes posting, short-posting services like Twitter are a more natural match for using on mobile devices.  You can blog from an iPhone, but it would take a lot of patience to tap a long posting out on the virtual on-screen keyboard.
* Reason I can't tell you which will be announced soon

In the meantime, you can look to Twitter and FriendFeed, e.g. for the recent ICSTI conference in Ottawa look at the #icsti2009 hashtag and the FriendFeed room.

This does point out one really unfortunate thing about Twitter search - it's not like Google, it doesn't go forever back in time.  It is intentionally limited to recent tweets.  So it looks like there was only one #icsti2009 tweet, when there were actually dozens, as you can see in the archive on FriendFeed.  (In fact making a FriendFeed room is one way to get some preservation of your tweets, although I believe FF search also doesn't cover all the way back in time either.)

And I recognize that Twitter is a much noiser information channel, full of half-formed thoughts, asides and insider person-to-person conversations.  The blog is still the best platform for long-form thoughts.

Britain's Science Minister uses Twitter for two-way discussions

Quite a few politicians have a presence on Twitter -- Barack Obama among them -- but most see it as a tool for advertising their activities rather than interacting with voters. But Lord Drayson, Britain's Science Minister, is different.

Times Online - Science Minister takes to Twitter - June 10, 2009

You can follow him: @lorddrayson

Quantum to Cosmos at Perimeter Institute - October 2009

For 10 exciting days this October, Perimeter Institute’s Quantum to Cosmos: Ideas for the Future (Q2C) will take a global audience from the strange world of subatomic particles to the outer frontiers of the universe. All events will occur on-site in Waterloo, Ontario and online at q2cfestival.com

http://www.q2cfestival.com/

October 15-25, 2009  Waterloo, Ontario

They have usual blog, Twitter, Facebook, FriendFeed.

You can attend in person, but I think all events will also be streamed live online.

There's a good list of speakers already.

World Science Festival (New York) 2009

The second annual World Science Festival, a five-day extravaganza of performances, debates, celebrations and demonstrations, including an all-day street fair on Sunday in Washington Square Park, began with a star-studded gala tribute to the Harvard biologist Edward O. Wilson at Lincoln Center Wednesday night. Over the next three days the curious will have to make painful choices: attend an investigation of the effects of music on the brain with a performance by Bobby McFerrin, or join a quest for a long-lost mural by Leonardo Da Vinci at the Metropolitan Museum of Art? Learn about the science behind “Battlestar Galactica” with actors from the show, or head to one of various panels of scientists and philosophers arguing about free will, alternate universes, science and religion, time and what it means to be human?

New York Times - Science, the Extravaganza - June 11, 2009

It runs June 10-14, 2009 in New York City. See http://www.worldsciencefestival.com/ for more information.

downtown location for new central Ottawa Public Library?

The proposed location is currently mostly a parking lot, on Lyon, between Albert, Slater and Bay. (It's not clear if the library will cover just the currently open area, or the entire square block.)  This is the view looking EAST (the clearest view as buildings block the other angles).

See in Virtual Earth.

This is the Google Maps view looking down, with the location in the centre top of the map.


View Larger Map

You can also see in Yahoo Maps.

This location is really good news.  Ottawa has a lot of wide streets and surface parking.  I was just walking down Lyon the other day on the way to ICSTI 2009 at Library and Archives Canada (LAC) and thinking what a dismal street Lyon is as you enter this part of what I would call the Central Business District (which I guess is also called Upper Town).

The former Ottawa official plan says

In the future, Upper Town will contribute significantly to the vitality of the Central Area and especially the Core, as an attractive, livable urban residential neighbourhood which focuses on a unique heritage district and enjoyable pedestrian environment.

Which if you've ever walked down the car-friendly, pedestrian-boring Lyon or Laurier in this area is pretty hilarious.  And quite sad given the density of people jammed into the hideous concrete towers on Laurier.

This location has a lot of advantages:

• it is actually central, unlike the ridiculous "Ottawa is big so let's put the central library out in the suburbs" plans previously mooted
• it is right on the major transitway routes downtown, and apparently near the planned downtown tunnel as well
• it will bring some people and street life into this pretty dead urban space
• as an added bonus, there is a big and (as far as I can tell) totally unused green space just a block away, bounded by Bay, Laurier, Slater and Bronson.  I don't know if it even has a name, Google just shows it as an empty green block.  It's actually one of the biggest greenspaces in the downtown area and currently vastly underused.  I look forward to "library in the park" events there.

The only loss in this whole equation is the Scone Witch, which was always a bit of an odd location and building - OttawaXpress put it well: "Among the parking lots and commercial buildings of Centretown's business district lies a little eatery called The Scone Witch."  But presumably it can remain nearby and benefit from much larger traffic once the library is built.

I did find it a bit odd that they announced the location (finally) because they had always said they didn't want to announce it before securing title to the land, in order not to get stuck paying inflated prices.

Many of the news outlets reported a similar story.  Here are the key points from the CBC story (which features a nice photo of the current hideous brutalist library jammed into a corner downtown):

• Jan Harder, the councillor for Barrhaven and chair of the library board, said it plans to ask the city for $26 million to go toward buying the land.
• The library's board said it plans to build a new $180-million library building in the city block bordered by Albert, Lyon, Bay and Slater streets.
• Harder said the board was hoping to have the doors to the new building open by 2014.

Here's more info from the Citizen

• at least 300,000 square feet
• the library would likely be a building of about six storeys
• the city would seek a deal with the CS Co-op, which owns most of the land, and other smaller owners
• there would be lots of room in the block of land to also build offices, stores and apartment housing.

The only thing that worries me in an otherwise positive commentary article "It's more than books" is the idea that this might be a so-called world-class iconic building.  Please people.  Stop trying to redo Bilbao.  It's been done.  Just build a nice, airy, light, functional maintainable building.  One that can handle Ottawa's extremes: -30°C winter with metres of snow, and +30°C summer.  One that can be a great gathering place for citizens, not just some tourist stop.

It is a shame that neither the library plan nor the transit plan are going to be ready in time for the current round of government infrastructure stimulus funding.

And in case you're like z0mg, $180 million dollars?! I will point out that that's less than the infrastructure money going into shiny asphalt roads in the Ottawa suburbs in a single round of stimulus funding (and just in case you think I'm ranting, the exact quote from the Citizen is "[part of the funding] will be spent on $192 million worth of road projects, including several new and bigger suburban roads.")

As I've said before, if you wondering why we have no great public buildings, it's because the money for them is all beneath the wheels of your tyres, in endless expensive ribbons of asphalt.

I've had a lot to say previously about the importance of a great central library:
July 22, 2008  the public library is for: the public
December 21, 2007  the central public library is a key civic space
August 25, 2007  America, land of the grand library

science for breakfast on the Hill

"Let's say my arms are the extent of the galaxy and I'm the black hole," she says, gesturing at her head, "our solar system is way out here," pointing at her outstreched hand.

The audience of 60 MPs, Library of Parliament workers, political staffers and scientists watches appreciatively.

Their attention hasn't flickered since she started talking 40 minutes earlier. Even those who haven't done a science course since high school often show up every month or two for a Parliamentary breakfast lecture, like this one on Thursday, from a prominent Canadian scientist.

Ottawa Citizen - Breakfast lessons for MPs bridge science, political gap - June 5, 2009

The series is put on by the Partnership Group for Science and Engineering.

UK open data, open government

I was sorely tempted to title this "would uk like some data, guv?"

The UK government is picking up the challenges issued in the excellent Power of Information Taskforce report.

Via Andy Powell in my FriendFeed, I find a Guardian article Free our data: UK set to follow successful US data method

Now the UK government has picked up on the idea, and in a post on the Cabinet Office blog Richard Stirling is asking the British public how a UK version of the US site should be implemented. "What characteristics would be most useful to you - feeds (ATOM or RSS) or bulk download by FTP?," he asks. "Should this be an index or a repository? Should this serve particular types of data eg XML, JSON or RDF?"

Although there is a list of dozens of the UK government's published data sources there is no clear pan-governmental approach to making data available. The proposal has been received with pleasure by a number of web developers and would-be data users, although it is not clear how free people would be to use the data commercially.

Richard Stirling is writing in the UK Cabinet Office Digital Engagement blog

http://blogs.cabinetoffice.gov.uk/digitalengagement/

At some point I will no longer be saying things like "yes, that's an official gov.uk blog" but... well, it is.

The four themes they list on their about page: open information, open feedback, open conversation, open innovation.

A more extensive extract of what Richard Stirling asks in his posting Information and how to make it useful :

Any solution must support open standards and would ideally be open source, but there are a couple of other questions we are pondering at the moment:

• What characteristics would be most useful to you – feeds (ATOM or RSS) or bulk download by e.g. FTP, etc?
• Should this be an index or a repository?
• Should this serve particular types of data e.g. XML, JSON or RDF?
• What examples should we be looking at (beyond data.gov e.g.http://ideas.welcomebackstage.com/data)?
• Does this need its own domain, or should it sit on an existing supersite (e.g. http://direct.gov.uk)

There are already 19 substantive comments, and he indicates they are also monitoring Twitter for the hashtags #poit (Power of Information Taskforce) and #opendata

There is a new Director of Digital Engagement, Andrew Stott, according to his official Twitter feed, @DirDigEng , he was scheduled to start in his position yesterday.

Sometimes I feel like a certain country often considered to be between the UK and the US is missing out on this whole official open data, blogging, twitter thing...

If anyone were to want someone to start blogging officially about government open data in a certain northern neighbour of the US, I am available...

has the day come for science in Canada?

At the Ottawa meeting - dubbed Science Day in Canada and organized by the Public Policy Forum - attendees considered points made by two recently released reports, one by an expert panel of the Canadian Council of Academies, the other by the federal Science, Technology and Innovation Council:

• That Canada's private sector lags behind those of most other OECD countries in its financial commitments to research and development;
• That this lag appears to be related to a lack of “innovation strategies” on the part of many Canadian companies rather than some deficiency in government policy or R&D tax incentives;
• That R&D conducted in Canada's public sector, including universities and hospitals, is among the best and best financed (on a per capita basis) in the world;
• That stronger collaboration is required among all components of the innovation chain - researchers, universities, governments and their agencies, businesses and the financial sector - to maximize the return on Canada's R&D investments.

One obstacle to more productive relations between the federal government and the STI community is confusion over exactly how and on what basis the federal government allocates funds to the science-oriented programs, agencies, councils, institutions and projects it supports.

Globe and Mail (online edition only) - Every day is ‘science day' - Preston Manning - June 2, 2009

The Public Policy Forum might want to work on its social media mojo - unless there was a hashtag I don't know about, searching Twitter for "science day" canada brings up all of 5 tweets.

I will have posts up about the CCA and STIC reports sometime this week.

Previously:
December 19, 2007  Preston Manning on federal science policy in Canada