What I’m Reading – 8/8/09
August 8, 2009
- Newsweek – August 10/17 2009
- Israel’s Chief Diplomat Goes M.I.A. – Israel’s top diplomat takes a trip to South America when Obama’s Middle East envoy, defense secretary, and national security advisor come to negotiate. He’s ultra-right wing and apparently an embarrassment to Israelis.
- Iran’s Widening Fault Lines – Economic differences between Khamenei and Ahmadinejad have the supreme leader reducing the president’s powers behind the scenes.
- No End to Earmarks – Despite Obama’s pledge to crack down on earmarks, the practice continues. Not a surprise to me – earmarks are a fundamental way to keep in good standing with your constituents and with lobbyists. What would the Congressional incentive be to stop?
- Russia’s Dry Well – While the world economy is starting to mend, the damage in Russia will take longer to recover from. $200 billion in debt, and businesses won’t be making huge profits in the coming year.
- New York Times
- Job Losses Slow, Signaling Momentum for a Recovery – The panic of this recession begins to subside as the number of eliminated jobs for July drops to 247,000 from a high in January 2009 of 741,000.
- U.S. and Pakistan Say Taliban Chief is Believed Dead – A drone has taken out the leader of the Pakistani Taliban. The war goes on.
- Conservatives Warn Ahmadinejad Not to Defy Ayatollah on Cabinet Picks – Two days after he is inaugurated, Ahmadinejad is told to stick to the conservative party line.
- MSNBC’s Olbermann and Fox’s O’Reilly Fire Up the Insult Machines Again – Just as I was getting hopeful, two networks disappoint. The battle between personalities continues, while American commentary suffers.
- Microsoft’s SharePoint Thrives in the Recession – “SharePoint is saving Microsoft’s Office business even as it paves the way for a new era of Microsoft lock-in,” said Matt Asay, an executive at Alfresco, which makes an open-source content management system. “It is simultaneously the most interesting and dangerous Microsoft technology, and has largely caught its competitors napping.”
- Richmond Times Dispatch
- Recession Hasn’t Cut Enrollment for Some Schools – The University of Richmond was aiming for 805 students this fall, an increase from last year’s 738. We now have 926 first-year students registered for the fall. It turns out other area schools had a similar enrollment experience.
- Guyland
- Chapter 5 – The Rites of Almost-Men: Binge Drinking, Fraternity Hazing, and the Elephant Walk: College life for young men is described, with one shocking episode after another. I continue to search for a rigorous approach to the subject, but the argument of the book continues without qualification or much quantitative information.
- Milton among the Philosophers
- Chapter 2: The Life of the Soul: The Cambridge Reaction – Just getting started with this chapter, which discusses Cudworth and More’s attempts to justify the ways of atoms to God.
What I’m Reading – 8/7/09
August 7, 2009
- New York Times
- White House Is Struggling to Measure Success in Afghanistan – What are the right metrics for success in Afghanistan? Congress (rightly) demands some measure of the progress of the war, but choosing the right things to monitor can undermine congressional or public support.
- The Chronicle of Higher Education
- A Laboratory of Collaborative Learning – “Undergraduate libraries have never been revenue generators, but, if this pattern of declining use does not change, many of them may soon seem like costly anachronisms.” “Housed in separate buildings, with fewer occasions for interaction and mutual understanding, faculty members and librarians may develop a weak sense of solidarity regarding their complementary roles in the institutional mission.” I’m sorry to say, but MISO Survey data backs up these concerns. I hope the author’s experiment this fall is a successful engagement with his academic library.
- The Best 371 Colleges (Princeton Review) – Rollins College – Reading up on Rollins, having received news of a colleague who will be taking a position there in the coming weeks.
Short reading day today, as the University of Richmond closes at noon so employees can spend the rest of the day at Busch Gardens. Maybe I’ll get some additional reading done in the car, but don’t count on it.
What I’m Reading – 8/6/09
August 6, 2009
- New York Times
- For Today’s Graduate, Just One Word: Statistics – Graduates with a statistics background are “finding themselves increasingly in demand – and even cool.” “‘The key is to let the computers do what they are good at, which is trawling massive data sets for something that is mathematically odd,’ said Daniel Gruhl, an I.B.M. researcher whose recent work includes mining medical data to improve treatment. ‘And that makes it easier for humans to do what they are good at — explain those anomalies.’”
- China Sees Progress on Climate Accord, but Resists an Emissions Ceiling – China says it will likely sign on to an agreement to reduce greenhouse gasses, but pushes back on capping emission of greenhouse gasses. “China now emits more carbon dioxide than the United States, although it remains well behind when populations are measured on a per-person basis.” Bilateral negotiations with the Obama administration are characterized as “quite fruitful.” Let’s hope.
- New Entry in E-Books A Paper Tiger – Barnes and Noble’s new e-book offering boasts almost twice as many books as Amazon, and gives you access on your PC or Mac. Their e-book reader won’t be available until 2010 (coming from Paper Logic). The catch is that most of the books at B&N are already available through places like Project Gutenberg. In short, they’re not the books you’re looking for. And the functionality of the various applications isn’t up to the good experience Amazon’s Kindle offers. Still, I’ll have to get a couple of books through B&N this weekend to see how it works for myself.
- Guyland
- Chapter 4: High School: Boot Camp for Guyland – High school boys learn to conform or be ostracized. Kimmel suggests a radical change of the culture around high school boys. I am sadly skeptical that so many different types of people need to change what they do: teachers, coaches, parents, peers. Culture rarely changes so drammatically, yet Kimmel makes it clear that broad changes are necessary.
- Chapter 5: The Rites of Almost-Men: Binge Drinking, Fraternity Hazing, and the Elephant Walk – In college, peers initiate peers into manhood, despite their lack of qualifications to do so. The anecdotes are extreme, and I find myself wishing for a more tempered argument in the book.
What I’m Reading – 8/5/09
August 5, 2009
- Creating an On-Demand Learning Experience – Echo360 presents a webinar on their new Building Block for Blackboard. 25 licenses for faculty to create videos using their laptop (screen capture, audio, webcam). Each account can post 10 presentations/3GB max. Intended to compliment classroom learning/video capture.
- Slashdot
- US Marine Corps Bans Social Networking Sites – This may explain why Fred has been quiet on Twitter lately. The Marine Corp implements a one-year ban on access to social networking sites, including Facebook, MySpace, and Twitter.
- New York Times
- Bill Clinton and Journalists in Emotional Return to U.S. – Euna Lee and Laura Ling have returned from prion in North Korea. A happy ending to a troublesome story.
- ACRL Member of the Week: Lucretia McCulley – Boatwright Library’s own Lucretia McCulley is the focus of an ACRL profile.
What I’m Reading – 8/4/09
August 4, 2009
- Parabola
- Kosiya, the Buddhist Scrooge – The king’s treasurer learns that “Generosity makes space in the mind and heart, while hoarding creates an interior prison.”
- New York Times
- Giant Particle Collider Fizzles, Adding to the Mysteries of Life – Electrical problems with the Large Hadron Collider mean it will be years, if ever, before its most ambitious work can be attempted.
- Obama Administration Weighs In on State Secrets, Raising Concern on the Left – In a friend of the court briefing, the Obama administration inserts an argument that the state secrets law is constitutional, not based on common law. Hardly a settled opinion, many on the left are dismayed at the administration’s position given Obama’s statements “that he wants to limit the use of the state secrets privilege.”
- Radio Free America – In an op ed piece, Nancy Sinatra argues for broadcast radio performance royalties for performing artists. Rather than directly argue for her royalties, she cites the destitute Helen Forrest, a 1940s big band singer. I’m not sure how many big band radio stations are out there anymore, but I doubt that revenues are sufficient to pay performance royalties.
- Bill Clinton in North Korea to Seek Release of U.S. Reporters – In Bill Clinton’s first public mission since his wife became Secretary of State, he travels to Pyongyang to seek the release of Laura Ling and Euna Lee. Disclaimer: my brother has been a big supporter of the movement to free the journalists.
- The Chronicle of Higher Education
- New Web Site Compares Student Outcomes at Online Colleges – A grant-funded web site looks to explain the programs available through online institutions and assess the effectiveness of those programs.
- Augmenting Human Intellect
- Detailed Discussion of the H-LAM/T System – Just getting started with this section. Considering the abridged version of this in The New Media Reader for a New Media Studies course we hope to teach in the spring term, but reading the full document for myself.
- Slashdot
- Student Sues University Because She’s Unemployable – Having graduated from Monroe College in April, a student sues in July, charging that the school’s Office of Career Advancement didn’t help her. The Slashdot comment thread should be interesting.
- Richmond Times-Dispatch
- Victim Assistance Academy graduates hear from one who was helped – Joan Neff’s program just finished its second year at the University of Richmond. The Center helps the Victim Assistance Academy by supplying a handful of laptops. It’s always nice to be even a small part of a program that’s making a difference in people’s lives.
The New Library Web Site
August 3, 2009
Andy Morton, along with others in the Library, and Eric Palmer and the Web Services group have just this morning launched the new University of Richmond Library web site. As Andy mentioned in a message on Twitter this morning, it’s a project he’s been working on since October 2008. I know he’s been thinking about the new site for a lot longer than that.
Much research has been done on how students, faculty, and staff use the library site, and the new design reflects both an effort to help our community access the content they need as efficiently as possible as well as an effor to engage with our community however they want to connect.
One of my favorite features on the new site is the all-in-one search bar at the top of every web page. From one tabbed interface you can search our catalog, our journals, our databases, our research guides, or the library site itself. Just click on a tab and either enter your search terms. It’s a significant step toward the dream of an integrated search across all resources, and I know a lot of work went into the design and functions of this feature.
The new site is more visual than any of our prior library sites, highlighting the library’s services and some of the resources they’ve created. Search through the Richmond Daily Dispatch to read newspaper articles from 1860-1865. Check out our campus paper, The Collegian, with archives online from 1914-2003. Visit Amarica at War 1941-1945 and view documents from the Federal Depository Colelction at UR.
Our library is connected to the social network. Check out Boatwright Everywhere on the library home page to discover links to Facebook, YouTube, Flickr, and Twitter. Boatwright Library is at the center of our university’s academic life and you can keep up with what’s going on through these links.
Data from the MISO Survey indicate that the frequency of use and importance of library web sites is going down. I will be curious to see how the revisions we’ve made to our web site change the way our community interacts with library resources and services.
What I’m Reading – 8/3/09
August 3, 2009
- The Chronicle of Higher Education
- An Intellectual Movement for the Masses – Positive psychology fights off New Age approaches that detract from ongoing scholarship.
- Will Higher Education Ever Change as It Should? – Robert Zemsky proposes methods for bringing about systemic change in higher education. I’m not certain he does a thorough job of outlining the specific problems he seeks to correct. Zemsky focuses on the Bologna Process in Europe, which “has resulted in greater integration and cooperation.” Those are good goals, but I’m not certain they are what Zemsky finds lacking in US higher education.
- New York Times
- At Louvre, Many Stop to Snap but Few Stay to Focus – Fine art today is quickly browsed rather than considered. “So tourists now wander through museums, seeking to fulfill their lifetime’s art history requirement in a day, wondering whether it may now be the quantity of material they pass by rather than the quality of concentration they bring to what few things they choose to focus upon that determines whether they have ‘done’ the Louvre.”
- Google Chief Resigns as Apple Director – Eric Schmidt steps down from the Apple board in a move that’s been anticipated since Google announced their own operating system.
- The Puppy Whisperer – A nice article about training a puppy, perfect for sharing with my animal-enthusiast daughter.
- Slashdot
- Students Settle with Turnitin in Copyright Case – Just beating a deadline for a Supreme Court appeal, students who sued Turnitin have settled.
- Guyland: Chapter 3
- Masculinity is largely a “homosocial” experience: performed for, and judged by, other men.
- Noted playwright David Mamet explains why women don’t even enter the mix. “Women have, in men’s minds, such a low place on the social ladder of this country that it’s useless to define yourself in terms of a woman. What men need is men’s approval.”
- Ask Us! Boatwright Library Is Ready to Help! – A new video from my friends at Boatwright Library encouraging students to ask a librarian for help.
- Parabola – Imagination (Spring 2009)
- “The Heart Eater” – A story from Sierra Leone about a genie who eats the hearts of villagers. Translated from the Mende and retold by Ishmael Beah.
- Milton Among the Philosophers – Chapter One – Mechanical Life: Descartes, Hobbes, and the Implications of Mechanism – A much-needed introduction to the philosophical debates that informed Paradise Lost.
- “Science, or natural philosophy, was only then in the process of separating itself from what we call philosophy.”
- “To the extent that one accepted Epicurean atoms as a metaphysical first principle, one was brought into conflict with orthodox beliefs in the incorporeality of the rational soul, freedom of the will, and Genesis creation.”
