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jrjacobs's blogNature Magazine: Big Data, Environmental Data[Note: this was cross-posted on Free Government Information] The Journal Nature has a special issue about "Big Data" with articles by Clifford Lynch, Cory Doctorow, and others. The whole issue is worth reading and is freely available online for a short time.
In the area of government information, David Goldston, the former chief of staff of the House Committee on Science, writes about environmental data.
He notes that there is no set of environmental indicators that is regularly updated -- something akin to economic statistics -- and that a report by the Heinz Center on the State of the Nation's Ecosystems (www.heinzcenter.org/ecosystems) is chock-full of lists of subject and geographical areas for which few if any data exist. He calls attention to the Data Quality Act, which, "has been anathema to environmental groups, which have seen it as a way to stymie regulation. And it has been primarily invoked by corporations questioning studies that raise alarms about their products." (The act is less than half a page in a public law of more seven hundred pages (Public Law 106-554 Sec. 515; Statutes at Large volume 114, pages 2763A-153 to 2763A-154, available online as plain text and as pdf). He also says that, "Even when instrumentation is regularly funded, as some kinds of satellites are, money is often lacking to maintain the data or to make them sufficiently accessible or digestible."
Must read: Library at Night by Alberto Manguel
Machine converts light from microfiche reader to music on a Casio keyboardAt last month's Maker Faire, Andrew (aka Pillowsopher) showed off his microfiche-to-MIDI machine. The microfiche machine takes light (in this case, from the screen of the microfiche reader) and converts it into MIDI signals that can then be sent to devices that take MIDI input, like synthesizers or computers. Andrew made the machine for a SF band called Microfiche. Anyone want to go to their next show on June 6?
Happy RSS day!Wow, today is a convergence day of holidays! Not only do we have May Day, International Workers' Day, and Loyalty Day, but now there's also RSS Day! RSS (aka "rich site summary") is the little XML file that could; that is, RSS can help librarians and readers in general collect and read the stuff in which they're interested. See the video below for a really good, straighforward description of RSS.
Here comes everybodyClay Shirky gave a talk last month (click on the image to get to the video) at the Berkman Center for internet and Society covering some of the ideas from his incredible new book Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations. The focus of the talk is Shirky's notions about the enabling power of the Web and along the way he has a lot of interesting things to say about sharing, conversation, collaboration and collective action. There's a lot of power in sharing and Shirky points to several interesting examples of that power. Here Comes Everybody: The Power of Organizing Without Organizations (Event Video/Audio)
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