Category — General

Licensed Librarians:
They license librarians in the Philippines. I wish they would do this in the US. Reasons forthcoming in my column for Information Today (February 2007 issue). (via)
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perhaps a licensure of librarians is a good thing…

“The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.”: An Opportunity for the Republican Machine:
[Christopher] Lohse, a social work master’s student at Southern Connecticut State University, says he has proven what many progressives have probably suspected for years: a direct link between mental illness and support for President Bush.

Lohse says his study is no joke. The thesis draws on a survey of 69 psychiatric outpatients in three Connecticut locations during the 2004 presidential election. Lohse’s study, backed by SCSU Psychology professor Jaak Rakfeldt and statistician Misty Ginacola, found a correlation between the severity of a person’s psychosis and their preferences for president: The more psychotic the voter, the more likely they were to vote for Bush.
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this is quite interesting…

Whither Information Architecture?:
Peter Morville (author of Ambient Findability) wonders out loud about the future of Information Architecture as a discipline, as well as about the role of IAs. Then a bunch of smart people comment… [Tags: information_architecture peter_morville librarians taxonomy folksonomy everything_is_miscellaneous]
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is information architecture dead? I think that the plurality of practices centered on organizing web-based information and making it interactive is under severe threat as a profession… primarily because of the binary of quite a few very high skilled people with 100x more less skilled people in the same field. that creates tensions and it will only be a matter of time before the higher skilled people figure out ways to keep the lesser skilled people out.

Under Surveillance (Flag) Mini Sticker:

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There are many great stickers here.

Spotlight News – Carnegie Mellon University:
Despite the portability of laptops, only a minority of students used them off campus, accounting for only 2 percent of the overall time spent on assignments. The exception was the strong tendency to work at home. Students reported preferring the comfort of working at home even though they recognized the greater educational value of working with other students on campus.

Working at home was also associated with negative social and psychological effects, such as loneliness and the erosion of a sense of community. Even when students did get help from peers, it was often online rather than face-to-face. This is something for educators to consider when designing optimal workspaces for learning, which should include features that provide physical comfort, such as comfortable furniture, access to food and lighting control. Researchers say comfortable, functional learning spaces can foster the sense of community that students reported they lost when using their laptops.

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well there is more to it than that, but i’m not sure if their findings are actually representative of laptop use of subcultural differences amongst students.

Virginia Tech | Invent the Future :
Virginia Tech ranks #1 (again) in college and university vanity license plates
Hokie Nation has taken to Virginia’s highways. . . and they have the license plates to prove it.

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this is sort of like “we’ll always have paris” where… you’ve never been to paris.

The Claremont Institute: The Era of Big Ideas is Over:
Do liberals think that conservatives’ fundamental ideas are wrong? Or do they think that having fundamental ideas is wrong? In the intramural debate over liberalism’s meaning and future these questions have become contentious. But whether this is a real debate between distinct alternatives or just much ado about nothing remains to be seen.

Certainly, the liberal world is abuzz with the idea that it needs Big Ideas. Kenneth Baer and Andrei Cherny, the editors of the new quarterly Democracy, seek to revive liberalism by “grappling with essential questions about how the world works and how it should work.” According to Michael Tomasky, writing in The American Prospect, “What the Democrats still don’t have is a philosophy, a big idea that unites their proposals and converts them from a hodgepodge of narrow and specific fixes into a vision for society.” He calls this “the crucial ingredient of politics, the factor that helps unite a party (always a coalition of warring interests), create majorities, and force the sort of paradigm shifts that happened in 1932 and 1980.”

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of course, one of the problems is that rhetoric has pushed politics back into an either-or situation. people think you need to vote or you don’t have democracy, you can be free or not free, etc. all of those binary structures limit the compositional freedom of thought.

RIAA wants the Internet shut down:
RIAA wants the Internet shut down

ONE OF THE lawyers involved in defending cases bought against people by the RIAA claims that if the music industry wins a crucial case, the Internet will have to be switched off.

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switched off? hah!

Imperial History:

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middle east history by maps and empires.