I don’t normally expect to see things like this review from Rolling Stone mentioning the song “Librarian” on the band’s new album “Evil Urges” on the JESSE listserv as I did yesterday (though this YouTube clip wasn’t included. JESSE folks, like myself, still tend to be fairly print-centric.) Though I expect this won’t be the last time, especially given some of the library school music videos I’ve seen lately….
Very interesting piece in Current Sociology called “Assumptions, Assertions and the Need for Evidence: Debugging Debates about Knowledge Workers” by Darr and Warhurst on the different theoretical perspectives from sociological and business literature on so-called “knowledge workers.”
It’s made even more interesting by the thought that someone who knows these literatures better than I do could probably guess most of their argument without actually reading the piece simply by viewing the citation map that Sage Journals Online now includes with its journal articles. (The rest of us should read the article, as it makes some excellent points about the satanic mills of knowledge management.)
Google’s Knol has just announced its official launch, after six months in beta. Interestingly, since Knol’s distinctiveness is supposed to lie in its “moderated” feature, the fact that Wikipedia has recently announced an “approval system” which appears to work in a somewhat similar way is unlikely to be a coincidence. (I also love the fact that both competitors use the same font, which I believe is “American Garamond” regular, though if I had time, I’d certainly use Identifont to double-check….)
And here’s yet another Answer Man competitor, this one claiming to offer the “true knowledge answer engine”, (and, since it’s now in beta, perhaps at this point one might want to try it with some question about “hubris”, for instance….)
Security guru Dan Kaminsky has apparently identified a major security hole in the current DNS system that has gone unnoticed for the past 20 years. The “peer review” process involved in his find is fascinating. (And, yes, “black hats” have their own conference, of course!) You might also want to take a look at his “Weaponizing Noam Chomsky” powerpoint presentation on the right-hand side of his blog…. bet you’ll never think of “grammar” in the same way again!
This one (DNATube) is courtesy of a casual mention by someone over lunch after the board meeting of the Oklahoma chapter of the Special Libraries Association I attended on Friday. Ever wondered about the process of making a gene library or seen a keratocyte dance? Watch the videos and support the site by getting the teeshirt!