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Once a week I get four allergy shots and then sit in a small waiting room for thirty minutes to make sure I don’t have any ...

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I happened upon this mini-library in my neighborhood and am so impressed with the movement that Little Free Library has started that I am getting one together for our street. The concept is simple: put a charming box full of books in a public place, encourage people to share them and to contribute their own. From their FAQ: If this were just about providing free books on a shelf, the whole idea might disappear after a few months. There is something about the Little Library itself that people se...  show all text

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Farscape was why my spouse and I bought a TiVo. It was a show we discovered not long after we got married and that we were soon watching faithfully. But we discovered after our babe was born in 2001 that live television watching wasn’t compatible with baby minding, and we rediscovered the unreliabilty of taping shows on a VCR. We couldn’t do without Moya and her crew, and so we bought a first-generation TiVo, along with a lifetime subscription to its services. We’ve been proselytizing the joys ...  show all text

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Nature can be extremely devious in the way it hides its secrets.  Sometimes the most remarkable and profound insights are staring us right in the face every day in the most mundane phenomena. For instance, we have all seen the spectacular colors that can appear in soap bubbles: Image from Microscopy-uk.org.uk, by Michael Reese Much. Borrowing his lovely images until I can produce my own! These colors are produced by optical interference, as we will discuss below; the “thin film optics” that c...  show all text

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The last couple of days, there's been a fair amount of blogosphere angst over Coding Horror's "Please Don't Learn to Code." Ironically, the best argument for learning to code appeared this morning, when it turned out that Judge William Alsup in the Google case could program, and learned Java in the course of the trial, and wasn't going for Oracle's claim that a short range-checking function was days of work. Alsup recognized immediately (and says he wrote the function hundreds of times during t...  show all text

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‘When people first discover that I am a historian of medicine, they often falter as they try to process this information. Most of the time, the response is: “That’s a real job?” It is an innocent reaction, not intended to be insulting, and is usually followed by a barrage of questions about my research. What kind of work does a historian of medicine do? Were people really bled by leeches in the past? How long did it take surgeons to amputate a limb before the discovery of anaesthetics? At the e...  show all text

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 BY JOHANNA DRUCKER Breslauer Professor of Information Studies at the University of California, Los Angeles The basic challenge for humanists comes from adopting visualizations that don’t suit our fundamental epistemological values. Obviously humanism is not monolithic. But methods of statistical analysis and empirical observation are grafted onto the humanities, they were not created from within the traditions of textual analysis and study. Put simply, the distinction between humanistic and e...  show all text

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QRator won the award! Well done to everyone @UCLDH @digitalurban @clairey_ross @clhw1 @melissaterras well happy! http://t.co/zeLeoPGR

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Cross-posted on the Inside Search Blog Search is a lot about discovery—the basic human need to learn and broaden your horizons. But searching still requires a lot of hard work by you, the user. So today I’m really excited to launch the Knowledge Graph, which will help you discover new information quickly and easily. Take a query like [taj mahal]. For more than four decades, search has essentially been about matching keywords to queries. To a search engine the words [taj mahal] have been just ...  show all text

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Much of a city's history is written in its architecture, its infrastructure, and even its natural geographical features. Over time, however, much of that history is lost. Buildings are leveled, and rivers and subway lines are entombed in the ground, interred forever to make room for taller buildings, wider roads, and longer passages. More »

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Was the plot to poison the Dalai Lama real? How successful are contact-poison assassinations likely to be? Find out on Elemental, the newest addition to the Wired Science Blogs network, where Pulitzer Prize-winning science journalist Deborah Blum will be investigating chemistry, poisons and the myths and mysteries that surround them.

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http://www.perspirationjournal.com /wp-content/uploads/2010/09/Thoreau _Simplify-223×300.jpg There is an interesting piece on ProfHacker this week called “Simplify, Simplify!” Ryan Cordell asks if we really need all that stuff around us.  As he prepares for a cross country move Cordell is philosophical about what’s worth bringing and what goes in the garage sale pile.  He mentions Thoreau who had three nice pieces of limestone on his desk and then realized that they needed to be dusted daily.  ...  show all text

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antwerpenR/Flickr Caffeine addicts, rejoice: all the coffee you're downing over the course of a day could be lengthening your lifespan. For real. According to research published today in the New England Journal of Medicine, people who drank four or five cups of coffee a day tended to live longer than those who drank only a cup or less. The benefit was more pronounced for women, but men also stand to gain somewhat from pounding joe. Coffee-drinking men cut their risk for death by 12 percent aft...  show all text

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If you’re plugged into the Internet, chances are you’ve seen a TED talk – the wonky, provocative web videos that have become a sort of nerd franchise. TED.com is where you go to find Facebook COO Sheryl Sandberg explaining why the world has too few female leaders, or Twitter cofounder Evan Williams sharing the secret power of listening to users to drive company improvement. The slogan of the nonprofit group behind the site is “Ideas Worth Spreading.”

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Announcing the next Knight News Challenge: Data Photo Credit: Flickr user Koen Vereeken The Knight News Challenge is being offered three times this year, in short, focused rounds to better mirror the...

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There seems to be a lot of topic modelling going on at the moment. Any why not? Projects like Mining the Dispatch are demonstrating the possibilities. Tools like Mallet are making it easy. And generous DHers like Ted Underwood and Scott Weingart are doing a great job explaining what it is and how it works. I’ve talked briefly about using topic modelling to explore digitised newspapers, something that the Mapping Texts project has also been investigating. But I’ve also been following with intere...  show all text

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The Electric Mind written by Jessica Benko. The Atavist, 2012. Kindle Singles, The Atavist app , iBooks, and other outlets via The Atavist website. Reviewed by Ed Yong Throughout the history of neuroscience, we have gained an inordinate amount of knowledge by studying people with severe brain damage, and watching how they manage to live. HM’s surgically altered brain revealed secrets about how memories are formed – after his death, he was revealed to be an American man called Henry Molaison. K...  show all text

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A Ruby programming tutorial for journalists, researchers, investigators, scientists, analysts and anyone else in the business of finding information and making it useful and visible. Programming experience not required, but provided.

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The associate editor of Genomics says its publisher Elsevier effectively denies developing world access to research findings Today I resigned from the editorial board of a well respected journal in my field – Genomics.  No longer can I work for a system that provides solid profits for the publisher while effectively denying colleagues in developing countries access to research findings. It has not been an easy decision to make. Some may feel that I'm grandstanding or making a futile gesture. And  show all text

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This is the third in a weekly series of posts leading up to the mini-conference The War of 1812: Whose War was it Anyway? being held at the University of Waterloo on May 30th. By Ian McKay and Jamie Swift Warmonger politicians customarily indulge in high rhetoric, attempting to rally the citizenry round the flag and boost the bloodletting. Or when invoking the glories of past wars. The War of 1812 was no exception. Those who witness war’s gruesome reality often remember things differently, as do  show all text

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T. Mills Kelly encourages his students to deceive thousands of people on the Web. This has angered many, but the experiment helps reveal the shifting nature of the truth on the Internet.  lisaquinn565.wordpress A woman opens an old steamer trunk and discovers tantalizing clues that a long-dead relative may actually have been a serial killer, stalking the streets of New York in the closing years of the nineteenth century. A beer enthusiast is presented by his neighbor with the original recipe f...  show all text

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