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Google Blog: “New inventions have fueled fantasies and shaped human society—from the first stone tools to robotic arms, steam engines to jet propulsion, pieces of paper to the internet, and hieroglyphics to emoji. Take the telescope, for example. Today, the Hubble Space Telescope orbits 340 miles above the Earth, capturing crisp images of 10,000 galaxies …
DigitalHumanities: “What connects Open Source Software development, scholarly edition making, Linked Open Data, and Digital Sustainability? All of them rely our human capacity for managing fine detail as much as or more than they rely on technological infrastructure. Although Digital Humanities often tends to focus on the macroscopic, with text mining, visualization, and distant reading, …
TorrentFreak: “The University of California (UC) is the latest institution to cancel its subscription to leading academic publisher Elsevier. UC cites high costs and the lack of open access research among the reasons. This likely means an increase in traffic for Sci-Hub, the site that’s often referred to referred to as ‘The Pirate Bay for …
EFF: “Earlier this month, OpenAI revealed an impressive language model that can generate paragraphs of believable text. It declined to fully release their research “due to concerns about malicious applications of the technology.” OpenAI released a much smaller model and technical paper, but not the fully-trained model, training code, or full dataset, citing concerns that …
“OCLC, a leading library technology and research organization, has published The Library 100: Top Novels of All Time, a list of the novels most widely available in libraries today. The list is based on data in WorldCat, the world’s most comprehensive database of information about library collections. Produced and maintained by OCLC and individual member …
“We are excited to announce the finalists of the 16th Annual Smithsonian.com Photo Contest. This year, we received more than 48,000 submissions from photographers in 207 countries and territories. From dynamic portraits to breathtaking landscapes, these 60 images stood out to our photo editors as the most unique and memorable. Readers’ Choice voting is now …
BookRiot: “You might have seen bookmarks advertising their existence stacked neatly on the circulation desk at the library. Maybe they were included in the acknowledgements of a local literary event’s brochure. Perhaps their name was noted as a supporter of a float in the town’s parade. Or, it’s possible you even attended one of their …
UC Office of the President: “As a leader in the global movement toward open access to publicly funded research, the University of California is taking a firm stand by deciding not to renew its subscriptions with Elsevier. Despite months of contract negotiations, Elsevier was unwilling to meet UC’s key goal: securing universal open access to …
The Atlantic – For the college-educated elite, work has morphed into a religious identity—promising identity, transcendence, and community, but failing to deliver: “…The decline of traditional faith in America has coincided with an explosion of new atheisms. Some people worship beauty, some worship political identities, and others worship their children. But everybody worships something. And …
Pew FACTANK: “About a quarter of American adults (24%) say they haven’t read a book in whole or in part in the past year, whether in print, electronic or audio form. Who are these non-book readers? Several demographic traits correlate with non-book reading, Pew Research Center surveys have found. For instance, adults with a high …
VentureBeat: “Mozilla wants to make it easier for startups, researchers, and hobbyists to build voice-enabled apps, services, and devices. Toward that end, it’s today releasing the latest version of Common Voice, its open source collection of transcribed voice data that now comprises over 1,400 hours of voice samples from 42,000 contributors across 18 languages, including …
The New Yorker – Are Robots Competing for Your Job? Probably, but don’t count yourself out. [For decades the internet heralded the demise of librarians – now it is AI perhaps – but we will still think – not!] “..The old robots were blue-collar workers, burly and clunky, the machines that rusted the Rust Belt. …
