Mystery Disease Fells Hundreds of Wyoming Elk. Wildlife officers have euthanized about 200 elk after finding them starving, dehydrated and unable to move. By Mindy Sink. [New York Times: Science]

This could turn out to be quite interesting. Large numbers of large mammals do not usually die for no reason.   comment []1:44:28 PM    

Most Depressing Moment of the CIL Conference.

Mary Lee Kennedy is offering her "Top Tech Trends," and instant messaging is one of them. She asked how many of the hundreds of people in the room use IM for work purposes, and six (maybe seven) hands went up. If you take away Aaron, Michael, Bob, and me, that leaves two hands. Two freaking hands from people at a tech conference who use IM for work!!!!!!

[The Shifted Librarian]

SO many information professionals are behind, mostly because their organizations have not yet made the leap to the new Age and still live with Industrial Age illusions.  comment []1:39:45 PM    

Heard at the CIL Conference.

"It's obvious. We have to do wireless at Internet Librarian." - Bill Spence (presumably this means at all future InfoToday conferences, too!)

"We're in a room full of Lisa Simpsons, but the world is full of Barts." - Stephen Abrams (approximate quote)

"We'll [meanint InfoToday] have RSS feeds soon." - Bill Spence

"The deck is stacked against students when they walk into the library. It's like winning at slots if they actually find what they want." - Jeff Wisniewski

"Students don't come to our site to learn. We built it, they came, they got confused, and they left." - Jeff Wisniewski

"I'd like to see a library dump the $20,000 virtual reference software and just get an AIM screen name." - Michael Stephens (approximate quote)

"The future is bright for complexity." - David Seuss

"As somone who has recently landscaped his house, I can officially say that storage is cheaper than dirt." - Roy Tennant

"If you put 1,000 options on my home page, are you really helping me?" - Mary Lee Kennedy

"85% of kids under age 25 have an IM account, usually more than one. They're having conversations on the web. When they get into the workforce, they are not going to want to get letters from their librarians." - Stephen Abrams

[The Shifted Librarian]

Several of these are going to enter my list. The Lisa and Bart one for sure.  comment []1:38:14 PM    

Gilligan meets Led Zep. Ever wonder what the theme song from "Gilligan's Island" would sound like if it were set to the tune of Led Zeppelin's "Stairway to Heaven"? Well, wonder no more. (From the Viral Marketing Blog.)... [seattlepi.com Buzzworthy]

This is just weird to hear. Why can't we have great TV theme songs like thi, set to classic rock tunes. How about 'Where Everybody Knows Your Name' to '(I Can't Get No) Satisfaction'  comment []1:34:28 PM    

ETA / Al Qaeda - who did it?.

The first answer is; no one can be sure until the evidence is in. The second one; no one can be told until the votes are in.

[Crooked Timber]

Well, the votes are coming in and more evidence indicates that Al Qaeda may be involved. So we could have another government getting in trouble for following the US while its people disageed.  comment []1:25:35 PM    

Another nail in the coffin of classic terrorism. The mass protests in Madrid prove yet again that "terrorism" as a method of warfare is deeply flawed.  It doesn't achieve the desired results:  to coerce or delegitimize a nation-state.   It does exactly the opposite:  it hardens the policies and increases the popular support of a nation-state.  Given that terrorist organizations are learning organizations run by educated, sane individuals (almost all the psychological literature on terrorists points to this), it is only a matter of time before classic terrorism gives way to something much more effective. [John Robb's Weblog]

This would sure make a libely comment at a party. Most would not use the term educated, sane individuals.  comment []1:24:09 PM    

Taming RSS.

Blogger Tristan Louis has published some thoughtful and thought-provoking observations about the flow of information and ideas in the blogosphere.

A few weeks ago, my list of subscribed feeds went over 300. That was the beginning of a sobbering experiment. While it is technically possible to follow 300 siets via RSS, it's not for the faint-hearted. I've since been prunning the list a little as it became more and more time consuming to go through all the entries. While I felt like I must be failing somehow, Sebastien Paquet pointed out that the median number of subscriptions people have is under 100.

I suspect this is where the power laws actually become useful. Because some blogs are disproportionally read, they can be seen as flag-bearers in the blogosphere. Because they are so powerful, they can easily shape opinions in the blog world. And because they do so, one can limit the number of blogs they read in order to get an idea as to consensus among blogsters. This is great in that those powerful bloggers become editors of sorts.

There is, however, a problem with that. As recently reported in a Wired News story, the most-read webloggers aren't necessarily the ones with the most original ideas. This means that the power laws succeed in a mainstreaming of ideas but fails in terms of coming up with new ones. This, unfortunately, means that there is a bit of a pack mentality among power bloggers which can only be counter-balanced by reading blogs that are not as popular. [Smart Mobs]

But, I read mst of those blogs because they are connectors, being the first to FIND the obscure idea or link, not because they are the first to HAVE the idea. Those are mavens and are important too. But, without connectors to find mavens, you do not have much hope.  comment []1:15:02 PM    

A little light reading.

Papers I read on the plane home yesterday:

• Implementing dynamic AOP using abstract schema by Rickard Öberg
• Sense-Making and Knowledge Collaboration Tools by Dr. Jeffrey Conklin.

Rickard is doing a lot of thinking (& acting) in the Aspect Oriented Programming (AOP) field. I think it's pretty exciting and fully expect AOP to be as mainstream, in 3-5 years, as OOP is today. I'm playing with Dynaop which is a very low impact AOP solution for Java written by "Crazy Bob". It's a great package and laughably easy to get started with.

Sense making is I guess one of my key themes these days. My work has taken me from the mainstream of KM (i.e. document management) into the world of organisational complexity, deep collaboration, wicked problems, patterns in information and making sense of it all. In particular this paper introduced me to Issue Based Information Systems (IBIS) and how they affect tools & approaches.

[Curiouser and curiouser!]

A little light reading.  comment []1:11:53 PM    

Simon Caulkin's perspective. Here's an excerpt from Simon Caulkin's excellent article in this morning's Observer (just posted by Ben Toth). "How's this for a winning publishing formula? A university funds scientific research; the research is turned into a paper by an author, who pays a colour illustration and reprint charge - say, £1,000 - and surrenders the copyright for the privilege of publishing his findings in a specialised journal. Peers review the work for free, then the publisher prints the article - and sells it back for a hefty fee to the institution where the work was carried out in the first place. Welcome to scientific publishing....It may not stay that way for much longer....[T]he scientific publishing shake-up is due to a combination of unsustainable monopoly and online technology that undermines the cost basis of traditional publishing....But even in the short term, there will undoubtedly be a richer, more competitive publishing ecology. And you don't need a scientific journal to tell you that richer competition equals greater benefits for science - and poorer profits for the likes of Reed Elsevier." [Open Access News]

Scientific publishing WILL change over the next decade. Another business model in severe turmoil.  comment []1:11:26 PM    

Tracking Disease Outbreaks from Outer Space. Forecasting the emergence of an infectious disease by coupling local data, such as the ecosystem parameters and disease data, with images from satellites is not a new idea, but the technology is here and works, says this article from RedNova. The approach mixes data from high-tech environmental satellites with old-fashioned, "khaki shorts and dusty boots" fieldwork. NASA is setting up a satellite-based malaria pilot study in the Mewat region of India. The goal is give warnings of high disease risk in a specific area up to a month in advance in order to prepare vaccination programs and save people and animals. [Roland Piquepaille's Technology Trends]

A nice use of high tech.  comment []1:09:01 PM