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Friday, July 4
Friday Fun Link - The WTF World of Wikipedia
by
Jason
on Fri 04 Jul 2008 05:00 PM CST
A pretty revealing list comparing word counts for various topics on Wikipedia:
 Call of Duty WWII Video Game (13 069 words) vs. World War II (11 884 words) Pokemon (5 721) vs. Poker (1 857 words) Superman (10 641) vs. Human (10 385)...and wait until you see the final result - God vs. Knuckles (of Sonic the Hedgehog fame). Yikes! Tuesday, July 1
10 Reasons Saskatchewan In The Most Canadian of Provinces
by
Jason
on Tue 01 Jul 2008 10:21 PM CST
A few years back, Canada ranked #1 in a UN survey of the best countries in the world to live in. That same year, a similar study ranked Saskatchewan as the best province in Canada to live in. So in honour of Canada Day (and with that sentiment in mind), I present the following list.
Of course, if you're going to make a list like this, the first thing you have to do is figure out what defines "Canadian" - not an easy task and something that writers, politicians, philosophers, artists and the folks on coffee row have argued about since 1867. But there are some common themes that come up in this discussion every time: hockey, the natural world, our friendliness, our politeness, our export culture, our relationship with the United States, our socialized medicine. So why is Saskatchewan the most Canadian of provinces when you consider it in light of these characteristics? 10. Geography Canada is a land that celebrates its geographical diversity from coast to coast and, contrary to the "flat boring" stereotype (or as the Corner Gas theme says: "You can tell me that your dog ran away/Then tell me that it took three days"), Saskatchewan is the most diverse province in Canada in terms of geography with eleven distinct geographical regions within its borders. (And trivia time - did you know that Saskatchewan is home to the northernmost sand dunes in the world?) 9. Export economy/natural resources The majority of Canada's wealth is based on its history as an exporting nation - from the early fur trade to being the largest supplier of oil to the US in the world today (many people, even in Canada, guess that it's a middle eastern country that is the number one supplier.) Saskatchewan is a huge part of Canada's export culture as a major exporter of oil, natural gas, potash, pulp & paper, diamonds and more. Of course there are those that would also point out that the biggest thing we export is our people and unfortunately that's often true as well. In fact, there's a popular belief among Saskatchewan residents that whenever you find a person in a position of power across Canada, perhaps not at the top of the ladder but the pivot person just below that, you'll often find a person from Saskatchewan filling the role. (One example - Ralph Goodale as Deputy Prime Minister under Paul Martin.) Saskatchewan people are apparently disproportionally represented whenever there are volunteer activities as well. 8. Friendly People In a country that's internationally renowned for its friendly, polite citizens, Saskatchewan's people are arguably at the top of the list. Why is this? A settler mentality stretching back to the province's earliest days which meant that you had to get along with your neighbours or suffer the consequences still infuses the province today - in how we deal with each other and how we welcome visitors. 7. Highway and roadways Canada is a land of travelers who are often defined by their need to be on the move. In fact, one classmate at library school did an entire presentation on the "road trip" as the ultimate Canadian experience. Saskatchewan, although admittedly with highways which leave much to be desired (the worst in Canada according to CAA!) also has the most road miles in Canada due to our grid road system which criss-crosses the province. Because of the sparseness of our population, we also think nothing of driving 3 or 4 or 6 hours for a one-day visit with relatives or whatever. (I'll always remember the FIMS classmate who was shocked that Shea and I decided spontaneously to drive to Niagara Falls from London one day - a round trip of six hours.) 6. Weather Canadians are obssessed with the weather and no where is this more true than "Next Year Country" where, with our agriculture-based economy, the local weather forecaster is the most important person on the nightly news broadcast. Saskatchewan holds a number of Canadian weather records including most annual hours of sunshine (Estevan), heaviest hailstone (Cedoux) and hottest day (Midale). 5. Relationship with the United States Some would say that our entire culture is based on our relationship with the United States - how we're similar, how we're different. In fact, the Canada Day issue of MacLean's this year is titled "How Canada Stole the American Dream". And nothing shows how clearly Saskatchewan leads the way in this differentiation from our southern neighbours than the story about how, in the 1950's, an American publisher produced a social studies textbook with a map showing all of the communist countries on earth in red including Russia, China, Cuba and...Saskatchewan! 4. Inferiority Complex Sort of related to the last point, a big part of why we're always comparing ourselves to the United States is that Canada has "little brother" syndrome (the more popular analogy is the one about a mouse sleeping next to an elephant.) Saskatchewan suffers from the same affliction except it's Alberta who is our "big brother" - a close relative who's more glamourous, richer, better looking and drives a bigger car - who we seek to emulate in many ways even as we put them down as too focused on money/fame/power/etc. 3. Hockey Saskatchewan produces more NHL players per capita than any other province, state or region in the world. 'Nuff said. 2. Generosity of Its People Canadians have a long history of selfless dedication to and for others - whether its Terry Fox or Dr. Norman Bethune or Stephen Lewis. But as a province, nobody can top Saskatchewan which is so generous during Telemiracle, an annual province-wide telethon, that the province has been awarded a place in the Guinness Book of World Records in recognition of the fact. An average year over the course of the thirty years of the telethon would see $1-3 donated for every man, woman and child in the province. In 2007, that record was destroyed when more than $5 was donated per capita! 1. Medicare Perhaps more than any other value, our socialized medicine system is a point of pride for the people of this nation, especially in light of the dysfunctional system that exists just south of us. As everyone who watched him win the CBC's "Greatest Canadian" competition, this innovation began in Saskatchewan with a man who was born in Scotland, raised in Manitoba and came to define the province he called home for most of his life - Tommy Douglas. Sunday, June 29
Link Dump - Middle of the Night Version
by
Jason
on Sun 29 Jun 2008 03:52 AM CST
I'm
not sure if I put Pace to sleep tonight or he put me to sleep but at
8pm, we were both in bed, crashed out. So that means I wake up now and
am going to be completely messed up tomorrow. Oh well - the same thing
we always say when he naps at an unusual time - "he's tired - he needs
it" applies to my little nap tonight as well!
Here's some randomness...apologies if you were the person who sent me one or more of these links. I've lost track of where I got them. "The Mother's Milk of Literacy: How Breastfeeding May Improve Literacy" - to which I say, "no duh!" The Science of Early Brain Development - you'll have to click on the first search result to see the PowerPoint presentation Neat New Stuff on the Internet - by librarian, Marylaine Block. "The sites I include are usually free sites of substantial reference value, authoritative, browsable, searchable, and packed with information, whether educational or aimed at answering everday questions." "It Takes A Village of Librarians To Raise A Teen" "Schools should continue to require library research so kids can learn how old folks used to Google stuff." "The Times (UK) Makes 200 Years of Newspapers Available Online for Free" "Reading The Future: Planning To Meet Canada's Future Literacy Challenges" - a new study has lots of stats and info from the Canadian Council on Learning "Dealing With Book Clutter" - includes a list of questions that could be used with slight modification during weeding at your library PaperbackSwap.com - a site that the previous linked article led to which allows you to swap books (and CD's and DVD's) with others. It appears to only be for US-based people right now (or people with access to a US mailing address) but still worth taking note of in case they expand to Canada in the future. "Who Says Librarians and Teachers Don't Like Tags?" And for a big, non-library-related finish, "What skills would be most useful if you could time travel back to 1000 A.D." (Man, it always feels good to get this accumulated kludge off the books!  )Saturday, June 28
So You Wanna Write A Memoir? - An Exhaustive Guide
by
Jason
on Sat 28 Jun 2008 11:58 PM CST
Entertainment Weekly magazine is one of my guilty pleasures. In fact, I had a subscription to it in the early 1990's right after it began publication. And I was surprised to see that last week's issue marked its 1000th issue!
I still read EW on a fairly regular basis but now it's visits to the local public library for a range of back issues (or when I'm in the area, the one local library branch that permits loans of the most recent issues of their magazines - how cool is that?) A recent issue had an article about the memoir and included a list of every possible permutation of the genre - memoirs by geography, occupation, addiction, disease and even who had to die in the author's life to provoke the writing of the memoir, etc. Friday, June 27
Friday Fun Link - 50 Best Cult Books (June 27, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 27 Jun 2008 10:59 PM CST
"What is a cult book? We tried and failed to arrive at a definition:
books often found in the pockets of murderers; books that you take very
seriously when you are 17; books whose readers can be identified to all
with the formula "<Author Name> whacko"; books our children just
won’t get…"
50 best cult books - Telegraph 50 best cult books - Telegraph Friday, June 20
Friday Fun Link - The Last Lecture (June 20, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 20 Jun 2008 11:57 PM CST
I think I first heard about "The Last Lecture" via a book request we got at the library. The Amazon page for the book has more info including a couple video clips explaining the background and significance of this particular Last Lecture.
A bit more searching revealed that the full video of the original Last Lecture presentation at Carnegie-Mellon University is on YouTube (of course). It's an hour long clip but if you watch the first couple minutes, there's a good chance you'll want to watch the whole thing. Wednesday, June 4
Time To Read Gala Windup (& Five Non-Library Related Reasons I Love My Job)
by
Jason
on Wed 04 Jun 2008 11:51 PM CST
Today, I went to the wind-up of Time To Read, a joint project of Southeast Regional Library and the Prairie Valley School Division. I was part of the initial steering committee for this project which started last summer but had to reduce my role when I went on the road for most of January, February and March.
The wind-up was a blast - hundreds of kids in a school gym, prizes, a great slideshow (I'm hoping the steering mounts it online eventually) and an appearance by everyone's favourite rodent, Gainer the Gopher (the beloved Saskatchewan Roughriders mascot for those who may not know.) That couldn't have worked out better - we were discussing possible celebrity partners early in the project and the idea of approaching Gainer was raised by our coordinator who had a connection with the Riders. Gainer turned out to be perfect - he has appeal to kids of all ages plus parents and other adults we were trying to reach, he's a province-wide icon who could be used again if this project becomes a template for similar partnerships between other school divisions and regional libraries in the province and little did we know when we got him confirmed but the Riders went on to win the Grey Cup last fall for what, only the third time in their entire history? Perfect timing! So what was my point? Oh yeah, a list that has been percolating as I've spent many miles on the road the past few weeks doing branch visits for weeding, some final computer training, mini-workshops for librarians who couldn't make our semi-annual training session due to bad weather and so on. FIVE REASONS I LOVE MY JOB (THAT HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH LIBRARIES) 1. I get to travel lots Some people don't like driving or spending time on the road but I've always enjoyed it, ever since my days selling cable TV subscriptions door-to-door around Saskatchewan during undergrad. (That's a whole different entry I'll do someday!) Semi-related but not worth a point of its own is the fact that our region has company vehicles so we don't have to use our own vehicles as was always the case everywhere else I've ever worked. 2. We are a small organization I report directly to the Library Director. We only have four professional librarians in the entire organization, maybe a dozen staff working out of headquarters and somewhere around 100 staff regionwide so there's not a lot of extra layers or bureaucracy. There are monthly Supervisors' meetings where issues are hashed out and decisions are made. If needed, we can change course very quickly. 3. We have a beautiful HQ building I haven't seen any other regional headquarters but have heard that ours is one of the nicest in the province. It only makes sense since my boss grew up in his family construction business in Ontario and oversaw the design and construction of this building. Great, high ceilings, a massive board room, a design that creates quasi-cubicles for clerical staff but in a way that doesn't make them feel like cubicles, an exercise area with free weights and a treadmill plus cable TV to watch while you work out (or so I've heard - if you've seen recent photos of me on this blog, you know I haven't visited it that often), a parking garage for company vehicles and the coolest photocopier I've ever had the pleasure to operate in my life (it still jams on me on a regular basis though!) 4. We have a great team. Many managers think that things would be perfect if only they could get staff who thought exactly like they do. But the reality is that the ideal staff has a wide mix of personality types, perspectives and attitudes. It's more of a challenge for the senior manager(s) but creates the most effective workforce. 5. I have an office It's a small detail but I have colleagues in different libraries who are working in cubicles, sharing workstations with co-workers or who don't really have *any* space to call their own. So having an office is a pretty big deal for a new librarian apparently. (I've always had an office in my previous workplaces and though I'd heard of "cubicles", it was a term I mostly knew from Dilbert so didn't realise how rare this might be.) Friday, May 23
Friday Fun Link - Spectra Visual Newsreader (and Some Thoughts on Some Other, More World-Changing Future Technologies) (May 23, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 23 May 2008 11:39 PM CST
Spectra is a new visual news reader from MSNBC. I haven't played around with it much but it looks cool, mostly because the news spins in a circle instead of the old-fashioned columnar approach. Whoo-hooo!
On a much broader scale, I've recently come across a couple lists predicting of technologies that will change the world put together by groups that know a thing or two about cutting-edge technology. IBM has posted their second annual "Five in Five" list and MIT's "Technology Review" journal has posted their list of "10 Emerging Technologies for 2008". What's especially cool about the MIT list is that you can click to past lists going back to 2001 (excepting 2002 when their super-secret crystal ball technology apparently broke down) to see if their predictions have come true yet or not. Here's the 2001 list and I won't be so presumptuous as to pretend I have a clue as to where the world is at with most of these (or even what some of them mean!). Brain-Machine Interface Flexible Transistors Data Mining Digital Rights Management Biometrics Natural Language Processing Microphotonics Untangling Code Robot Design Microfluidics But some, like data mining and DRM are definitely ones people involved in the information world are struggling with now. One final thought...my own bold prediction for the future. At some point in the very near or not so near future, people will begin to wear a small recording device that constantly captures the video and audio of every moment of their lives. This will be stored by some sort of advanced system (think Google on crack - voice recognition, natural language processing, high level artificial intelligence) that allows people to search for pretty much any type of information about their lives instantaneously: "what did I have for lunch in that cafe in Montreal in 2009?", "where did I leave my sunglasses?", "how much have I spent on gas in the last 12 months?" I recently heard about U of T engineering prof Steve Mann during Michael Ridley's presentation at the SLA conference and he's been on this path for, oh, almost thirty years already. I also came across an article (which I didn't bookmark and can't find now but maybe it was in Wired?) about somebody else who was doing something similar - wearing a computer that could OCR things he looked at like his hotel and flight reservation then transfer it into a database for easy retrieval later. I think there was also a web site that performed this function for him or that was trying to do something similar for people mentioned in the article but again, can't remember the name of it. Not keyhole.com but maybe something like that? [Edit: Found it. Twine.com] Oh, and I'll also predict that the natural reluctance people feel towards this privacy-destroying, possibly society-altering device will be no different than the acceptance rate for any other new invention. [2008-06-29 - Edit #2 - I don't think Twine was what I was thinking of. Here's the article from Salon about someone using a technology called Evernote that I think was what I was looking for originally. And while I'm adding stuff, here's a story about how new technologies will eventually allow us to add 1 TB of data on a thumbdrive. Doesn't this sound exactly like I what I'm talking about: ""All the current limitations in portable electronic storage could go away. You could record video of every event in your life and store it."] Wednesday, May 21
The Quest for Every Beard Type
by
Jason
on Wed 21 May 2008 11:11 PM CST
As you may have noticed in the Flickr pics from Pace's birthday, my "winter beard" is gone ("winter beard" being a very loose definition - some years it doesn't appear until January as happened this year, some years it sticks around for pretty much 11 months as I think was the case while I was at library school.)
Anyhow, it's always a bit of a minor milestone when the beard either begins or ends and so this site which records one man's quest to attain every beard type struck a chord. Like him, I often take the ritual "shaving of the beard" as an opportunity to try a five-second version of "hey, what would I look like with a fu manchu/goatee/soul patch/mutton chops/etc."? Unlike him, I will not be posting photos of my experiments! (via Reddit) Friday, May 16
Friday Fun Link - 13 Rule Breaking Films (May 16, 2008)
by
Jason
on Fri 16 May 2008 11:23 PM CST
"For all the creativity and innovation that goes into making (some)
Hollywood films, there are also a lot of ideas that get recycled time
and time again. I’m not referring to stock characters or the sequalitis
that hits multiplexes every summer. I’m talking about the basic
building blocks of storytelling that are ingrained in the movie-going
experience.
Every once in a while, though, a film comes along that takes an assumption about how American movies are supposed to be made and changes it, sometimes resulting in something truly memorable. Producers who want to make a film that breaks one of the unwritten rules of motion pictures risk a lot – studios might not want to fund the film, theaters might not show it, audiences might not respond to it. The reward for taking the chance, though, is recognition for being a really interesting experiment, or, in some cases, taking your place among the greatest films ever made." GLI Press: Review: 13 Rule-Breaking Films |
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