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Wednesday, February 05, 2020

It’s Not What Libraries Hold; It’s Who Libraries Serve

Shannon Alder commented “The only real battle in life is between hanging on and letting go.”

“One thing I believe in, to the bottom of my heart, is that we should elect more scientists to the US Congress” — Martha Nussbaum (Chicago) is interviewed about her work and politics in The Nation




Night of Philosophy and Ideas 2020




The annual “Night of Philosophy & Ideas” events will be taking place around the world over the weekend of January 31st – February 2nd, 2020 - 20200202


Intuitions and common sense are not, I claim, a good basis on which to reach philosophical conclusions.”
Those are the words of Michael Della Rocca (Yale) in a recent interview at 3:16AM.

Melissa Merritt (University of New South Wales) reviews Emotion, Reason, and Action in Kant (Bloomsbury), by Maria Borges.


Doctor who first warned about virus and was detained, falls ill
He and fellow chat group doctors were accused of spreading rumours. A few days later, confirmation came.

This continuously updated global tracker identifies confirmed cases of the coronavirus by country and region – along with total deaths and total recovered – with an additional map view.
See also  via Vice – ‘It’s a Moral Imperative:’ Archivists Made a Directory of 5,000 Coronavirus Studies to Bypass Paywalls – The potentially illegal archive is a ‘moral imperative,’ said one organizer.

    I Cut The 'Big Five' Tech Giants From My Life. It Was Hell

    How Bad Will the Coronavirus Outbreak Get? Here Are 6 Key Factors NYT


    Jerks of academe. If you spot one in the wild — at a conference hotel, across the seminar table — react as if you had seen a bear  


    Newly discovered home audio recordings of Bertrand Russell — “the tapes offer new insights into his life, humour and behind-the-scenes influences” reports the BBC

    Description

    This book will change your life by showing you how life changes. Why does happiness get harder in your 40s? Why do you feel in a slump even when you're successful? Where does this malaise come from? ...Google Books
    Originally published: May 2018
    Author: Jonathan Rauch

    A new study on international happiness found that people are most miserable at 47 years of age.

    And the good (well great) news, our happiest times come back – in our seventies.

    The research shows happiness going into a free-fall from our peak optimism at 18 years old, via thirty, flirty and thriving to bottoming out in the late 40’s – when we realise we won’t be an All Black, an astronaut, a rock-star, a world changing philanthropist – or even a mortgage free home owner.

    A midlife slump is awaiting us – and chimpanzees and orangutans also hit the same midlife slump.

    Our values and our brains change.

    We start out hard-wired for social competition, belief, hope and ambition.  But our ambition is a trickster – it never lets up and by midlife we feel disappointed, no matter how far we’ve come.  (And of course the sex hormones also start declining for men and women.)

    But there really is hope.

    With time, happiness perks back up again, according to this new research.  In fact happiness climbs back to heights seen only in our 20’s once more in our 70’s.

    So no matter how dark the middle ages seem, hold on – the Happiness Curve will see you right.

    As the t-shirt says “Ol’ Men Rule!”.


     Pete Recommends – Weekly highlights on cyber security issues February 1, 2020 – Privacy and security issues impact every aspect of our lives – home, work, travel, education, health and medical records – to name but a few. On a weekly basis Pete Weiss highlights articles and information that focus on the increasingly complex and wide ranging ways technology is used to compromise and diminish our privacy and security, often without our situational awareness. Four highlights from this week: Ring Doorbell App Packed with Third-Party Trackers; How Corporate Lawyers Made It Harder to Punish Companies That Destroy Electronic Evidence; Jeff Bezos Phone Hacking – WhatsApp Hack – Is WhatsApp Safe?; and 8 cities that have been crippled by cyberattacks — and what they did to fight them.

    The responsibilities of academic libraries have evolved, yet Integrated Library Systems (ILS) still narrowly focus on the acquisition, management, and delivery of objects while the end user remains in the background. It is OhioLINK’s belief it is imperative to shift that focus, moving from collections and holdings to those that use them. It’s not what libraries hold, but who libraries serve.
    ITHAKA S+R – Seeking a User-Centered Future for Academic Libraries – “The mission of academic and research libraries is expanding, and our work is transforming. Collections alone are no longer sufficient to articulate our new value proposition and establish ROI to our institutions. Our academic and research libraries are doing more than just managing collection-centric resources, we are contributing to faculty productivities and student success. As we aim to support the goals of our colleges and universities and maintain mission relevance, including technological advancement, we must also understand and support the evolving needs and requirements of our users…In 2018, OhioLINK engaged its membership to envision a constellation of platforms and applications that would take the next step beyond “next-generation” commercial integrated library systems (ILS). This paper is the result of that process. The business of higher education, as it relates to libraries, is amid continued and drastic change. Managing collections is now but one aspect of library management. Libraries support teaching, affordable learning, and innovative research. They are managing services and products, online and off, amid expanding service offerings and technological advancements while under added pressure to reduce costs and barriers for people who want to learn—be it for a certificate, a two- or four-year degree, or a Ph.D.

    Coronavirus on your mind? Or the flu, for that matter? — philosopher Dana Tulodziecki (Purdue) on the origins of hand-washing as a public health measure (via John Brunero)


    New ransomware doesn’t just encrypt data. It also meddles with critical infrastructure Ars Technica

    Every single stat you need to know about the internet
    TheNextWeb – “Our new Digital 2020 reports – published in partnership with We Are Social and Hootsuite – show that digital, mobile, and social media have become an indispensable part of everyday life for people all over the world. More than 4.5 billion people now use the internet, while social media users have passed the 3.8 billion mark. Nearly 60 percent of the world’s population is already online, and the latest trends suggest that more than half of the world’s total population will use social media by the middle of this year. Some important challenges remain, however, and there’s still work to do to ensure that everyone around the world has fair and equal access to life-changing digital connectivity.
    You’ll find the full Digital 2020 Global Overview Report in the SlideShare embed below, but read on to find our summary of this year’s key headlines, numbers, and trends…”


    Auschwitz, the Holocaust, and the Fog of Propaganda War Yasha Levine, Immigrants as a Weapon 

    Anecdotal reports and small-scale studies suggest that elections are stressful, and might lead to a deterioration in voters’ mental well-being. Nonetheless, researchers have yet to establish whether elections actually make people sick, and if so, why. By applying a regression discontinuity design to administrative health care claims from Taiwan, we determine that elections increased health care use and expense only during legally specified campaign periods by as much as 19%. Overall, the treatment cost of illness caused by elections exceeded publicly reported levels of campaign expenditure, and accounted for 2% of total national health care costs during the campaign period.
    That is from a new paper by Hung-Hao Chang and Chad Meyerhoefer.

    This story reminded me of a story, a decade ago Australian, Lynne Dowd, killed by lightning strike in Africa ...,

    Law.com, Big-Law Senior Associate Killed in Japan Avalanche:
    LevyA Freshfields Bruckhaus Deringer lawyer has been killed in an avalanche in Japan while on a ski trip.
    According to local media reports, Hong Kong-based senior associate Barnaby Levy was skiing away from ski runs with his brother and a local guide on Mount Pinneshiri on Saturday when at around 11:30 a.m. the group was hit by an avalanche.
    A lawyer in the Magic Circle firm’s tax department, Levy moved from the firm’s London office to Hong Kong in May 2018, according to his LinkedIn profile.