July 23, 2013
Does Open Access Diminish Publishing Opportunities for Grad Students?
The American Historical Association just released a statement that "strongly encourages graduate programs and university libraries to adopt a policy that allows the embargoing of completed history PhD dissertations in digital form for as many as six years." The statement is aimed at publishers who are disinclined to consider books based on dissertations that have been made freely available in open access databases. Some responses cite a 2011 survey, "Do Open Access Electronic Theses and Dissertations Diminish Publishing Opportunities in the Social Sciences and Humanities?," that found most publishers self-reported they would indeed consider publishing such dissertations, but also suggested university libraries are refusing to buy books based on dissertations that have previously been available online. "The Road From Dissertation to Book Has a New Pothole: the Internet," a 2011 article from the Chronicle of Higher Education, quotes editors who are wary of publishing such books, and discusses the process by which students can restrict access to their work at companies like ProQuest, "the electronic publisher with which the vast majority of U.S. universities contract to house digital copies of dissertations." [more inside]
"Sometimes he talks about art in his sleep."
The Pixel Painter is a short documentary about Hal Lasko, a 97-year-old artist who paints in Microsoft Paint. [more inside]
"So a sardine is not a sardine is not a sardine!"
The Sardine Museum with host Tony Nunziata (part two, part three, part four, part five). Bonus: Tony tells a short story. [more inside]
Seeing.Thinking.Drawing
Francis Ching is professor emeritus of architecture at the University of Washington who keeps a blog of his city-focused sketches. Discussion varies from thinking about construction and layout to materials and focus when drawing scenes.
Grant Hart's new record The Argument finally out
Previously mentioned back in in 2012, The Argument, a concept album with influences from Milton's Paradise Lost and William Burroughs, has at last appeared. [more inside]
Zdeněk Burian
放浪息子 Hourou Musuko, Wandering Son
放浪息子 Hourou Musuko (often translated as Wandering Son) is one of the better depictions of transgender life in manga and anime (and maybe in any medium). It's a slice of life drama about two young people who are trans and starting middle school in Japan. The manga is being published in English by Fantagraphics, and the anime is officially licensed in English subs on Crunchyroll. [more inside]
Eat Ice Cream
In his meticulous diaries, written from 1846 to 1882, the Harvard librarian John Langdon Sibley complains often about the withering summer heat: “The heat wilts & enervates me & makes me sick,” he wrote in 1852. Sibley lived before the age of air-conditioning, but recent research suggests that his observation is still accurate: summer really does tend to be a time of reduced productivity. Our brains do, figuratively, wilt. [more inside]
Music Videos Without Music
Crowdsourcing Support for Creators: "Is it idealistic? Hell yes, it is."
John and Hank Green of the Vlogbrothers have launched a new subscription service called Subbable, that aims to crowdsource support for content creators through direct payments, rather than through the typical model that uses advertising. Subscribers can pay nothing and still view the content, but those who opt to pay earn Perks from the channels to which they subscribe. Right now, the vlogbrothers' educational channel Crash Course is the only content available, although applications are being taken for other content creators to join...assuming it works with Crash Course. [more inside]
Scrapped but not forgotten
The Science Museum in London closed their Shipping Galleries in 2012, having been open for almost 50 years. But in case you missed it, here's a narrated short virtual tour, as it looked then. [more inside]
Playing with nukes and fire: online simulations of explosions and plumes
Alex Wellerstein, an historian of science who specializes in the history of nuclear weapons and nuclear secrecy, has put together two online maps mashups: NUKEMAP2, and NUKEMAP3D, which use Google Maps and Google Earth, respectively. With those tools, you can see the blast radius for nuclear explosions of your own design, or from one of the presets. But this doesn't get into dispersion of fallout. If you're interested in that kind of thing, you might want to see various smoke modeling tools, which are used for wildfire management. [more inside]
Something is going to happen in 77 days
Pronunciation Book (previously), a YouTube channel started in April 2010, is known for providing mostly-accurate pronunciation guides for difficult words: acacia, ouroboros, Tlaxcala. But on July 9th, the channel started posting something new: a countdown. [more inside]
Sad YouTube
Degrassi Panthers
Degrassi Panthers "Degrassi Panthers is a blog dedicated to mapping out the shoot locations of all 3 seasons of the Canadian TV series Degrassi Junior High."
So best not to think of a pink elephant
Of cats, rabbits and monstrous births, about the persistent Medieval/Early Modern belief that a woman's pregnancy could be influence what she gave birth too, as in the case of Agnes Bowker, who supposedly gave birth to a cat.
Yes, I am both a speedboat and a speed train.
In 1980, two years before her death, she was offered a short column in “Parade.” Here are some excerpts.
Ask Ayn, by John Hodgman. (SLNewYorker)
"This one is SUPER lucky!"
At the dawn of the millennium, Japanese society has suffered a severe economic collapse, leading to widespread youth apathy and 800,000 students boycotting school. Adult society sought to reassert their authority by passing the Millennium Education Reform Act, otherwise known as the BR Act. - a look at Kinji Fukasaku's Battle Royale.
He who rides a tiger is afraid to dismount
Milwaukee Brewer Ryan Braun has been suspended for the rest of the season due to his involvement with a former "anti-aging" clinic called Biogenesis that allegedly supplied athletes with human growth hormone, anabolic steroids, testosterone, and other performance-enhancing drugs (Taiwanese animation video). Alex Rodriguez is expected to be suspended next, along with 15-20 other Major League Baseball players, with punishments expected to linger into the 2014 season.
Shooting Porn With Glass Is... Different
POV is a trick used in both Hollywood filmmaking and adult filmmaking to let the viewer feel like the camera’s eyes are theirs. The problem is, no matter how skilled the Hollywood cinematographer or the porn videographer, traditional POV shots don’t have a true lifelikeness because the camera is still too big to get intimate, close-up line-of-sight shots as we would see with our naked eyes. Glass changes that. And while the quality of Glass-shot video isn’t good enough for Hollywood blockbusters, it’s more than good enough for porn. [SLFC] [NSFW]
ROCKY: I mean, c’mon - do I look like a Rambo to you?
In 2010, six friends sat down to watch all four Rambo movies in one day. Inspired, they realized how f&%king awesome it would be if Rambo were to fight his doppelganger Rocky. They plotted the movie in five minutes, split up the writing chores, and each wrote a section, without any of them reading the others' work.
This is that story.
(Not the story of how they wrote it, but the actual script they wrote, Rocky Vs Rambo)
I cry all the time thinking of my child
The Department of Justice filed a lawsuit yesterday (after a long investigation) against the state of Florida alleging the state is in violation of the Americans with Disabilities Act (ADA) in its administration of its service system for children with significant medical needs. [more inside]
Metamorphosis
A celebration of geek girls in song
Nothing to Prove (SLYT) The Doubleclicks rebut the "fake geek girl" meme in this awesome song. [more inside]
Adrift in the Corporate Shuffle
It hit me this morning that perhaps all of my endless toil and hard work has landed me here. I've transferred so much within the company that all paperwork on me has been long since misplaced. I exist only in a computer program that spits out a 4 digit paycheck to my bank account every other Thursday - just another tick on the underbelly of the corporate warthog. Too senior to be fired, too misunderstood to be bothered, I am truly the forgotten employee.
getting old doesn't mean sex has to
The Hebrew Home in Riverdale, NY has a comprehensive policy regarding sexual expression. The policy, which appears to be the only one of its kind among U.S. residential facilities for the elderly, says that residents "have the right to seek out and engage in sexual expression,” including “words, gestures, movements or activities which appear motivated by the desire for sexual gratification." As Baby Boomers age and begin to enter nursing homes in greater numbers, they're taking their freer sexual attitudes -- and their Viagra-- with them. An 80-something resident of the Hebrew Home says "she’d love to have someone special in her life.
'You want to have someone to pat you, someone to hold hands with,' she said. 'Age should not be a barrier to anything.'"
This pain... it is a glacier moving through you
Glacier, the concluding track from John Grant's 2013 album Pale Green Ghosts is "the song that I wish I would have heard when I was a teenager". [more inside]
"superior in their natural gifts on the average to the mass[es]"
"In Victorian England, getting a job was all about who you knew, [but] Charles Trevelyan, the permanent secretary to the Treasury 1840-59, was horrified by the Barnacle types in the civil service, once describing a colleague, as a "gentleman who really could neither read nor write, he was almost an idiot"."
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