There’s more than one path into a successful data job than through the university system’s “talent pipeline.” READ MORE: How These Three Women Made Mid-Career Pivots Into Data Science | Fast Company | Business + Innovation
Category Archives: Librarianship
How Employees Shaped Strategy at the New York Public Library | HBR #libraries #employee #engagement #innovation #strategy #organizationalexcellence #strategicplanning #services
The New York Public Library is one of the largest public libraries in the world, with 18 million visitors yearly, a budget of nearly $300m, and 93 branches. It serves vastly diverse populations…
Library leaders knew that given the immense changes brought on by digital innovations, as well as shifts in the communities that the Library served, it would need to evolve. How to transform such a huge, iconic institution, wrapped in history, into a nimble player? How to provide hyper-local services tailored to the diverse needs of its patrons while also upholding a consistent and high standard of service?
In the spring of 2014, we proposed a radical approach: offer anyone on staff – over 2,500 individuals, many of them union members – the chance to shape the library through strategic conversations with senior leaders. READ MORE: How Employees Shaped Strategy at the New York Public Library | Harvard Business Review
More than 1.8 million teens are reading books by text messages thanks to this startup | Washington Post #SMS #texting #reading #books #youth #YA #mobile #storytelling #teens
OK, it’s not exactly Dickens. But how about a great story delivered to you by text message? That’s the idea hatched by Prerna Gupta and Parag Chordia. The two entrepreneurs launched their company, Telepathic, a year ago with an application called Hooked after raising $1.9 million from investors that included numerous venture capital firms and Lean Startup author Eric Rie… And the kids, they do love it. READ MORE: More than 1.8 million teens are reading books by text messages thanks to this start-up | The Washington Post
Maine State Library study finds that Librarian is one of the most trusted professions | LRS #Librarians #fakenews #librarianship #research #ethics
A recent survey by the Maine State Library shows that librarians are the second most trusted professionals out of the 22 professions studied. The purpose of this research was to determine the perceived trustworthiness of librarians compared to other professions and to assess perceptions of librarians across demographic groups. READ MORE: Maine State Library study finds that Librarian is one of the most trusted professions | Library Research Service
More research supporting that Librarians are the solution…and always have been the solution…to the fake news problem! Verify, verify, verify. ALA Code of Ethics “We provide the highest level of service to all library users through appropriate and usefully organized resources; equitable service policies; equitable access; and accurate, unbiased, and courteous responses to all requests. We do not advance private interests at the expense of library users, colleagues, or our employing institutions. We distinguish between our personal convictions and professional duties and do not allow our personal beliefs to interfere with fair representation of the aims of our institutions or the provision of access to their information resources.” – infophile.ca
Forgotten audio formats: Wire recording | Ars Technica #soundrecordings #analog #machines #audio #format #medium
Image Source: ars technica | Gregory F. Maxwell/Wikimedia Commons
It’s bizarre but true: wire recording is the longest-lasting capture format in audio history, one that paved the way for reel-to-reel tapes and a host of others—even though most people today, and some techies included, have barely heard of it. READ MORE: Forgotten audio formats: Wire recording | Ars Technica
How to solve Facebook’s fake news problem: experts pitch their ideas | The Guardian #news #facts #authority #validation #HireALibrarian #duh
The past few months there was quite the vacuum of factual, non-fake news to post to infophile. Thankfully, with the U.S. election finally over, some cool, timely and hopefully accurate stories are percolating up in my news feeds. Interesting times. How about just Hire a Librarian!!!
A cadre of technologists, academics and media experts are thinking up solutions, from hiring human editors, to crowdsourcing or creating algorithms
Source: How to solve Facebook’s fake news problem: experts pitch their ideas | Technology | The Guardian
Giant Flip Books Are Hiding in the Woods of New Hampshire | WIRED #books #creativity #devices
TUCKED AWAY IN the forests of New Hampshire, somewhere just outside of Strafford, is a family of giant metal boxes. Each one is filled with 50 drawings and rigged with a system of gears that lets you crank through the images with the turn of a handle. As the illustrations flip past, they combine to form a simple animation. They’re like those flip books you used to play with as a kid, only much, much bigger. READ MORE: Giant Flip Books Are Hiding in the Woods of New Hampshire | WIRED
Listen to the First Music Ever Made With a Computer | Gizmodo #archives #music #preservation #computers #history
Researchers from New Zealand have restored the very first recording ever made of computer generated music. The three simple melodies, laid down in 1951, were generated by a machine built by the esteemed British computer scientist Alan Turing. READ MORE: Listen to the First Music Ever Made With a Computer | Gizmodo
Google swallows 11,000 novels to improve AI’s conversation| The Guardian #AI #books #language
When the writer Rebecca Forster first heard how Google was using her work, it felt like she was trapped in a science fiction novel. “Is this any different than someone using one of my books to start a fire? I have no idea,” she says. “I have no idea what their objective is. Certainly it is not to bring me readers.”
After a 25-year writing career, during which she has published 29 novels ranging from contemporary romance to police procedurals, the first instalment of her Josie Bates series, Hostile Witness, has found a new reader: Google’s artificial intelligence.
“My imagination just didn’t go as far as it being used for something like this,” Forster says. “Perhaps that’s my failure.” Forster’s thriller is just one of 11,000 novels that researchers including Oriol Vinyals and Andrew M Dai at Google Brain have been using to improve the technology giant’s conversational style. After feeding these books into a neural network, the system was able to generate fluent, natural-sounding sentences. READ MORE: Google swallows 11,000 novels to improve AI’s conversation | Books | The Guardian
Cool Bookish Places: The Penguin Bookshop in Toronto | BOOKRIOT #books #publishers #bookstores
Penguin Canada opened a bookshop! And it’s really pretty. SEE THE PICS: Cool Bookish Places: The Penguin Bookshop in Toronto | BOOKRIOT
infophile 