Another “slow news” entrant. I subscribe to the theSkimm newsletter but often wish it had more depth to its content like NextDraft, which I find too long at times. Lenny might be exactly what I’m looking for. I’m all for women supporting other women in any way they can!
“Lenny” wants to provide contemporary feminism for the inbox. READ MORE: Lena Dunham Is Launching A Newsletter For Young Women | BuzzFeed News.
Memorabilia and personal items belonging to late civil rights activist Rosa Parks are set to go on display at the Library of Congress.
READ MORE: Library of Congress to Receive Hundreds of Rosa Parks Personal Items | Jezebel
Sure I could have chosen one of the more conventional blogs to repost this news from but I really appreciate the Jezebel POV (general interest women’s website). It’s worth your time checking out. Of all the blogs I follow, Jezebel is the one that provides the most insightful, critical, controversial…and entertaining…commentary. The authors at Jezebel provide a much needed female perspective on current issues, social and cultural events, fashion, technology, etc. Warning content is highly opinionated and at times NSFW. Grab the Jezebel RSS here.
The New York Times might be a widely respected chronicler of past events, but can we use it to divine the future? Kira Radinsky, a 27-year-old Israeli computer prodigy dubbed the “web prophet” says yes.
Radinsky, who appeared this year on MIT’s prestigious list of top 35 inventors under the age of 35 (previous winners include the likes of Mark Zuckerberg, Larry Page, and Sergey Brin), and who started university at the age of 15 and received her Ph.D. in computer science at 26, has developed a unique system which she claims has already predicted the first cholera epidemic in Cuba in many decades, many of the riots that started the Arab Spring, and other important world events.
The complex computer algorithms she wrote collect immense volumes of electronic data–most notably several decades of New York Times archives but also anything from Twitter feeds to Wikipedia entries–and processes it to extract little-known cause and effect patterns that can be used to predict future events.
Red more: This Scientist Uses The New York Times Archive To Eerily, Accurately Predict The Future | Co.Exist
Books & Publishing
Amazon
Music & Film
Education & Technology
Librarianship
Are Digital Libraries A ‘Winner-Takes-All’ Market? OverDrive Hopes So | Forbes
“Schools and libraries in all forms are transitioning their spends from providing physical items that are being stored on shelves and branches to digital items — the fastest portion of their growth,” said Steve Potash in a recent interview. Potash is President and CEO of OverDrive, the Cleveland-based provider of technology for managing and distributing digital content for lending libraries.
Gross: Fifty Shades of Grey goes viral – literally | theguardian
Library copies of the bestselling sadomasochistic romance were found to carry traces of herpes and cocaine.
October was chock-full of library-related articles and blog posts which were both educational and entertaining. My two favorite resources for the month would have to be the article illustrating 37 Ways To Proudly Wear Your Love Of Books, as well as the informative and thought-provoking article by Brian Mathews, Seven things to think about as wearable computing emerges. Here are all 30 of the library stories you may have missed out on last month.
Read: 30 Library Stories You May Have Missed in October | Ellyssa Kroski | OEDB.org.
The Pew Research Center is today releasing comparative numbers looking at how U.S. adults use social networking sites to read news (a follow-on from earlier research focusing on two specific sites, Facebook and Twitter).
This is significant for a couple of reasons. Social media sites have become a key component of how many news organizations today are looking to reach consumers as old-media forms like printed editions continue to decline. In turn, social media sites are turning news a way of attracting more eyeballs to improve their own ad-based businesses. That is to say, news and social media are dancing partners that are still working out how to move in the same direction without stepping on each other’s feet, and this survey is one indicator of how well the public is receiving that.
Read more and see all the charts: Pew Social Media Study: 30% Of The U.S. Gets News Via Facebook; Reddit Has The Most News-Hungry Regular Users | TechCrunch.
Books & Publishing
Music & Film
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