About a new colleague

Headline in the UConn Advance: "Teenagers exposed to alcohol ads drink more"

The study was published in the Jan 3 issue of the Archives of Pediatric and Adolescent Medicine, by Leslie Snyder, professor of communication sciences and director of the UConn Center for Health Communication and Health Marketing and colleagues from UConn & Ohio State.

The "Results" section states: "Youth who saw more alcohol advertisements on average drank more (each additional advertisement seen increased the number of drinks consumed by 1%). Youth in markets with greater alcohol advertising expenditures drank more (each additional dollar spent per capita raised the number of drinks consumed by 3%). Examining only youth younger than the legal drinking age of 21 years, alcohol advertisement exposure and expenditures still related to drinking. Youth in markets with more alcohol advertisements showed increases in drinking levels into their late 20s, but drinking plateaued in the early 20s for youth in markets with fewer advertisements. Control variables included age, gender, ethnicity, high school or college enrollment, and alcohol sales."

Very troubling, but congratulations on the study to Leslie & colleagues!

Daniel Dennett podcast on Public Radio’s Tech Nation

From their podcast entry in iTunes, "Dr. Moira Gunn interviews Daniel Dennett Daniel Dennett, professor of philosophy at Tufts University and author of Breaking the Spell -- Religion as a Natural Phenomenon. He looks at the emergence of religion throughout natural history and asks us to bring in science to study it."

Dennett is a good interview, and now I want to read the book ...

(see also some cool interviews in the Tech Nation archive)

RssFwd helps me stay current

Tony showed me a very cool way to stay current with blogs: RssFwd. Their tag line is “Reading RSS the way you are already reading your emails“ — they will take an RSS feed and email you when there are new posts to the blog.

I believe Tony uses this for all of his blog reading, but I use it only for the blogs I don’t want to miss, like ISEL Update, Our Future, and the FeelGoodLibrarian. These are low-traffic blogs, so I have been very pleased with knowing what’s going on immediately; the email is the full-text of the blog entry, with links to the original post.

Tony’s doing a presentation on blogs for UConn later this month, and I’ll be a guest presenter. Hopefully I’ll get even more cool blogging tips!

Open J-Gate — Open Access Journal Database

From India comes Open J-Gate, a great open access journal database, in which all articles are freely accessible. It appears to cover many disciplines, and they say that content goes back to 2001 and indexes 3,000 journals.

What’s cool about this from an LIS perspective is the indexing. One might almost say “cataloging” — articles are given subject headings, which are searchable.

On the downside, there isn’t much in the way of metadata (no abstract; it just links to the full-text), and although the subjects look like they’re hyperlinked, they’re actually not. Worse, in the advanced search, Boolean searching isn’t possible; a search for “cats and diabetes” in the veterinary science section is not fruitful, because “[m]ore than one word will be treated as phrase“

Still, this one is definitely worth a look!

She's back ... kind of

Hmm. Not sure what the status of this blog is, besides ... “quiet”. The new job is keeping me hopping, as is the part-time job on weekends. Less time to blog, and, sadly, less exposure to cool stuff in Cognitive Science.
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
I must admit that’s what I miss most about the new job, although in all other respects, it’s terrific. But it’s no CogSci. :-(

That said, I am just starting to work with UConn’s Department of Communication Science. This department includes media coverage, CMC (computer-mediated communication), as well as communication disorders. Maybe some of that will pop up in this blog?

In the meantime, I’ll post less and it will be more LIS-related, tho’ hopefully still interesting to some aspects of CogSci.

SFX comes to UConn

[brag on]: My counterpart Nicholas and I implemented SFX at UConn in 3 weeks! Big accomplishment for us, and huge improvement for the university. You can see a bit of what we’ve done. What you won’t see: complaints from colleagues or users because links don’t work ... Very very happy! [/brag]

updated: now includes our SFX button as well ...

The Value of Words

FeelGoodLibrarian recently posted a touching story about the the value of words. She helped a patron at the reference desk who wanted to know what it's called when your cognitive skills aren't what they used to be. After some back and forth, they got a definition which satisfied the patron. She tells it way better than I do; and her story illustrates both the value of words and the value of good reference service.

Science And Reason In The Age Of Unreason

Science And Reason In The Age Of Unreason
Pervez Hoodbhoy
Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad

Monday, February 6, 2006
4:15 p.m., Franklin Patterson Hall, East Lecture Hall
Hampshire College

------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
Abstract:
Over the last two decades, science and the scientific method have come
under relentless attack from forces that cover the entire spectrum between
religious orthodoxy and post-modernism. Immense social and political
consequences flow from this surprising, and remarkably global, change. In
this lecture I shall address the reasons behind the growing philosophical
rejection of modern science in Islamic countries, and how this has
affected their social and political development.

Brief Bio:
Dr. Pervez Hoodbhoy is Professor of nuclear and high-energy physics
at Quaid-e-Azam University, Islamabad, Pakistan. He has written and
spoken extensively on topics ranging from science in Islam to
education issues and nuclear disarmament. He is the author of
"Muslims & Science: Religious Orthodoxy and the Battle for
Rationality" and his writings on scientific and political issues have
been published in international newspapers, including the Washington
Post, Le Monde, the Hindu, and Dawn. He is the recipient of 2003
UNESCO Kalinga prize for the Popularization of Science.

Sponsor:
The Integrated Science & Humanities Initiative at Hampshire College

Lecture on Intelligent Design

Wednesday, Feb. 8, 6:30 p.m.
West Lecture Hall, Franklin Patterson Hall

Hampshire College will host a panel discussion on evolution, science and intelligent design. The panelists include professors from the schools of Natural Science, Cognitive Science and Social Science. We will discuss the principal arguments offered in support of intelligent design, the theory of and evidence for evolution by natural selection, why intelligent design does not belong in a science classroom, and the relationships among evolution, religion and our quest for meaning. Open discussion will follow.

Panelists include (alphabetically):
Ernie Alleva, Instructor, First-Year Program, CS
Mark Feinstein, Professor of Linguistics and Animal Cognition, CS
Salman Hameed, Assistant Professor of Integrated Science & Humanities, NS/CS
Laura Sizer, Assistant Professor of Philosophy, CS
Lee Spector, Professor of Computer Science, CS
Jason Tor, Assistant Professor of Microbiology, NS
Jim Wald, Associate Professor of History, SS

Reference Librarians as Pitchmen?

We got a Ronco Turkey Oven for Christmas. A librarian friend pointed me to the 2000 New Yorker profile of Ron Popeil, Mr. Ronco and inventor of the Ronco Turkey Oven, among other things.

The article is fascinating, but what struck me was Malcom Gladwell’s description of the pitch:

“You have to explain the invention to customers-not once or twice but three or four times, with a different twist each time. You have to show them exactly how it works and why it works, and make them follow your hands as you chop liver with it, and then tell them precisely how it fits into their routine, and, finally, sell them on the paradoxical fact that, revolutionary as the gadget is, it's not at all hard to use.”

Gladwell then talks about a handy invention called a video cassette recorder which was supposed to help us watch TV on our schedule, not the networks’. However, Gladwell argues that the VCR never was widely used for that purpose. Why?

“That's because the VCR was never pitched: no one ever explained the gadget to American consumers-not once or twice but three or four times-and no one showed them exactly how it worked or how it would fit into their routine, and no pair of hands guided them through every step of the process.”

Which makes me think about library databases: do we pitch them to our patrons? Do we explain not once or twice but three or four times, slightly differently each time, how to use InfoTrac / LexisNexis / Academic Search Premier? Do we demonstrate how these databases fit into patron’s (search) routines, and, despite their great power, how easy they are to use?

Should we think of ourselves as database pitchmen?

–
“THE PITCHMAN; Ron Popeil and the conquest of the American kitchen”
The New Yorker, October 30, 2000, ANNALS OF ENTERPRISE
by Malcom Gladwell
Pg. 64, 8162 words. Available in LexisNexis, and in the 2002 edition of “The Best Business Stories of the Year”
Also available on Gladwell’s site gladwell dot com (pdf available, too).