I had never heard of the laws below before; but they ring so true…
The Second Law of Sexual Dynamics
If you think a girl is attracted to you, you are wrong.
The First Law of Sexual Dynamics
In a given dispute, the female is more likely to be correct.
These laws explain much that I did not understand half my life ago, when I was young, single, and in love with everyone. Heck, they even mostly explain my current family (and occasionally work/profession, too) dynamics 
As I Twitter’d earlier, I just watched a YouTube video from TEDtalks by Hans Rosling which forwarded me on to the Gapminder Google Tool, a mashup of UN and other public data sources to make really easily understandable [and amazing] graphs of comparative world data.
Here’s the link to the [20 minute long] YouTube video
Here’s the link to the GapMinder Google Tool
Play with the data in GapMinder, I think this resource would be a fabulous source for data display in any number of subject areas (though I didn’t search for the citations of the datasets). I’m thinking about contacting professors in Poli-Sci, Business, International Studies, etc. to ask for their comments and how they think it might be useful for their students. If you think of other subject areas that might find this type of thing useful, let me know.
Still scrolling through the ACRL Conference Blog, finding more gems.
ACRL peeps Merinda Hensley & Annie Paprocki have started a discussion forum in the ALA Online Communities for anyone to join. The discussion forum is based in ACRL’s section of the Communities. I posted a message to the NMRT email list, which reads semi-indignantly to my shame, making folks aware of the resource and wondering if NMRT has a similar resource or has one in the works.
Steps to follow to join the ACRL New Member Online Community can be found on the NEW: New Member Online Community post on the ACRL Conference Blog.
Saw this article, The public library as an asylum for the homeless, a few days ago in my Bloglines current awareness feeds.
From my days as a librarian in public libraries (Chattanooga (1996-1997) & (Brooklyn (1995)) and as library technical assistant (NYPL Research Library on 42nd & 5th (1991-1993) I can say that the homeless situation is not really a “new” phenominon. While I was more aware of the less-than-mentally-healthy people when I wasn’t in NYC, we had plenty of patrons in all three public libraries that I watched pretty closely — my attitude adjustment specialist job history meant I was usually in “bouncer mode” when certian patrons came in just in case an incident occurred.
If you have not read (and told people about) this article, I encourage you to spread the word about how libraries have taken on a social support safety net role in communities which, if they go away, will leave many poorly served, needy people without any help at all. Yes, that is a plaintive bleat; but it’s nonetheless true.
So I was persuing the ACRL Conference Blog & saw several posts about PennTags. Intrigued (again), I Googled up more about PennTags and caught some of the discussions about how some people think PennTags ignored the existence of del.icio.us and other social bookmarking sites. Which made me think, “hm… could I add a way for my users to socially tag records directly from our catalog?” Turns out I can, with a few wrinkles still needing ironing out, and have thrown a beta “Tag with del.icio.us” link into our ExLibris / Endeavor Voyager Catalog (see example, the link is at the bottom of the record)
The cool part of PennTags, which my little hack doesn’t do, is the FRBRized tally of tags per catalog item. I would love to figure out how to show a tag cloud of potential future tags, too. I would love to add a pre-populated tag entry to better discover tagged items from our catalog, but I do not see a way to turn on the autocomplete function for the “tags” entry in del.icio.us.
While I was scrolling through ACRLblog’s Official Correspondent Site of the 13th Annual National Conference, I read the “anxious much?” and “Do you have anxeity about doing research” posts hinting at sessions or posters or discussions about research anxiety, research to support a successful tenure track chase, and research for students’ class assignments. I would love to hear more of the ACRL Conference discussions (As well as other venues) about these and how people are managing theirs or their students’ research angst.
While I respect and applaud ACRL for making the effort to host a simultaneous virtual conference, I see no mechanism for post-event information dissemination/sharing. I checked the “About” page and only see that if I want to “attend” I would have had to pony up the registration fee for the Virtual Conference before registration closed.
Is there a moving wall of access? Maybe ACRL members (like me) have access (I prefer interactive, but read-only would be acceptable) after the conference ends, ALA members a few weeks later, and maybe read-only for the general netizen a few weeks after that? Yes, lots of policy and finance discussions would probably need ot happen at the ACRL level.
I suspect there’s a lot of info in there that could be potentially useful & I’d like an opportunity to check it out and maybe add to the discussions.
So, okay, I was light on posts for a bit.
Friday I turned 39 and I again realized I’m probably more than halfway through my alotted span (even though my lovely wife hates it when I say stuff like that) and I really ought to get going since I’m less that halfway along on my “things I want to do and get done” list (which I don’t have in hard or online copy anywhere).
Right, so I’ve got a huge backlog of emails, links, twits, and blog musings and conference follwow-ups and stuff that I really ought to get going on. Enough laurels squatting, time to fire it up and git-r-done…