mentoring

Posted on May 3, 2007 by Marie Kennedy

i’ll soon be attending my first medical library conference (medical library association) and was assigned a conference mentor, one who has been to an mla conference before and is willing to guide a newbie. i have been to conferences before and can certainly navigate on my own, but it’s a nice touch that mla would foresee that some may need help. i appreciate that the organization wants to make one’s first mla a pleasant and full experience.

i would say that overall the field of library and information science is good about mentoring. in a previous life i had expectations of working as an educator in the field of fine art, in photography, but i never found a true community there. the field of photography is more insulated and about individual success, whereas library and information science seems to be pushing forward a communal goal. do you agree?

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i write like a man?

Posted on May 2, 2007 by Marie Kennedy

i dumped my blog post commenting on expertise in pictorial perception into the “gender genie,” and it thinks i am a man. what is surprising about this, you ask? i am a woman. here’s the metadata it logged from the text i put in:

gender genie screenshot
(click to biggify)

now that my curiosity is piqued i am going to go read the article on how the algorithm was developed and how the authors decided which are distinctly “male” terms and which are “female.”

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increase the n

Posted on April 27, 2007 by Marie Kennedy

oh boy, i have just the thing to perk you up this friday.  here’s a snippet of lyrics from the song by hefe, “increase the ‘n'”:

there’s a trend but the error is big
increase the N
the rat’s no good use the guinea pig
increase the N
the antibody’s weak the background high
increase the N
my P value is bigger than pi
increase the N

see?  don’t you feel better?  here’s a link to the rest of the lyrics: http://www.scq.ubc.ca/?p=180 ,
and the song at hefe’s myspace page: http://www.myspace.com/heferocks

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“open data” = “data, laying around somewhere”?

Posted on April 24, 2007 by Marie Kennedy

i’m still processing the position paper on “open data,” but so far i’m having a difficult time with the practicality of the concept.  the argument falls flat for me because it calls for no restrictions on (certain) scientific data at all, noting that it should be made available for use without permission (or acknowledgment, as far as i can tell from the wikipedia article).  the wikipedia article implies that these data are just laying around somewhere, waiting to be used, but in fact their very collection implies some intellectual authority and that, in my opinion, should be respected and acknowledged.

futhermore, murray states in his paper that “the data be Open and be re-used by someone not connected with the original author without the need for permission or correspondence. Legal, syntactic, semantic and ontological questions must be answered by the data themselves.”  in a community of scientists where the key for “openness” seems to be about a more active communication, why would you make part of your position that you be allowed to shut yourself off from the data collectors?

any feedback is welcome as i continue to process the concept of “open data.”

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my first amendment to publication agreement

Posted on April 19, 2007 by Marie Kennedy

i got a chapter accepted for publication (yay!) and am preparing the packet of materials to send to the editors, including the publication agreement.  i will be attaching the amendment to the publication agreement that i made.  a particularly disagreeable clause in the agreement they want me to sign reads: “Furthermore, author(s) cannot post the contents of the chapter on any personal website or other sites, or distribute the work to others in either electronic or print forms.”  if i accepted that clause it would mean that i can’t send my mom a copy of my chapter or post it in my institution’s repository.

i’ll report back with any comments from the publisher.  stay tuned!

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david lynch, weather man?

Posted on April 12, 2007 by Marie Kennedy

every morning between 9 and 10 david lynch phones in to the indie radio station here in l.a., 103.1, and gives a weather report.  it usually goes something like this: “today is april 12.  it’s a thursday.  where i am the skies are blue, with glorious sunshine.  it’s 60 degrees fahrenheit, 15 degrees celsius.  thought for the day: beginning to feel like spring.”  the funny thing about his reports is that he doesn’t always say where he is, and he may be calling in from a totally different climate.  one time he called in and reported that where he was it was gray, looked like rain, and was very cold, certainly nothing like l.a.!  i guess the other funny thing is that david lynch is doing a weather report.  yes, that david lynch.  view a quicktime video of his weather report at davidlynch.com.

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