Jared Diamond has a new book - "Collapse"

The NYTimes review by Gregg Easterbrook:
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/30/books/review/30EASTERB.html?oref=login

"Bright, funny, and well-read, Emily had dropped out of a Ph.D. program in history. She was single and working as a librarian. Tentatively I asked her, "But you are so bright and you have such a passion for history, why did you ever drop out of graduate school?"

Her response: "Early on, I realized that academe has no office culture. I know office culture is always seen as a joke but I realized that as a single person, I was going to need some interaction at work. Academe couldn't offer me that -- but a library could."

It took me a while to mull that one over: Librarians are more socially outgoing than academics? Admittedly, there was a little envy on my part, too: If I was so smart, how come I hadn't figured out, as Emily had early on in her graduate career, that I wasn't going to be spending large chunks of my academic career sipping sherry with my colleagues while we discussed a range of issues?"

A Ph.D in History who decided to leave academia, writing in the Chronicle of Higher education
http://chronicle.com/jobs/2005/01/2005012601c.htm

new blog features

and I didn't know about them til' now!

This is something I emailed... finally got round to changing the date/timestamp to M'sian time... which is when I found out about the easy new features and settings.

For someone living out of things, still, I've downloaded Firefox and am interested in Picasa... but we shall see... I have no desire to spend so much time booting up my computer and then sitting at the table and fixing plugs and so on... Lazy! It seems like not worth it... for dial-up. But that's why I came back, wasn't it... partly... away from the conveniences... it's tough to be half-in, half-out, though. Not like it's totally not available. Just not affordable. Or not commensurate with my projected use... talking about broadband, of course. Will just have to adjust to a different type of digital culture, I guess!

"According to blog search-engine and measurement firm Technorati, 23,000 new weblogs are created every day—or about one every three seconds. "

From 10 TECH TRENDS Why There's No Escaping the Blog
Freewheeling bloggers can boost your product—or destroy it. Either way, they've become a force business can't afford to ignore. By David Kirkpatrick and Daniel Roth, From the Jan. 10, 2005 Issue
http://www.fortune.com/fortune/technology/articles/0,15114,1011763-2,00.html

ETS (who do the SATs, GREs, etc.) comes up with an information literacy test... educational institutions want to know if students are up to scratch.

Measuring Literacy in a World Gone Digital By TOM ZELLER Jr. Published: January 17, 2005

"The Information and Communications Technology literacy assessment, which will be introduced at about two dozen colleges and universities later this month, is intended to measure students' ability to manage exercises like sorting e-mail messages or manipulating tables and charts, and to assess how well they organize and interpret information from many sources and in myriad forms....

...Knowing where and how to find information, they agreed, was just the beginning. Interpreting, sorting, evaluating, manipulating and repackaging information in dozens of forms from thousands of sources - as well as having a fundamental understanding of the legal and ethical uses of digital materials - are also important components."

http://www.nytimes.com/2005/01/17/technology/17test.html?ex=1106888400&en=fe1369fd2fd3ccc2&ei=5070

It starts out with a general statement about research:

"There was a time when researching a high school or college term paper was a far simpler thing. A student writing about, say, Count Ferdinand von Zeppelin, might have checked out a book on the history of aviation from the local library or tucked into the family's dog-eared Britannica. An ambitious college freshman might have augmented the research by looking up some old newspaper clips on microfilm or picking up a monograph in the stacks.

Today, in a matter of minutes, students can identify these and thousands of other potential resources on the Internet - and, as any teacher will attest, they are not always adept at sorting the wheat from the chaff."

Free full-text journal articles! Found it while looking for Information Outlook (the Special Libraries Association monthly publication)

http://www.findarticles.com/p/articles/tn_ref

Gaston Leroux's The Phantom of the Opera (full-text) online
http://www.literatureproject.com/phantom-opera/index.htm

The parent site:
http://www.literatureproject.com/
Who are they? They also offer ebooks and text-to-speech

While we're on the subject of 19th century romances, here's a site dedicated to the numerous (yes, there was more than one) books/tales of the Scarlet Pimpernel. Showing here (also full text and also free):
http://www.blakeneymanor.com/