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Saturday, December 03, 2005 |
Holiday Books: Cooking. What inspires us to go into the kitchen is the voice of a writer, seducing and prodding and bucking us up. By CORBY KUMMER. [NYT > Books]
The voice that spoke to a generation of cooks is back with the 40th anniversary edition of MASTERING THE ART OF FRENCH COOKING (Knopf, $40). This time, Julia Child's name is front and center, and her collaborators, Louisette Bertholle and Simone Beck, are listed in small type. But the voice behind the voice is back too: Mme. Saint-Ange, whose BONNE CUISINE DE MADAME E. SAINT-ANGE (Ten Speed, $40) was the inspiration for Child's thorough, encouraging step-by-step approach. For years, readers of the 1927 French edition would marvel - or cluck - at how similar the attitude and even the recipes were. Now that the first English translation, by the former Chez Panisse chef Paul Aratow, is available, anyone can compare - and take life lessons from this delightfully opinionated cook. To make a trilogy and add some generational continuity, Julie Powell's engaging blog of a year of cooking every recipe in "Mastering" has been expanded into a book called JULIE AND JULIA (Little, Brown, $23.95).
Important news: For the next couple of weeks, you can discuss things Julie & Julia with Julie Powell over at the Well's Inkwell.
7:07:58 AM 
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The White House's Media Takedown.
Free Press: War on the Press. America’s leadership is waging a war against the journalistic standards and practices that underpin not only a free press but our democracy. The Fourth Estate is withering under an unprecedented White House assault designed to intimidate, smear and discredit investigative journalism — and allow the president and his political cronies to lie with impunity.
There's some hyperbole (but that all that much) in this comprehensive catalog of the Bush administration's moves to make the press irrelevant. Most of the mass media sadly lost their appetite for doing their jobs -- holding power to account -- some time ago. It's not too late to recover. [Dan Gillmor's blog]
7:06:43 AM
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Eek-A-Mouse jamming with Irish pub musicians. Cory Doctorow: Here's a six-minute MP3 of reggae hero Eek-A-Mouse jamming with a bunch of traditional Irish pub musicians -- fiddles, pipes, etc -- at his 50th birthday party. The result is great; Eek-A-Mouse's schtick is to sing in a high, Chinese-sounding falsetto, but to groovy reggae beats. Add to that some lively Irish fiddlers and you've really got something. Link (Thanks, Matt!) [Boing Boing]
7:06:42 AM
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Gaming in Libraries Symposium Pre-Notes.
A few last minute details before the Gaming, Learning, and Libraries Symposium officially starts on Monday. First of all, to the 131 of you coming, you ROCK! I can’t wait to meet each and every one of you, so please say hi. 
[snip]
- Other people you might want to meet while there include Michael “My Library Is Gaming and Wiki-ing!” Stephens, Aaron “I Do Such Cool Stuff on My Library’s Website” Schmidt, Kelli “Hey, We Do Some Pretty Cool Stuff on My Library’s Website, too!” Staley, Chad “Accidental Techie, All-around Nerd, and Most Excellent Blogger” Haefele, Chris “I’m Going Ahead with Systemwide Gaming” DeWeese, Mindy “We Have an Online Game for Our High School Students” Null, and many more (not to mention all of our wonderful speakers!). Take advantage of all of the brainpower that will be in this room and spend some time talking to your peers, your fellow gamers, your fellow librarians!
[The Shifted Librarian]
7:06:25 AM
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The Future of Scientific Research.
There's a fascinating set of articles in Nature this week on openness, sharing, and new publication models. From "Science in the web age: Joint efforts:"
"Science is too hung up on the notion of 'the paper' as the exclusive means of scientific communication," says Leigh Dodds, a web expert at the publisher Ingenta. Publication and research assessments are more geared to measuring a researcher's standing than communicating science, he claims.
Jennifer Hallinan, a biologist at the University of Queensland, Australia, who runs the blog Cancer Dynamics, agrees with him. The web is providing a hierarchy of sources, she says, including useful blogs and wikis. "Each level of the hierarchy has its own sources of error, its own strengths and weaknesses," she explains, "but these are known and can be taken into account when using them."
(and)
"Put a description of your paper on a weblog, though, and something very different happens," says Myers. "People who are very far afield from your usual circle start thinking about the subject. They bring up interesting perspectives." By sharing ideas online, you get feedback and new research ideas, he says. Also, don't miss "Let data speak to data:"
Such services will also require new thinking on open data. Web services are dependent on computers being able to freely access data in real time. Although GenBank and many large databases allow unhindered access to their data, many research organizations still cling to obsolete manual data permission policies, which prevent their data being used by web services.
Scientists may be justified in retaining privileged access to data that they have invested heavily in collecting, pending publication — but there are also huge amounts of data that do not need to be kept behind walls. Data that's kept behind walls is not only offensive to the taxpayers who paid for it, it inhibits the scientific process. No one ever said "If I have seen further, it is because I stand on the parapet of a paywall."
It's certainly useful to checkpoint research, collect it into a polished form, and make it available. There's also a great deal of research that would work well as blog entries. In particular, I'm thinking of a subset of "I broke your cryptosystem" papers where the attack is fairly obvious. The attackers are required to write a full paper to get the "full paper" credit in looking for tenure, but oftentimes, good results must be stretched to make a full paper happen. A richer ecology of forms of dissemination will enhance a great many pursuits, including scientific research.
(Via Paul Kedrosky, "Science, Nature, and Blogs.")
[Emergent Chaos]
7:05:04 AM
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