News I'm Reading

Any librarian, particularly a public librarian, could have told U.S. airlines that as soon as they started offering in-air wi-fi, they'd have to deal with porn. I wouldn't expect American Airlines flight attendants to be any happier about it than librarians are.

Here's a great example business librarians can use on vetting information: an old story on the Sun-Sentinel website got picked up by Google News as fresh, triggering a massive sell-off of United stock. It occurs to me that a particular piece of metadata--the story's date of publication--would have prevented this, if news articles had such metadata attached and news aggregators such as Google News looked for such metadata as a matter of course. More coverage here and here. (One wonders if any canny investors realized what was happening and scooped up some of the stock on the cheap...)

Speaking of Google...microfilm is a valuable medium for storage and preservation, but using it is a total pain. Now, you might not have to: Google is digitizing newspaper archives, including those stored on microfilm. Some of the same concerns and questions are being raised here as by the Google Books project, but at first blush, this is way cool, and a boon for research involving newspapers.

Something I'd like to read: American Widow, a new graphic-novel memoir by a woman who lost her husband in 9/11. (I'd definitely prefer to read that over some of today's news coverage.)

Speaking of books, The Jewel of Medina has found a new publisher. To be honest, it took longer than I thought it would.

Reference publishers should take note of this analysis of Wikipedia entries showing up on Google search results pages, while they dither about following JSTOR's lead and at least exposing their citations to search engines. I find myself increasingly frustrated by reference publishers. They've got the good information, but it's harder to find and use than it needs to be.

Esquire will publish its 75th anniversary issue with an e-paper cover enabling moving images. Life imitates Harry Potter.

Recent Reading: Field Notes from a Catastrophe

As pleased as I was when the cherry trees began to blossom on Capitol Hill this year (I love spring), it was a little alarming to see that happening in January. The Pacific Northwest is known for a temperate climate that, in the low-lying areas along the coast, rarely drops below freezing (although when I went hiking near North Bend last weekend, we did get sleeted on). But still, cherry blossoms in January seemed a bit much.

It's more of that kind of thing that we can expect, though, according to Elizabeth Kolbert's Field Notes from a Catastrophe: shifting seasons, wilder weather, and the extension, contraction, and alteration of wildlife ranges. Recommended by a friend currently working on her doctorate in oceanography, Field Notes is a sober take on an alarming subject for a lay audience. It may or may not persuade the unconvinced, but the survey of climate scientists, not to mention the people whose lives are already being affected by climate change--human-induced or not, there is little doubt that it is happening--at the very least shows the choice that the human race has before us: adapt, or don't. That might very well include attempting to mitigate our impact on the Earth, though by some lights it's already too late for that.

Field Notes from a Catastrophe is a good starting point for understanding a complex, contentious, and if you'll pardon the expression, heated subject.