OldBlog

When you have 100 good ideas to choose from, the critical skill isn’t choosing five, but sacrificing 95.
You can’t be certain of the future, but you can’t wait for total stability either.
Lessons from the Past Require Your Past to be Preserved
(“Digital Information will never survive by accident,” 11 Aug 2004)

Costumo usar “a influência dos raios gama sobre as margaridas” como sinónimo que conseguir encontrar quase tudo de uma assentada numa base de dados bibliográfica. Acho no entanto que vou agora adoptar “Spam poetry: transcending the junk mail paradigm“, título de uma análise feita aos efeitos de rima e cadência por vezes criados por aquelas palavras injectadas ao acaso em...

David Judson Haykin (1951, 7), Chief of LC’s Subject Cataloging Division [T]he reader is the focus in all cataloging principles and practice. All other considerations, such as convenience and the desire to arrange entries in some logical order, are secondary to the basic rule that the heading, in wording and structure, should be that which the reader will seek in the catalog, if we know or can...

In the preface to the fourth edition of Rules for a dictionary catalog, Cutter stated: The convenience of the public is always to be set before the ease of the cataloger (Cutter 1904, 6). … Yet not once in those ninety years did catalogers ask library users whether they understood the subject headings assigned to cataloging records … The research described in this report is the first...

Principalmente para um estudante universitário:
Should Top Universities Be Led By Top Researchers and Are They?
Aparentemente a resposta do estudo é que as melhors universidades são dirigidas por grandes investigadores… Ou será que os investigadores de cada universidade têm tendência a citar o seu reitor?

Only lifelong learning
can ensure
lifelong employability”

As pessoas são brilhantemente estupidas ao mesmo tempo que estupidamente brilhantes
Rebecca Z. German, PhD, M.Sc(?)

Thanks to science and technology, access to factual knowledge of all kinds is rising exponentially while dropping in unit cost. It is destined to be global and democratic. Soon it will be available everywhere on television and computer screens. What then? The answer is clear: synthesis. We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesisers...

Commissioner Reding has proposed that EU member states initiate national digitisation schemes to preserve and make their heritage available online. … “The internet is the most powerful new tool we have had for storing and sharing information since the Gutenberg press, so let’s use it to make the material in Europe’s libraries and archives accessible to all,” Reding...

Hoje em dia fazem-se muitos produtos com obsolescência incorporada. Tipo: para quê resolver o problema de aquecimento no chip tal e tal; rebentam em dois anos mas ao fim de um ano já o cliente comprou outro tocador de MP3… Isto é de tal maneira um problema premente e corrente que a NASA, que precisa que os chips funcionem durante dez anos ou mais de viagem inter-planetária, está com sérias...