Astor Place

.flickr-photo { border: solid 2px #000000; }.flickr-yourcomment { }.flickr-frame { text-align: left; padding: 3px; }.flickr-caption { font-size: 0.8em; margin-top: 0px; } A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.A walk around the lower east side late last year ended at Astor Place...

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Serials Solutions and HathiTrust Indexing

Serials Solutions announce full indexing of HathiTrust content. From their press release:Serials Solutions and HathiTrust today announced an agreement to enable full-text search of the entire HathiTrust collection of digitized scholarly books from the Summon™ web-scale discovery service. Researchers and faculty at institutions with the Summon™ service will be able to use the library’s own...

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Copyright's Beyond the Book looks at what's next for the Google Book Settlement

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MediaWeek (V4-N13): Bookclub for the Homeless, Plagiarism or "Creative Reuse", Hollywood, Gallimard, Jean Auel

Bostonia magazine tells us about a Boston lawyer who set up a book club for homeless readers (Bostonia):For years, Resnik, a tall, unassuming civil litigation defense attorney, had been walking from his Back Bay condo to his State Street law firm, McDermott Will & Emery. He made a nice living trying high-profile...

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United Artists Redux - Repost

Repost From not so long ago: July 20, 2010. Given the excitement over Amanda Hocking and Barry Eisler.Amidst radical change forced on them by major advances in technology (largely out of their control), a small group of leading media producers have joined together to establish their own (insert word): broadcaster, publisher, studio, agency. Unlikely? Not now, because the functions that support...

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North Beach San Francisco

North Beach San Francisco 2008A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.I've visited San Francisco many times beginning in 1977 and just enjoy the architecture of the whole city. This image is from 2008 when I was visiting on business and was lucky enough to have a bright blue...

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Taking it on the Chin

Maybe Google tried too hard to stir the ocean with a swizzle stick. Way back in time, Google believed that indexing printed content that they had scanned represented a fair use of that content and compatible with the method they used to index web pages upon which they (and many other companies) had built search businesses. Judge Chin’s ruling that the court would not approve the Google book settlement...

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Elsevier's SciVal Strata: Evaluating Researchers

Elsevier announced the availability of SciVal Strata (an odd name) which enables a user to evaluate the performance - both actual and projected - of individual or teams of researchers. The product uses data from Scopus and the tool can be used by all members of a subscribing institution to demonstrate research excellence and to secure, allocate and measure return-on-investment of funding. Applications...

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Inside the Educational Testing Sweatshop

City Pages a newspaper in Minneapolis wrote recently about the educational testing business and in the process gave both credibility and publicity to a book written by an insider. Here are several excepts from the article (City Pages):Today, tens of thousands of temporary scorers are employed to correct essay questions. This year, Maple Grove-based Data Recognition Corporation will take on 4,000...

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Media Week (V4-N12): Hay Festival, Reviewers, Heart of Darkness, Alice in NYC,

Ahead of the Hay Festival in the UK, The Telegraph has travel tips. PND hasn't been to the festival but the town and area boast very pretty English country side. Worth a drive. (Telegraph) So nobody was really surprised when, 24 years ago, a recent graduate called Peter Florence decided to put on a literature festival. The first Hay Festival sold tickets from a caravan under the clock tower...

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Kyoto 1972: Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji)

Kyoto 1972: Temple of the Golden Pavilion (Kinkaku-ji)A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.This image is from the same roll as one of the first I posted in this series. I wasn't on this trip and I've not gone beyond the hallways of Narita on my infrequent trips to Japan.Looks...

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I Steal Stuff

I remember a conversation early on in my tenure at my last company that ended along the lines of ‘well, you know, consultants just take credit for the ideas they hear from the employees’. There is some truth to this and, having been on the employee side of that observation/accusation, I can attest it can be demotivating to hear consultants spouting your ideas and concepts to a room full of people....

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Media Week (V4-N11): UK Copyright, The Killing, History in the UK.

The UK government has launched a wholesale review of UK copyright law (Guardian):The review into "Intellectual Property and growth", chaired by Ian Hargreaves, the professor of digital economy at Cardiff University and a former editor of the Independent, won't just impact on the ability of musicians to be rewarded for the work they have created.The outcome could affect publishers, film companies,...

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Genesis of My Career

Monty's News Agents, Bourke Street Melbourne 2000A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.My first media job was working for Rupert Murdoch when I was about 14. The job required that I pick up my allotment of newspapers - The Herald - from this newsagents each day after school...

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Media Week (V4-N10): Spy Magazine, Hiaasen, Casino Royale, Curious George and Ryan Giggs

The Atlantic looks at the afterlife of Spy Magazine:Leaving that aside, you can peruse the Spy catalog here. (Andersen has said the initial chunk uploaded represented about half of the archive, with the rest en route.) As the Toback feature and so many other Spy features attest, the magazine at its best seemed committed to expending the energy necessary to get a particular story, however unhinged...

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Before The Lion King

42nd Street - Before the Lion King, April 1993A weekly image from my archive. Click on the image to make it larger.Hard to believe it has been almost 20 years since I took this photo on a coolish April morning in 1993. For a few weeks that year, there was an art installation where artists placed messages...

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Cengage and their MindTap Personal Learning Environment

Personal Learning Environments gain credibility as Cengage launch MindTap.Cengage has taken a first step in development of an entirely new approach to delivering educational content with the launch of MindTap which they say goes "well beyond an eBook, a homework solution or digital supplement, a resource center website, a course delivery platform or a Learning Management System."On this platform,...

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