smurgy - Slashdot User

Submission + - Google magazine search hides a poverty of sources (facebook.com)

Submitted by

smurgy

on Friday December 12, 2008 @10:40PM

smurgy writes: "Google recently announced implementation of magazine searching.

As a professional librarian, I was interested to see what range of coverage this new functionality offered. A search found nothing, but revealed other industry professionals were asking the same questions.

This poses a problem to both librarians and non-librarians alike, as conducting research on an unscoped source will lead to hits of unverifiable quality. In this case, google books searches "a few dozen" magazine titles according to an email from "Yana" (no surname) at the Google Book Search Team (full transcript here.) Compare this to library and academic industry standard journal database Proquest Social Sciences — only one part of the Proquest offering, and listing 547 titles.

Google is free, but through public and academic libraries databases such as Proquest (of which I am in no way a representative) achieve a nearly similar coverage for virtually free. The facebook group is added as it is a method I am using to promote concern over this issue and a repository for communications with google. Slashdot readers interested in joining a more enduring facebook group may go here."

Comment Re:Wow. (Score 1) 104

by smurgy on Monday September 29, 2008 @06:45PM (#25199117) Attached to: Achewood Creator on NPR

"X has no taste" parses syntactically, ergo one can say it. Being right or wrong is another matter.

The real issue is that the GP fell for an obvious troll.

I'm like you. Things go on my comics list (mine's on my flock RSS browser), some have stayed on for years, some stay on for a while - my tastes change, or they change for the worse, or they don't change (ie they reveal themselves to be one-noters).

FWIW my taste differs from yours from your list.

Submission + - New gamers' energy drink 2x caffeine of Red Bull (manapotions.com)

Submitted by

smurgy

on Tuesday February 05, 2008 @01:43AM

smurgy writes: "Harcos, Inc. have produced a new energy drink aimed at gamers called the Mana Potion.

The site claims the drink contains twice the caffeine per serve as Red Bull.

I'm strangely tempted, but equally I predict a link between uptake of this drink by consumers and gaming-related heart attack deaths."

Submission + - Intuitive youtube interface in fullscreen mode (upforreview.com)

Submitted by

smurgy

on Saturday January 19, 2008 @09:30AM

smurgy writes: "Browsing youtube this evening I found an interesting feature hidden in fullscreen mode; if one pushes the button just to the right of play/pause (it's not the wind-to-end button usually found) one goes to a visual map of related videos; hovering the mouse over one related video will spawn buttons for the related list to that video, as well as giving you the option to play it. While I didn't exhaustively test the feature one could spawn a number of times without any protest, and click and drag to refind icons that had gone off the edge of the map.

There's an excellent description including screenshots here."

Submission + - UK Media Studies lecturer bans web-based research (timesonline.co.uk)

Submitted by

smurgy

on Thursday January 17, 2008 @04:34PM

smurgy writes: "Today I came across mention of one Tara Brabazon:

Let them read books, commands the impressively named Professor Tara Brabazon, of the University of Brighton where she is Professor of Media Studies. She says that she has banned her own students from using Wikipedia or Google as research sources, and insists they read printed texts only. In a lecture, she argues that only thus will we produce the critical thinkers that the nation needs.

Having seen Brabazon in action as a keynote conference speaker two or so years ago I was amused at her unreadable sketchy OHP sheets (why not use a snazzy animated-with-sound .pps like the rest of the pros?), intrigued by the layers of meaninglessness that revealed themselves behind the rhetoric she spoke, and appalled when I realised that I was sitting in a packed audience listening to someone brazen enough to claim the title media studies professor who felt confident to make the decision to exclude the fastest growing medium as a source of information about itself. Interesting that she's quite prepared to use the net for self-promotion..."

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