little pieces of things that might interest you

A few links that have been keeping me from inbox zero for the past few weeks.

  • “…the increased popularity of the Internet in America has not been correlated with an overall increase in reported sexual offenses; overall sexual offenses against children have gone steadily down in the last 18 years” Note: this does not say “oh the internet is safe!” It just says that the internet getting more popular doesn’t correlate with sexual offenses against children. More from the Research Advisory Board of the Internet Safety Technical Task Force
  • Speaking of Berkman people, I’ll be hanging out in the Boston area over the turkey weekend and likely going to this event that Saturday. Anyone in the area should consider going, it looks like fun.
  • Evergreen is gaining traction as an ILS that works even for big/complicated systems. The Traverse Area just went live with their Evergreen implementation. Doesn’t that look nice? More about Michigan’s open source ILS project.
  • I’ve been reading more lately. I read Cory Doctorow’s book Content (my review) and think it should be required reading for librarians or anyone else in the various digital content industries. If you’d like a copy, you can read it for free online, or if you’re a librarian or a teacher, you can request a donated copy from the website. I already gave mine away.
  • FCC broadband bill passed. This might help Farmer Bob [my generic term for the people over on this side of the digital divide] get broadband.
  • Pew Report “When Technology Fails” (and even really great technology sometimes does). The results will likely not surprise the librarians. “15% of tech users were unable to fix their devices” and “48% felt discouraged with the amount of effort needed to fix the problem.”

Supreme Court decision concerning “free exercise”

I think this is important. It’s a case, one of hundreds, that the US Supreme Court declined to review. “There is no free exercise right to be free from any reference in public elementary schools to the existence of families in which the parents are of different gender combinations … public schools are not obliged to shield individual students from ideas which potentially are religiously offensive, particularly when the school imposes no requirement that the student agree with or affirm those ideas,” the court said. Some more details from a previous OIF post and the School Law blog.

a few lovely little sites

I’m doing some site round-ups for a few upcoming talks and I found a few things that I thought you might enjoy.

Posted in hi

Sarah Palin, VP nominee

I try to keep “who to vote for” politics pretty well off of this blog and prefer to discuss politics in general and better and worse strategies for promoting libraries in whatever political climate we happen to be in. People acutely interested in high level politics in the US who also work in libraries may be interested in this Time magazine article about Sarah Palin. I was very interested in this paragraph.

[Former Wasilla mayor] Stein says that as mayor, Palin continued to inject religious beliefs into her policy at times. “She asked the library how she could go about banning books,” he says, because some voters thought they had inappropriate language in them. “The librarian was aghast.” The librarian, Mary Ellen Baker, couldn’t be reached for comment, but news reports from the time show that Palin had threatened to fire her for not giving “full support” to the mayor.

Usually I’m just happy to see libraries even mentioned in national level politics, but not like this. Mary Ellen Baker resigned from her library director job in 1999.
note: there’s some buzz being generated that says that this post contains a comment that lists the books that Palin supposedly wanted banned. The list is here, but there appears to be no truth to the claim made by the commenter, and no further documentation or support for this has turned up.

Join for free along with the best English webcam chat dating – live sex chat porn

Immerse yourself in the atmosphere of bliss and luxury after a challenging day, eliminating stress and fatigue. Stunning body couple, know how to please each other and the viewer the pleasure and able, awaiting you!

Free live XXX webcams featuring the sexiest webcam girls

A lot of girls can only dream of their attention which the girls with large all-natural tits can have. They are on the top. Watch live XXX, they are as usual. Some girls that aren’t that gifted are working to pay for the boob job and it pays off. But all-natural boobs are currently bringing people in the conversation. We see them thicker and bubblier and they are sometimes different kinds.

Teens are dressed in school uniform and enormous tits are indicating how the girls are not innocent.

WordPress 2.6 open for business

Hi — I just upgraded my WordPress install and along with it, removed some old crusty plugins that I don’t think I was using anymore. If you come across something that is broken or working worse than it was this morning, please drop me a line or a comment and let me know. Thank you.