Yosemite, fire, the legacy of John Muir and other Thanksgiving thoughts
I just ran across this Scientific American‘s Primate Diaries blog post, “Fire Over Ahwahnee: John Muir and the Decline of Yosemite” by Eric Michael Johnson. Anyone who’s read Charles Mann’s 1491 (great read btw!) knows that the indigenous peoples of the Americas from the forests of New England to the Amazon, rather than living in […]
CIA search: Down for two years and counting
Yesterday, when I was writing a post about The CIA’s Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf, I was looking on CIA.gov for a link to all the occurences of this regular feature in the CIA’s magazine Studies in Intelligence. Naturally, I used the CIA’s own search box. I was a bit surprised to find that every search I […]
The CIA’s Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf
One of my guilty pleasures of govdocs is the reading lists and other book lists that agencies post. I find it fascinating to see which books an agency lists – and which they omit. I only recently discovered one that has been around for a long time. It is the “Intelligence Officer’s Bookshelf” – a […]
The extraordinary growing impact of the history of science
In a recent paper published on arxiv.org entitled “On the Shoulders of Giants: The Growing Impact of Older Articles”, the authors examined the citation arc over time of older scholarly articles and how that impact has changed over time and with increased digital access. They found that citations to older articles (and therefore their impact) […]
President Obama supports net neutrality. How about a truly public “public utility”?
The news is all over the Internet: President Obama today made a strong statement in support of [[Net neutrality]], urging the FCC to adopt strict rules on net neutrality in order to assure a level Internet playing field and not allow Internet Service Providers (ISPs) to discriminate Internet traffic (news coverage here and here). Yes, […]