New Stephen's Lighthouse. Seth's Blog. We still teach a lot of myths in the intro to economics course, myths that spill over to conventional wisdom. Human beings make rational decisions in our considered long-term best interest. Actually, behavioral economics shows us that people almost never do this. Our decision-making systems are unpredictable, buggy and often wrong. We are easily distracted, and even more easily conned. Every time we assume that people are profit-seeking, independent, rational actors, we've made a mistake. The free market is free. The free market only works because it has boundaries, rules and methods of enforcement. Profit is a good way to demonstrate the creation of value.
In fact, it's a pretty lousy method. Profit is often a measure of short-term imbalances or pricing power, not value. I hope we can agree that a caring nurse in the pediatric oncology ward adds more value than a well-paid cosmetic plastic surgeon doing augmentations. The best way to measure value created is to measure value, not profit. Librarian in Black. Information & Advice Blog. The UK economy is recovering from the deepest recession since the Second World War and this recovery has been slower than forecast. According to the latest figures from The Office for Budget Responsibility, the economy is predicted to shrink by 0.1 per cent in 2012. Chancellor George Osborne used his Autumn Statement , delivered last Wednesday, to announce a one year extension of the "era of austerity" to 2017-18.
More bad news is promised in the spring as yet further cuts are set to be announced in the Spending Review, which has been brought forward to next year. This is a bleak prognosis and it would be foolish not to expect LIS professionals working in all parts of the economy to feel the chill. But first for some of the potentially good news. But it will only be "good news" if we can make the connections with quality library and information services and make the case for getting some of the cash on offer. But the core message was one of continuing austerity: Tell us what you think. UKeiG. TeleRead. I want to. The issue of backups is always an important one, but something we so often ignore, right up until the moment has passed and it's too late.
I have backed up important material onto discs in the past (both CD and DVD), and I have also got data backed up onto several external hard drives. You should also make sure that one of your backups is off site - the distance that I once saw was something like 'double the wing span of a crashed aircraft on your house' which is rather dramatic, but not a figure that you'll forget. Obviously the best place to backup to these days is into the Cloud, and after having a look around I've chosen to go with SquirrelSave which claims to be the UK's #1 service. It's a commercial offering, costing around £60 a year, but it's all automated and works entirely in the background, which is exactly what I wanted.
I also have an unlimited amount of space, which is just as well, given that I'm backing up rather a lot. They highlight their keys points thus: Phil Bradley's weblog. To the Chair of a professional library interest group, I’m angry, depressed, sad and disappointed that I need to write this open letter to you. You sent a member of your group onto two courses that I ran, and the total cost was £198. I try and keep my costs as cheap as I can because I think making sure we have well trained and informed professionals is important. My fee has been tightly worked out, and as an independent trainer it’s important that I get it right. I have to pay for my own National Insurance, I get no holiday pay, no sick pay and I have to pay for my own pension. My invoices state that I wish to be paid within 30 days, and this is something that almost all of my clients are able to do without issue – sometimes within hours of receiving their invoice I’m paid.
If I don’t get paid inside my 30 days I’ve then got to decide what to do next. Let me explain something at this point. So, what should I do now? Of course, there’s also the question of ‘do I tell anyone’? Online Insider. No Shelf Required. From the OverDrive blog: OverDrive conducted an end user survey from June 26-July 15, 2015. Administered via library websites, the survey collected input from 16,756 respondents. Their full report examines the positive effect the shift to digital content has had on the role of libraries in their communities by helping attract new readers, serve existing patrons better and reach beyond their physical walls. There is a nice infographic on the original OverDrive blog post.
Click here to see the full report and survey. MADISON, Wis. “We’re excited to add the Boopsie team and software platform to our global organization because their people, technology and user-centric approach are designed to deliver a superior experience for librarians and their patrons. I am the former Editor-in-Chief of TeleRead, the Internet’s first blog devoted to ebooks. This is a listing of those tweets for the last week. (Denver, CO) September 15, 2015: Why are libraries screwed by ebooks now? Toshiba BookLive! Karen Blakeman. Locating images that can be re-used, modified and incorporated into commercial or non-commercial projects is always a hot topic on my search workshops. As soon as we start looking at tools that identify Creative Commons and public domain images the delegates start scribbling. Yes, Google and Bing both have tools that allow you to specify a license when conducting an image search but you still have to double check that the search engine has assigned the correct license to the image.
There may be several images on a webpage or blog posting each having a different copyright status and search engines can to get it wrong. Flickr’s search also has an option to filter images by license and there are sites that only have Creative Commons photos, for example Geograph. But the problem is that you may have to trawl through several sites before you find your ideal photo. Creative Commons has just launched a new image search tool that in theory would save a lot of time and hassle.
Information Literacy Weblog. If:book. Important two-part piece by Melville House publisher, Dennis Johnson Part I The furor over Milo Yiannopoulos’s book deal with Simon & Schuster’s Threshold Editions inspires this publisher to ask one question of the disconcerted: Where have you been? Because this is where American publishing is now—or at least, the fifty percent of it dominated by the so-called “Big Five”—and it’s been there for a long time.
Look at Threshold alone: It’s published Karl Rove, Dick Cheney, Rush Limbaugh, Glenn Beck, and Donald Trump. S&S launched the imprint back in 2006 (with Mary Matalin as its founding editor) when Random House’s conservative Crown imprint (publisher of George Bush) formed an even more conservative sub-imprint, Crown Forum (Ann Coulter, Pat Buchanan), in 2003 … which in turn had been a response to Penguin’s 2002 formation of its conservative Sentinel imprint (Mike Huckabee, Scott Walker). It’s the modern predicament in a nutshell — the normalization of the most vile nonsense.
Booksellers! Go To Hellman. DT > Digital Textbooks. The Distant Librarian. Against-the-Grain.com. INFOdocket. LISNews: | Trying To Kill Ourselves With Fun. Lorcan Dempsey's Weblog.