DrWeb's Domain

CNN.com - North Carolina: Historic resort gets new life - Sep. 30, 2003

CNN.com - North Carolina: Historic resort gets new life - Sep. 30, 2003

North Carolina: Historic resort gets new life Tuesday, September 30, 2003 Posted: 2:29 PM EDT (1829 GMT)

ASHEVILLE, North Carolina (AP) -- It took 12 years of persistence, a new spa and a reluctant architect to get the golf course at the Grove Park Inn -- designed by Donald Ross -- the attention it deserved.

Now, restored to its classic Ross-style risk-and-reward splendor, the 18-hole layout actually merits its $145 price tag for a round of golf -- and is an ideal complement to the famously romantic environs of the Grove Park.

Nice story on one of my favorite spots in the North Carolina mountains, Grove Park Inn.. I recall last time I was there was trying out for Jeopardy! and meeting Alek there, great guy.. ps. I didn't make the show, but I still love it.. hope to get back to Asheville, NC for a visit soon....

Moreover Introduces New Blog Monitoring Tool

Moreover Introduces New Blog Monitoring Tool

Moreover Introduces New Blog Monitoring Tool
by Barbara Quint

September 29, 2003 --Moreover Technologies (http://w.moreover.com), based in the U.K., has announced a new business information service called Weblog Content Pack. The database service scans some 25,000 Weblogs (aka blogs) for enterprises eager to expand their competitive intelligence and market research to encompass this new form of information. The new package adds to Moreover's Connected Intelligence (ci) product suite. For an additional fee, users will be able to receive near real-time (15-minute delay) updates on blog content filtered for profiled interests through standard delivery options offered in Moreover's ci services.

Fine update from the all-wise, all-knowing Barbara Quint.. interesting tool, and will likely find a nice niche market....

Really Good Films

Really Good Films

Why Really Good Films?<br>

If you are a fan of quality films, you already know it can be difficult to keep track of what's new or worth seeing. Blockbuster films spend tons on advertising, and so they get most of the attention. A lot of terrific films may not break records on opening weekend, but there are still lots of people who want to see them! Really Good Films is here for those people who really love quality films.

Interesting new site, worth a book mark.. it beats all those other sites listing every movie and new release, and frankly, there's a very few films today worth the $10 a ticket to see in a theatre, sad truth....

Wired News: IBM Examines How Inventors Invent

Wired News: IBM Examines How Inventors Invent

IBM Examines How Inventors Invent

Associated Press

10:03 AM Sep. 28, 2003 PT

YORKTOWN HEIGHTS, N.Y. -- On a bright, warm morning at IBM's research center here, seven of Big Blue's scientists gathered around a conference table to consider a nonscientific question: What helps inventors invent things?

Source: WebReference Update Newsletter, September 29, 2003

On TV, Men Are the New Women

On TV, Men Are the New Women

On TV, Men Are the New Women
By ALESSANDRA STANLEY
Published: September 28, 2003

The effect of 30 years of feminism on television is a little like an old folk legend: a crippled peasant asks God to make both his hands the same and awakens to find that both are shriveled.

Women on television are still sometimes squeezed into demeaning caricatures (or at least inappropriate clothing: surgeons, homicide detectives and high school teachers all wear low-cut tank tops to work). But increasingly, so are men. The new fall season shrinks the number of belittling stereotypes they may occupy to just two: cads or dads.

Good read, and explores the current television season and shows for men's roles and styles.. if it's hard to know how to be a man in the modern world, television roles and stereotypes aren't much help.. recommended reading....

Web Research, Stem to Stern

Web Research, Stem to Stern

Web Research, Stem to Stern

By BOB TEDESCHI

Published: September 28, 2003

More than 85 percent of cruise aficionados research their vacations online, according to industry officials. Given the vast array of such material online, though, surfing a sea of cruise Web sites can quickly lead to cybersickness. There are a few cruise sites that are useful starting (or ending) points.

CruiseCritic.com is among the best places to start. The site doesn't sell cruises; rather, it positions itself as an objective source for cruise information, whether in the form of discount alerts from the cruise lines, reviews from its staff of writers or feedback from some of the roughly 60,000 registered CruiseCritic users.

Brief article, lists some good Web sites to use for researching and planning cruise travels....

Literary Lion Plimpton Dies in His Sleep at 76

Literary Lion Plimpton Dies in His Sleep at 76

LITERARY LION PLIMPTON DIES IN HIS SLEEP AT 76
By MARSHA KRANES

September 27, 2003 -- George Plimpton, the witty, urbane man of letters and madcap exploits, died in his sleep in his Manhattan apartment early yesterday. He was 76.

Plimpton was a bona fide Mayflower blueblood who spoke with an aristocratic accent and hobnobbed with high society.

He became a respected literary patron as unpaid editor of the Paris Review, the highbrow, low-circulation quarterly in which he published the early works of little-known writers, including Philip Roth, Terry Southern and Jack Kerouac, and enlightening interviews with established giants, like Ernest Hemingway, John Updike and William Faulkner.

A true original, he will be missed.. he had just signed not long before to write his autobiography, due to publish it in 2006; that would have a been a grand story indeed.. George went to the bullfights with Hemingway, and published some very wonderful interviews with Hemingway in his Paris Review....

Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld

Emerging Alternatives: Blogworld

...

But there still exists a publishing format that manages to embody all these lost qualities, and more -- the Weblog. The average blog, needless to say, pales in comparison to a 1957 issue of the Voice, or a 1964 Los Angeles Free Press, or a 2003 Lexington, Kentucky, ACE Weekly, for that matter. But that's missing the point. Blogging technology has, for the first time in history, given the average Jane the ability to write, edit, design, and publish her own editorial product -- to be read and responded to by millions of people, potentially -- for around $0 to $200 a year. It has begun to deliver on some of the wild promises about the Internet that were heard in the 1990s. Never before have so many passionate outsiders -- hundreds of thousands, at minimum -- stormed the ramparts of professional journalism.

...

Recommended reading, from Columbia Journalism Review.. first-rate overview of blogging's impact on journalism and potentials for future impacts....

Twenty-five libraries host "The Sixties" film discussion series

ALA | Twenty-five libraries host "The Sixties" film discussion series

For Immediate Release
September 26, 2003

National Video Resources (NVR) and the American Library Association (ALA) Public Programs Office have named 25 public and academic libraries as pilot sites for the film discussion series, "The Sixties: America's Decade of Crisis and Change." This new six-week library program features scholar-led lectures, documentary film screenings, readings and discussion sessions on a period of extraordinary change and social conflict in American history. Issues covered in the film series include: the Kennedy and Johnson administrations, Kennedy's reform agenda, the civil rights movement, America's involvement in Vietnam, the anti-war movement, the "counterculture," and rage and reaction in 1968.

From the ALA press release.. looks like a good series, only wish it were more widely available.. only one library, Oakland Public, in California was selected to host....

The Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers

The Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers

The online presentation of The Wilbur and Orville Wright Papers at the Library of Congress, comprising about 10,121 library items or approximately 49,084 digital images, documents the lives of Wilbur and Orville Wright and highlights their pioneering work which led to the world's first powered, controlled and sustained flight. Included in the collection are correspondence, diaries and notebooks, scrapbooks, drawings, printed matter, and other documents, as well as the Wrights' collection of glass-plate photographic negatives. The Wright Brothers' letters to aviation pioneer and mentor Octave Chanute, from the Octave Chanute Papers, were also selected for this online collection. The Wright Papers span the years 1881 to 1952 but largely cover 1900 to 1940. This online presentation includes the famous glass-plate negative of the "First Flight" at Kitty Hawk on December 17, 1903, as well as diaries and letters in which Wilbur and Orville Wright recount their work that led to that day.

A really wonderful, first-rate collection, and should be a treasure hunt for most researchers and just plain people who want to know more about these remarkable brothers.. we were just at Kitty Hawk and the memorial, and it's awesome.. the centennial of Flight is December 17, 2003, and it's going to be a special celebration of their creation, their inventions, their spirit, and their flights....

Panic in Paris: "French cafe society foaming at Starbucks invasion"

Guardian Unlimited | Special reports | French cafe society foaming at Starbucks invasion

Seems there's a panic in Paris over Starbucks coming to the land of bistros and cafes...

French cafe society foaming at Starbucks invasion

Jon Henley in Paris

Friday September 26, 2003, The Guardian

It is a fair bet that the likes of Hemingway, Fitzgerald, Sartre, and de Beauvoir, would not have become the giants of world literature they are today had they been fuelled by Starbucks takeaway caffe lattes rather than shots of strong espresso in such celebrated Left Bank cafes as Flore and Les Deux Magots.

But that did not stop the giant US coffee chain announcing plans yesterday to open its first branch in France early next year and even to insist that customers would have to observe its no-smoking policy.

Beat Mystique Endures at a San Francisco Landmark

Beat Mystique Endures at a San Francisco Landmark

Beat Mystique Endures at a San Francisco Landmark
By DEAN E. MURPHY
Published: September 25, 2003

SAN FRANCISCO, Sept. 23 — The shelves at the City Lights bookstore were pushed aside, and two chairs were arranged against a wall near the erotica section. It was standing room only as Lawrence Ferlinghetti, San Francisco's celebrity poet and a founder of the bookstore, took a seat with a friendly, twinkling smile.

Mr. Ferlinghetti was joined by a longtime friend, Eric Bauersfeld, a radio producer and dramatist, who ambled to a microphone and started the advertised event: an intimate evening of conversation in celebration of City Lights' 50th anniversary.

One of my all-time favorite book places in the all the world.. long live City Lights, long live the Beats....

France's Precursor to the Internet Lives On

France's Precursor to the Internet Lives On

France's Precursor to the Internet Lives On
'80s-Vintage Minitel Network Upgraded to 'Complement' the Web

By Maite Selignan, Special to The Washington Post

Thursday, September 25, 2003; Page E02

PARIS -- Strange but true: The Minitel is still up and running. The clunky French data communications system, which blossomed into the world's first mass-market online network in the 1980s, has found a second life thanks to new services that connect it to the Internet.

This is from the Washington Post, where you have to have cookies on and ID yourself to read news.. a bit of hassle, and I'm not sure why they continue to put barriers in the way of reading news.. I much prefer the NY Times approach, where I'm registered and recognized whenever I visit their site...

Are Reference Librarians Headed for Extinction? (Not Likely!)

Are Reference Librarians Headed for Extinction? (Not Likely!)

Are Reference Librarians Headed for Extinction? (Not Likely!)
By Judith M. Nixon

Judith M. Nixon is a librarian at the Management and Economics Library in the Krannert Graduate School at Purdue University.

Is there a future for reference librarians? Will reference librarians be replaced by Web search engines such as Google? This may seem impossible to those dedicated to reference service, but isn't this what has happened to catalogers? Are reference librarians going to become as rare as catalogers? Twenty-five years ago at a small academic library, we had three professional catalogers and three reference librarians. Today, at Purdue, which is eight times larger, we have more than 30 public service/reference librarians and only three professional catalogers. What happened to all those catalogers? And, perhaps the more important question is, are reference librarians headed down the same path to becoming an endangered species?

Wonderful tale of change in this enewsletter, from database provider and producer Gale.. the solutions here are about making change happen, and continuing to serve and find new ways to deliver services...

Book Industry Study Group: 13-Digit ISBNs...

Book Industry Study Group

The ISBN-13 and the Transition to EAN/UCC-13

Book Industry Study Group, in their role of assisting the industry with technology and standards issues, will be reporting to members on upcoming changes in the area of book product identification (ISBN, EAN, and UPC). The following information will offer some general background. As various organizations and groups work towards the transition of product identification, BISG members will be updated through newsletters and our website.

What product identification changes will take place in the future? The Uniform Code Council (UCC) has established January 2005 as "2005 Sunrise," the date for general retailing in North America to complete an evolutionary transition in product identification. By that time, retailers are to provide the capability to scan and process EAN-8 and EAN-13 symbols and numbers in addition to the 12-digit U.P.C. This will apply to all items, not just books and audio.

In January 2007 (or soon thereafter), the US ISBN Agency will begin assigning 13-digit identifiers to books and book-related products. These identifiers, "ISBN-13s", will incorporate the existing Bookland EAN into a new book identifier where the prefix can be either '978' (current value) or '979'.

And let's hope there's room in the integrated library systems, databases, and record fields for ISBNs to hold the new digits. Originally reported in today's Publisher's Weekly Daily for Booksellers' newsletter.