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BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Saving the sounds of history

BBC NEWS | UK | Magazine | Saving the sounds of history.

Saving the sounds of history
By Sean Street

From Vietnamese spoon music to the first ever recording of bird song, the BBC presides over an extensive sound archive. The fact it almost wound up on a scrap heap only to be saved by a "temp" is one of the great untold stories of broadcasting history - until now.

In 1937 Marie Slocombe was working as a summer relief secretary at the BBC.

One of her tasks was to sort out - and dispose of - a pile of dusty broadcast discs. She noticed that among them were recordings of GB Shaw, HG Wells, Winston Churchill, Herbert Asquith and GK Chesterton. So she hesitated. In that moment was the humble beginning of what became one of the most important collections of recordings in the world - the BBC Sound Archive. [Editor's note: Inline link added]

Titanic survivors Spoon music Edward's abdication Titanic survivor King David's harp Working with Lynton Fletcher, who was in charge of recorded programmes, Slocombe carried on collecting.

Covey to lead United Space Alliance - Houston Business Journal:

Covey to lead United Space Alliance - Houston Business Journal:.

Covey to lead United Space Alliance
Houston Business Journal - 11:26 AM CDT Thursday, August 30, 2007

Richard Covey has been named president and chief executive of the United Space Alliance, effective Sept. 28.

Covey, who has been chief operating officer since February 2006, will replace Michael McCulley, who announced his retirement.

McCulley has spent 38 years as a Naval aviator, NASA astronaut and highly respected space industry executive.

My namesake the astronaut, who probably is not the only one of "us" out there (but I sort of adopted him), is retiring.. me next ;) .. ah, soon.. I wish you well, MM, enjoy the retirement.. I wonder if he's going back to Tennessee?

SPACE.com -- Lunar Eclipse Dazzles Skywatchers

SPACE.com -- Lunar Eclipse Dazzles Skywatchers.

Lunar Eclipse Dazzles Skywatchers
By Dave Mosher, Staff Writer, posted: 28 August 2007 9:55 am ET

Those who gazed into the darkened skies early Tuesday morning caught a breathtaking view of a blood-red lunar eclipse.

The second such event of the year gave those along the Pacific Rim, including California, New Zealand and eastern Australia a view of a total lunar eclipse from start to finish. Inhabitants in the Central U.S. and Canada through New England and even Japan, however, also got a spectacular view.

Earth's full shadow, or umbra, crept over the moon at 4:51 a.m. EDT (1:51 a.m. PDT) and completely covered it by 5:32 EDT (2:52 PDT). The celestial event ended after sunrise on the East coast and at 4:22 a.m. PDT on the West coast.

A don't miss image gallery accompanies this article.. some great images from around the globe on this eclipse...

Filmmaker's Tool Kit: Creating a Movie with Web 2.0

Filmmaker's Tool Kit: Creating a Movie with Web 2.0.

Filmmaker's Tool Kit: Creating a Movie with Web 2.0
Written by Josh Catone / August 24, 2007 / 22 comments

In this post I will show you the tools you need to go from idea to finished film using as many web 2.0 products as possible. In June, I wrote about 8 online video editors that could be used to slice together your masterpiece. But there's more to being Kubrick than editing. You have to write your film, cast it, shoot it, edit it, and distribute it to the masses. Web 2.0 applications and services can help with (nearly) all of these phases.

The tool kit below will help you take your idea from start to finish and fulfill your dream of winning an Oscar (okay, maybe not, but you have to start somewhere). This is film making on a budget.

Hydrapinion - Create - Writers Block! A Solution.

Hydrapinion - Create - Writers Block! A Solution..

Writers Block! A Solution
Tuesday August 28, 2007, By David HAGUE

Writer’s block. Anyone who has sat down to write The Next Big Novel or The Screenplay to End All Screenplays knows that feeling. Sitting there staring at a blank screen or sheet of paper.

You have the idea, just not the exact details. The plot is there, but the character development is not. The surprise ending with a delicious twist is a beauty, but the start of the tome is not yet decided with three or four possibilities swimming around in your head.

But they are all in your head and you have no idea of how to get on paper. Well I am sure I may have mentioned this in passing before now, but the writer’s best friend is without question, Microsoft Word. Yes, yes I know it is good for typing, spell checking and more dubiously, grammar checking (I always feel that robotized grammar checking turns all writing into a clone of something).

The latest versions are even good for research purposes, finding synonyms and the perfect word for the situation at hand, but I maintain that Word’s party piece as far as a writer is concerned, is its outlining ability. It amazes me more people don’t use at and even more that many don’t even know outlining exists or understands what outlining actually is.

NASA - NASA and Internet Archive Team to Digitize Space Imagery

NASA - NASA and Internet Archive Team to Digitize Space Imagery.

NASA and Internet Archive Team to Digitize Space Imagery
News Release/Contacts:
Bob Jacobs, Headquarters, Washington 202-358-1600 bob.jacobs@nasa.gov
Paul Hickman, Internet Archive 415-462-1509, 415-561-6767 paul@archive.org 
Aug. 23, 2007 RELEASE: 07-178

WASHINGTON - NASA and Internet Archive of San Francisco are partnering to scan, archive and manage the agency's vast collection of photographs, historic film and video. The imagery will be available through the Internet and free to the public, historians, scholars, students, and researchers.

Currently, NASA has more than 20 major imagery collections online. With this partnership, those collections will be made available through a single, searchable "one-stop-shop" archive of NASA imagery.

"Making NASA's important scientific and space exploration imagery available and easily accessible online to all is a service of tremendous value to America, and we're pleased to partner with the experts at Internet Archive to accomplish this effort," said Robert Hopkins, chief of strategic communications at NASA Headquarters, Washington.

NASA selected Internet Archive, a nonprofit organization, as a partner for digitizing and distributing agency imagery through a competitive process. The two organizations are teaming through a non-exclusive Space Act agreement to help NASA consolidate and digitize its imagery archives using no NASA funds.

Librarian, or Author? - 8/15/2007 - Library Journal

Librarian, or Author? - 8/15/2007 - Library Journal.

Librarian, or Author?
By Ronald M. Gauthier -- Library Journal, 8/15/2007

Fresh out of college, I was dissuaded from pursuing a writing career by countless stories of embittered and starving writers eking out meager existences as dishwashers or janitors, unpublished and disheartened by rejection letters from agents and publishers. I fled from what I thought would be a torturous reality and dedicated 20 years to social services and librarianship. Librarianship turned out to be the perfect setting to nurture my skills as a writer. A free-flowing world of information, the library environment spurred me to reclaim the dream deferred.

Library as laboratory
As a library branch manager, I am surrounded by rows of books, periodicals, and compact discs. I traverse mounds of data in electronic format, links pulling me like tentacles into a world illuminated through the wide screens of computers. The library has enriched my storytelling and writing and helped me to take my characters on unforeseen paths, enabling them to become more vivid and real.

The City of Light, as Seen From a Glittering Perch - New York Times

The City of Light, as Seen From a Glittering Perch - New York Times.

Europe > France > Paris
Heads Up | Paris
The City of Light, as Seen From a Glittering Perch
By ALISON SMALE, Published: August 26, 2007

LIKE many of the best things in life, this one came along by chance — though it had been hiding in plain sight.

On a witheringly hot summer day a few weeks ago, our niece and daughter had chickened out of the trek to the Eiffel Tower, and the long wait to go up it. But a friend recalled that it was open at night, and, indeed, to my surprise I learned that you could ride up as late as midnight.

So we set off, and hit the tower line around 10 p.m. As during the day, the lines snaked away from the elevators at the north and east pillars, and the stairs in the south pillar. But you weren't wilting in heat, forced to buy bottled water or ice cream at exorbitant rates from nearby stands. Nor was the wait quite as long — an hour or so, better than the 90 minutes you can expect on the average summer day in July and August, when the tower attracts up to 31,000 visitors during the hours the elevators are open.

Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?

Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?.

Beyond Google: How do students conduct academic research?
by Alison J. Head

Abstract
This paper reports findings from an exploratory study about how students majoring in humanities and social sciences use the Internet and library resources for research. Using student discussion groups, content analysis, and a student survey, our results suggest students may not be as reliant on public Internet sites as previous research has reported. Instead, students in our study used a hybrid approach for conducting course–related research. A majority of students leveraged both online and offline sources to overcome challenges with finding, selecting, and evaluating resources and gauging professors’ expectations for quality research.

Interesting though small-scale study at a smaller academic school in California.. it bears repeating at larger academic institutions.. is there hope for the students in college for getting to the "right stuff" that libraries and universities pay megabucks for? Let's hope...

F as in Fat 2007: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America 2007

F as in Fat 2007: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America 2007.

F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America, 2007
2007 Report (2.06MB .pdf)

Adult obesity rates rose in 31 states last year, according to the fourth annual F as in Fat: How Obesity Policies are Failing in America, 2007 report from the Trust for America's Health (TFAH). Twenty-two states experienced an increase for the second year in a row; no states decreased. A new public opinion survey featured in the report finds 85 percent of Americans believe that obesity is an epidemic.

Mississippi topped the list with the highest rate of adult obesity in the country for the third year in a row, and is the first state to reach a rate of over 30 percent (at 30.6 percent). Colorado was the leanest state again this year, however, its adult obesity rate increased over the past year (from 16.9 to 17.6 percent). Ten of the 15 states with the highest rates of adult obesity are located in the South. Rates of adult obesity now exceed 25 percent in 19 states, an increase from 14 states last year and 9 in 2005. In 1991, none of the states exceeded 20 percent.

Stay up late - or get up early - for spectacular lunar eclipse

Stay up late - or get up early - for spectacular lunar eclipse.

Stay up late - or get up early - for spectacular lunar eclipse
David Perlman, Chronicle Science Editor, Monday, August 27, 2007

What is a lunar eclipse?

A lovely total lunar eclipse will be visible throughout the Bay Area and all of California before dawn Tuesday morning as the Earth's shadow darkens the bright full moon, and wherever skies are clear, it will be a time to look upward wide-eyed. Astronomers say the eclipse should be a beauty, but only people willing to stay up very late or set their alarm clocks for long after midnight will see it.

It will last for a full hour and a half, and during that time, the moon's color could be anything from a dull and dusky red-brown to a reddish or even orange glow, depending on how much dust, pollution and mist is in the atmosphere, according to Andrew Fraknoi, chair of astronomy at Foothill College in Los Altos Hills, who has observed many in his time.

For the wide-awake, a partial eclipse will start at 1:51 a.m. Tuesday and become total starting at 2:52 a.m. By 4:22 a.m., the total phase will be over, but then as the moon begins to emerge from Earth's shadow, another partial phase will begin. The eclipse will end at 5:24 a.m., just as the sky lightens at dawn.

The Questia Online Library

The Questia Online Library.

The Questia Online Library
Over 5,000 free eBooks available online from Questia

From the publisher's site: "Read more than 5,000 books - for free. There's no doubt Questia is a world-class research tool, but our library is filled with some terrific classic and rare books.

"We figured our subscribers weren't the only ones interested in reading them, so we've made more than 5,000 books available for Free."

Top 10 Free Books

• A General Introduction to Psychoanalysis by Sigmund Freud
• Alice's Adventures in Wonderland by Lewis Carroll
• The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain
• Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Origin of Species by Charles Darwin
• Tarzan of the Apes by Edgar Rice Burroughs
• Up from Slavery by Booker T. Washington
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• The Scarlet Letter by Nathaniel Hawthorne
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Bronte

Variety.com - Library of Congress gets gift of space

Variety.com - Library of Congress gets gift of space.

Library of Congress gets gift of space
Three-building preservation facility donated
By WILLIAM TRIPLETT, Friday, August 24, 2007

Looking for original camera negatives of Frank Capra's movies? Or maybe the screenplays? How about the first 45 rpm record ever made? Or maybe you've wanted to see every episode of "The Ed Sullivan Show," or hear everything FDR said to Congress following the attack on Pearl Harbor?

These and nearly 6 million other artifacts constituting the Library of Congress' vast film and audio collection -- the largest in the world -- used to be dispersed in warehouses in five different locations.

Not any more, courtesy of a recent, unprecedented gift from the Packard Humanities Institute that's just made the lives of many cultural researchers and historians a lot easier.

David Woodley Packard, PHI prexy and son of the co-founder of electronics giant Hewlett Packard, donated a new three-building, 45-acre, state-of-the-art preservation facility, whose construction his foundation underwrote for more than $150 million. The roughly 5.7 million moving images and sound recordings, including related material such as manuscripts and posters, were previously held in storage facilities in Virginia, Maryland, Pennsylvania, Ohio and Washington, D.C. They will now be housed together at the Packard Campus for Audio-Visual Conservation -- aka the National Audio-Visual Conservation Center -- about an hour outside Washington in Virginia.

Technology News: Portals & Search: 2007: A Google Space Odyssey

Technology News: Portals & Search: 2007: A Google Space Odyssey.

2007: A Google Space Odyssey
By Katherine Noyes, TechNewsWorld 08/22/07 11:09 AM PT

Google Earth now includes much more than just images of our planet -- its new feature Sky lets users view 100 million stars and 200 million galaxies. Sky also features several informational layers that focus on particular events and celestial bodies. For example, the Backyard Astronomy layer is designed to help amateur astronomers learn about particular areas of the night sky.

Google Earth turned its gaze upward Wednesday with the debut of a new feature that allows users to view the best images of the sky captured by astronomers around the globe.

Called "Sky," the new feature lets Google Earth users view and navigate through 100 million individual stars and 200 million galaxies. The images presented are a combination of those from numerous scientific third parties -- including the Space Telescope Science Institute, the Sloan Digital Sky Survey, the Digital Sky Survey Consortium, CalTech's Palomar Observatory, the United Kingdom Astronomy Technology Center and the Anglo-Australian Observatory -- stitched together by Google's engineers.

This very semi amateur astronomer guy is thrilled at this innovation.. I can't wait to try it out some...

Where you fall in poll of U.S. reading habits - CNN.com

Where you fall in poll of U.S. reading habits - CNN.com.

updated 5:16 p.m. EDT, Tue August 21, 2007
Where you fall in poll of U.S. reading habits

Story Highlights
* One in four Americans read no books last year
* More women are avid readers than men
* Southerners read more than rest of country
* Democrats, liberals read slightly more books than GOP, conservatives

WASHINGTON (AP) -- There it sits on your nightstand, that book you've meant to read for who knows how long but haven't yet cracked open. Tonight, as you feel its stare from beneath that teetering pile of magazines, know one thing -- you are not alone.

Women are more avid readers than men, a new poll says. 1 of 2 One in four adults say they read no books at all in the past year, according to an Associated Press-Ipsos poll released Tuesday. Of those who did read, women and seniors were most avid, and religious works and popular fiction were the top choices.

The survey reveals a nation whose book readers, on the whole, can hardly be called ravenous. The typical person claimed to have read four books in the last year -- half read more and half read fewer. Excluding those who hadn't read any, the usual number read was seven.