Author Archives: jrochkind

No, this isn’t about “predatory publishers”. Check out this Nature comment about a comment.   scientists at Amgen who were able to reproduce findings in only 11% of 53 published [pre-clinical cancer research] papers…. …The Amgen scientists approached the papers’ original authors … Continue reading →

YES, JQuery 2.0 has been released, which does not support IE8 and previous. BUT, JQuery will continue to simultaneously support a 1.x series — current 1.9 and plans for a future 1.10 even — which are API-compatible with JQuery 2.0 … Continue reading →

Umlaut is the open source more-than-a-link-resolver/link-resolver-front-end/just-in-time aggregator of “last mile” specific-citation services. The upcoming 3.1.0 release of Umlaut has a majorly reworked visual design. It’s based on bootstrap, and scales down well on smaller/mobile screens. (Which is maybe a bit … Continue reading →

Millions (billions?) of dollars, hours of time, and degredations of privacy and dignity all go into trying to reduce the chance of someone being able to sneak a Toothpaste Bomb (over 3oz!) onto a plane. Meanwhile… An extremely well attended … Continue reading →

In the New York Times today: Scientific Articles Accepted (Personal Checks, Too), by Gina Kolata.  But some researchers are now raising the alarm about what they see as the proliferation of online journals that will print seemingly anything for a fee. … Continue reading →

Bootstrap typeahead (ie autocomplete) component has, like most of Bootstrap, a great visual design. But it’s got a very limited feature set, it lacks some of the customization features found in other autocomplete widgets (like JQuery-UI) — and it lacks … Continue reading →

So in our catalog, like most academic libraries, we have a number of edited collections, books that are collections of scholarly essays by various people. For instance: Global critical race feminism : an international reader edited by Adrien Katherine Wing … Continue reading →

Google Scholar supports a feature where many (but not neccesarily all) hits can include a link out to delivery/access services from your particular institution, using an OpenURL link resolver. This feature keeps getting harder and harder to find though. For … Continue reading →

So it turns out you can have ruby strip illegal bytes for any arbitrary encoding (like UTF-8), or replace them with “?” or the unicode replacement char “�”. You’ve got to use the second argument to String#encode, “source encoding”, and pass … Continue reading →

A recent New York Times article touches on the ‘first-sale doctrine’ and ebooks: Imagining a Swap Meet for E-Books and Music by David Streitfield. The First-Sale Doctrine is the legal ruling in the US that says the legal buyer of a … Continue reading →