Digital Musings

John Kenneth Galbraith passes away

John Kenneth Galbraith passes away at the age of 97. Galbraith is a Harvard icon. Richard Parker, his biographer and an economics professor at Harvard, describes Galbraith as Harvard's most famous economist.  Galbraith has been active on many fronts (politics, foreign affairs, society, economics etc...). He has written 48 books.

Galbraith never stopped observing the world, writing books, articles, giving inteviews. Here are some of quotations by the great man and an interview he gave at UC Berkeley Institute of International Studies.

Also an interesting a video link to an interview of Parker on Galbraith. Parker has also put together a site on his book.

Google mapping academic podcasts...worldwide!

Feeling overwhelmed with locating university and academic podcasts? Well, here is a solution: Another application of the now famous Google maps. We owe it to a nice app called Wayfaring. Wayfaring is a typical Web 2.0 app which allows you to create your own value added maps, share them and, of course, commect to other people.

Here is a Wayfaring map dedicated to academic podcasts worldwide. At the time of writing, only two podcasts lilks were reported for France. This academic mapping comes from Spain.

To stay tune with the Best of Wayfaring just subscribe to its RSS feed.

Services like Wayfaring are smart in the sense that they aggregate communities of people who by the simple fact they create their personalized maps tell a  bit more on who they are, what they like. In the course of doing so, they attract people of the same kind. Some cheap way of building databases that are today the real name of the business game!

I have started building the map of our community, namely that of the business schools that use Cyberlibris. It's fun and simple and I hope it will prove useful to our users. Indeed, my idea is to provide as much information as Wayfarer permits (such as blogs, professors' digital bookshelves etc...) to our users.

Windows Live Academic - Beta version

The market for academic search is hot these days. Google Scholar and PennState Smeal Search are no longer alone. Microsoft strikes back with its own service: Windows Live Academic.

To put it in Microsoft's own words:

"Windows Live Academic is now in beta. We currently index content related to computer science, physics, electrical engineering, and related subject areas. Academic search enables you to search for peer reviewed journal articles contained in journal publisher portals and on the web in locations like citeseer.

Academic search works with libraries and institutions to search and provide access to subscription content for their members. Access restricted resources include subscription services or premium peer-reviewed journals. You may be able to access restricted content through your library or institution.

We have built several features designed to help you rapidly find the content you are searching for including abstract previews via our preview pane, sort and group by capability, and citation export."

I'll give it a try. If you want to see a list of journals and sources already indexed go there.