Did you know that "ten-cent store" is no longer in the Oxford English dictionary?
Nor "teliferous" (whatever that is)! Every year, hundreds of words are dropped form the dictionary to make room for new ones.
Oxford University Press has launched an initiative called Save The Words that aims to prevent lesser-known English words from dying out of our language.
You can Adopt a Word and Spread the Word. Me, I think I'll adopt ... veteratorian.
I just got a postcard in my mailbox for this company who will be at ALA midwinter. Since most of us aren't going to ALA....
Filed under the category "I didn't know that" there are only 14 combinations, including leap years, of months and days on the Gregorian calendar. That opens up a market for the recycling of old calendars. There is even a website - time and date.com - that will calculate the matching years for you. For 2009 there are 12 repeats going back 118 years!
Missing their announced December launch date by just a little, RIM has opened their Blackberry application store to submissions. Much like Apple, and unlike Android, applications will have to be vetted prior to admission to the store. Take a look at their Application Storefront Vendor Guidelines.
This just popped up on the Apple website. That is since July, 2008. Amazing.
The policy requires that at least one editor know the identity of every source. Anonymous sources cannot be used when on-the-record sources are readily available. They must have direct knowledge of the information they are imparting; they cannot use the cloak of anonymity for personal or partisan attack; they cannot be used for trivial comment or to make an unremarkable comment seem more important than it is.
"Librarians are turning into job counselors -- and even social workers -- as they have to deal with a sometimes-desperate new class of patrons. "They are frustrated, overwhelmed and thought they would not be job hunting again in their lives," says Jan Perrier, head of reference and adult services at the Roxbury Public Library in Succasunna, N.J. "I had one woman just so overwhelmed she sat in front of the PC and cried."
Many jobless people are reporting to the library as they used to report to the office. Career books are in particularly great demand at the Morris County Library in Whippany, N.J. "The shelves are bare," says Lynne Olver, chief librarian there. She says attendance in "Career Resource Seminars" that the library has held for many years jumped to 745 in 2008, from 472 in 2007.
Others come in to escape their troubles for a while. Wesley Martin on Friday tapped his hands to the beat of a hip-hop video he was watching on one of the Tracy library's computers. "This is just a chance for me to get out of my house," said the 33-year-old, who lost his job at a discount store a month ago."
"Make an appointment to meet one of our therapists – either in person or by phone or email – and you can discuss any area that you would like some books to shed light on. Perhaps you are looking for a set of books to help you think about your career options, or you’d like to fathom an aspect of a relationship. Maybe you want to spend six months reading history books or you have a demanding five-year-old for whom you’d like to put together a small library for the year ahead.
Whatever reading needs you have, we’ll take exceptional care and effort to create a reading prescription that’s perfect for you."
This idea both excites me and ... kinda irritates me! If folks only knew they could get that from their local public library... they can, can't they?...
hakia is reaching out to librarians seeking to help improve Web search results. hakia is a "semantic" natural language search engine, dedicated to a quality search experience based on Web site credibility, information relevance and librarian assistance. hakia's indexing process seeks to determine what questions a page can answer rather than simply indexing all the words on the page.
engine to reach out to librarians to build a collection of credible Web sites. Librarians join hakia and suggest credible websites based on their knowledge of the site and the following criteria:
Pledge Bank is a site to help people get things done, especially things that require several people. PledgeBank allows users to set up pledges and then encourages other people to sign up to them. A pledge is a statement of the form 'I will do something, if a certain number of people will help me do it'. The creator of the pledge then publicises their pledge and encourages people to sign up. Two outcomes are possible – either the pledge fails to get enough subscribers before it expires (in which case, we contact everyone and tell them 'better luck next time'), or, the better possibility, the pledge attracts enough people that they are all sent a message saying 'Well done—now get going!'
From Google.org/flutrends: "We have found a close relationship between how many people search for flu-related topics and how many people actually have flu symptoms. Of course, not every person who searches for "flu" is actually sick, but a pattern emerges when all the flu-related search queries from each state and region are added together. We compared our query counts with data from a surveillance system managed by the U.S. Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) and found that some search queries tend to be popular exactly when flu season is happening. By counting how often we see these search queries, we can estimate how much flu is circulating in various regions of the United States."
