Commerce
"Wasting seven seams of coal meant the mine would have a shorter life, about forty years rather than 140 years if the coal from all ten seams was recovered. Dave questioned the logic of mining only three seams. The mine's financial officer provided an explanation: 'We
Politics
Andrew Pace notes the perils of "doing more with less". A related question: If someone is saying that a public agency should do, say, 110% of its previous work with 90% of its previous resources, then who is getting that 10% of the resources that has been taken
History
-- Walter Russell Mead, God and Gold: Britain, America, and the Making of the Modern World (New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2007), pg. 309.
History
"Today we reel at the speed of globalization and long for the placid, pastoral times of, say, Edwardian Britain in the years before World War I. Yet people living in those times did not think their lives were placid or that the pace of change was slow. As suffragettes
History
"Conversely and significantly, the vast majority of the joke tellers who were denounced and brought before special Nazi courts received a mild punishment, if any. Usually they were let off with a warning. 'Whispered jokes' were a surrogate for, and not a manifestation of, social conscience and
Chapbook
begin -- John Tabak, The History of Mathematics: Numbers, Revised Edition (New York : Facts on File, 2011), pgs. 160-61.
Music
In the wake of Amy Winehouse's death, many people (intending wit, I suppose) have said that she should have gone to rehab. They miss the point of the song, and miss it in a characteristically American way. In the United States, we see problems as fixable. But many
Communication
[U]nderlying each connection are the core beliefs that the parties about to communicate hold about each other. These colour the whole relationship. If you think a person is incompetent then no matter how much you try to mask that belief it percolates as a subtle energy through the relationship,
LIS + DataSci
(Previous posts: #1, #2, #3) After 20 years of steady but containable erosion of the library's customary position as an institution that controlled everything within itself, the final (and ultimately fatal) blow came in the mid-1990's: The World Wide Web. As the Web grew from
Chapbook
He wanted to teach us to despise the soppy mush of feeling, the false generosity that for an instant, and in all good faith, promises the sun, moon and stars, convinced of its own generous impulse, but that for all sorts of sound, valid reasons draws back when it comes
LIS + DataSci
(Previous posts: #1, #2) The second crack in the century-long stability of American libraries began to arrive in the 1980s: Online databases. These databases vastly expanded patron access to periodicals without requiring an equally vast building program. The percentage of library collection budgets spent on these databases has steadily
LIS + DataSci
In my last post, I described the characteristics of libraries during the century before 1975. During that century, libraries faced no fundamental changes and were fully in control of how they presented themselves to patrons. That stability and control have now been shattered. Why? The first crack came with the