"1959: The Year that Changed Everything"

Just finished reading Fred Kaplan's "1959: the Year Everything Changed", and while I'm not convinced  1959 qualifies as the singular hinge year of the 20th century, I'm not sure that matters (even to Kaplan), and it's a good book in any case.

He analyzes and weaves together a wide variety of events, e.g.: Castro seizing power in Cuba; Allen Ginsberg reading poetry to rapt audiences in New York; the Lunik 1 spacecraft breaking free of Earth's orbit; William Burroughs publishing "Naked Lunch"; John Howard Griffen publishing "Black Like Me"; Miles Davis recording "Kind of Blue"; John Coltrane, "Giant Steps"; Dave Brubeck, "Time Out"; Ornette Coleman, "The Shape of Jazz to Come"; Jack Kilby introducing the integrated circuit (the microchip); IBM selling the first 'modern' computer: the model 1401;  Malcolm X traveling to Mecca; the opening of Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum;  Searl Pharmaceuticals submitting Enovid, a.k.a. the birth control pill, for FDA approval, etc., etc .

The common theme is a sense of liberation from traditional constraints (e.g., hackneyed art, pervasive racism, the 'tyranny of numbers', and an optimism (and dread) toward the emerging "new frontier" in politics, technology, and art.

"Emerging Technologies in Academic Libraries" (International Conference in Norway)

Per emtacl10 announcement: "The future success of academic libraries is dependent on in-depth understandings of the relevance of emerging technologies. Our focus must be on accessibility, interaction, intuitivity, sharing, user-driven content and other web 2.0 challenges. This is a conference for academic library workers and others with a general interest in emerging technologies and electronic information services."

Learning Languages on the Web

I'm grateful to dchud for pointing out to me these two outstanding open-access web sites: lang-8 and smart.fm . I'm particularly intrigued by the way lang-8 connects people around the world who are trying to improve their language skills. For example, it lets you keep a "journal" that native readers will review and correct for you (and you do the same for them), and might even help you make new friends along the way. You collect something like karma points for correcting other people's journal entries and doing other helpful things, which then elevates your site ranking. What I like about smart.fm are the language tutorials (along with toolkits for building your own tutorials) with digital flash cards, vocabulary quizes, example sentences, native speaker pronunciation, usage notes, and other features. I wonder if these kinds of sites will soon be putting the text book publishers out of business.