Four short links: 28 May 2019
Research Libraries, Disinformation Campaign, Unstructured Text Mining, and Building a PiDP-11
- The Books of College Libraries Are Turning Into Wallpaper (The Atlantic) — University libraries across the country, and around the world, are seeing steady, and in many cases precipitous, declines in the use of the books on their shelves. […] Statistics show that today’s undergraduates have read fewer books before they arrive on campus than in prior decades, and just placing students in an environment with more books is unlikely to turn that around. (The time to acquire the reading bug is much earlier than freshman year.) And while correlation does not equal causation, it is all too conspicuous that we reached Peak Book in universities just before the iPhone came out. Part of this story is undoubtedly about the proliferation of electronic devices that are consuming the attention once devoted to books. The interaction between the book format, information scarcity, and digitalization plays out in research libraries.
- Live Coverage of a Disinformation Operation Against the 2019 EU Parliamentary Elections (F-Secure) — the visualization and research into botnet clusters is interesting.
- Knowledge Extraction from Unstructured Texts — an interesting rundown of approaches and papers.
- PiDP-11 Retro Computer Build (YouTube) — building and operating the PiDP-11.
