Enhance the productivity and security benefits of RFID by utilizing industry leading 3M RFID Tags. 3M is actively involved in designing and testing RFID tags specifically for libraries. This means your library can utilize RFID tags that have longer read ranges, provide increased security and productivity benefits and are designed to consistently perform for as long as your items last. The RFID tag is the hub of the RFID system. Don’t trust your investment to a supplier without the knowledge and understanding of the most important part of the solution.

The graph shows the relative value that members of the academic community place on a range of methods for finding articles. The age differences are startling and they suggest that the shift away from the physical to the virtual library will accelerate very rapidly and that tools like GoogleScholar will be increasingly a real and present threat to the library as an institution.

So what are the main challenges to libraries and their information services in meeting the needs of users?

1. Taking full advantage of the popularity of scholarly information.
2. Reversing the process of dis-intermediation in a full-blown do-it-yourself consumer marketplace.
3. Becoming much more e-consumer-friendly and less stodgy and intellectual.
4. Avoiding the decoupling scenario – libraries being decoupled from the user and the publisher.
5. Introducing robust, fit-for-purpose mechanisms for monitoring and evaluating their users.
6. Really getting information skills on the agenda because clearly people are having great difficulties navigating and profiting from the virtual scholarly environment.
7. The library profession desperately needs leadership to develop a new vision for the 21st century and reverse its declining profile and influence.

• Google Generation show a preference for visual information over text
• Google Generation want a variety of learning experiences
• Google Generation Have shifted decisively to digital forms of communication
• Google Generation ‘Multitask’
• Google Generation are impatient and have zero tolerance for delay
• Google Generation find their peers more credible as a source of information than authority figures
• Google Generation need to feel constantly connected to the web
• Google Generation learn by doing rather than knowing
• Google Generation prefer quick information in the form of easily digested short chunks rather than full text
• Google Generation have a poor understanding and lack of respect for intellectual property
• Google Generation are format agnostic
• For the Google Generation, virtual reality may be as real as the real experience

At the beginning of the year 2000 there were only 500 million mobile subscriptions globally and 250 million Internet users.
By the beginning of this year 2011 those numbers have mushroomed to over five billion mobile users and two billion subscribers to the Internet.

Apple on Thursday lifted the veil on its plans to remake the educational landscape in a way that centers on its best-selling tablet computer, the iPad.
At a press conference in New York, the company announced three products that aim to get students and teachers to use the iPad’s touch-screen interface to read, write, plan classes and communicate with each other.
First, a free app called iBooks Author lets anyone create a digital, interactive textbook.
Second, an update to a piece of software called iTunes U lets teachers plan their curriculum and communicate with their students over the iPad.
Finally, a new textbook store called iBooks 2, also a free app, will feature digital e-books for schools.

Technological protection measures (TPM) encompass software, devices or other technologies used to block or limit access to a work, or certain actions with respect to the work (e.g., copying). TPMs include such things as encryption, passwords, and access controls.
Section 1201 of Title 17, enacted as part of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), prohibits anyone from circumventing a “technological measure that effectively controls access to a work.” There is no ban on circumventing a technological measure that protects a right of a copyright owner, such as reproduction or distribution, without controlling access to the work. Circumventing a copy control in and of itself, for example, is not prohibited.
Section 1201 also prohibits manufacturing, providing, or trafficking in devices or services primarily designed to circumvent either access controls or rights controls. There are a number of exceptions to these anti-circumvention provisions.

While the goals of SOPA and PIPA are clear and we support them, the way SOPA and PIPA attempt to accomplish the goals amounts does not work for the internet and companies such as Wikia because:

• They assign legal liability to site owners for ALL user generated content — Wikia would have to inspect and filter everything users upload — all text, images or video for copyright infringement and prevent it from being posted.
• They completely bypass today’s notice/takedown provision of the DMCA (Digital Millenium Copyright Act) where content owners can demand copyrighted content be taken down and site owners have to comply.
• They deny site owners the due process of law by enabling DNS blacklisting based on any good faith assertion by an individual copyright owners.
• They also compel payment processors to stop doing business with the web site in question.
• While the laws are aimed at foreign companies in general, they can be equally applied to US companies.

Internet protests on Wednesday quickly cut into Congressional support for anti-Web piracy measures as lawmakers abandoned and rethought their backing for legislation that pitted new media interests against some of the most powerful old-line commercial interests in Washington.
Freshman Senator Marco Rubio of Florida, a rising Republican star, was first out of the starting gate Wednesday morning with his announcement that he would no longer back anti-Internet piracy legislation he had co-sponsored. Senator John Cornyn, the Texas Republican who heads the campaign operation for his party, quickly followed suit and urged Congress take more time to study the measure that had been set for a test vote next week.

So where did Wikipedia go? That’s a question millions of people are asking this morning as they find the popular online encyclopedia has gone dark.
Wikipedia, Craigslist, Reddit and other websites have blacked out in protest against two anti-piracy bills in Congress — the House’s Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA), and the Senate’s Protect IP Act (PIPA) — that are pitting the entertainment industry against the tech world.
The bills were designed to stop piracy of copyrighted music, movies, and television shows. But critics including Google, Twitter, and some of the original architects of the Internet itself, say the legislation could censor the Internet, hobble online innovation and change what made the Internet what it is today.

Five men believed to be responsible for spreading a notorious computer worm on Facebook and other social networks — and pocketing several million dollars from online schemes — are hiding in plain sight in St. Petersburg, Russia, according to investigators at Facebook and several independent computer security researchers.
The men live comfortable lives in St. Petersburg — and have frolicked on luxury vacations in places like Monte Carlo, Bali and, earlier this month, Turkey, according to photographs posted on social network sites — even though their identities have been known for years to Facebook, computer security investigators and law enforcement officials.
One member of the group, which is popularly known as the Koobface gang, has regularly broadcast the coordinates of its offices by checking in on Foursquare, a location-based social network, and posting the news to Twitter. Photographs on Foursquare also show other suspected members of the group working on Macs in a loftlike room that looks like offices used by tech start-ups in cities around the world.

Koobface will probably earn its place in history for pioneering and leading the criminal exploitation of social networks, rather than the size of its profits.

SOPA is disguised as an anti-piracy bill. Any first year CS student knows better. The bill is, in actuality, designed to obliterate free speech on the internet and allow media publishing companies to commercialize everything.
SOPA explicitly states that companies will be liable for everything their users post. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, or any sites that allow user generated content CANNOT exist under these laws. Immediately after this bill is passed, you will see the media mafia (MPIAA, RIAA, etc) replacing websites like Wikipedia with commercialized encyclopedia software. Mainstream media outlets will not cover this bill because they are the ones lobbying for it.
“I don’t really know much about the internet, but we should pass this bill” – Congressman Walt
CBS VIACOM, Microsoft, and Disney all distribute uTorrent, Kazaa, Limewire, Frostwire, and other popular copyright infringement software on their websites, then turn around and sue people for it. CNET even has a search engine specifically designed to find MP3s (and offers embedded download links) – CNET is owned by CBS VIACOM. This bill isn’t designed to eliminate piracy, it is designed to give them control of the internet, the pesky free speech tool that has crippled their obsolete business model.

SOPA explicitly states that companies will be liable for everything their users post. Sites like Facebook, YouTube, Twitter, Reddit, Wikipedia, or any sites that allow user generated content CANNOT exist under these laws. Immediately after this bill is passed, you will see the media mafia (MPIAA, RIAA, etc) replacing websites like Wikipedia with commercialized encyclopedia software. Mainstream media outlets will not cover this bill because they are the ones lobbying for it.

In the days of 64k memories, programmers wrote code with as much care as ancient scribes carved out verses on precious pieces of rock, one expensive chisel-pounding rep at a time.
In the remarkably short space of 50 years, programming has evolved from rock-carving parsimony to paper-wasting profligacy.
Still living machine-coding gray eminences bemoan the verbosity and empty abstractions of the young. My one experience of writing raw machine code (some stepper-motor code, keyed directly into a controller board,  for a mechatronics class) was enlightening, but immediately convinced me to run away as fast as I could.
But why shouldn’t you waste bits or paper when you can, in service of clarity and accessibility? Why layer meaning upon meaning until you get to near-impenetrable opacity?
I think it is because the process of compression is actually the process of validation and comprehension.  When you ask repeatedly, who is listening, every answer generates a new set of conflicts. The more you resolve those conflicts before hitting Publish, the denser the writing. If you judge the release density right, you will produce a very generative piece of text that catalyzes further exploration rather than ugly flame wars.

No one has been able to explain to me why young men and women serve in the U.S. Military for 20 years, risking their lives protecting freedom, and only get 50% of their pay. While politicians hold their political positions in the safe confines of the capital, protected by these same men and women, and receive full pay retirement after serving one term. It just does not make any sense.
Fox news learned that the staffers of Congress family members are exempt from having to pay back student loans. This will get national attention if other news networks will broadcast it. When you add this to the below, just where will all of it stop?
PS. The above information was forwarded to us via e-mail. We have no idea if the information is correct.

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