According to Slashdot, Google Scholar debuted yesterday. From the "About" page:

Google Scholar enables you to search specifically for scholarly literature, including peer-reviewed papers, theses, books, preprints, abstracts and technical reports from all broad areas of research. Use Google Scholar to find articles from a wide variety of academic publishers, professional societies, preprint repositories and universities, as well as scholarly articles available across the web.

Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article's author, the publication in which the article appeared and how often it has been cited in scholarly literature. Google Scholar also automatically analyzes and extracts citations and presents them as separate results, even if the documents they refer to are not online. This means your search results may include citations of older works and seminal articles that appear only in books or other offline publications.

Please let us know if you have suggestions, questions or comments about Google Scholar. We recognize the debt we owe to all those in academia whose work has made Google itself a reality and we hope to make Google Scholar as useful to this community as possible. We believe everyone should have a chance to stand on the shoulders of giants.

Via Slashdot, this forum from Nature Publishing looks to be an ongoing series of pieces on Open Access and the implications for publishing. From the introduction, Declan Butler says:

Link I found over at GrepLaw that is amusing and helpful, to boot.

Siva Vaidhyanathan, in commenting on this piece by Peter Givler in The Chronicle (registered users only, unfortunately), says:

First, no one who understands the value of reasonable copyright is seriously arguing against copyright. But no one should be suckered into believing that just because some copyright is good than maximal copyright is better. Second, those of us who criticize the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act and the Digital Millenium Copyright Act are the supporters of TRUE copyright -- copyright that is humane, balanced, reasonable, effective, and worthy of public support and private adherence.

The original post contains a lengthy quote of Givler's piece for those of us who do not subscribe, but also relevant commentary. Read Siva's post here.

One day I was running late for my ethics class and realized I was missing a few pieces of information for a lecture I was about to give on social mores. On the way to the auditorium I visited a colleague's office to ask if he could do a quick Internet search for me on Puritanical influences on mass media. With a printout or two, I figured, I could refresh my memory and wing it in class.

"Sure," he said. At the time he was working on a text document. He minimized that screen only to reveal thumbnail images of naked women in sexual poses. I was looking for a Bay Colony and got a nudist one.

Every day, millions of people receive dozens of unsolicited commercial e-mails (UCE), known popularly as "spam." Some users see spam as a minor annoyance, while others are so overwhelmed with spam that they are forced to switch e-mail addresses. This has led many Internet users to wonder: How did these people get my e-mail address?

Carrie Hintz talks of holding office hours connected with her class on Milton:

This is a new one on me. KartOO takes a search query and maps all of the associations, which are in turn (de-)selectable for refining the search. It's cool. I'm trying to think of ways this can be used in teaching online research methodologies or the like.

Requires flash.

Clay Shirky writes:

In systems where many people are free to choose between many options, a small subset of the whole will get a disproportionate amount of traffic (or attention, or income), even if no members of the system actively work towards such an outcome. This has nothing to do with moral weakness, selling out, or any other psychological explanation. The very act of choosing, spread widely enough and freely enough, creates a power law distribution.

[Read more here...]

"Yesterday I had midterm grading conferences with my journalists. (Just for the record, I abhor grades, for a list of reasons too long to post here.) It was interesting to me how Web logs have changed the whole process, and it has me thinking more seriously about the assessment issues that come along with this technology.

Most teachers using Web logs on the 9-12 level aren't using them as online portfolios/filing cabinets for all classwork. As with anything else, there are advantages and disadvantages to doing so. Since I haven't changed the content of my curriculum much from my pre-Web log days, the way I assess the individual pieces hasn't changed much. But with such a drastic change in the process, a whole new list of issues has come up.

The biggest advantage I have found is..."

Read the full blog: Weblogg-ed