Creekside Chatter

Digitization at its best.

Another great shot of St. Augustine's grand hotels. The rooftop you see behind the Alcazar's left tower is where I work.

We’ve made no attempt to hide our belief that Internet Explorer 6 must die. IE6 is an ancient browser that does not support many of the major innovations of the last 8 years. Yet it is still used by 15-25% of Internet users – and that fact alone is holding us back from a new area of web applications.

Luckily, we’re not the only ones that feel this way. Twitter users and the Digg community both rallied behind our battle cry. But now a high-profile group of startups, most funded by the well-known early stage venture firm Y Combinator, have started their own initiative, IE6 No More.

This day in history has thus far generated 101 total awards. Almost 3 percent of the total awards of the Medal stem from this one day of the year - and the bulk of that from one battle in1864.  This didn't occur often, and after the Spanish-American War didn't happen at all. 

I'll bet this is interesting . . . Written between 1901 and 1904, Ms. Pinkham seemed to have her own line of medications specifically for women. I wonder how much that influences the contents of her book.

Forget trying to shoe-horn technology stars into government cyber security jobs (a worthy if doomed-from-the-start experiment) or creating more useless bureaucracy with another czar. We need a facilitator - someone with a lot of betweenness and closeness, to use some social networking terms - to make sure that the right people are talking, sharing, and collaborating as they best see fit. Collaboration is key to improving security and collaboration comes from trust, not edicts from the Kremlin.  

An injured Navy vet spent nine years on painkillers — destroying his kidneys, liver, and pancreas — waiting for the VA to pay for an operation. They never did.

A short post on the Google News blog today revealed a big number: Google recently quadrupled the number of newspaper articles in its News Archive Search. You may recall that at TechCrunch50 last year, Google’s Marissa Mayer demoed this powerful news tool that can search the text of publications far back in time — some over 200 years old.

The recent update saw Google add a bunch of new publications, including some from different parts of the world. And it even has a newspaper in the archives from 1753 now. The fact that it’s searchable is fairly insane.

Medical care in the United States is derided as miserable compared to health care systems in the rest of the developed world.  Economists, government officials, insurers and academics alike are beating the drum for a far larger government rôle in health care.  Much of the public assumes their arguments are sound because the calls for change are so ubiquitous and the topic so complex.  However, before turning to government as the solution, some unheralded facts about America's health care system should be considered.

We've just posted Smithsonian Web and New Media Strategy, Version 1.0. The strategy talks about an updated digital experience, a new learning model that helps people with their "lifelong learning journeys," and the creation of a Smithsonian Commons—a new part of our digital presence dedicated to stimulating learning, creation, and innovation through open access to Smithsonian research, collections and communities.