Wikipedia the film Revenge of the Nerds and you’ll get an idea of what inspired me to write this post. It starts in the first line of the article.

“Revenge of the Nerds is a 1984 comedy film satirizing social life on a college campus.”

Three words catch my attention:

“1984,” “social” and “college.”

1984 was one year before I was born (age spoiler alert) and before the “Internet” was wide-released. Computers were hitting the scene and the word “social” was synonymous with international uprising or shoulder pad-wearing teens awkwardly dancing to Duran Duran at their high school dance.  Zuck, The Man Your Man Could Smell Like and ICanHasCheeseburgers were far from the periphery.

As much as we all love to reminisce about the hairspray-toting 80s, fast forward to present day.

“2012,” “social,” and  “college.”
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This past Saturday, our very own Alen Yen and Cheryl Tivey tied the knot in a beautiful ceremony in Vermont. But let’s remember…iFactorians are over-achievers. We don’t wake up on our wedding day and do a few crunches…we wake up on our wedding day and participate in a triathlon. Okay, not all of us do, but Alen and Cheryl sure did. Check out the full story (which, we boast, aired across New England…and Georgia, and Nevada, and Florida)…

View the complete story / proof that we’re not making this up.

Congratulations, Alen and Cheryl!

CrossRef officially launched the CrossMark system for alerting users as to whether or not there are updates available on published scholarly content. This system is incredibly valuable since there are often multiple ways for a user to access a particular journal article, and it isn’t always easy to tell whether or not you are accessing the most recent version.  Now that Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) are ubiquitous it will be interesting to see if  if publishers embrace this new system.

In addition to the issue of updates, it also appears that retractions are becoming an increasing problem. In this interesting post on scientific reproducibility, the chart rather starkly shows the increasing retraction problem over the last decade or so.

One way in which reproducibility will improve is by the increasing the practice of making datasets available along with journal articles (Dryad is one example in the biosciences). I think that the tight integration of text and data will be an area of increased innovation over the next few years. The potential for transparency and the ability to use visualization tools to provide compelling new insights, may finally be the impetus that moves online articles away from their current print-centric orientation.

Mid-April, I had the privilege of participating in my second week-long residency at grad school. Much like the first session in October, it was filled with brilliant faculty and student presentations, enough laughter to make a belly-button ache, and just enough sugar to keep my brain pumping through twelve-hour days.

One of my professors, Natalia Ilyn, has spent quite some time analyzing the impact of art and design on culture—both on us today, and historically. During our October stay, with a little more than a hour and a half, she gave us a window into the study of semiotics—something that could have easily taken the entire week to articulate. But in that short talk,
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iFactory delivered this webinar on May 1st as part of our iFactoryEd webinar series.

The range of audiences needing specialized gateways, content and pathways on dot edu sites can be difficult to manage. In this webinar, we discussed strategies which can help you tailor your site to a particular audience, both with and without user login.

Topics covered:

• Configuring options for audience selectors
• Implementing different designs to distinguish areas of the site for each audience
• Using the Field Permissions module to deliver fine-grained customization of content delivery

The presenter was Lisa Sawin, Solutions Architect for iFactory. This was part 3 of a 3 part series.

For the full webinar visit our YouTube channel–the recording will be posted soon: youtube.com/ifactoryboston