Welcome to the MSU Library Fall 2021 Workshop offerings. All workshops will be held in person and online in a hybrid format. In person will be in the Digital Scholarship Lab computer classroom on the second floor of the west wing of the main library (with the exception of the GIS Discussion Meet Up on Nov. 5th which will be held in the Map Library). To attend online, please register and a Zoom link will be sent to you.
Learn QGIS: Making a color shaded map in QGIS
Wednesday September 22nd
4-5 PM
Learn the basics of QGIS, the free open source geospatial software...
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The Tokyo Olympics came to a close on Sunday and so we thought we’d bring you some statistics from the games.
Here are some quick stats for your next trivia night:
The official price tag for the Tokyo Olympics was $15 billion+, which a University of Oxford study says is the most expensive on record.
In the two years between April 2017 and March 2019, 100 percent of the metals required to manufacture the approximately 5,000 gold, silver and bronze medals were extracted from small electronic devices contributed by people from all over Japan. The medals were handed out across 50... Continue reading "Statistics from the Tokyo Olympics"...
The Big Ten Academic Alliance and the Open Library of Humanities (OLH) have signed a three-year collective agreement that provides multi-year support for OLH from all of the BTAA’s fifteen member libraries. This move was made possible thanks to the OLH Open Consortial Offer, an initiative that offers consortia, societies, networks and scholarly projects the opportunity to join the Open Library of Humanities Library Partnership Subsidy system as a bloc, enabling each institution to benefit from a discount.
The Open Library of Humanities is an award-winning, academic-led, gold open-...
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Have you ever wondered what's in the syllabi of other universities? Ever wanted to browse "the best" or most common resources on a subject?
The Open Syllabus Explorer plot shows over one million of the most frequently assigned texts in courses around the world. The corpus references a database of more than seven million college course syllabi and subsequent readings.
The Open Syllabus Galaxy is an infographic rendering of syllabus readings from schools around the world.
A simple search for business in the Galaxy matches over 200,000 courses and at least 10,000 texts...
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Our 2021 calendar (annual report) is available to view here.
“Leverage in the crypto markets — particularly on the retail side — has been a big theme that accentuates the volatility.” – Devin Ryan, JMP Securities
Bitcoin is a notoriously volatile market. The lack of oversight found across cryptocurrency exchanges makes the market ripe for abuse. And, since massive price swings occur at least biweekly, fears of manipulation are founded.
The assertion that Bitcoin is subject to price manipulation is bolstered by the fact that such practice is rampant among “altcoins.” Wash trading, pump and dump schemes, and spoofing have become almost...
Continue reading "Crypto Data Digest: Manipulation and Volatility"...In a move that reflects both a national trend and a campus commitment to partnership, Michigan State University Press has merged with Michigan State University Libraries. The announcement was made by Dean of Libraries Joseph A. Salem, Jr.
“We’re thrilled about this partnership, and we think it’s a natural way to support scholarly publication and strengthen our mutual commitment to learning,” Salem said. “Like other academic libraries, MSU Libraries has taken an active role in scholarly publishing. And, like other...
Continue reading "MSU Press Merges With MSU Libraries To Optimize Resoures & Expand Access"...Bitcoin mining – the process in which a bitcoin is awarded to a computer that solves a complex series of algorithms – is a deeply energy-intensive process. When people mine bitcoins, what they are really doing is updating the ledger of Bitcoin transactions, also known as the blockchain. This requires them to solve numerical puzzles which have a 64-digit hexadecimal solution known as a hash. The hash rate is the measuring unit of the processing power of the Bitcoin network.
On March 18, 2021, the annual power consumption of the Bitcoin network was estimated to be 129 terawatt...
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One of the 20th century’s greatest writers, Jorge Luis Borges – who called the universe a library, served as director of the Argentine National Library, and left a prolific body of literature when he died in 1986 – now has his own sort of library within a library at Michigan State University Libraries, which recently acquired more than 19 boxes of correspondence, papers, photographs, rare manuscripts, first editions, publicity, clippings, and other ephemera related to Borges’s life and work that was collected by former MSU Professor Donald Yates. The most recent...
Continue reading "MSU Libraries Acquire Major New Collection of Manuscripts & Materials Connected to Borges"...Price is what you pay, Value is what you get
Proof-Of-Work
For something to be an effective currency, it must have value. Until 1971, the US dollar (USD) represented actual gold. The gold was scarce and required work to mine and refine, so the scarcity gave the gold value. Cryptocurrencies are similar. “Coins” (which are nothing more than publicly agreed on records of ownership) are generated or produced by “miners.” These miners are people who run programs on specialized hardware made specifically to solve proof-of-work puzzles. The work behind mining coins gives them value...
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