I reread nothing. I intentionally don't look at the stuff at all until I've finished the book. At that stage when you go back and reread for the first time, it's kind of horrific. But I don't want to have everything perfectly made before I take the next step. It seems like moving forward with armed guards.

(from an excerpt of The artful edit, by Susan Bell)

This is the first installment in a new series from Science Magazine and AAAS.

When I was 11 years old, I went to summer camp for geeks. It was my first time alone, away from home and family. By day, we learned how to program computers. By night, we fought epic shaving-cream wars, flirted, scarfed down pizza, set traps in bunk beds, and made friends for life.

... I was surprised to learn that grown-up geek camps are mushrooming across the summer landscape ...

What do you get out of the ultimate growing-up experience when you're already grown up? What sort of grownups go back to summer camp anyway? And would there be a shaving-cream war?

From SummerCon, to SummerCamp, a week-long event ... a massive inter-networked road trip caravan, from DC to SF ...

A Summer Camp for Grown-Up Geeks

For recent research, see here.

"Information foraging is the most important concept to emerge from Human-Computer Interaction research in the last decade." --Jakob Nielsen, Nielsen Norman Group, and author, Designing Web Usability

"This is a wonderful and exceptionally interesting book." --Marc Mangel, Professor and Fellow, John Baskin School of Engineering, University of California, Santa Cruz

"... a significant achievement in both science and engineering ... It will be a classic ... a deep and substantial body of work, conveyed with clarity and erudition." -- George W. Furnas, Professor and Associate Dean, School of Information, University of Michigan

You might begin with an early technical report on IFT, from 1999:

Information Foraging Theory is an approach to understanding how strategies and technologies for information seeking, gathering, and consumption are adapted to the flux of information in the environment. The theory assumes that people, when possible, will modify their strategies or the structure of the environment to maximize their rate of gaining valuable information. Field studies inform the theory by illustrating that people do freely structure their environments and their strategies to yield higher gains in information foraging.

Information Foraging Theory: Adaptive Interaction with Information

Alan Kay says:

"Rich Gold was one of the most creative and unusual minds of our era. His unique vision lives on in this book."

John Seely Brown says:

"This is a gem that will shape your way of seeing and thinking about the world forever. Rich was one of the true visionaries of Xerox PARC and this unique book, in both its form and content, provides a window into a brilliant and incredibility imaginative mind at work."

Publishers Weekly review:

The Plenitude is the word of Silicon Valley polymath Gold for the limitless stuff produced to feed our consumer-focused economy, but this small, posthumous (Gold died in 2003) book reads more like his private notebook than a business guide. That's not a bad thing: Gold, a scientist, inventor and artist who worked at times for the toy company Mattel and the legendary Xerox PARC research labs, is good company. Based on a few of his lectures, this breezy book shares thoughts on creative hats Gold has worn, such as artist and engineer, and the worldviews they impose on practitioners (e.g., engineers like to solve problems while designers are contemptuous of artists for their detachment from the commercial). The later part of the book weighs consumerism's pros and cons, coming out in favor—where else could an inventor fall?—while offering valid critiques (e.g., so much of what we make and buy is ugly). Throughout, Gold displays casual insights—such as illustrating the sheer abundance of the plenitude by pointing out the variety of shirts in an audience and the work that went into each—and pads this very skinny book with his own goofy cartoons. The result is a fun splash in some of the important ideas behind modern consumption.

MIT Press has the table of contents and sample chapters here. The book was reviewed last month in the LA Times:

This little book, with its simple logic and language and unforgettable, whimsical drawings, will change the way its readers look at the world around them.

The Plenitude: Creativity, Innovation, and Making Stuff

Publishers Weekly Starred Review:

Edited by New York Times science writer Gina Kolata, this volume celebrates writing that captures the excitement of scientific discovery and also its human consequences. Tyler Cabot's The Theory of Everything spotlights theoretical physicists awaiting the greatest, most anticipated, most expensive experiment in the history of mankind. By contrast, Manifold Destiny by Sylvia Nasar and David Gruber tells of Russian mathematician Grigory Perelman, who quietly announced a solution to one of the field's most elusive problems: Fermat's Last Theorem. Atul Gawande's The Score looks at the all-too-often painful history of obstetrics, and Truth and Consequences by Jennifer Couzin examines the bitter fallout for innocent graduate students and postdocs when their adviser is accused of falsifying data. Oliver Sacks's Stereo Sue explores the marvel of binocular vision, and Barry Yeoman's Schweitzer's Dangerous Discovery profiles unconventional paleontologist Mary Higby Schweitzer, discoverer of tissue remnants in dinosaur bones. These articles, culled mainly from general interest publications like the New Yorker but also from science magazines like Discover, showcase articles that show, in Kolata's words, how [a]dvances in science have changed who we are as human beings and... are changing what we will become, and readers will indeed find them as exciting as they are compelling.

See also further description from the publisher, and a review in the Globe.

The Best American Science Writing 2007

Database Aesthetics examines the database as cultural and aesthetic form, explaining how artists have participated in network culture by creating data art. The essays in this collection look at how an aesthetic emerges when artists use the vast amounts of available information as their medium. Here, the ways information is ordered and organized become artistic choices, and artists have an essential role in influencing and critiquing the digitization of daily life.

The set of contributors might be useful:

Sharon Daniel, U of California, Santa Cruz; Steve Deitz, Carleton College; Lynn Hershman Leeson, U of California, Davis; George Legrady, U of California, Santa Barbara; Eduardo Kac, School of the Art Institute of Chicago; Norman Klein, California Institute of the Arts; John Klima; Lev Manovich, U of California, San Diego; Robert F. Nideffer, U of California, Irvine; Nancy Paterson, Ontario College of Art and Design; Christiane Paul, School of Visual Arts in New York; Marko Peljhan, U of California, Santa Barbara; Warren Sack, U of California, Santa Cruz; Bill Seaman, Rhode Island School of Design; Grahame Weinbren, School of Visual Arts, New York.

Database Aesthetics: Art in the Age of Information Overflow

Remember when we learned that "the reality is that everything is made of chemicals"?

Now, you can learn even more!

Welcome to a tour of some of the recent advances in chemistry, taking in the cosmetic factory, the pharmacy, the grooming salon, the diet clinic, the power plant, the domestic cleaning company, and the art gallery along the way. Award-winning popular science writer John Emsley is our guide as he addresses questions of grooming, health, food, and sex. The trip is for all those of us wanting to know more about the impact of chemical products on our everyday lives.

Better Looking, Better Living, Better Loving: How Chemistry can Help You Achieve Life's Goal

Everyone has some kind of place that makes them feel transported to a magical realm. For some people it's castles with their noble history and crumbling towers. For others it's abandoned factories, ivy choked, a sense of foreboding around every corner. For us here at Curious Expeditions, there has always been something about libraries. Row after row, shelf after shelf, there is nothing more magical than a beautiful old library.

See also the new rules, and my tidbits from April, especially this part:

John Sutherland's How to Read a Novel and Francine Prose's Reading Like a Writer are mildly entertaining, more or less harmless bits of fluff, ideal for winter beach reading (You don't go to the beach in winter? Exactly.), while Alberto Manguel's The Library at Night is a real book, masterfully written and actually about something.

A Compendium of Beautiful Libraries

Washington Post Book World:

A lovely story about the Holocaust might seem like a grotesque oxymoron. But in The Zookeeper's Wife, Diane Ackerman proves otherwise.

NYT Book Review:

The Zabinskis’ effort was not just merciful, it was human in the deepest sense of the word.

While the Nazis depopulated the ghetto, the Zabinskis repopulated the zoo — this time with humans. Those who had papers or Gentile looks were passed via the underground to other parts of Poland. The rest stayed.

A Natural History of Terrible Things

Studying the new sequence of the canine genome shows how tiny genetic changes can create enormous variation within a single species.

Most dog breeds have only been in existence for a few hundred years.

In this article I highlight first our current understanding of what a dog breed really is and summarize the status of the canine genome sequencing project. I review some early work made possible by this project: studies of the Portuguese water dog, which have been critical to our understanding of how to map genes controlling body shape and size, along with studies aimed at understanding the genetics of muscle mass.

Genetics and the Shape of Dogs