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Recent Posts
- AI as an existential threat – Kevane preliminary draft
- “What can it do?” A living list of computational problems that deep learning/AI/neural nets can or seems likely to “do” (at varying cost and efficacy)
- Reading August-September 2025
- The typical popular sci-fi version of AI posing an existential risk?
- AI productivity growth and “the economy”
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Friends of African Village Libraries (I post regularly here)- Rapport de mission d’une équipe de ABVBF à Waly
- Visite du centre de lecture et d’étude de Béréba (CLEB)
- Don de livres par ABVBF à l’école primaire publique de Waly
- Sortie de la BMP: Ste Thérèse de Houndé, Burkina Faso
- Distribution des livres CMH aux élèves de l’école B de Koumbia, Burkina Faso
- Night activities at Sumbrungu Community Library, Ghana
- Gowrie-Kunkua night reading, Ghana
- Initiation aux jeux de mots croisés de 02 élèves du primaire à la bibliothèque de Koho
- Jeux de cartes des élèves de l’école franco-arabe de Koho, Burkina Faso
- Animation d’une séance de lecture à la bibliothèque de Karaba, Burkina Faso
Category Archives: Public library history
The Greenville Eight – Integrating American libraries in the South
On the afternoon of July 16, 1960, eight African-American students bravely filed into the whites-only Greenville County (S.C.) Public Library and sat down in the reading room to look at newspapers and books. One of those students was a young … Continue reading
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Wayne Wiegand’s short article on the struggle of young people like Joseph Jackson to desegregate libraries in the South in 1961
Read the full article here, “Desegregating Libraries in the American South” Forgotten heroes in civil rights history” by Wayne A. Wiegand in American Libraries. At 11 a.m. on March 27, 1961, nine students from the historically black Tougaloo College walked … Continue reading
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Anecdotes about the power of libraries never stop coming
Growing up, Clementine spent much of his teenage years at the library, which became his sanctuary. He was taken by the writing of William Blake and Immanuel Kant, and was particularly interested in the work of the 17th-century philosopher John … Continue reading
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Libraries pass the Pritchett postulates of development test with flying colors!
From Alex Tabarrok at Marginal Revolution:. After promoting women’s groups in West Bengal as a route to development a West Bengali woman asked Lant Pritchett: You all are from countries that are much richer and doing much better than our … Continue reading
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Did the Civil War cause Americans to become readers?
I was skimming a fun book by library historian David Kaser Books and Libraries in Camp and Battle: The Civil War Experience where he suggests that in 1860 American men were pretty much 90% literate and books had become incredibly … Continue reading
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