The Rogue Scholar

Codex Sinaiticus Now Viewable Online

The Codex Sinaiticus, one of the oldest known extant bibles and one of the most important handwritten manuscripts in the world, is now online for your viewing pleasure. (Mmmm, manuscripts...)

5 Things You Should Read About Gaming and Learning

This comes from Chris Cox, on behalf of the ALA Research & Scholarship Committee via the ILI-L listserv:

Looking for some reading material over the summer?  Want to learn a little more about a hot topic in instruction to inform your teaching next year?  Just in time for ALA Annual, the Research & Scholarship Committee of the Instruction Section of ACRL presents “5 Things You Should Read about Gaming and Learning,” the latest in the “5 Things…” Series.  Based on the popular EDUCAUSE series, "7 Things You Should Know About...", “5 Things” seeks to instruct and educate readers about topics relevant to library instruction, presenting articles, video and audio clips, blogs, etc., from outside librarianship to inform our work as educators.  This installment presents readings which illustrate some of the issues and challenges of incorporating gaming into education, highlight good learning principles, and discuss commercial, modified, and custom‐designed games.

Enjoy!

Happy Independence Day!

While you're out in the backyard or at the beach setting dead animals on fire and drinking your weight in beer (as I and mine will be), at some point in the festivities please take a moment to read and remember two documents that made your debauchery possible: The Declaration of Independence and the U.S. Constitution.  Recommended reading, both of them.

Happy Fourth of July!

The Most Important Person in Town

A few weeks ago I located a new copy of Alas, Babylon by Pat Frank in a Brentano's in a mall near Seaford, Long Island. It was frankly a surprise both for me and the woman behind the counter: I was under the impression that the book had been out of print (and that Brentano's had been out of business) for years and the store manager hadn't remembered it being on the shelves.  I'm into end-of-the-world stories, and this book has been on my list for some time (along with On the Beach,  Level 7 and a few other genre classics) so I snapped it up and started reading.

Alas, Babylon is a story about the end of the world.  Specifically, the world that the people of the small town called Fort Repose in Central Florida ca. 1959 have come to understand and experience as normal. It's a heavenly place of constant fresh food, electric lights, easy motoring to distant cities, air travel, plumbing, medicine, comfort, and leisure.  It is as close to Heaven on Earth as human civilization has ever come in its 100,000 years on this planet. But it's as fragile as it is comfortable and convenient, and one day it ends at the hands of Soviet bombs.

Life for many of the town's inhabitants fall apart. But there is one bright spot in all this: Alice Cooksey, the town librarian finally gets a chance to shine:

Watching the car chuff past, Alice reminded herself that this evening she must bring back new books for Ben Franklin and Peyton.  It was a surprise, and a delight, to see children devour books. Without ever knowing it, they were receiving an education.  Alice would never admit it out loud, but for the first time in her thirty years as librarian of Fort Repose she felt fulfilled, even important.

It had not been easy or remunerative to persist as librarian in Fort Repose.  She recalled how every year for eight years the town council had turned down her annual request for air conditioning.  An expensive frill, they'd said.  But without air conditioning, how could a library compete?  Drugstores, bars, restaurants, movies, the St. Johns Country Club in San Marco, the lobby of the Riverside Inn, theaters, and most homes were air conditioned.  You couldn't expect people to sit in a hot library during the humid Florida summer, which began in April and didn't end until October, when they could be sitting in an air-conditioned living room coolly and painlessly absorbing visual pablum on television.  Alice had installed a Coke machine and begged old electric fans but it had been a losing battle.

In thirty years her book budget had been raised ten percent, but the cost of books had doubled. Her magazine budget was unchanged, but the cost of magazines had tripled.  So while Fort Repose grew in population, book borrowings dwindled.  There had been so many new distractions, drive-in theaters, dashing off to the springs and beaches over the weekends, the mass hypnosis of the young every evening, and finally the craze for boating and water-skiing.  Now all this was ended.  All entertainments, all amusements, all escape, all information again centered in the library.  The fact that the library had no air conditioning made no difference now.  There were not enough chairs to accommodate her readers. They sat on the front steps, in the windows, on the floor with backs against the walls of stacks.  They read everything, even the classics.  And the children came to her, when they were free of their chores, and she guided them.  And there was useful research to do.  Randy and Doctor Gunn didn't know it, but as a result of her research they might eat better thereafter.  It was strange, she thought, pedaling steadily, that it should require a holocaust  to make her own life worth living.

This passage stopped me cold when I first encountered it and the last few lines made me positively misty-eyed. The image of a town library, long abandoned to the "distractions" of modern life, now literally packed with hungry, anxious, physically and spiritually drained survivors of a nuclear war, every one of whom is suddenly rediscovering the fact that civilization has rested upon the printed word, is beyond description.  The last line is a bit of manipulative violin-playing, but it's easy to overlook that bit in light of the larger point that Frank is making. Namely, that this, too, shall pass. The cheap, abundant electricity that powers our society is slowly ebbing and one day, we'll have no choice but to rely on our print collections as our primary--or possibly, our only--resource.  This is not to say that digital collections are a bad idea--I have created them, maintain them, and am happy to be able to say they we have them to offer--but I am saying that they may not be the be-all and end-all of librarianship.  Even if the electric current keeps running without fail for the next thousand years, our DVDs, CD-ROMs, flash drives, hard drives, etc., are doomed to fail within a few decades. There are too many moving parts, the parts are continually redesigned and the mechanisms into which they are integrated fail and need to be replaced. During that process, the mechanisms are "improved" and data are  frequently lost because of reverse compatibility issues (meaning where old data cannot be read by new mechanisms or applications).  At the very least, library directors and librarians all over the U.S. remain infatuated with the idea that new technology must by definition be better technology.  It isn't.  New tech is merely new. Better is a judgment that each librarian must make for him or herself. Added to that is the fact that electronic resources and collections rely on a very complex web of infrastructural necessities, which itself relies on nearly free and constant flows of electric current.

Granted, writing in 1959 Pat Frank had no idea about the communication medium called ARPANET that the Pentagon would soon begin funding, or that in a generation or two, it would become the backbone of the most amazing world-spanning information exchange ever built.  But he understood just how easily and suddenly all that his generation (and ours) regarded as normal could end.  He further understood that if it did end, the books would remain, and be sought after. In a word, let's not throw out our books just yet.  One day, we will need them.

A Lesson in British Libel Law

The thing to remember as you read the article, from Sue Reid in today's Daily Mail, is that under British libel/copyright law, the defendant is presumed guilty and must prove his or her innocence, rather than in criminal cases, where "innocent until proven guilty" is still the test.

Back 'cures', a brave scientist and an epic court battle: How Britain's libel laws are threatening free speech

By Sue Reid
Last updated at 2:38 PM on 01st July 2009

With his round, John Lennon-style specs and nerdish good looks, physicist Simon Singh is an unlikely hero.

As one of the country's most acclaimed science writers, he has spent much of his 45 years cloistered in his Home Counties study penning Number One bestsellers on mathematical conundrums, code-breaking and the Big Bang theory.

Turning his hand to alternative medicine, last year he published a book called Trick Or Treatment? that included a chapter on the history of chiropractic therapy (the manipulation of the spine to realign the back), which was invented by grocer and spiritual healer Daniel David Palmer in 1890s America.

Inspired by the 'miraculous' recovery of a deaf man whom he treated by manipulating or 'racking' his back, Palmer said that 95 per cent of all diseases are caused by trapped vertebrae.

Suddenly, the therapy (which takes its name from the Greek word for hand) became a near-religion, with Palmer boasting he was a successor to Christ and Mohammed. He even practised vigorous 'racking' on his own children, which led to him beingrrested and jailed for cruelty.

Palmer's ideas caught on and, in 1925, the British Chiropractic Association (BCA) was set up and several clinics opened specialising in the treatment. Chiropractors were able, it seemed, to cure a myriad of ailments and began to broaden their therapies.

Recently, the association has said that even children suffering from colic, eating problems, ear infections and asthma can be helped.

However, many in the traditional medical profession view the therapy with deep suspicion. Though the General Medical Council and the Royal College of General Practitioners advocate its use  -  especially for back pain  -  some scientists say there is no evidence that chiropractic spinal manipulation is better than other forms of back massage.

This has led to widespread debate in the medical world, with some doctors refusing to refer patients to chiropractors, claiming the treatment does not work and can even cause harm.

Read the rest of the article here. Enjoy!

Anthony Benjamin Frater, RIP

Anthony Frater passed from this earth to whatever awaited him on April 8, 2001, making today roughly the 3000th day since he left. He is still missed.

Is My iPhone the Most Dangerous Cell Phone Ever?

A good friend of mine sent me this link in an e-mail recently, warning me about the dangers of my cell phone (I have an iPhone, which the video singles out as "the most dangerous" example of the gadget kingdom.) She's a good friend, very health-conscious, and very much like family to me. She means well. But she listened to a fast-talking salesman who used just enough scientific jargon to sound knowledgeable while misleading the listener.

This video is properly termed an advertisement. Advertising is not an exact science but it does utilize very well-designed tricks and techniques to get you to buy a particular product that's being offered. What the presenter does is to separate his sales pitch into two parts: 1) he tells you that you have a problem. Telling you about the problem should ideally involve generating some emotional response, often making you feel lonely, mildly freaked out or worried. The follow-up is where he 2) he tells you that he has a solution, which he also describes. This is Advertising 101: generate an emotion, then hit them with the product. 

The presenter in the linked video clip knows what he's doing in terms of following the format for an ad, but he he's either lying about or fairly ignorant of the device's shortcomings to support his claim. (I freely admit that the iPhone does have real shortcomings.) First, he says that the iPhone acts like a base station. This is wrong. A base station acts like a signal booster between a Wi-Fi node and a much larger transmitter, like a microwave tower. The iPhone can interact with such networks (Wi-Fi, Edge, 3G) but it can’t send, resend, or receive some other phone’s data, and then pass it on to a third exchange like a cell tower, which is what it would be doing if this claim were true.  Theoretically, the iPhone could do this if it was already active on an existing Wi-Fi or cellular network, but no peer-to-peer applications have been written for it yet (not that I’ve heard.) I’m less clear on whether this is due to technical limitations of the equipment/software or Apple’s legal intervention, although one developer I heard from said it was strictly a hardware limitation. Additionally, the range on a transmitter the size of an iPhone is very limited, and AT&T’s cellular network coverage is concentrated in highly populated areas with lots of cell towers and proper signal booting equipment.

Whenever someone cites a supposedly well-known fact (“Cell phones cause brain cancer!”) without providing a reference or citation to the research, I get nervous. No citation of longitudinal “X hours of exposure to 200 Hz carrier wave induces cell damage” studies are given in the written or video material, and even if it were, a carrier wave tends to be a much higher frequency than the input signal. A 1 GHz input signal cannot be transmitted by a 200Hz carrier wave although the reverse is true. (I admit I may have misunderstood what he was saying.)

(As a brief aside, the differences between signal frequencies are significant, and differ by several orders of magnitude. Imagine you're walking on the beach somewhere. The sand that shifts between your toes and gets into absolutely everything is in the gigahertz (GHz) range. The bigger pebbles, like gravel or crushed stone, is what you find in the Megahertz (MHz) range. A rock big enough to skim over the surface of a pond is in the Kilohertz (KHz) range and any stone big enough to painfully stub your toe against is in the Hertz (Hz) range. I'm oversimplifying for the sake of illustration, but keep in mind it's the proportions that are important.)

Anyway, the video claims that signals in the 200MHz range cause health problems, which is fine, but the iPhone doesn’t use any signal frequency as low as 200Hz. (I couldn’t find any type of radio transmitter that does.)  It uses a quad-band GSM (the international cellular standard range), which operates at 850, 900, 1800, or 1900 MHz, generally toward the upper range in the U.S., Canada, Europe, and Far East. The speaker/microphone’s audio frequency response ranges from 20 to 20,000Hz, but that is the range of sounds the speakers are capable of converting into an electronic signal, not the frequency of the carrier or the input wave.

 He also talks freely about “radiation” (the word appears 25 times in a three-page document) but doesn’t differentiate ionizing radiation from non-ionizing radiation. It’s a pretty important difference. Ionizing radiation is the type which is powerful enough to separate electrons from atomic nuclei, ionizing them (e.g., X-rays, gamma rays, alpha particles, beta particles, neutron bombardment.) This ionization damages the DNA in your body’s cells and will kill you with sufficient exposure. Non-ionizing radiation (generally the less energetic portion of the electromagnetic spectrum, including radio waves, microwaves, and everything in the visible light spectrum) isn’t nearly as powerful; these waves have the ability to merely excite the electrons in the target atoms, not sever them. I’m the first to say that with sufficient power, you can probably blast an electromagnetic wave powerful enough to ionize every cell in the human body, at least in theory. But radios small enough to carry in a pocket (including cell phones and the iPhone) are too small to ionize anything.

 I was surprised to hear him even mention Bluetooth earpieces, since they use exactly the same frequency range of carrier waves that the phone does, and they sit in your ear all day, so using one would actually be worse than not (he belatedly admits this as part of the pitch).

 Finally, you’ll notice that he’s selling his new supposedly safe earpiece for $25 apiece (plus $5 for adapters) and up (i.e. the "solution" to your "problem" which is the threat supposedly posed by your continual iPhone use). The entire bottom portion of the website is devoted to making a sale as convenient for the reader as possible. (That’s Marketing 102). In short, he’s trying to make a living, not save me from brain cancer.

I’m the first to admit that we don’t know exactly what the long-term effects of persistent cell phone use might be (I suspect that the people most at risk are the yuppies and teens who remain glued to them for several hours each day over the course of many years), but I don’t think this promoter or his staff writers know either. Also, I have never used the advertised product and don't know if it does what he says it will do, or not. Finally, if there is someone out there reading this who is in a position to know more about the iPhone than I do and spots a mistake, I trust they'll let me know.

Utilizing LC's Controlled Vocabularies

I found this e-mail from Margaret Mauer's TS-LIBRARIANS listserv in my mailbox recently:

I have been experimenting with the newly opened ID.LOC.GOV web service this evening as I am thinking about pointing it out to folks via TechKNOW. It’s pretty cool. LCSH is the first controlled vocabulary that LC is opening up. The goal of the service is to “enable machines to programmatically access data at the Library of Congress but the web interface also provides simple user access…” at http://id.loc.gov/authorities/search/.  Type in a term like “retrievers” select the term “retrievers” and then go to the visual interface tab. It provides you with a data map of how the term “retrievers” connects to other terms in the controlled vocabulary. The search mechanism is sort of rudimentary, but the concept is terrifically interesting. Here’s the link to the about page for the new service:  http://id.loc.gov/authorities/about.html.

 I’ve been saying for a long time that we under-utilize our controlled vocabularies. Perhaps this will start to change this.

I've taken a look at the service she describes and it is indeed pretty cool. The "details" tab of the results page for any given query offers a metric ton of raw data: the URI and heading type, as well as a variety of live links to related, broader and narrower search terms. Besides that it also gives you any and every source it located the query string in, and lists those for you. Finally, you get the date the item was created and last modified and the LC classification data. Most of the data is available in multiple formats (generally including RDF/XML, N-Triples and so on). The "visualize" tab for the results gives the 2-dimensional relational  map for the term. 

Enjoy!

Earliest Known Sound Recordings Revealed

There's a lot going on here today which is preventing me from posting more than occasionally, but I thought I'd share this:

Earliest Known Sound Recordings Revealed
Researchers unveil imprints made 20 years before Edison invented phonograph
Posted June 1, 2009
 

By Ron Cowen, Science News

WASHINGTON—The muffled sounds from more than 150 years ago resemble the “wa wa” of the unseen teacher in the Peanuts cartoons. It would be impossible to know that someone was playing the coronet and guitar, although other fragments, from a dramatic speech from Shakespeare’s Othello, might be discerned if you knew the lines by heart in French.

Yet these sound bites and other snippets, unveiled May 29 by historians at the annual meeting of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, are the earliest known recordings. A bunch of wavy lines scratched by a stylus onto fragile paper that had been blackened by the soot from an oil lamp date from 1857. That’s 20 years before Edison invented the phonograph.

Parisian inventor Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville never intended for the soot-lined imprint of the sound waves to be played back, the historians reported. But the inventor hoped the visual patterns of the sound waves he had recorded using a hornlike device with the stylus attached resembling an artificial ear — called a phonautograph — might one day be read like sheet music to recreate a singer’s voice or the timbre of a musical instrument.

Instead, these visual renditions of sound, known as phonautograms, languished at the French patent office and elsewhere in Paris for some 150 years. In 2008, record historian David Giovannoni of Derwood, Md., and his colleagues, part of an informal group of researchers known as First Sounds, uncovered the first cache of them. Last year, he and First Sounds colleague Patrick Feaster of  Indiana University in Bloomington played what appeared to be a recording of a young girl singing a 10-second snippet of the French folksong “Au Clair de la Lune,” which Léon Scott had recorded in 1860.

But a group of thought-to-be-lost Léon Scott phonautograms was found late last year in Paris and dates from 1857. “It was immediately apparent that this would be some of the most important [phonographic] excavations to date,” Giovannoni said.

Sound historian Sam Brylawski, former head of the Library of Congress’ recorded sound division in Washington, D.C., and now affiliated with the University of California, Santa Barbara, said the new findings are important on several levels. These are not only the first known recordings, Brylawski notes, but are “providing the full picture of the history of recorded sound.… This is a biography unfolding.”

Read the rest of this story here. Enjoy!

Shit Happens to the Best of Us

I read this article by Edmund Andrews of the NY Times when it came out and realized that shit happens to the best of us.  And it does.  We are human, and we do stupid things for reasons that seem sound--kind of--at the time. At least part of this essential truth comes from the fact that humans possess huge brains that are far more likely to make decisions based on emotional responses than logical, analytical ones.  I could, of course, be especially obnoxious and suggest that getting roughly a million dollars in debt when you only make 120 grand a year is not the best idea, no matter when it occurs or why.  I confess that at the time, all I could think was "you poor fuck" while noticing that the article had not been written by, say, Floyd Norris or David Cay Johnston.

And now it turns out that there is more to the story than Mr. Andrews wrote. This recent bit from Andy's website offers much fodder for cynics everywhere, including myself:

Turns out, there’s more to the story.  Did Edmund Andrews mention anywhere in his article or his book, Busted, that his wife had twice before declared bankruptcy?  Chivalrous of him to leave that out; but, as Megan McCardle notes for The Atlantic, relevant to his tale.  Writing of this new twist, Andrew Leonard complains, “One of Busted’s selling points is the level of personal detail Andrews provides about his finances and his marriage. To leave out a detail so relevant to his tale of debtor’s woe smacks of outright dishonesty – and it’s exactly the kind of behavior that you would hope a New York Times reporter would avoid at all costs.”  Nor is Leonard buying Andrews’ response.

I strive each day to pass no judgements on anyone.  That said, sometimes the cynic in me has it right. Enjoy!

The Creative Writer's Bill of Rights

Lenny Schiff, a friend of mine from college and one of the best writers/teachers/musicians/performers I know--his songs about "The F Train" and "Utopia Parkway" remain etched on my brain 17 years after hearing them--wrote this manifesto last year for his creative writing students. Then he, lost it, forgot about it, then found it again just recently. He thinks it's a little glib, but I think these rules are right on the money. I post them here with his gracious permission. Enjoy!

The writer shall have the right:

1. To flip off all critics, external and internal.
2. To write out of sequence.
3. To get right to the good stuff and skip the boring stuff.
4. To change point of view, tense, voice or anything else on a moment's notice.
5. To change the story as desired.
6. To make discoveries.
7. To write any character, regardless of character or author's gender, race, age, nationality, religion, sexuality, or physical or mental ability.
8. To steal ideas from other writers-- and filmmakers, artists, fishermen, etc.
9. To exercise the imagination without limits, free of guilt, responsibility or fear.
10. To have a really crappy writing day, and feel bad about it, and then get back to writing.

What They Mean by "Recovery"

First, as I've been writing for the past few years on this day, Happy International Workers Day! This is a day to spend a minute or two remind ourselves that while we work to live, we should not necessarily live to work.  There's a fundamental difference between the two points of view.

Two forms of life on this planet live to work: insects and bacteria. Neither are good role models for human activity.

People work to live.  We do things with our hands, our feet, our brains to provide for ourselves and families in terms of acquiring food to eat, water to drink, shelter within to live, play, love, sleep. This is normal.  Working is normal.  Some of us look forward to working at one job more than another but deep down we know that in a finite universe nothing is free and we are supposed to  earn our keep somehow. The only segment of human society you'll likely encounter resistance to this idea from is the very rich, who need to answer the question, "Who is supposed to do your share of the work and why should they?" The rest of us understand that it's natural to work.

For all that, as Fred Clark, Joe Bageant and others have pointed out, there's no section of any daily newspaper published anywhere with a section called "Labor". Not even one called  "Work." Yet most of them have "Business" sections. Which is technically correct, but when was the last time you said "I need to go to business," or "I can't go out tonight, I'm handling the late shift at business?" How about "Don't call me Sir, I business for a living"? No, you don't hear it because what we do is work. We do not "business." Even those of us who believe in the power of business to make life on this pale blue dot a bit easier, happier, and healthier for ourselves and others, do not "go to business."

Business in the classical sense means "the act of buying and selling." (The first 3 entries in Dictionary.com identify this meaning.) Work, on the other hand, means physical action, to exert oneself in the act of creating something, or a place of employment. To make the distinction as simple as possible, work built the world, while business paid for it.

The reason we work to live is because work, until fairly recently, had limits.  Until we started using machines to make other machines to make more stuff, faster and in greater quantity than was previously possible, work had real limits. A field, for example, can only be worked so many hours in a given day subject to daylight and the limits of the human body. Ever plant rice in a paddy? If you're doing it manually, it's intense, muscle straining, back-breaking work that you do hunched over with rice shoots carried in one hand, knee deep in up to a foot of water, ankle deep in thick mud for hours at a time. You have to take each shoot and bury the roots under several inches of mud just a few inches away from it's neighbor. There's a reason the older generation of rice farmers in the Far East are all shaped like capital Ls. A more accessible test of endurance might be just clearing out a one-acre plot of land with a hoe. If you haven't tried it, you should. Blisters, dust, and aching muscles are instructive.

But then came the industrial revolution and factories replaced individual workshops.  Work-related skills became less focused on total product creation and more on creating a small portion of the product on an assembly line. The good news is that the system worked. A great deal of new stuff was made by a smaller fraction of the total population than ever before, and these things could be sold for a lot less than before. And life--material comfort, at any rate--did indeed improve for millions. The bad news is that the system needed two things to be invariably true for it to operate: low-cost energy and materials, and unlimited markets. As sensible people understand, neither of these are givens any longer. Capitalism was born in an era of cheap raw materials, nearly free energy, and expensive labor. Today we have exactly the opposite problem. Labor costs can be mitigated to some extent, but with energy and raw materials becoming more difficult to pull out of the ground and in lesser amounts when it's acquired (therefore growing more expensive), mass production just isn't going to work that well any more. This would be true even if markets really were unlimited, and as any salesman who has dealt with the problem of market saturation and overbought customers can tell you, there are no unlimited markets. Not really.

Just on a whim I typed '''U.S.' AND 'economy' AND 'recovery'" into Google and came up with 48 million results.  Replacing the word "recovery" with "depression" got 20 million hits and replacing it with "recession" returned 17 million.  So if this amazingly unscientific survey of the web suggests anything it might imply that people are pretty interested in recovering from this global economic mess that we find ourselves in.  But "recover" is a tricky word, usually used to refer to going from a bad situation to a good one (or at least a better one). It implies that the problems you're currently working through are temporary and limited. It implies that the current unfortunate situation is not normal.

Unfortunately, that is not the case any more. The system we were using to provide for our physical (and to some extent emotional and spiritual) comfort is running up against a reality that no longer exists. So, we have a decision to make, governments, businesses and individuals, all of us. We have to decide what recovering actually means.

That's not a simple question to ask anyone, especially anyone who's never given much thought to the invisible (and incredibly complicated) network of labor, transport and work (and business) that's made our current condition possible over the past century. It still needs to be asked. It should be thought about long and hard and you should do so in private, with the TV or radio,  Internet and cell phone turned off, and preferably unplugged. It is a personal thing to imagine in a private setting.

I can imagine three broad ways this will pan out. First, we do nothing--to choose by not choosing. That's the default setting on human psychology, as repetition breeds habit, habit breeds familiarity, and we are drawn to the familiar. We'll keep borrowing money we don't have to spend it on things we don't need and keep wondering why things are so rotten while we continue to elect politicians who may give us hope but refuse to give honest answers to real concerns.  

Another possibility is we junk the whole system and invent something genuinely new. Being new it would have to be more fair/honest/just than what we have in place now. Unfortunately, I have no idea likely it would be that we could rewrite the habits of several generations, but it's something to think about.

A third possibility is to voluntarily downsize our lives, which means downsizing our expectations from life.  Most of what we expect from our lives, or families, friends, employers, neighbors, and strangers alike has been sold to us like a bill of goods by a very complex and extremely effective marketing industry. They push a button and we jump. This process is nearly unconscious in the American mind, so it will be a royal pain to learn to resist these messages, but I can only see benefit to us personally and socially if we try it. What happens afterward will likely make us less comfortable than we are used to being, but at least it will be more honest.

Happy International Workers Day.

Weaving the Threads Together

It's impossible to cover absolutely every blog post, article, or story that appears on the Intarwebs because there's just too much worthwhile stuff to read and too few hours in the day to read it.  Having said that, there are a few things I've come across recently that I think deserve a bit of time out of your busy day.

I admit that the news about Swine Flu in Mexico gave me a flashback to working at NYAM, when SARS made the news. Two coworkers canceled conference trips to Canada, and my then boss postponed a trip to China.  Hong Kong effectively shut down for several weeks, according to a few people I know who'd been working there at the time.

Now, it appears to be our turn.

First, take a look at Elaine Meinel Supkis' excellent background briefing on the flu. The current  strain of Swine Flu In Mexico and California may be much ado about nothing (if you can call 60+ deaths "nothing") or it may turn out to become as bad or worse than the 1918 outbreak, or it could--and probably will-- turn out to be something in between. Education is key to keeping your balance when listening to the many sources of information on the topic. This is a good place to begin. 

That done, you might want to read James Howard Kunstler's blog post from today (where I nicked the previous link from).  Kunstler's a bit extreme in his analysis but that doesn't mean he's wrong. One point he makes is worth repeating here: public health crisis events have a way of screwing with the daily behind-the-scenes mechanics of life that we depend on, yet ignore when things are working to our satisfaction.  Simple things like public transportation, hospitals, electricity, hot and cold running water, food being trucked to the local supermarket, etc.  The systems that provide all these things get disrupted when germs have their ways with the people who make those systems run.  Some systems bounce back more quickly than others, and some don't bounce back at all. Just something to remember.

Charles Hugh-Smith has another rather more precise analysis of exactly this point, very much worth your time.

In the meantime, wash your hands, Lysol your office phone and computer keyboard, and maybe rely on Netflix and eating in for a few weeks.  Good luck!

Quote of Note

O Lord our God, help us tear their soldiers to bloody shreds with our shells; help us to cover their smiling fields with the pale forms of their patriot dead; help us to drown the thunder of the guns with the shrieks of their wounded, writhing in pain; help us to lay waste their humble homes with a hurricane of fire; help us to wring the hearts of their unoffending widows with unavailing grief; help us to turn them out roofless with their little children to wander unfriended the wastes of their desolated land in rags and hunger and thirst, sports of the sun flames of summer and the icy winds of winter, broken in spirit, worn with travail, imploring Thee for the refuge of the grave and denied it…

-- Mark Twain, "The War Prayer"

Scenes from a "Tea Party"

According to some, Barack Obama is black. According to others, he is multi-racial. According to still others, he is African-American.

But according to the folks at Dick Armey's Freedom Works Foundation propaganda outfit, our president is apparently a Nazi, a Soviet Communist, a Subgenius, or Hitler.  I'm unclear as to whether that's in any particular order, or if the categories overlap in some strange way.

Fred Clark explains how. Enjoy! (Buy the book.)

Happy Civilization Day!

All right, so very few Americans are happy today, since this is April 15, the day when our taxes are due to be filed. I don't like to pay them, you don't like to, nobody in this country from sea to shining sea likes to pay them.  Generally only the very rich or the very poor routinely get out of paying them, the former group through the employment of clever, crooked, or connected lawyers, accountants, and financial planners and the latter by being broke. I mean really broke, the kind of broke that we middle class folks shy away from when we pass a homeless guy on the street (the Wall Street Journal has been known to refer to those individuals who are too poor to pay taxes as "lucky duckies.")  Yes, trying to keep a family of four afloat on $35,000 in NYC a year feels broke, but it's not when compared to true poverty. At any rate, if you're in the vast middle, you don't have access to your personal lobbyist to Congress but you're still hanging on to a sliver of the American dream, so you get hosed (or feel like it anyway.)

And yet, getting hosed is a relative term.  For instance, my vast personal fortune is the result of inheriting money from my grandparents. It's not enough to constitute actual wealth and prosperity, but it does mean real savings, which didn't exist before they passed on, and which to me was essentially free money. I didn't work for it, I didn't earn it in any conventional way except by being related to them. That said, their estate was in fact large  enough to get intercepted by the federal and NY state governments when they died and the money passed to their heirs. The taxes paid constituted a sizable bite out of the whole, but there was enough left over to provide a cushion in case things really went south. So, yes, it could have been more--would have been more perhaps with some astute estate planning my grandparents never invested in--but it still is better to have it than not to have it.  In short, I didn't get hosed, I got lucky. In my view, everyone in this country who has had (or will have) a similar experience, doesn't get hosed, they just get lucky. 

Not everyone sees it that way, of course. Andy of the DNC, Fred the Slacktivist and the eXiles give different examples of the crowd that staunchly believe that "no taxes are good taxes" on their websites today. I've heard of and read plans to fund cities  states and nations without levying taxes, and some of them are quite ingenious. Some of them may work if tried out on real life. But that's not the world we live in at the moment. We like things like roads, schools, laws enforcement, a social safety net, etc. And if we want to keep them, we need to pay for them. It's that simple.

The ugly truth that the anti-tax folks crowd never acknowledges is that taxes and government are normal for human society. Not mandatory by any means--Somalia, for example, has avoided both for some time now--but normal. Deep down we're herd beasties, no matter how badly we like to think of ourselves as individuals brimming with free will and self-determination. Grouping together under collective organizations makes us feel safer and happier than we would living solitary existences surrounded by hundreds of miles of fallow countryside. That's not to say, of course, that all governments in all times and places are necessarily of the same value to those ruled by them--a 12th century feudal lord exercised a very different type of power over his serfs from that which a 20th century democratic representative exercises over his constituency, for example. Not all government functions are equally valued by those who live under them, either, as a bit of observation over any budgeting process will show in a bout ten minutes.  And it's not to say that our current government is well run or even sustainable, but that's the subject of another post.  My point is that governments--by which I mean ruling bodies in one form or another--are by and large, things we like. If we didn't, there would be fewer of them and they'd collapse more quickly when they did form.

This ramble has gone on longer than I intended so I'll end here. Except to challenge my fellow libertarians and capitalists out there: if you want to get attention and promote your ideas, demonstrate their worth.  And I don't mean pushing lame ideas like piling into New Hampshire to stage a coup from within. I mean coming together to buy up a couple hundred acres of land, and building upon it a town where people would want to live, funded by rents and a few service fees and nothing else. It's been done before, so one imagines that it could be done again. Make it happen, make it work, make it work better for its inhabitants than the competition could, and you'll have everything you need to change the face of civilization itself.

If you can't make it work, however, just pay your taxes and stop complaining.

Judith Krug, RIP

From the pages of USA Today:

Library Advocate Judith Krug Dies of Stomach Cancer

EVANSTON, Ill. (AP) — Judith Krug, a director of the Chicago-based American Library Association and a founder of its Banned Books Week, has died.

Judith Platt, president of the ALA's Freedom to Read Foundation, says Krug died late Saturday at Evanston Hospital in suburban Chicago following a battle with stomach cancer. She says Krug had been ill for more than a year.

Krug's age was not immediately available.

She had been head of the ALA's Office for Intellectual Freedom since 1967.

Banned Books Week has been observed since 1982 during the last week of September. ALA officials say the event celebrates intellectual freedom.

Banned Books Week is a major holiday in the Frater home. Make it one in yours as well.

Why Write Diet Books? For the Money, of Course!

I heard this story on my local National Public Radio station this morning: Lynn Neary does a pretty good job on describing the diet book business. The link lets you listen to the broadcast, and it only takes five minutes of your day so I'd encourage you to do so.

It's simple, really.  People write diet books for the money.  Other people buy them because reality, as they say, bites.  Nobody really wants to think of themselves as horribly inadequate but--being human--we all are in one way or another, and deep down, I'm pretty sure most of us realize this. But therein lies the real trouble--most of us are damned lazy. I mean mentally lazy, what A.M. Rosenthal called enormous "rolls of fat around our bodies and our brains," in a NY Times Op-Ed column I remember reading years ago.  Real problems, like the kind that plague us from childhood on often contain a spiritual component and Americans are not often considered particularly spiritual.

So we diet. It's an easy fix to complicated problems, easier certainly than enduring real self-reflection and attaining genuine self-knowledge.  George Carlin said it best on a stage long ago (as best as I can remember):

"I think [the fitness craze in this country] is a post-Vietnam guilt syndrome of some kind. America has lost its soul, so now it's going to save its body. Bullshit, dude, it doesn't work that way. It doesn't work like that."

Neary discusses a number of diets in her report and they're all roughly one part blind hope and two (or more) parts "discipline," but the one that caught my eye was The Writing Diet, by Julia Cameron. There's an excerpt in place from the book itself, which speaks to its purpose better than I could write it here:

I'm a creativity expert, not a diet expert. So why am I writing a book about weight loss? Because I have accidentally stumbled upon a weight-loss secret that works. For twenty-five years I've taught creative unblocking, a twelve-week process based on my book The Artist's Way. From the front of the classroom I've seen lives transformed — and, to my astonishment, bodies transformed as well. It took me a while to recognize what was going on, but sure enough, students who began the course on the plump side ended up visibly leaner and more fit. What's going on here? I asked myself. Was it my imagination, or was there truly a "before" and an "after"? There was!

I can't vouch for the worth of her workshop (I have never attended it) and aside from a somewhat (to me) bland writing style, it seems like a perfectly readable book. But I've been writing consistently for  over thirty years and while my weight has gone up and down in that time, writing, I'm fairly certain, had nothing to do with it. Writing has and does get me fired up in a good way, which is why I do it. And I suppose one could learn to harness that energy to do whatever one might want to be happier and more productive, but that's where it stops for me.

Diets are silly, potentially harmful to one's health, and expensive (buy the book!). I watched one diet after another wreck my mother's (and later on, my wife's) mental stability and health as they both lost hundreds of pounds over and over again across a period of decades.  You want to lose weight? Fine, here's what to do: eat food. Not the crap that comes in fancy boxes or plastic wrappers, I mean real, healthful food, the kind that comes off trees and bushes, or out of the ground, or off an animal that ate grass or bugs for a living. Exercise, too: a thirty minute walk a day should be fine for most people. Finally, don't obsess about your weight. That's all you have to do.  Keep your money in your pocket where it belongs.

Sex and Sin in the Big City

Just a fast note to those who follow such things: Ig Publishing has released another volume in their growing and truly amazing stable of non-fiction works.  This one is titled The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City, by Kat Long, a detailed work of history about those naughty bits we all know happen in the five boroughs every moment (to someone if not ourselves) in days past.

I haven't read the book yet but Susan Dominus of the NY Times did:

These days, pornographers, pundits and scientists are forever pondering what women want, but in 1913, at least, it was pretty clear: They wanted “The Inside of the White Slave Traffic,” a film depicting the sexual coercion of innocents into a life of brothels, and they weren’t going to let a team of New York’s finest get in their way. When the deputy police commissioner of New York brought six officers to the Park Theater to seize the film, the 500 or so women waiting to see the 9:30 screening nearly broke into a riot, waving their green tickets and making a mad dash for the door. The scene attracted several thousand protesters who joined the cause in sympathy, a crowd that dispersed only when the police brought in reinforcements. Never was a film purporting, in its own words, to “teach a great moral lesson” so ardently embraced by a group of young women. (The producers’ argument: Learn from the mistakes of our protagonist to resist the seductive ways of that dark, handsome stranger.)

There’s a great history of racy entertainment covering itself, if scantily, in a cloak of righteous education. Kat Long describes these protective measures, or ruses, in “The Forbidden Apple: A Century of Sex and Sin in New York City,” less a catalog of vice than an analysis of attempts to evade its suppression. Long promises at the outset that the book will demonstrate that “the agents for good and evil, in New York especially, are symbiotic.”

When it comes to illicit media, the agents for good and evil, even outside New York, are always symbiotic: pornography, in the experience of many moral crusaders, is like an infuriating weed that loves nothing more than a good pesticide, its strength only enhanced by efforts to tamp it down. But Long also chronicles the way that initiatives to eradicate vice only helped pave the way for its further evolution in the city. Try to eliminate drinking on Sunday by limiting it to hotels, as did the Raines Law of 1896, and suddenly every bar and saloon in Manhattan is putting up cheap dividers to create makeshift accommodations, ideal breeding grounds for prostitution, which thrived in the era of the so-called Raines Law hotels. Try to provide a place where working-class men can find a bathroom that isn’t in a bar, and from that solution — public restrooms — will come another challenge: gay (semipublic) sex. Close down the Continental Baths, a glorious, early-’70s gay pick-up spot, and make way for Plato’s Retreat, a heterosexual swinger’s club in the same location in the basement of the Ansonia Hotel.

The sexual history of 20th-century New York, as written by Long, the co-author of the guidebook “Sexy New York,” has, at times, the feel of a whirlwind tour: Step up and see the sexually free flapper of the ’20s rebelling in a post-World War I rejection of staid social values; see the burlesque theaters thrilling the Depression-era man who’s down on his luck; see the pill liberate sex from reproduction. Along the way, the tour highlights some lesser-known figures in New York’s sexual history, among them its premier peep show entrepreneur, Martin Hodas, and the young women who flocked to the city as military groupies during World War II and came to be known as the khaki whackies.

Read the review.  Buy the book.

Books Are Burning

Books are burning
In the main square, and I saw there
The first eating the text
Books are burning
In the still air
And you know where they burn books
People are next
I believe the printed word should be forgiven
Doesn't matter what it said
Wisdom hotline from the dead back to the living
Key to the larder for your heart and head
Books are burning
In our own town, watch us turn 'round
And cast our glances elsewhere
Books are burning
In the playground
Smell of burnt book is not unlike human hair
I believe the printed word is more than sacred
Beyond the gauge of good or bad
The human right to let your soul fly free and naked
Above the violence of the fearful and sad
The church of matches
Anoints in ignorance with gasoline
The church of matches
Grows fat by breathing in the smoke of dreams
It's quite obscene
Books are burning
More each day now, and I pray now
You boys will tire of these games
Books are burning
I hope somehow, this will allow
A phoenix up from the flames

---"Books Are Burning" by XTC

Happy Anniversary, Iraq War!

RS Edit: I actually wrote this two weeks ago when it really was the sixth anniversary of the war, but just published it today. My bad for not realizing it would go to the top of the blog. Enjoy!

According to the AP today is the sixth anniversary of the current War in Iraq. Also according to the AP that particular venture has cost this country (i.e., you, me, and 300 million other taxpaying (or not) Americans) something like 800 billion dollars.

I've been reading Innumeracy by John Allen Paulos, so I started wondering what that figure really meant. Yes, it’s a shitload of money but it’s impossible to visualize. Even in Scientific Notation 800 billion looks like 8 x 10^11, which is easier to write but doesn’t really help comprehension. And bring ups a number of questions in my mind, including:

What does 800 billion buy these days? Let's think about it for a moment. With 800 billion dollars one could buy, pay for, or otherwise provide:

• 120 McDonalds cheeseburgers for every man, woman and child on the Earth;
• 8,422,850 "A-class" shares of Berkshire Hathaway (or the entire company 16 times over;
• 80,000 miles of rural highway  or 20,512 miles of urban highway. Let’s say that it would build a highway long enough to circle the earth three times;
• A pair of new 2007 Audi A3s in every driveway in NY state—not that you’d want to;
• The entire American space shuttle program 5.5 times over;
• 5,818,181 F-2 Raptors--enough to arm every country in the world with them several times over;
• Total health care to a population 8 times the size of the U.S., which means the entire populations of China and India.

These are not small things. And while I wouldn't suggest actually doing any of them, it does help provide a sense of scale to the numbers we're discussing.

Now that we have some sense of scale, we can ask a more interesting question: If, as is generally understood at this point in time, the invasion of Iraq was all about securing their oil for our use, then what would it have cost us to simply buy the oil we needed on the international markets over the course of the war?

Given: the U.S. uses about 22 million barrels of the stuff per day, and over six years (2,192 days including 2 leap days) that comes to 48,224,000,000 or 42.224 billion barrels of it.

That’s fine but as we know the price of oil changed drastically between 2003 and now. The only way I can hope to deal with this is taking an average of the price of crude oil each January each year from 2003 to now. It’s not the best method of derivation but it should work here.

Therefore, given that:

Jan 2003: $27
Jan 2004: $34
Jan 2005: $45
Jan 2006: $58
Jan 2007: $65
Jan 2008: $95
Jan 2009: $45

The resulting average is $52.7 (let’s round up to $53/barrel)

So 42.224 billion x 53 = 2,237,872,000,000 or about two and a quarter trillion dollars. A bargain, you say! Well, maybe, maybe not.

$800 billion is just the official cost of the war, meaning supplemental outlays that were approved by Congress over the past six years for this particular overseas action. There are additional costs to be considered as well.

For instance, it’s been said that the cost of a single human life is something like $129,000, a price that’s used for cost analysis by health insurance companies. But that refers to the monetary value of a single year of life for an individual. For that calculation to work in this case, we need to consider average life expectancy as well. So, if the average life expectancy in modern day America is 77 years, and the average soldier is 25 years old, that’s 52 years of life that were cut short by dying in battle. 52 x $129,000 = $6,708,000. Rounding off American deaths to five thousand we get 5,000 x 6,708,000 = $33,540,000,000 or 33 and a half billion dollars.

On the other hand, what about 70,000 or so American troops who were wounded over there? Obviously, they are still alive, but they're not really expecting a normal life any more. For our purposes, let's accommodate this by saying their remaining life expectancy is cut by 25% or 13 years. Keeping the assumptions from the previous calculation, a wounded soldier can expect to live for another 39 years. 

So: 70,000 x 39 x $129,000 = $352,170,000,000 or 352 billion dollars and change. Total cost to American livelihoods: 385 and a half billion dollars.

Additionally, it’s been suggested that around a million Iraqis have been killed bring an added cost of its own (I know, I know, some of you will say American lives are worth more than Iraqi lives, but from where I sit, people are people and they’re all worth the same.) There’s also the argument that America really isn’t on the hook for non-American lives ended by American guns and ammo, but as the famous gentleman said, “you break it, you own it.” We killed them, directly or indirectly, their relatives will be thinking of ways to make us horribly uncomfortable (or dead) for years to come, and they’re part of the bill.

However, the average Iraqi (pre-invasion) life expectancy was rather lower than for Americans at 57. We’ll use the same age of death for this computation as we did with the Americans, 25. That means each Iraqi life was worth $129,000 x 32 (the difference between 57 and 25). So 1,000,000 x 129,000 x 32 = 4,128,000,000,000 or 4.128 trillion dollars.

Total (so far): 800 billion + 385.71 billion + 4.128 trillion = 5,313,170,000,000 or 5.31317 trillion dollars.

In other words this adventure has cost us a bit more than two and a half times what it would have cost just to buy the oil we wanted on the open market over the past six years.  (Assuming of course, that oil was all we wanted over there.)

There are plenty of other questions and costs we can consider, too.  A few that come to mind are:

What are the costs in lost productivity and economic activity in having a majority percentage (60% is a number I see a lot) of the forces there made up of reservists rather than professional troops?

How much oil was burned in the pursuit of this war by the U.S. armed forces?

How much of the stuff has been extracted from Iraq since 2003?

There's more I could say but this is long enough and I think I've made my point.  I thought this war was a bad idea back in February 2003, when my wife and I stood out in the bitter cold for six hours behind police barriers to protest the damn thing. I still think it's a bad idea. For all the fancy assumptions about costs and the value of human lives, I think it's fair to say that the loss of any human being to violence is going to be felt by someone. Some of those someones will take it badly indeed. Maybe blaming it on you and yours. Maybe trying to kill you and yours. And maybe succeeding.

None of it had to happen. For my two cents, we'd have been a stronger, safer and better country had it not.

A Long and Wacky Week

I haven't been posting lately for simple reasons. The most prominent one being that this week we endured a visit by the Middle States Commission on Higher Education. (This is the organization under which our accreditation is formed and periodically verified.) Their crew of educators and administrations visited on Monday and Tuesday, spoke to us in the library and every other department, scaring the bejeesus out of everyone in the process, I'm sure. Certainly we in the school library spent buckets of time making sure that anything these nice people wanted to see could be presented with as  few problems and in as effective a manner possible.

Well, the came, they saw, they asked many questions and on Wednesday they presented their generally positive findings. We're here for five more years as an accredited institution. (Yea!)

Wednesday was April 1, a.k.a April Fool's Day. Two things happened to me personally that made my life more interesting than I really cared for. The first was my wife who woke me up that morning saying, "I opened all the bills and put them on your desk. They're not bad. April Fool! They're really really bad!"

(I love my wife. I want to say that again. I love that woman more than I can describe in non X-rated language. But sometimes . . . yeah. Well. Guys, you know what I mean. Probably you ladies do as well. . .)

I got to work at 10 Wednesday morning and had just unlocked the door to my office when my boss pulled me aside and asked me to cover the desk until further notice. His reasoning was that the place was empty and he and the library manager needed to go to the Middle States presentation downstairs. No problem. I do a shift at the desk every day and since  we're not quite in finals week it shouldn't be too busy, so I'm there.

Then I find out that the public computers were not connecting to the internet. None of them. The private PCs were all right--the circ desk PCs, the ones in our personal offices are fine, just the public ones, which includes a PC lab of about 20 and 20 more in the library proper. 40 computers out of wack at a stroke. That is A Very Big Deal indeed.

IT came down, ran tests and declared that were are a victim of a virus worm. A big one that somehow manages to rewrite the task manager's scripts such that the PC is so damn busy running bogus instructions that it never even gets a chance to log on to an internet connection, even if one is readily available.  Every public computer was affected. In tech speak we are screwed, at least until they can run whatever patches they can find to repair the actual damage.

This is a major inconvenience for sure but not an Act of Total Destruction. Our books, after all, are fine. But our catalog, being electronic and thus only generally usable by a PC with an internet connection, is unavailable. But if a student comes to me at the desk and asks for a title, I can find it for him because those PCs work. In the meantime if a student needs to use a PC, we've been sending them to dedicated labs on the other floors. So far, so good.

The problem is being fixed: instead of trying to reverse engineer a virus patch (which they're not really equipped to do) IT took all of our nerfed PCs out and are slowly replacing them with brand new models. Ten got replaced yesterday, I'm hoping that they'll have finished with the work by Monday. Of course we've been asking for new PCs for going on two years now, and IT has been saying it's way too expensive and labor intensive to do that--but then pulling 40 PCs out of their department's collective ass isn't the sort of thing you can do in 24 hours. Orders that large from any major supplier can take 2-3 weeks to arrange (I know because I've had that job.)  And these are new machines in new boxes, so they didn't just fall off a truck. I find the coincidence interesting, but that's where I'll stop. 

That's all notable but not what interests me the most. What really got my attention was our students' reaction to the whole mess.  At first, we put a sign on the library door, a simple notice printed in Microsoft Word, saying the library computers are fritzed, please go to the other labs, etc. Nobody saw it. In my first ten minutes at the desk, I had to turn away twenty kids. Logical conclusion: we need a better sign. So we cleared off a much bigger white board and wrote the message in a big red marker, ALERT! LIBRARY COMPUERS ARE NOT WORKING and if anything, the number of students coming in to use them increased. Then we closed the door to the library but kids pulled it open and came in to work just the same. Finally, we put the message board in front of the doorway and then the kids noticed something was up. One girl pulled it out of the way, walked up to the desk and complained that the doorway was blocked. Another boy walked around the board and went past the desk on his way to use the PCs.

I understand 20-somethings. I was one myself, after all, even if that was sometimes last century. But my generation was drilled to look for signs in BIG RED LETTERS  that denoted something different about the terrain. And I grok that once they walk through those glass doors in the lobby habit takes over and to these kids it's just another day at school. Since many of our programs are geared toward business and public administration, it's interesting that they're not more on the ball or on the lookout for the strange and unusual--one of our big draws, for example is our degree in Emergency and Disaster Management. Habits can be dangerous when trying to analyze the unexpected and adapt to it.

Is there a lesson here? I don't think so. Just a long and wacky week in the edumacation business.

Find Your Local Library With a Text message

This tidbit comes from Ben Ostrowsky's blog by way of a note from Marie Tomlinson Ascher's Facebook account:

I’m working at a non-library job on a contract that lasts through 2009, but that doesn’t mean I’ve forgotten the library world. Today I am very proud to announce that I’ve created the service I wished for ten years ago.

Text LIBRARY 12345 to 41411, assuming that your ZIP code is 12345 (and if it is, how’s the weather in Schenectady?). You will get a text message with the name, address, and phone number of the nearest library.

Here’s how it works:

--You send the text message “LIBRARY 12345″ to 41411 (TextMarks).
--TextMarks uses the word LIBRARY to assign the rest of the message (”12345″) to my TextMarks application.
--My TextMarks application sends the rest of the message (in this case, your ZIP code) to a server at freeshell.org. Running PHP scripts on freeshell.org isn’t free, but for a one-time $36 donation, you get that privilege.
freeshell.org searches NCES for branch and central libraries, then finds the first result and identifies the name, address, and phone number in its HTML code.
freeshell.org sends back a very simple result with newlines where appropriate (view the source to see how it’s really formatted).
--TextMarks sends you the literal answer from freeshell.org, plus a brief advertisement with which TextMarks pays the bills. (I don’t see a penny from this except when y’all phone up potential employers and tell them they’d do well to hire me for 2010.)

Ben added a few bit that he'd like to add eventually, but this sounds like an amazing start on a genuinely new way of navigating the wide world of Libraryland.

Pity the Rich Folk . . . For the Moment

This has nothing to do with libraries (unless you happen to be a legal librarian or working in a B-school library at the moment.) But it's too good to pass up, so here is Bill Bonner's opening bit from today's Daily Reckoning:

Where the Bailout Money is Really Going
By Bill Bonner 

Pity the rich. Pity the CEOs. Pity the capitalists.

Poor Warren. He's down to his last $25 billion. And Bill Gates can barely hold his head up; his pile has shrunk to barely $18 billion.

And do a Google search of "AIG outrage" and you will get 621,000 hits.

Alas, being rich isn't as easy or as much fun as it used to be.

The rally paused yesterday. The Dow lost 7 points. It could be over. More likely, it will run for a few months. Gradually, people will come to think that this is the real thing. They'll begin to imagine that it is 2003 all over again. Of course, it's not...this market has nothing in common with the Great Rebound of 2003-2007. (More below...)

Oil traded at $47 yesterday; it is slipping toward the $50 level. And the dollar is slipping around too - it is losing ground against the euro, now trading at $1.29/$. But it is mostly steady against gold, which seems to like the $900-$950 range...for now. We have a feeling it's going to go much, much higher before all this is over. See here.

AIG is today's main story. Everyone is appalled, outraged...or apoplectic about it. First, we under-reported the amount in bonuses paid out. The real amount is $450 million, says the Wall Street Journal...and one member of Congress charges that many bonuses were disguised as other things...and that the real total is more like $1 billion. 

The average lumpenvoter has no idea how bailouts work. He was willing to believe that giving Wall Street hundreds of billions in taxpayer money would somehow make his house go up in price, but now that he sees how it really operates, he is ticked off about it. He may not understand macroeconomics, but he knows chicanery when he sees it. 

Under pressure, AIG revealed what it did with the bailout money. It came as no shock to us to discover Goldman Sachs at the top of the list of recipients. Goldman's main man was in the room with the feds - the only representative of Wall Street - when the decision was made to rescue AIG. What's more, the feds' main man at the time - Hank Paulson - also used to be the top honcho at Goldman. So the fix was in. The government gave money to AIG and AIG gave it to a long list of speculators - including Goldman.

This seems perfectly natural to us. If we'd been in on the fix we would have steered some of the loot our way. But the politicians are feigning shock and horror. Senator Grassley even said AIG management should "resign or commit suicide." He later calmed down and said he didn't mean it. 

But we would have simply edited his remarks, giving the schmucks at AIG a last chance to exit with honor: "Resign AND commit suicide, in that order."

Barney Frank added that "maybe it's time to fire some people." Why not? The feds own 80% of the insurance giant now. Go ahead; fire all the people you want. That's about the only pleasure a real capitalist has left to him. Reach out...and fire someone today!

Elsewhere in the news, the economy continues to deteriorate. Industrial production fell 1.4% in February. And credit card defaults are at a 20- year high. 

Misters Smoot and Hawley seem to still be on the federal payroll. The news this morning is that they began a trade war with Mexico and the Mexicans have already retaliated. That's all we know about it...

But back to the tribulations of the rich...

First, Mr. Market is downsizing fortunes - fast. In the last 12 months, the average rich person has probably lost half his wealth. Not only did he own millions worth of stocks and real estate...he was also among the privileged few to get into good deals on derivatives, SIVs, hedge funds and private equity. Many of those complicated and conflicted assets have been wiped out completely. Or, maybe he was unlucky enough to count Bernie Madoff as a friend.

Second, what Mr. Market doesn't take, Mr. Politician is looking at. All over the world, plans are afoot to increase his taxes...and close down his tax havens. President Obama has already revealed his plans to soak the rich. Every other group will come out even...or better...from Obama's tax proposals. But the rich are going to be saturated...marinated...soaked to the bone.

And third, the poor rich guy has become a pariah. He doesn't get invited to charity events anymore - or even to join the guys after work for a beer. Europeans have always distrusted rich people. But in America, a rich man used to be respected - just because he was rich. People asked his opinion on politics...on fashion...on art. He was presumed to be an authority on all things and was generally treated with respect...even deference. 

But now rich are seen as chumps, losers, incompetents and malefactors. Even Americans look at rich people and think they must be either stupid or corrupt.

"Le secret des grandes fortunes sans cause apparente est un crime oubli , parce qu' il a t proprement fait." said Balzac. Which has been paraphrased to "Behind every great fortune lies a great crime." Of course, he was referring to France, where it is has probably always been true. Money is dirty in France. But in America, money was supposed to be clean...innocent...honest and forthright. The richest man in town always sat in the front pew in church and stood for election to local office. 

But come the depression and even the rich suffer. And unlike the starving urchins, unlucky widows and innocent orphans, no one cries a tear for the rich. Here at The Daily Reckoning we always take the side of the underdog...and always support the lost cause. So when we think of the rich...those darling people with their Italian suits...German cars...and Swiss bank accounts...our cheek gets a little moist. For we - and we alone - still admire and respect the rich. Of course, the rich are human beings too - just like the rest of us. And yes, dear reader...we still despise them as much as anyone else. When it comes to intelligence or moral rectitude, they are probably no better than the lower classes, though probably no worse. But we still admire and respect their money. Their money is no better either - but they have more of it.

The rest is here. Enjoy!

New York Technical Sservice Librarians' Spring Reception at NYPL

From an e-mail from Angela Sidman, NYTSL Secretary:

You are cordially invited to the New York Technical Services Librarians Annual Reception for Librarians, Information Professionals and Library School Students.

This reception is co-sponsored through corporate support from EBSCO and through our association sponsors: the Association of College & Research Libraries, New York Metropolitan Area Chapter (ACRL/NY), Medical Library Association/New York-New Jersey Chapter, and the Visual Resources Association/Greater New York Chapter.


When:

Friday, March 27, 2009

3:00 - 5:00 p.m.

 

Where:

The New York Public Library

Trustees Room (206)

Fifth Avenue & Forty-Second Street


Why:

This is an opportunity for librarians, archivists, and information professionals from the metropolitan area to meet informally. It is also a chance for library school students to learn about the various professional organizations in the metropolitan area and to meet future colleagues and employers.

 

Please RSVP to angela.sidman@yahoo.com by Friday, March 20, 2009. 

 

Wine & Cheese will be served.


You are welcome to bring announcements of professional opportunities to the reception.


Cindy Wolff, NYTSL President
Pratt Institute

cwolff2@pratt.edu

 
Angela Sidman, NYTSL Secretary
Catalogue Librarian
Mina Rees Library
CUNY Graduate Center

365 Fifth Avenue

New York, NY 10016

(212)817-7072

asidman@gc.cuny.edu

See you there!

Frick Art Reference Library Launches 'Arcade' Research Catalog

This bulletin comes here courtesy of the METRO-L listserv (edited for links):

We are delighted to announce the launch of Arcade, the shared catalog of the Frick Art Reference Library and the libraries of the Brooklyn Museum and The Museum of Modern Art. The catalog, which can be found at http://arcade.nyarc.org, unites more than 800,000 records representing material of art and cultural history from the antique to the contemporary. This collaboration was made possible with the generous funding of the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. A third grant was awarded in December 2008 to further develop Arcade. 

 
The press release can be found here.

Additionally, we are thrilled to have been mentioned in The New York Times!


For questions please contact:

Lily Pregill at pregill@frick.org  
Or Debbie Kempe at kempe@frick.org

All I can say about this is that if Lily Pregill--with whom I had the pleasure of working at the Academy for several years--worked on this project, it's sure to be something special.  Enjoy!

"I've Worried About It With All of My Heart."

Stolen from Fred Clark over at Slacktivist:

The Lorax said nothing. Just gave me a glance ...
just gave me a very sad, sad backward glance ...
as he lifted himself by the seat of his pants.
And I'll never forget the grim look on his face
when he heisted himself and took leave of this place,
through a hole in the smog, without leaving a trace.

And all that the Lorax left here in this mess
was a small pile of rocks, with one word...
"UNLESS."
Whatever that meant, well, I just couldn't guess.

That was long, long ago.
But each day since that day
I've sat here and worried
and worried away.
Through the years, while my buildings
have fallen apart,
I've worried about it
with all of my heart.

"But now," says the Once-ler,
"Now that you're here,
the word of the Lorax seems perfectly clear.
UNLESS someone like you
cares a whole awful lot,
nothing is going to get better.
It's not.

Happy birthday, Doc.  You've no idea how much you're missed.  

Old Children's Books Banned, Courtesy of the Federal Government

From Walter Olson, writing in the City Journal:

The New Book Banning
Children’s books burn, courtesy of the federal government.
12 February 2009

It’s hard to believe, but true: under a law Congress passed last year aimed at regulating hazards in children’s products, the federal government has now advised that children’s books published before 1985 should not be considered safe and may in many cases be unlawful to sell or distribute. Merchants, thrift stores, and booksellers may be at risk if they sell older volumes, or even give them away, without first subjecting them to testing—at prohibitive expense. Many used-book sellers, consignment stores, Goodwill outlets, and the like have accordingly begun to refuse new donations of pre-1985 volumes, yank existing ones off their shelves, and in some cases discard them en masse. 

The problem is the Consumer Product Safety Improvement Act of 2008 (CPSIA), passed by Congress last summer after the panic over lead paint on toys from China. Among its other provisions, CPSIA imposed tough new limits on lead in any products intended for use by children aged 12 or under, and made those limits retroactive: that is, goods manufactured before the law passed cannot be sold on the used market (even in garage sales or on eBay) if they don’t conform. The law has hit thrift stores particularly hard, since many children’s products have long included lead-containing (if harmless) components: zippers, snaps, and clasps on garments and backpacks; skateboards, bicycles, and countless other products containing metal alloy; rhinestones and beads in decorations; and so forth. Combine this measure with a new ban (also retroactive) on playthings and child-care articles that contain plastic-softening chemicals known as phthalates, and suddenly tens of millions of commonly encountered children’s items have become unlawful to resell, presumably destined for landfills when their owners discard them. Penalties under the law are strict and can include $100,000 fines and prison time, regardless of whether any child is harmed.

Take a look at the text of the law (linked above).  The reporting about $100k fines and jail time is scary enough, but the rubric of how much exposure to these chemicals constitutes harm to the child is more than merely nebulous: it doesn't exist.  There is no metric given in the text of the law (that I can find, I might easily have missed something) that specifies what constitutes harm or physical damage to anyone, child or otherwise.  What it does do is establish that any "child's product" that contains more than 600 parts per million, more than 180 days from the date of the enactment of the law, is considered a "banned hazardous substance, under the Federal Hazardous Substances Act".  This limits drops to 300 parts per million after 1 year, then drops again to 100 parts per million after 3 years, but--and there is always a but in legalese--the rest of that section (Section 101, paragraphs C, D, and E) describe an 'out', as it were, for the Commissioners.  Essentially, if they determine upon review that 100  ppm is "not technically feasible" for a product category, they may "establish an amount that is the lowest amount of lead, lower than 300 parts per million, the Commission determines to be technologically feasible to achieve for that product or product category."

In other words, the 100  ppm limit is an ideal, meant to sound good but not meant to ever really be enacted. For example the Commission could, upon review, establish a limit of say 299 ppm and it would stick because it meets the test for being lower than the 300 ppm limit.

In any case, Olson's main point is here:

Not until 1985 did it become unlawful to use lead pigments in the inks, dyes, and paints used in children’s books. Before then—and perhaps particularly in the great age of children’s-book illustration that lasted through the early twentieth century—the use of such pigments was not uncommon, and testing can still detect lead residues in books today. This doesn’t mean that the books pose any hazard to children. While lead poisoning from other sources, such as paint in old houses, remains a serious public health problem in some communities, no one seems to have been able to produce a single instance in which an American child has been made ill by the lead in old book illustrations—not surprisingly, since unlike poorly maintained wall paint, book pigments do not tend to flake off in large lead-laden chips for toddlers to put into their mouths.

That's not entirely correct--lead can get into the human body by skin contact, although it would take quite a hefty number of repeated exposures for it to happen--but in general, no I have not seen more than a few young children attempt to eat their old story books.  But the law deals with that as well, providing for a review and evaluation procedure to determine if a given product will  "(A) result in the absorption of any lead into the human body, taking into account normal and reasonably foreseeable use and abuse of such product by a child, including swallowing, mouthing, breaking, or other children’s activities, and the aging of the product; nor (B) have any other adverse impact on public health or safety."  That's a very broad measure of potential harm, but as I said earlier, there's no specific description of what constitutes "public health or safety."

The bit that concerns me as a librarian who deals with a substantial collection of children's books for our Education Resource Room is this one from Olson:

A further question is what to do about public libraries, which daily expose children under 12 to pre-1985 editions of Anne of Green Gables, Beatrix Potter, Baden-Powell’s scouting guides, and other deadly hazards. The blogger Design Loft carefully examines some of the costs of CPSIA-proofing pre-1985 library holdings; they are, not surprisingly, utterly prohibitive. The American Library Association spent months warning about the law’s implications, but its concerns fell on deaf ears in Congress (which, in this week’s stimulus bill, refused to consider an amendment by Republican senator Jim DeMint to reform CPSIA). The ALA now apparently intends to take the position that the law does not apply to libraries unless it hears otherwise. One can hardly blame it for this stance, but it’s far from clear that it will prevail. For one thing, the law bans the “distribution” of forbidden items, whether or not for profit. In addition, most libraries regularly raise money through book sales, and will now need to consider excluding older children’s titles from those sales. One CPSC commissioner, Thomas Moore, has already called for libraries to “sequester” some undefinedly large fraction of pre-1985 books until more is known about their risks.

I went on to Thomas.loc.gov to see what exactly Senator DeMint (R-SC) considered a "reform" to CPSIA, but kept getting server errors.  Hmmmm.  Well, anyway, I'll say it here and now: if anyone has a cache of these older books and is desperately afraid of being caught, hold on to them.  Put them in a big box and shove them into the local self-storage cubby.  That's what I would do.  The official ALA stance--"Piss off, Feds"--is a good one but, as Olson points out, there's no way to know when or if the government will ever attempt to enforce the new law, other than banning imports from countries we don't like (read: "China".)  It's difficult to imagine the feds systematically visiting every house, every book store, every thrift or Goodwill, every basement, every attic, in search of books that may be seized as hazardous waste.  Just lately it's difficult to imagine them having the time, energy or money to search for (or invest in) anything that doesn't go "Boom!"  That said, it's a lot easier to imagine ambitious (and desperate for funds) local officials to team up with private entities to see what they can find around town.  Things happen and at $100k each, they might happen a lot faster than you'd think.

Or they might not.  We shall see.

Peak Oil & Libraries 4.0: Food, Shelter, Transport, Security

The Peak Oil Blues have returned (again).  As I write this, President Obama (I will never get tired of writing that) is on his way to Denver to sign his new stimulus bill.  Some laud the new law as being the right idea and others despise it for a wide variety of reasons.  In my supremely unedumacated opinion, it's a nice political stunt, but the bill itself contains too few of the real investments that the country needs (e.g., where is the national high-speed rail network, guys?) and too much of the financial legerdemain that keeps bankers and accountants happy but robs depositors of their deposits, to be of much value.  Also, given a $13 trillion economy, $790 billion--about 6%--really doesn't go very far.  Even if we spent it on stuff that matters, which we didn't, it's pocket change.  (Imagine you have $100 for the week. You budget $25 for rent, $25 for groceries, $25 for the car payment, and $25 is saved.  Uncle Sam gives you $6. Now, yes you could take that extra cash and buy a few more groceries, pay down your car a bit more quickly, over-pay your rent a bit or save it, but compared to the grand scheme of your weekly spending, it just ain't that big a deal.)

On the other hand, the new CEO of America, Inc. needs to do something--which is why he was elected, after all, by an increasingly desperate electorate.  And the new law will indeed do something.  Just what, I don't know.  Maybe nothing.  Maybe create 3.2 million jobs.  Maybe something totally different.  We'll just have to wait and see what happens. Something that surely will take place is that $790 billion is added to the national debt which will have to be paid off at some point by somebody (if you're curious as to who that somebody will be, look in the mirror, then imagine your kids and grand-kids and their kids and grand-kids all looking back at you.  Scowling actually, because they're going to be pissed off.)

In addition, the Dow is now falling through the 7,500 mark.  About 6,500 is where it was before the dot-com rise-and-bust in the mid 1990s, and that's around where it should be now, seeing as how all the financial additives are being siphoned out of the economy.  (Granted, the two things have very little to do with each other but that's the subject of better writing than my own, much of which can be found along the Money & Economics links in the left sidebar.)  That's not to say it will go to 6,500 then go back up, nor to say it won't keep going down to 5,000, 3,000, or straight to zero.  It's not likely to go down that far but, well, things happen.

At the moment life maintains its apparent cohesion the way a water strider glides (hops?) across the surface of a pond.  The bug can do this because of how it's built and because it only weighs a few micrograms.  If that tiny insect were several orders of magnitude larger, it would go straight to the bottom.  It's just not in the nature of insects that the big fat ones get to walk on water like the tiny ones do.  Similarly, life appears to go on the way it's supposed to.  My car starts when I turn the key in the ignition.  There's food on the shelves of the local supermarket.  My bank pays out a check I wrote last Thursday.  These things happen not because there's any natural law that says they need happen, but they're the result of very specific systems having been put in place decades ago.  But we only see the surface features so it's all we generally think about.  For the moment, things continue to work and that's a good thing.

I ordered a new laptop back in January, one of the new MacBook Pros, which, if I'm lucky, will ship next week and arrive about a week later.  The funny thing is that it took three rounds of phone calls to my bank and two credit card companies (and to Apple of course) to find a way to pay for the silly thing.  I have the cash in the bank for it, but getting that cash to Apple was the challenge.  I think everything is done, but we'll see.  As I just wrote, things continue to work, but . . . we'll see what happens.

I have resigned myself to knowing that this will be the last computer I own. There will be no other after this one.  First because there's nothing I'll be doing (other than some gaming on the weekends) that I'll need a computer for that can't be done with paper and pen. My writing, financial bookkeeping and such can be done in blank journals and on ledger paper (or my checkbook) and as long as I remember to print the important stuff out and store it properly, there is no reason the record-keeping methods used in the 19th century should fail me now. With a bit of luck I expect to be using the new machine until it dies or falls apart. Much like I expect to do with my car, a 2000 Nissan Sentra that gets relatively little wear and tear (65,000 miles as I type this over 8 years).  This is something to get used to: trading up and handing the older stuff to those in greater need than yourself.  The laptop I'm typing this on is being sold to a friend who's upgrading her own hemispherical iMac (remember those?) from five years ago.  One day the parts will cease being made, and that will then be that. 

I've got about six months of prescription asthma meds tucked away in case I need them; I'm less sure how to get a reserve supply of Zoloft (for other members of the family) or the very specific state-controlled meds my nephew uses, but that's something I'm working on.

There's enough cash in a safe deposit box to last awhile, until then, we're still employed and trying to keep expenses down.  And I've got about a month of food stored in my kitchen which I believe I can make last twice as long if nobody insists on going back for seconds (or eating a ton of rice).

In his latest blog entry Dimity Orlov describes four areas to concentrate on in pursuit of the post-collapse lifestyle: food, shelter, transport, and security.  All else, he says, is besides the point.  (He may be right, we'll see.)  Food I have at least in the short term; transport depends on my car, which has been little used and well maintained--gas is the real problem, but it gets better gas mileage than 50% of the cars on the road, so perhaps that's not too bad.  Shelter is interesting--my wife and I have discussed it, and if things got really bad, we're able to entertain the thought of moving into my mom's house.  (Actually picking up and doing it is another story.)  Security is dependant on how well I can conceal a long knife (nicely, it seems)  or a sword (not that well) on my body.  I practice with a .22 once a week and I have a carved longbow I badly need to learn to use.  But I live in NYC which is the gun control capital of the country, so one hopes I'll have some time to figure out a few more ways to gut a man before things actually stop working.

But that's just concerning me and the Mrs. When I think about my brother and sister-in-law, niece and nephew, friends, godchildren, in-laws, and so on, things get much murkier and thicker.  Very few of them listen to me when I tell them that this show known as Early 21st Century Industrial Society will soon be going on the road.  Part of me is looking forward to it; it will be such a relief not to have to go "work" every day.  Unfortunately, being an asthmatic makes me a bit of a liability in the Darwinian sense to those around me so I'm building up my post-technology library as well.  I'd be nice to be known as they guy who had all the Books We Need.

I apologize for this rant, I usually try to be more coherent.  But this is not a subject that engenders a lot of coherence (unless you're Sharon Astyk, who has never been anything else.)  I refuse to panic or give in to despair but I haven't really believed in The System for a long, long time, and I suspect that's helped me keep going.  In the meantime, I think about this stuff.  Quite a lot.

We shall see.

Google Book Search Settlement Meeting Report

This comes from Dottie Hiebing, Executive Director of the Metropolitan New York Library Council, by way of the METRO-L listserve:

http://www.wo.ala.org/districtdispatch/?p=1881 

Members of library community discussed the implications of the Google Book Search settlement in a meeting hosted on February 9, 2009 in Washington, D.C. by the American Library Association Washington Office, the Association of Research Libraries and the Association of College & Research Libraries. Under the settlement, Google and the American Association of Publishers and Authors Guild resolve their legal dispute over the scanning of millions of books provided by research libraries. The settlement still requires approval of the presiding judge.

Although this is a private settlement, the result has very real implications for public policy and the way libraries of all types will operate. The mission of libraries is to provide the broadest public access to the use of information, and the library community has a long history of advocating for laws and policies that protect the rights of library users. Because of the complexity of the agreement, its potential long-term impact on libraries, thus user interests, and the enormity of the book collection involved, many librarians have raised questions about the settlement's impact.

Issues raised at the meeting that members believe are of key concern to libraries include:

-Access. What will the settlement mean for protecting the public's ability to access and use digital resources from the nation's libraries? Since the Book Rights Registry established as a condition of the settlement will represent the interests of the authors and publishers, who will represent the interests of libraries and the public? What are the financial implications of participation? Could the settlement create a monopoly that threatens the mission of libraries by raising the prices to an unreasonable level that limits public access?

-Privacy. What will reader privacy look like in a Google subscription-based world? Will the years of hard-fought effort to protect library users' confidentiality be compromised as a for-profit company has new capabilities to monitor and track user reading habits under this settlement?

-Intellectual freedom. Are there academic freedom issues to consider? What are the implications of Google's ability to remove works at its discretion? Will there be notification of their removal? What are the issues regarding possible access and use restrictions on the Research Corpus?

-Equitable treatment. Since not all libraries are addressed in the settlement, what impact will it have on the diverse landscape of libraries? In light of tight economic times, will this negatively affect libraries with lean budgets? Will it expand the digital divide?

-Terms of use. Under the terms of the agreement, will library users continue to enjoy the same rights to information under copyright and other laws? Will the settlement impact the legal discussions and interpretations of library exceptions that allow for library lending, limited copying and preservation?

Next, the executive boards and other leadership bodies of the library associations will consider a number of options available to them to have their voices heard in this debate. To stay posted on the latest developments of the associations' next steps, see www.ala.org/washoff; www.arl.org; and www.ala.org/acrl.

Help Michael Moore With His Next Movie (If You Can)

February 11, 2009 

Friends, 

I am in the middle of shooting my next movie and I am looking for a few brave people who work on Wall Street or in the financial industry to come forward and share with me what they know. Based on those who have already contacted me, I believe there are a number of you who know "the real deal" about the abuses that have been happening. You have information that the American people need to hear. I am humbly asking you for a moment of courage, to be a hero and help me expose the biggest swindle in American history. 

All correspondence with me will be kept confidential. Your identity will be protected and you will decide to what extent you wish to participate in telling the greatest crime story ever told. 

The important thing here is for you to step up as an American and do your duty of shedding some light on this financial collapse. A few good people have already come forward, which leads me to believe there are many more of you out there who know what's going on. Here's your chance to let your fellow citizens in on the truth. 

If you have any info that would help, please contact me at my private email address: bailout@michaelmoore.com. 

For the rest of you on my email list who don't work in the financial industry, you're probably wondering, "What the heck is this all about? I thought he said he was making a romantic comedy!" 

Well, I just can't say much right now. I'm sure you can understand why. One thing I can tell you is that you're gonna like this movie when I'm done with it. Oh, yeah... 

So, again, if you work for a bank, a brokerage firm or an insurance company -- or if you have seen things or heard things that you believe the American people have a right to know -- please contact me at bailout@michaelmoore.com. 

Thank you in advance for your help! 

Yours,
Michael Moore
bailout@michaelmoore.com
MichaelMoore.com

Slouching Toward "Social Networking"

I admit it: I'm not as quick on the draw as at least a few of my friends and co-workers think I am.  The immediately relevant case in point is that fact that I'm having a bear of a time learning how to navigate the NetworkedBlogs application on Facebook.  Facebook is itself easy enough to figure out.  The NetworkedBlogs app is actually kind of nifty, and the preliminary work of registering this blog on it was simplicity itself.  The vetting process--where they demand 10 friends' confirmations as you (me) as the author, and a minimum 'fan' base of 20 to enter the feed in cascading posts--while less than efficient (I'll explain why shortly) at least makes sense.

The real problem is getting the RSS feeds to transfer from Feedburner.com (which I use) to Facebook. I managed a few manual posts and link, no problem.  But when I checked the staus of the RS Blog on Networked Blogs, I saw error messages in the feed status area.  Which is a fancy was of saying that Facebook didn't recognize what Feedburner was sending it.  I don't know why this is--I hope it's a simple matter of me giving it the wrong URL. (I've just fixed it, so if that was the problem, it'll be corrected shortly.  I hope.)

The efficiency matter I just mentioned is more of a pet peeve than a real design flaw.  On Facebook, you have the ability to launch applications more or less at will, and a lot of these are geared toward signing your friends up for wacky good and services, like joining a game of Knighthood, or getting a digital Mushroom, or starting a digital garden, or whatever.  If you have more than a few friends on this thing (I managed to gather 54 in the past month, don't ask how) these gifts, requests and such like are going to back up.  Facebook has, to its credit, anticipated this, and segregated the older requests-in-waiting from the newer ones.  But they don't seem to have anticipated the probability that faced with, say, 6,452,744 outstanding requests, most people will just ignore that darned button and after a few minutes, not even think about it.  (My wife who is a case in point, had over 100 of these requests gathering dust and it never occurred to her to clear them out.)

My point is merely this: Facebook is not quite the untapped wellspring of fame and prosperity I'd been led to believe "social networking" sites are. At the very least, using them effectively takes skills that I don't have (yet).  Obviously, this is not to say that there's no value to Facebook-based applications (if a creep like Michelle Malkin can get 300+ freaks and weirdos to read her stuff there's every chance I can get a bunch to read mine.)  I think it is to say that there's clearly a learning curve involved in dealing with this type of tech and the hype there, like everywhere else, needs to be cut through first before one can become productive using it.

On the positive side, the RSS feed to this blog is available on Livejournal.com--that took two minutes to set up--but the lack of formatting in the text is something I'm not that happy with.  Still, it's there.  And if you're on Facebook and want to subscribe to the feed there, you can do that here.  Heck, become a fan and/or confirm I own this silly place.  (I'd be grateful.)  I'm dealing easily enough with LinkedIn and I don't know enough people on MySpace to create a profile there, but . . . we'll see.

Next, I try to install Google Analytics . . .

Digital Archivists, Now in Demand

This came in yesterday's edition of the NY Times:

Digital Archivists, Now in Demand 
By CONRAD DE AENLLE

WHEN the world entered the digital age, a great majority of human historical records did not immediately make the trip.

Literature, film, scientific journals, newspapers, court records, corporate documents and other material, accumulated over centuries, needed to be adapted for computer databases. Once there, it had to be arranged — along with newer, born-digital material — in a way that would let people find what they needed and keep finding it well into the future.

The people entrusted to find a place for this wealth of information are known as digital asset managers, or sometimes as digital archivists and digital preservation officers. Whatever they are called, demand for them is expanding.

One of them is Jacob Nadal, the preservation officer at the University of California, Los Angeles. He does not use the “digital” modifier because his duties include safeguarding analog materials in U.C.L.A.’s collection, not just preparing them to cross the digital divide.

“I don’t think there’s any day where I would say I’m the digital guy,” he said. But he concedes that he’s not really an analog, ink-on-paper guy, either, and that is increasingly the case in his field. These days, he noted, “if you want to work in a library, you have to deal in electronic resources.”

Read the rest of the article here. Enjoy! 

Problems with Workflows and Plans for 2009

Now that it's a new year/new semester, I'm back to playing catch-up with the world.  Namely, back to cataloging. 112 new volumes that are destined to sit upon the noble shelves of the Reserve section (required text for the most part) and the Education resource Room.  This will take days but at least it's not difficult work.

What is more difficult (or at least aggravating)  is navigating the guts of SirsiDynix Unicorn Workflows Java Client v. 3.21.2.1.  I've got the ILS installed on all but one of the staff workstations in the library and for the most part it's working nicely.  One thing that is really giving me the business is the configuration modules's use of override passwords.  The passwords are easy to set up--in fact we migrated all the previous password to the current setup.  It remembered everything that came over from the earlier install, so that's not the problem.  The problem (I know this is a roundabout explanation, but bear with me, we're almost there) is that every detail of the five main configuration flowcharts must absolutely agree with each other, or the ILS blocks the user's access to the module function.  In other words all the details must agree to get access to the stuff I and the staff had full access to before we migrated. 

The confusing part about this is that when creating or modifying a new User Access profile, it gives you the option of choosing or omitting any one of the wide array of tools and permissions that are part of the access tree. For example, I've got student workers able to perform only basic actions (create/modify user, check in/discharge, etc.) but now even those require password overrides.  Even the super user account I created for myself some time ago is subject to the overrides.  

Long story short (as if you haven't sat through enough already), I have to create a block of time to sit down, print out every configuration rule chart this application has, and figure out how to make everything agree.  It'll be ugly but the guys at Sirsi Clientcare insist that's how one goes about fixing it.  Yowza.

In the mean time, there are other things to plan for. The catalog need a deep reaming and that's the sort of thing that goes above and beyond mere semiannual weeding.  The RFID tags (using our single tagging station) have been integrated into our Reserve collection and that part of the grand scheme is working as expected.  But now we need to follow through.  We'll need to budget for additional circulation stations to start tagging the rest of the collection and a definite time-frame for this to happen.  45,000 books can be tagged at a rate of 10,000 per year in 4.5 years, so it's doable but we need to keep up with it.  That means talking to Bibliotecha, the company we bought the system from.  A lot of talking.

Another major project, which I'll need to report on to my boss by mid-March is the possibility of integrating our Full Text journals into the catalog. I can think of a number of ways to do  this (something like Serials Solutions' Article Linker comes to mind since I worked successfully with it in the past).  The mechanics need to be figured out of course, but the benefits to the students and faculty are pretty clear ("More stuff on tap! Yea!").  Then there's the actual labor involved, but since Serials Solutions would be doing the heavy lifting on it, that's less of a problem than it might sound.  Finally, there are the training issues for staff, students and faculty.

There's more to think of: preparing better and more frequent stat reports for the staff and admin folks, improving and implementing new quality control procedures, and improving our collective levels of customer service, to name three, but that's for later.

For now, back to cataloging.

The Universe Just Gets More and More Interesting

Odd planet's extreme global warming: Highs of 2240
BY SETH BORENSTEIN, AP Science Writer 
Wed Jan 28, 3:18 pm ET

WASHINGTON – Astronomers have found a planet with a galactic case of hot flashes. In just six hours, this planet four times the size of Jupiter heats up by more than 1,200 degrees, according to a study published in Thursday's issue of the journal Nature. "It's the first observation of changing weather" on a planet outside our solar system, said study author Gregory Laughlin, an astronomy professor at the University of California at Santa Cruz. He used NASA's Spitzer Space Telescope to study the planet.

Change is a mild way to put it for the lifeless world, called HD80606b, where the word "mild" would never enter a weather forecast.

Normally, the planet is a toasty 980 degrees or so. But in the few hours it whips around its sun the planet gets zapped with mega-heat, pushing the thermometer closer to 2,240 degrees.

During its brief close pass to its sun, the planet is 10 times nearer its star than Mercury is to our sun. When it comes closest to its star, it becomes one giant "brewing storm" complete with shock waves, Laughlin said. The radiation bombarding the planet is 800 times stronger than when it is farthest away.

Then just as quickly, the planet slingshots away and radiates the heat to the cool vacuum of space. It glows cherry red and the temperature plummets, Laughlin said.

"Utterly bizarre," he said. "It is thoroughly completely uninhabitable. In a galaxy of uninhabitable planets, this one stands out as being completely inhospitable to life."

The planet circles its star — the larger of two stars in a binary system — in a comet-like orbit in just 111 days.

The star is visible from Earth near the Big Dipper. On Feb. 14, HD80606b will travel between the Earth and its star. There's a 15 percent chance that amateur astronomers using small telescopes could see it swing by, obscuring a tiny part of the star, Laughlin said.

"This is indeed an oddball planet, where the temperature range of the season changes from hellish to super-hellish," said Carnegie Institution astronomer Alan Boss. "This place makes Venus look like a nice place to live and that is saying something."