The Rogue Scholar

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!