The Rogue Scholar

Recovering When Blackboard Goes 'Poof!'

Our content/course management system (we use Blackboard v. 6.3) has gone Poof!

The problem had been developing for some time. All the signs were there. Files would go missing for days or longer, and sometimes would simply not return. Log-in problems for both students and faculty were consistent if randomly dispersed throughout the respective bodies of users. Calls and e-mails to the Blackboard tech support hub were sometimes helpful, and sometimes not. Sometimes they were ignored completely.

And yet, we took heart that we were running version 6.3 of their software, an ostensibly stable version as opposed to, say, the most recent 8.0, which is now recognized by CUNY's IT department (which adopted it wholesale upon its release) as a Blood And Sweat Sucking Techno-Leech from Hell. But that was CUNY's problem, not ours. We were smarter.

Last Thursday we lost Blackboard. More specifically, students and faculty lost the ability to log in to the system, and so were unable to access the files stored therein. Faculty couldn't upload grades, and students couldn't upload their homework or access past or current projects. 

A meeting was held at a high level of the school's administration.  One member of the committee wanted us to say nothing about the lack of access for fear of spreading panic. But we are currently in our last week of classes here, and finals start next week. And students and faculty already know that something is horribly wrong with Blackboard. So saying nothing merely shuts them out of a real situation that demands (and commands) their attention. Once that starts, then they really will panic, and that's what we'd like to avoid. So, we sent out an e-mail telling everyone that Blackboard was unavailable and we had no idea what was going to happen. Students were directed to talk to their professors and work out some arrangements for delivery of homework and final exams.

And that's where we are, one week later. Our IT guys are working with Blackboard but the outcome is far from certain and those files inside the system are still unavailable.  The lesson here should be clear as mountain air: never rely on a single electronic storage medium for mission critical data.

It's doubly annoying for those of us who consider ourselves (or are considered by those not) tech-savvy. A lot of us take these electronic systems which we rely on for so very much in our work and personal lives for granted. The technophiles among us, both students and faculty, were doing exactly that--relying on the system--because they had faith in it. Ironically, the technophobes are the ones who got off the lightest: they never used Blackboard much and so lost very little when it went bust. 

Anyway, there are simple things to do when this stuff happens:

1. First, choose reality. I know that sounds harsh, but reality says that machines fail and they often do so when we need them the most. Sometimes they can't be made to unfail. That leads to the second point, which is:

2. Backups. Backup everything and often and in several different ways.  Personally, my backups include hard copy and a flash drive. But there is no reason to stop there. I'm looking into on-line storage and a dedicated external hard drive as well.

3. Diversify. Ideally, you want your most valuable work to live in a combination of diverse places, so that if one craps out, it doesn't take the others with them. Hard copy at the office, plus a dedicated hard drive at home, plus your hard drive on your laptop, makes a good example. Backing up your work to three drives residing on the same network might not make as much sense.

4. Communicate. Students and professors (or employers and employees) need to know what each other needs to do right by the other. The only way to get that going is to talk to each other. And both sides need to understand that things happen and sometimes alternate courses of action are needed. 

This, too will pass, but since luck favors the prepared, it's a lesson worth internalizing sooner rather than later.

Next Stop: Mars! (Or Not)

40 years ago we landed humans on the Moon.  It was A Very Big Deal.  It really happened.  That said, let us all watch a clip of Buzz Aldrin punching a conspiracy theorist in the face.  Personally, I could watch that clip all day, but I think once is enough to make the point.

 I was a little over two years old in 1969 and don't remember a thing about the big event. My parents did, and so did their parents friends and neighbors and coworkers, however. To some extent it was a generational thing. So, first, some review: in 1957, the U.S.S.R. launched a satellite called Sputnik 1 into low orbit and for the first time, anybody on Earth could adjust their short-wave radio to a particular frequency and listen to the signal from this artifact that the future Evil Empire had sent into the sky. The engineers and engineering students understood that nothing would be the same again. The Cold War was in full swing, both superpowers were building fleets of heavy bombers and bombs to drop from them, and the nation that could build a missile big enough to push a satellite into orbit could just as easily build one big enough to carry a nuclear bomb across the North Pole.  Such a nation would then be the Unquestioned Supreme Power in the Universe, or so went the thinking at the Pentagon and Kremlin.

Faced with this obvious shortcoming, Americans behaved predictably: we got scared. Yes, we had enough B-52s and atomic bombs to annihilate all of Eastern Europe, but the Russians had demonstrated that had something better. We needed one, too.  Preferably a whole fleet of them. So over the next half-decade the U.S. government poured money into a ballistic missile program of our own. Finally, JFK put the issue on center stage when he declared in 1961 that he would make it a goal of the United States to put a man on the Moon "by the end of [the] decade." And we did.

The thing to remember is that the Apollo program didn't just happen because the American president wanted it to happen, even one as renowned as John Fitzgerald Kennedy. The work that led to it was a long string of failures, partial failures and some pretty darned cool successes as engineers in the U.S. and Soviet Union perfected their understanding of ballistic science, life support systems, microgravity and acceleration, and multi-stage thrust systems. It's one thing to comprehend the trigonometry that enables you to plot where a given projectile, traveling at an assumed speed, in a particular direction for a specific amount of time, will land. Building a rocket big  enough to transport three human beings a quarter million miles of harsh vacuum and return them safely to Earth is something else. But marrying these two accomplishments into the Apollo program is several orders of magnitude more difficult. There are relatively few among us who truly grasp the difficulties and labor involved in making that day happen. There's a good reason that Buzz decked the conspiracy wacko.

But in today's news environment, the Moon is considered boring. Now, we're told, the next stop on the journey is a manned mission to Mars at some point in, say, the next 20 years.  That's fine. Dandy, even.  But what do we do in the meantime? Our existing fleet of space shuttles is A) over 20 years old and B) due to retire in a few years. The Air Force no longer builds the heavy Atlas-type boosters that were the mainstay of NASA's heavy lift fleet 30 years ago in quantity (although if the Atlas V proves anything it's that somebody can still build them well.)  And now they want us to believe that sending astronauts 35 million miles away is the answer to maintaining a viable human presence in space? I don't agree. A better choice is going back to the Moon.

I can think of a few reasons for this. The Moon is A) known territory, having been explored thoroughly by us and the Soviets back when we had the money and drive to do it, B) only a quarter million miles away, and C) getting there is something we've done before. We need to go back and dig in. There are plenty of ways to do this, some of which are insane and others pure genius. It can be done. And it makes sense to work the kinks out of any space colonization program we adopt closer to home than not.

That said, it remains the case that Mars is by any reckoning A Very Big Deal.  The thought of going there captures the imagination of astronauts, politicians, science geeks (including me) and Joe and Jane Average in a way that few projects do.  But putting some very big (and valid) parts of that deal--the price tag, the timing, the political will, for starters--off to the side a moment, there is one concern that looms large in my mind about this particular proposal: if something goes horribly wrong, we lose the entire investment. It's 35 million miles from here to there one-way and let's face it, things go wrong.  Sometimes they can be fixed (or, such as in the case of Apollo 13, not fixed but at least navigated through and endured). But, as in the case with Space Shuttle Challenger in 1986 and more recently, the Columbia in 2003, when something goes wrong, it often all goes wrong at once and the result is destruction and death.

I totally buy the argument that says that when you explore new frontiers, you need to pay the piper, and in the case of our collective space programs, that means the occasional blood sacrifice.  I agree, that much is the nature of the game. Only a fool or a Pollyanna would argue with it.  But let's also admit that planning a trip to Mars is a long-term goal (ten years? twenty?), so while we plan for Mars, why not get in as much practice as possible in the meantime? Why not go back to the Moon and this time stay there?

The bottom line is that a manned mission to Mars would be impressive as hell if it ever happens but not in the same way the Apollo missions were back in the seventies. Then, the Cold War was still on and the space shuttle--a remarkably successful program for all the problems--hadn't even been built yet. The entire industrial world relies on satellite communications and a dozen countries have ballistic technology sufficient to launch them into stable orbits now. But a working Moon base that gives us the reason and opportunity to develop and refine the infrastructure to get our carbon-based monkey asses off this pale blue dot and into the inner solar system for the benefit of future generations would be infinitely more worthwhile.

If it ever happens.

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.

Now Back to Our Regularly Scheduled Librarian

I am hoping now that the election is over (more or less) and Barack Obama is safely considered the U.S. President elect that I can back to dealing primarily with library-related issues, ideas and articles. That's not to say that politics is boring or unimportant. Neither is it to say that I'll now refrain from posting things of a non-library nature I find genuinely interesting, but enough is enough.

On that note, I'd like to point out Denise O'Shea's FDU Library Technology News weblog. I just found it after losing contact with Denise some time ago (we worked together at NYAM for a while and she is now the Systems Librarian/Tech Support Specialist at Fairleigh Dickinson University.) It (and she) promises to be an amazing resource for those interested in systems librarianship. You can find this link in the Library Blogs typelist in the left margin.

Enjoy!

Outsourcing our Proxy Server

We want to outsource our library's proxy server. In essence, we are working apart from our IT department which has shown no inclination to helping us manage the library's electronic resources (they insist it's not their job.) The company that's been doing the hosting for our existing proxy wall has been slowly but surely declining in customer service quality, so we're shopping for a new vendor. We've had very little interest from giants like Verizon and AT&T so we're looking for suggestions on other smaller firms that provide this sort of service. Anything anyone might be able to offer would be welcome.  (Just drop me an email at jfrateratmcny.edu or post a comment.)

Thanks!

10 Things About Electronic Resources That Librarians Need to Know

I haven't been around much the past few days. There are a few reasons for that. We're starting to bind journals again for the first time in months.  I've taken over a number of knowledge management duties for the library that are forcing all of the librarians here to rethink their work flow models.  I'm putting together a proposal for the 2006 METRO Digitization Grant for delivery in about three weeks.  We're integrating PubMed into our Article Linker subscription.  And I'm working with my boss on getting our journal subscriptions evaluated and renewed, so there is a lot going on right now.

That said, while I wondered about how to deal with the knowledge management responsibilities, I got to thinking about what I learned from my 20+ years working with computers and how that knowledge helps me plan work both tactically (day to day) and strategically (quarter to quarter, year to year).  I've always liked machines, and as I got older and learned to think more abstractly I found that I liked thinking about systems in general. (I was one of those truly nerdy kids --now a nerdy adult--who would  wonder who first created the laser death ray and why  everybody in one sci-fi universe or another seemed to have them.  Did the inventor not patent the thing? Couldn't he have licensed it to the army? To the Time Corp? What about antimatter bombs? Heck, while we're at it, who invented the time machine?  Did people pay royalties to H.G. Wells when they built their own? If not, then why not? And how big an economy does a planet really need just to build a single Super Star Destroyer?)

The point is that in my daily interactions with the librarians here it became clear that I know more about these things than most of them do.  And that's fine--reference librarians don't need to know every detail about the information systems they use the same way a concert violinist need not know how to build a violin.  But that lack of knowledge works both ways--there are some things our network just can't do, or at least, can't do without enormous additional resources (time, money and staff, but mostly time . . . and money).  Even our library's director--for whom I have enormous respect as both an administrator and a librarian--sometimes thinks of the system as a magic box that works like any ship's computer on Star Trek.

Well, the world . . .  she don't work that way. What follows are some extremely basic and blunt thoughts on the things that the planners of Libraryland might wish to take into account if they feel so inclined.   Think of it as a friendly and well-meant rant.

FactCheck.org, MeSH and TypePad Metadata

First, a big WooHOO! to Factcheck.org for receiving domestic and international awards.  If you haven't subscribed to their e-mail news listserv you're missing a lot.  I love this site.  If you're looking for truly professional (i.e., fair and thorough) analysis of political ads and such, this is the place to go (or at least the place to start.)  Click on the previous links and experience the love first hand.

The 2007 MeSH is available now so I went and book marked it.  In truth, this has probably been available for some time and I just noticed it now, which is kind of sad since I use this page nearly every day for catalog work.  At any rate, there it is.

And we have broken the 7,000 visitor barrier (we're at 7056 as I write this), for which I must thank  a billion or so librarians sporting body art of various types, styles and tastes,  offering  tidbits of information about themselves to satisfy my rampant curiosity.  Most of the traffic this site gets happens through federated search engines (lots of Google, rather less Yahoo, a mix of others) bouncing hits off past metadata entries, and in an average week, it'll see about sixty or seventy web browsers pass through on their ways to elsewhere.  I'd love to find out how many are repeat visitors--I'd love even more to learn how many folks have linked to the RSS here.  I've gone through the Typepad help area and made a few calls to the help desk but I can't find any support for that sort of statistic gathering.  Am I looking for the wrong thing in the wrong place?  Any and all advice would be appreciated.

Osmosing Data and Leaky Cell Phones

In 1990 I found a wacky (and vaguely depressing) manga anthology by Joji Manabe (whose work I love) called "Dora." One of the stories in it (actually the first few pages of one of the stories in it) contained the germ of an idea I eventually turned into a short story called "Norma" (no relation to Dora). A couple of years later I decided that Norma had a lot more to do and so I spent the next five years turning it into a massive first novel with the pretentious title "The Electric Gods." To this day I  haven't gotten it published, and considering the quality of the writing and the manuscript's stupendous need for editing, that's probably just as well.

Anyway, one of the things that Norma learned in her adventures in that (vaguely depressing) universe was that information has a way of osmosing from one place to another regardless of the efforts people and their machines put into restricting it. That's probably a function of how we utilize the stuff--we tend to organize things into disjointed bits and pieces that we call "trivia", which is a distinctly twentieth century creation. In the nineteenth and earlier centuries, data were organized in rather more coherent forms. Little was truly disjointed, and details coalesced into a particular process. With the advent of assembly line manufacturing, you didn't need to know the details of the process, just your little portion of it. That little portion, from the point of view of an earlier age, might have been essentially meaningless--trivial--but to the line worker, it was everything.

Eighty years later, we are walking data banks of trivia.

So it's no surprise to see an article like this one: Don't Keep Secrets on Cell Phones, from USA Today. People put what can be considered classified secrets (even just to themselves) on cell phones, and then tend to forget that they're embedded on bits of silicon that can be mined by people who know what they're doing. Random things: birthdays, addresses, phones numbers for cell, work, and home, as well as those for the spouse, parents, kids, coworkers, etc. Social security numbers. God alone knows how many e-mail addresses and whose. Work and home addresses, meeting schedules, date books. Bank accounts. Credit card numbers. Every one of which has potential value to someone who knows data systems and isn't too scrupulous about selling that data to someone else.

I have read one economic (slightly off the wall) theory that says that money has a natural tendency to pool where it will do the least good to the fewest number of people. There may be a similar theory of information that says that information tends to pool in places where it will do the greatest harm to the largest number of people (Total Information Awareness, anyone?) Or maybe this is just the result a crapload of trivialities finding critical mass.

Anyway, read the article, and fry your cell phone before giving it away.

Two-Tiered Internet

I like the Center for American Progress.  I really do, for the sheer level of research they utilize when writing any given bulletin they send out. I am in awe. Having said that, I'm not sure how I feel about their latest posts on what they call the Two-Tiered Internet. The NY Times has a better written account of what it means and why.

"'Meta-Utopia'"? Who Said That?

Google Alert just dumped a link in my lap that I'm a bit conflicted about: it's called "Metacrap" and it's an angry and obnoxious attempt by Cory Doctorow to make what should be an excellent point. Namely, that not all meta-data is reliable and the level to which it is unreliable necessarily degrades its utility for everyone, including (especially?) libraries.

I'll just say now that I have no idea who Doctorow is or why he's so unhappy with the idea of meta-data--he seems really annoyed by the fact that the stuff is routinely misused by everybody from porn site designers to slick web marketers and novices who don't know a thing about HTML getting involved.  But he concludes by saying that meta-data are actually quite useful:

"Certain kinds of implicit meta-data is awfully useful, in fact. Google exploits meta-data about the structure of the World Wide Web: by examining the number of links pointing at a page (and the number of links pointing at each linker), Google can derive statistics about the number of Web-authors who believe that that page is important enough to link to, and hence make extremely reliable guesses about how reputable the information on that page is.

This sort of observational meta-data is far more reliable than the stuff that human beings create for the purposes of having their documents found. It cuts through the marketing bullshit, the self-delusion, and the vocabulary collisions.

Taken more broadly, this kind of meta-data can be thought of as a pedigree: who thinks that this document is valuable? How closely correlated have this person's value judgments been with mine in times gone by? This kind of implicit endorsement of information is a far better candidate for an information-retrieval panacea than all the world's schema combined."

To him, I say only: Dude, calm down.

I think he's making a few errors of his own here: a popular web site may be a better source of disinformation than fact, for example, no matter how many Google links point to it or how many hits have been logged over time--what about a completely factual site that nobody chooses to give credence to, for that matter? (Good info, no coverage. He also ignores Roy Tennant's analysis of Google's limitations). He's right that as more and more pages spring up from more and more sources that nobody has first-hand knowledge of, the general quality of the information disseminated goes down, but that's just common sense , or it should be.  People have all manner of bias and those biases invariably find their ways into the work they create.  No argument there.

Second, and perhaps more importantly: has anyone actually written anything on how the increasing use of meta-data will somehow solve all  information seekers' problems? Has anyone actually put that idea forth? Or is "meta-utopia" something Doctrow just came up with because it sounded cool?  (I suspect the latter, but what do I know?)

Yes, meta-data are misused, sometimes badly abused, to the detriment of many. Of course there are problems.  Show me anything created by the human race without the potential for misuse or problems. If you can't--and we both know you can't--stop your whining and help those of us who believe in meta-data's value as an information locating aid to fix the problems that you've found.   Lead, follow, or get out of the way.

This concludes the sermon. As I said, his general point has value; he's just burying it beneath a few tons of cranky hyperbole. I've included the link above so you can go read what he says and judge for yourself.