Opuscula de vita cujusdam Geekus librarius

7:43am: Internet culture as shame-based culture

http://www.readwriteweb.com/archives/social_network_profile_costs_woman_college_degree.php

Social Network Profile Costs Woman College Degree
Written by Sarah Perez / December 5, 2008 6:05 AM

Forget losing your job, apparently your MySpace or Facebook profile and photos can now cause you to lose your degree. In what may be one of the most frightening rulings regarding social networks and privacy to date, a federal judge has ruled against a former student of Millersville University of Pennsylvania who was denied her college degree because of an unseemly online photo and its accompanying caption found on her social network profile.

( The Case of 'Drunken Pirate', Stacy Snyder )

With all the hand-wringing that people in the information field do over the potential privacy violations inherent in social networks, the ultimate truth of it is that people only see what you post. If you don't want your boss to see you acting like a drunken moron, don't post pictures of yourself acting like a drunken moron publicly on your MySpace page! Or better yet, don't act like a drunken moron at all!! This cultural panopticon is nothing new. In anthropology, there is talk of shame-based culture vs. the guilt-based culture we currently live in. The accusations of unprofessionalism in this case are absolutely spot on, but Synder feels that she can protest her innocence, despite the fact that it is our perception of her behavior as an internet driven community that decides consequences, not any sense of guilt or innocence on her part.

Whoa... Heavy post to make before my morning coffee...

10:14am: I love my iPhone, but...
Why did Apple have to design the headphone jack so that only Apple headphones will fit in it?!? I forgot my iPod headphones at home this morning, and my spare pair of earbuds at work won't fit into the phone's jack.

And folks near my desk are very noise :-(

Edit: And I'm ok until they start playing Wagner. I hateses Wagner!

9:40am: I could *totally* do this :-)

http://www.cnn.com/2008/LIVING/wayoflife/10/22/tiny.houses/

CALISTOGA, California (CNN) -- Bill and Sharon Kastrinos practice the ultimate in minimalism. They've squeezed into a 154-square-foot home that looks more like a kid's playhouse than their previous 1,800-square-foot home.

The Kastrinos moved into this tiny home from an 1,800-square-foot place.
( Read more... )

I love the idea of this kind of voluntary simplicity. When I'm seriously thinking about buying a house in a few years, I think I'd like to check something like this out.

8:22am: The problem with public libraries


"Well, my tax dollars pay for your library, don't they?"

Sure. Here, you bought the library this piece of paper. Don't use it all in one place.

7:34am: When you see this, post in your own journal with your favorite quote from The Princess Bride. Preferably not "As you wish" or the Inigo Montoya speech.

"When I was your age, television was called books!"

or

"It just so happens that your friend here is only MOSTLY dead. There's a big difference between mostly dead and all dead. Mostly dead is slightly alive. With all dead, well, with all dead there's usually only one thing you can do."
"What's that?"
"Go through his clothes and look for loose change."

1:47pm: Im more impressed by his Kelmscott than by his Sputnik
From Wired...

Nothing quite prepares you for the culture shock of Jay Walker's library. You exit the austere parlor of his New England home and pass through a hallway into the bibliographic equivalent of a Disney ride. Stuffed with landmark tomes and eye-grabbing historical objects—on the walls, on tables, standing on the floor—the room occupies about 3,600 square feet on three mazelike levels. Is that a Sputnik? (Yes.) Hey, those books appear to be bound in rubies. (They are.) That edition of Chaucer ... is it a Kelmscott? (Natch.) Gee, that chandelier looks like the one in the James Bond flick Die Another Day. (Because it is.) No matter where you turn in this ziggurat, another treasure beckons you—a 1665 Bills of Mortality chronicle of London (you can track plague fatalities by week), the instruction manual for the Saturn V rocket (which launched the Apollo 11 capsule to the moon), a framed napkin from 1943 on which Franklin D. Roosevelt outlined his plan to win World War II. In no time, your mind is stretched like hot taffy.

( Read more... )

7:05am: Don't *even* say it...

1:35pm: I read bland books

10:06am: Copyright: so complex, here's a slide rule to decode it
From Ars Technica.

If you don't work in the fields of digital preservation, library science, or copyright law, you might have the impression that copyright is a fairly pedestrian beast—the milk cow of the legal world, if you will. What could be simpler than writing your book, recording your song, or drawing up your vessel hull design? Copyright law immediately grants you a set term of protection. Simple. Clear. Deliciously creamy.

It's also a pipe dream. The reality is that US copyright is a humped and horned animal with two heads, pebbly skin, and a ravenous stomach that gorges itself on the grain called "Complexity."
( Read more... )

A legal system of this complexity is untenable, especially given how the econtent market is churning publishers and content providers. Don't get me wrong, I do think that content creators deserve the right to profit from their creations, but the public domain cannot be treated as if it were an afterthought to copyright law. It is (or at least should be) the eventual destination of every intellectual creation of humankind, from fire and the wheel to the latest anti-cancer drugs.

7:06am: Emergency Librarian
How could I not have known about this before?!? These are all my (now former) classmates. I particularly like Kristin and her highly trained K9 counterpart Maggie at :40 here.

3:22pm: What I've been up to lately

Hosting my friend Dänae from Eugene while he was up in the Puget Sound area for a luthiers' convention.

Finishing school for the year

Attending Jasmine's first musical theater performance

Knowledgebase Expansion

My first conference as a library professional

Reassuring edgy clients about ProQuest's Dialog buyout

Running down recalcitrant publishers at SLA

Hosting a presentation by Stephen Abram at work

Trying to breathe... That can wait, though.

9:09pm: Unicode Lament
It is my considered professional opinion that ebooks suck.

*ahem*

7:55am: More t3xtua1 studies
Researchers: written English language will weather LOL storm

Concerned parents and disgusted Internet elitists often criticize teenagers for their use of abbreviated speech and shorthand online, frequently arguing that it is ruining their language skills. It turns out that's not the case, however, according to new research from the University of Toronto to be published in the spring 2008 issue of American Speech. In fact, not only is "IM speak" not destroying anyone's language skills, it is actually being characterized as "an expansive new linguistic renaissance."
( Teh t3xting ain't hurt mah leet engrish skillz! )

3:51pm: June gloom
This quarter at school feels a little bit weird. My cohortmates, with whom I have worked so hard over the last two years, are preparing to graduate. Portfolios were due this Monday, and seeing the relief on their faces makes me a bit jealous. But, on the other hand, I do feel like, from what I've heard of their thoughts on the subject, that I'm more or less ready now. So I have the next two years to leisurely put it all together. Not that I'm really just going to sit around and do nothing. I have a plan to try to write an article for publication over the next year. I need to look around for journals that I think might be interesting to publish in. Also, with their completion of portfolios comes the job hunt. I don't envy them for that. I spent enough time in that hellhole over the last 5 (no... 10...) years that I'd never want to trade my current wonderful position to be done with the degree quicker.

Still, the thought of continuing on this track for two years does not thrill me. And then there are my continuing plans for a second masters degree. solcita asked me recently why I was still thinking about doing that, given how much this program is taking out of me, and I had no answer for her. It's just something I feel like I have to do.

12:39pm: Why I love Seattle reason #5678
A bald eagle just flew by my office window.

Seriously.

9:37am: Sunset for Ideology, Sunrise for Methodology?
From Found History

Sometimes friends in other disciplines ask me the question, “So, what are the big ideas in history these days?” I then proceed to fumble around for a few minutes trying to put my finger on some new “-ism” or competing “-isms” to describe and define today’s historical discourse. Invariably, I come up short.

Growing up in the second half of the 20th century, we are prone to think about our world and our work in terms of ideologies. Late 20th century historical discourse was dominated by a succession of ideas and theoretical frameworks. This mirrored the broader cultural and political discourse in which our work was set. For most of the last 75 years of the 20th century, Socialism, Fascism, Existentialism, Structuralism, Post-Structuralism, Conservatism, and other ideologies vied with one another broadly in our politics and narrowly at our academic conferences.
( But it wasn’t always so. )

4:30pm: History suggests copyright crusade is a lost cause
From Ars Technica this morning.

Recently, the Los Angeles Times's Jon Healey kicked off a new round in the long-running debate about the moral status of file-sharing. Critics of the practice analogize copyrights to property rights, suggesting that file-sharing is a form of theft. Property rights have emotional resonance across the political spectrum. As a result, those who want to increase the power of copyright owners have tended to stress the similarities between copyrights and property rights. In contrast, those who who favor less restrictive copyright laws, as well as those who oppose copyright altogether, have resisted this analogy.

In a sense, this is obviously just a semantic dispute. But there are also important philosophical and legal issues underlying these arguments. As a strong supporter of property rights, I'm very interested in the similarities and differences between copyrights and traditional property rights.
( Read more... )

8:28am: Be the doorway, not the doormat
A good lesson for all libraries, and anyone else in public service.

8:34am: More real world indexing problems
From CNN...

NEW YORK (AP) -- It can stop you from voting, destroy your dental appointments, make it difficult to rent a car or book a flight, even interfere with your college exams.

More than 50 years into the Information Age, computers are still getting confused by the apostrophe. It's a problem familiar to O'Connors, D'Angelos, N'Dours and D'Artagnans across America.
( Read more... )

3:34pm: Thought for the day
The test of any cognitive framework for classification is how it deals with its exceptions.

11:06am: Party like it's 1998
From the NYT

Seattle Taps Its Inner Silicon Valley

By JOHN MARKOFF
Published: February 8, 2008

Seattle

Many communities dream of becoming the next Silicon Valley. This one is actually doing it.

Stroll through the hip Fremont District and you will sense the Valley vibe. Google recently opened a research lab here, its second in Microsoft’s backyard. Technology start-ups are sprouting up amid quirky neighborhood landmarks like a bronze statue of Lenin and the Fremont Troll, the giant concrete creature lurking beneath the George Washington Memorial Bridge.
( Read more... )

7:16am: t3xtua1 studies
There was a post on Typefoundry this morning about the history of the "ß" character, or the esszett, otherwise known as the German double s. While this in itself is interesting to a student of textual studies and typography like me, what I found more interesting was the throwaway comment in the post that...

"[I]t has a place among the glyphs of the ASCII character set and Unicode, and it is accessible on any mobile phone. (Apparently young Germans and Hungarians currently use it in their texting as a substitute for double s, regardless of spelling rules, in order to reduce the overall character count of their messages.)

The post goes on to say that the use of the esszett is "so bound up in matters of national identity and sentiment [...] that it seems rash for an outsider to take it on, even in a modest way." The thing that interests me in all this, however, is the fact that the German and Hungarian texters mentioned above are using the esszett for the same use for which the typesetters of old originally pioneered it. Economy. Economy of time, and of keystrokes, have driven both of these disparate groups, separate by time and extremes of culture. This is the same force (among other cultural forces, naturally) that drives texters to substitute numbers and other characters for letters in other contexts, as well. I'm personally fascinated by haxxor, and I think the parallels between it and early type production are nothing to be sneezed at.

9:58am: Federated search on YouTube
I recently had a conversation with seattlejo about federated search and it reminded me of this YouTube video I found a few weeks back. Interesting that YouTube can be thought of as a pretty mainstream media source. It was nice to see a building awareness of fed search coming about. It's certainly not a perfect solution to issues I was discussing the other day, but it's a start.

10:24am: Quote for the day
"Everything looks pretty from on top of a cliff."

--My coworker Lorraine, referring to the "10,000 foot view" of a project that a library administrator gets to see.

8:55am: First one free, second one half price
An interesting blog post appeared on ReadWriteWeb this morning.

The Danger of Free
Written by Alex Iskold / January 16, 2008 5:19 AM

Everyone loves to get stuff for free. We line up to get a free drink, we sign up for free checking accounts, and we're happy to get a free gift with the purchase of our next car. We love free stuff, even though we all know and understand that free is an illusion. After that free drink, we pay for the next three. The bank is making money by investing what we put in that checking account. The car dealer can afford to give away a small gift because the profit on the car is large. But none of this seems to bother us - free things still have a certain allure. But is the concept of free taking us down a dangerous road?

( Read more... )

While I don't necessarily agree with all the original posters thoughts, I did think he brought up some interesting points, especially with relation to this particular comment, which I snipped out from the rest...

This is dead on. But it really speaks to a larger problem. Its about all IP. and the point is that *all* intellectual property (essentially anything that doesn't come in a box) is asymptotically approaching a value of ZERO. This is everything from software to patents, to music, to film. The fact is that marginal cost is becoming the only relevant factor in our culture for evaluating things.

The interesting thing about this is not just that it is happening, but that there is a new moral/ethical framework that is emerging that establishes the idea that theft of IP is OK, and that it is somehow wrong to protect your IP. Patent protectors are all "trolls". The music industry is "evil". Having a subscription wall is "stupid".

Interestingly, this really results in a kind of wealth redistribution from creators to consumers. This is, of course, incredibly troubling from an economic perspective because if we loose the economic incentive to create, huge pieces of the economy will go away. We are seeing this now with the music business. When this happens to film, the impact will be even worse. And on our current course it will happen. Certainly a huge part of the American GDP is in intellectualy property. Of course this is great for china, whose economy's IP component is small. They can get our goods for free, and we cant get their goods for free. Talk about trade deficit.

Trouble is indeed brewing.

More thoughts on this later, perhaps. But now, back to work.