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Archives for January 2006

The Worst Word

January 27, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Jeremy Clarkson opines thus in The Sunday Times:

". . . the worst word. The worst noise. The screech
of Flo-Jo’s fingernails down the biggest blackboard in the world, the
squeak of polystyrene on polystyrene, the cry of a baby when you’re
hungover, is ‘beverage’."

It’s a fun article, but I am forced to disagree: having spent far too long in the technology industry (in one capacity or another, I must say that if anyone ever comes up to me at a party and tells me about a new technology "solution", I’m going to beat them to death with my shoe. I hear that word and I see red. An urge to kill rises, and one day I’m not going to be able to control myself. Software (and many kinds of hardware) is not a solution . . . more often than not, it’s the problem that requires the solution. So while I respect Mr. Clarkson’s opinion, I think the worst words are invariably buzzwords. They’re great ad copy but they rob real words of any meaning they contained.

Well.  I’m glad I got that out in the open.  It’s Friday.  Time to drink.  (59 minutes and counting …)

Filed Under: Articles & Nifty Links

Real Estate and Satellite Images

January 24, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Found this on SearchEngineWatch.com: Hot:Real Estate Industry Uses of Satellite/Aerial Imagery. It’s a longish post with about a million hyperlinks, but it’s worth it if you have the time. The databases that are being developed in this area are huge:

"The combo of online maps, satellite/aerial imagery, and real estate are a hot combo these days. This new Reuters article, Every inch of Netherlands viewable online, offers a profile of Funda.nl
a database that lists 75 percent of the Dutch property for sale and
gets 2.6 million visitors every month. It will soon provide 15 million
photographs growing it to 21 million images by year-end."

I’ll point out for those who haven’t figured this out yet (all six of you and you know who you are) that these are tools that until very recently were available only to the military. Even then, an object the size of an airplane hangar or a ICBM silo was just big enough to capture in any detail. Not anymore.  Imagine seeing how a plot of land you’re considering buying in another city (or another state or another country) is affected by local roads, access to other towns, or changing coastlines in five minutes with a mouse click or two. Imagine planning a town (or even a city)  from the ground up in advance based on the topography available through this medium. Imagine what will happen in the not-too-distant-future (somewhere in time and space) when the imaging and metadata tools get even more powerful.

I’m nowhere near smart enough to imagine all the ways this infrastructure can be used (an awful thing for a guy who writes scifi in his spare time to admit), but I have faith that plenty of others are that smart and will come up with amazing stuff.

Filed Under: Articles & Nifty Links

We Are Right and They Are Wrong

January 23, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Kurt Vonnegut had this to say in the  Guardian this past Saturday:

"The title of Michael Moore’s Fahrenheit 9/11 is a parody of the
title of Ray Bradbury’s great science-fiction novel Fahrenheit 451.
Four hundred and fifty-one degrees Fahrenheit is the combustion point,
incidentally, of paper, of which books are composed. The hero of
Bradbury’s novel is a municipal worker whose job is burning books.

While
on the subject of burning books, I want to congratulate librarians, not
famous for their physical strength, who, all over this country, have
staunchly resisted anti-democratic bullies who have tried to remove
certain books from their shelves, and destroyed records rather than
have to reveal to thought police the names of persons who have checked
out those titles.

So the America I loved still exists, if not in
the White House, the Supreme Court, the Senate, the House of
Representatives, or the media. The America I loved still exists at the
front desks of our public libraries."

We are legion and we are mighty as long as we stick together. More importantly, we are right and they are wrong. Tell everyone who will listen. Then tell everyone who won’t listen.

I’m buying this book and I posted the entire excerpt behind the link.

[Read more…] about We Are Right and They Are Wrong

Filed Under: Reader Advisory

Copyrights, Copywrongs

January 19, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

Will Femia, author of the "Clicked" blog on MSNBC.com, declares today that:

"Lessig is wrong — Lawrence Lessig
is a champion of the Creative Commons movement and an advocate for
loosening copyright restrictions.  His current battle is over the
digitization of books.  Google wants to scan books into a database to
make the text searchable.  You wouldn’t get the whole book in a search,
just an excerpt.  Ignoring whether this is a good idea or a handy
utility, this blogger makes a good argument against Google’s plan.  For
what it’s worth, there is a larger issue at play as well, which is
whether search engines and other services that surface material from
the Web (like RSS aggregators) are taking advantage of the original
content holders."

There’s more to it than this excerpt, so check out the whole thing if you have the time. Actually, you should probably make the time regardless.  This issue will not go away any time soon.

Filed Under: Articles & Nifty Links

English as She is Spoke

January 12, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

I’m honestly not sure if this is a proper reader’s advisory or not, but, it’s an awesome article: "Moving Forward–and Backward–With the English Language." This comes courtesy of the Christian Science Monitor, a newspaper I’ve been reading (online) for years without ever seeing a single article on christian science.  I must be looking at the wrong section.

Just be aware that Stephen Colbert owns "truthiness".

Filed Under: Reader Advisory

Cataloging Manga & Anime

January 12, 2006 by Jon Frater Leave a Comment

The December 2005 issue of TechKNOW (care of Kent State U.’s TSLibrarians listserv)  is out. (It’s actually been out for a while, but the hyperlink I had only started working a short while ago–it’s fixed.)  This quarter Jeanne Poole covers cataloging cleverly selected bits and pieces of the wacky (and not entirely consistent) world of Japanese anime and manga. We get a brief history of the art form and a bunch of well-formed MARC records to boot.  Good stuff, folks.

(Why can’t I write articles like this?  I own manga and anime; I’m friends with the Editor in Chief of Media Blasters, for corn’s sake.  Grrr…)

Filed Under: Cataloging

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