Jon Frater

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Archives for February 2006

Google Search Tidbits

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Making Your Web Searches Smarter

By Michael Masterson

Recently, The Wall Street Journal
ran an article about "hidden features of Google and Yahoo engines" that
make research on the Web faster, easier, and more rewarding.
Neanderthal though I am with regard to technology, I was actually aware
of several of them:

  • Using two or three words instead of one to get more relevant links
  • Surrounding
    your search terms with quotation marks when you are looking for an
    exact name or phrase (such as "To Kill a Mockingbird")
  • Combining quotes with extra words ("Kill a Mocking Bird" and Harper Lee)

 

[Read more…] about Google Search Tidbits

The Life & Death of Public Records

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This bit comes from Terry Allen from In These Times, and it’s titled "Information Is Power." It begins thusly:

"Sometimes it’s the small abuses scurrying below radar that reveal how
profoundly the Bush administration has changed America in the name of
national security. Buried within the Intelligence Reform and Terrorism
Prevention Act of 2004 is a regulation that bars most public access to
birth and death certificates for 70 to 100 years. In much of the
country, these records have long been invaluable tools for activists,
lawyers, and reporters to uncover patterns of illness and pollution
that officials miss or ignore."

The rest is here.  Not to belittle the Bush White House in its efforts to promote secrecy to heights never before known to God or man, but the government’s proclivity to secrecy over unethical, amoral, or just embarassing tidbits, we need to remember, is not something that began in 2004 or even 2001.  It’s been going on a long, long time; the scope of what is considered secret and the extent to which the executive branch of government will go to to keep it so has merely become ridiculous recently.

Granted, there are some things that We The People do not need to know to function–troop movements, our elected representatives’ sexual exploits, and who the vice president has shot recently are examples that come readily to mind–I just happen to think that the fact that a few million of us have our email and phone conversations digitally recorded and evaluated by the NSA to no apparent good result is probably not among them.

David Englin Speaks

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This is not strictly a matter for librarians (not all of them anyway), but in the spirit of Presidents’ Day, here’s
a recent speech delivered on the
floor of the

Commonwealth of

Virginia House of Delegates
by David Englin
(D-45). He quotes
President Washington, whose birthday we celebrate today; and nothing in his
speech, I suspect, would have drawn anything but approval from President
Lincoln, whose birthday we also celebrate, were he alive today.

[Read more…] about David Englin Speaks

Russ Feingold in MARC

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This might not be perfect, since it’s been some time since I did any original cataloging for web pages, but here it is (apologies in advance for the MESH).  Suggestions are welcome. One hopes you click on the link below to read the actual statement, too.

100 1     Feingold, Russell D.
245 10  $a I strongly oppose Patriot Act deal : $b statement of U.S. Senator Russ Feingold as prepared for delivery from the Senate floor, February 15, 2006 : [$h electronic file]/ $c  Russ Feingold.
260 00 $a [Encinitas , CA]: $b Truthout.org, $c [2006]
300        $a World Wide Web Page [1].
500        $a Wednesday, February 15, 2006.

530        $a Available via the World Wide Web.
538        $a System requirements: Internet Explorer or other web browser.
650 12  $a Federal Government $z United States.
650 12  $a Terrorism $x prevention & control $z United States.
650 12  $a Terrorism $x legislation & jurisprudence $z United States.
856 41  $u http://www.truthout.org/docs_2006/021506R.shtml

[Read more…] about Russ Feingold in MARC

In The News

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And now, a bunch of pretty decent links:

This week’s favorite line from Techsploitation Chick: "The[rehashed dot.com companies such as] Zupits suck up funding, while true visionaries innovate for free."  Not a bad thing to keep in mind in this age of big companies who want us to use their metadata in ways they determine with minimal imput from us. Controlled vocabularies are nice, but the price for their use is  sometimes quite high. And huge, ostensibly metadata-friendly ILS systems with their myriad add-on services are rarely as customizable as those who sell them to us would have us believe. Anyway, read the whole thing here.

A major event in the "Woo-Hoo!" department is the Academy’s Grey Literature Report being written up in ResourceShelf.   We even made Resource of the Week! (Yea!) Granted, we’re not the only repositories of Grey lit to be found with a bit of effort, but I still think we have one of the bst. But, what do I know? I merely catalog the stuff that goes into the report every couple of months.

Here’s a kind of creepy revelation from The Nation magazine:  "The nation’s largest telephone and cable companies are crafting an
alarming set of strategies that would transform the free, open and
nondiscriminatory Internet of today to a privately run and branded
service that would charge a fee for virtually everything we do online."  (The full article is here.)

Another related story on the same issue is here, from the NY Times.  Should something like this go through (unlikely but always possible) how does one get the service of an ISP overseas? Assuming, of course, that this law would apply only to access points within the continental USA? Something to think about.

Here’s something else to think about. Granted, it’s a tiny bit dated, but I think "just plain insiring" is a good description.

Still More Vonnegut

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I’m not interested in turning this into the "All Vonnegut All the Time" blog, but this week, it seems to be shaping up that way.  Not that I’m complaining: I’ve been reading the gentleman’s work my whole life and am amazed and encouraged by the fact that so much of it is still in print.  It’s a gift to be pessimistic and funny simultaneously. That’s by no means easy to do, except when you read his writing, when it surely seems easy. Mark Twain could do it, too, but he’s not mentioned in the papers much these days.

At any rate, this article is more biographical than excerpt, care of the Sunday Herald. Enjoy!