Jon Frater

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Archives for September 2006

Mouseprint & Your Tax Dollars at Work

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Are you familiar with the term "Mouseprint?  Bob Sullivan is–or, he is now–it’s the fine print that’s so damn tiny only a mouse can read it.  Sullivan took a look at a website (appropriately named Mouseprint.org) that serves as a mouseprint magnifying glass , as it were, and it makes for fun yet grim reading.  Truth in advertising my foot.

Something else that’s kind of fascinating in the sheer potential for misinformation: Mr. Bush has just signed a law to "create an online database for  tracking about $1 trillion in government spending on grants and contracts." The ostensible explanation is to make the budget subject to greater public scrutiny, but depending on how it’s designed and built it could just be an enormous smokescreen; or, at least, a database with a strangely malleable content depending on such things as election year calendar or scandal gossip. (If they can falsify electronic voting, they can falsify this too.)  We shall see.

“All of It”

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I’ve been invited to write a few paragraphs about some cool electronic resource for the next edition of the NYAM Newsletter.  And unhappily, I have a bit of a problem with that. Granted, I have the time and the talent and the motivation, but the problem persists and it’s been there for as far back as I can remember.

My trouble is simple: I can’t decide on just one thing to write about. The world is too big, and I’ve always been interested in, well, all of it. You can blame at least part of the attitude on Cerebus the Aardvark, by the way.  When asked how much money he’d want if he could name any price for his services, Cerebus replied "All of it!"  It’s a physical and economic impossibility, but it sums up how I feel.

So I deal with the limited time and space (mostly time) here by sorting through who knows how many blogs, web bites, e-mail announcements, and seeing how any given item makes me feel. I get really into some weird stuff that’s extremely useful in passing (Library Thing is a good example of that) but doesn’t warrant a lot of my attention. Something like George Ure’s website Urbansurvival.com is another matter–I’d live there if I could. Ure sees himself as a financial reporter with a website rather than just another blogger, and the attitude shows in his writing. He catches everything the mainstream media misses, and it misses, in my estimation, almost everything worth reading. Andy’s website is another one in that category although he’s more direct in his politics than Ure.  Andy’s got my constant attention for a slightly different reason, however. First, he’s Treasurer of the DNC.  Second (and more important to me personally) he has answered nearly every single e-mail I’ve ever written to him and he’s posted my comments a few times.  To my mind, he’s a god. Mike "Mish" Shedlock’s not a god, but his economics blog is worth the time to read just the same (pay particular attention to the external link list on the right margin–good, good reading to be found there.)

And now, for something completely different: Doug Ritter’s Equipped to Survive website and blog and The Liberty Dollar website. The liberty dollar is just plain neat from an underground market perspective.  I wouldn’t use it to invest in silver (not when silver coins are half the price of a single liberty dollar, according to Kitco.com, another good source of info on the gold and silver markets). I also don’t think it’s ever replace the greenbacks that you and I use for daily over-the-counter purchases, but, well, take a look if you are at all inclined.

Back to Libraryland: if you don’t subscribe to ResourceShelf’s weekly e-mail newsletter, you’re missing out on a ton of new items that are available from Gary Price and his editors.  I’m also partial to Wikipedia as a place to go for general information on pretty much anything–it’s been rare that I typed in a reference to it couldn’t match with some kind of entry.  Just be aware that some of the information contained therein is, uh, disputed.

So you see my conflict.  I think it’s all interesting.  It’s all worth knowing, or at least worth knowing about.  It is, as I (and Cerebus) said, "All of it."

Cataloging 9/11

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It’s been a busy week (last week, I mean). Article Linker works for the databases we’ve linked to it (so far, Ebsco, Ovid, Gale), and we’re jumping through all kinds of hoops working on linking it to PubMed. You have a choice–use a script to build a prepopulated ILL form on your server and access it as an Outside Tool, or use LinkOut–which would work (if we went that route), but would require us jumping through a rather different set of hoops. In either case, it’s time-consuming, and energy sapping. And we’re putting the next edition of the Grey Lit Report together next week, so we’ve a stack of pamphlets that nee to be cataloged as quickly as we can arrange–and when you’re busy catalogging, there’s a lot of energy that you don’t have to spend on other projects. Such as linking Article Linker to PubMed.

A cataloging note from this morning caught my attention: not only did NLM need four years (years!) to add "September 11 Terrorist Attacks" as a MeSH entry term, but "Adverse Effects" is not included among the qualifiers they list for use. You can choose "Classification", "Economics", "Ethnology", "Ethics", "History", "Legislation & Jurisprudence", "Prevention & Control", "Psychology", "Statistics & Numerical Data" or "Trends", but there’s no qualifier that deals specifically with the health problems that the attack generated. And I’ll tell you right now, we’ve cataloged several hundred items on that subject alone in the past four years. It makes no sense to me that "Adverse Effects" doesn’t fall under the same rubric as "Psychology" or any of the other choices. Was it an oversight? Did they  consider it and deliberately discard it? If so, then why?

Electoral-Vote.com

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From Andy’s website:

"This terrific site
is running again. It has tons of election data (click successively on all the
icons below the map to see what is there) and a "nonpartisan" (but enlightened)
blog about the state of the mid-term elections. Click
on the "Previous report" link at the top of the page to see previous blogs. In 2004, I’m
told, this was the most popular election site in the country, pulling in 700,000
visitors a day."

The site in question is Electoral-vote.com and it was immensely addictive through 2004.

Hampton U. and Literary NY

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So, according to this email, maybe Hampton U. isn’t dissolving their cataloging department after all (thank you nice people at Kent State for this):

"I have
received from a number of colleagues a copy of announcement of the
closing of
the Technical Service department of the Harvey Library at
Hampton
University .  Harvey Library has no
plans to close the Technical
Services department.  Professional
cataloging of our resources will
continue in house.  Authority work will
continue.  We will continue to be
staffed by professional librarians in
the catalog department assisted by a
staff of qualified
paraprofessionals.  Cataloging of our ever increasing
complement of
electronic resources will still be necessary as with printed
and audio-visual
materials.

Frank B. Edgcombe, Acting Library Director, Harvey Library,
Hampton
University."

I said it before, and I’ll repeat it here–I have no idea how (un)true any of this is. But I would hope the catalogers keep their jobs.

An uplifting note about upstate New York is here, courtesy of Yahoo! News:

Literary Pilgrimage in Upstate New York

"AUSTERLITZ, N.Y. – Twin baby grand pianos stand in the living room of a
white clapboard farmhouse high on the Taconic Ridge on the border of
New York and Massachusetts. Here the poet Edna St. Vincent Millay
composed and played duets. The sculpted bust of the Greek poet Saffo
still dominates one corner, while a painting depicts Millay’s husband
and sister swimming naked in the outdoor pool, now filled with murky
water beneath a heavy canopy of trees."

It’s not the best written travel piece I’ve ever seen, but it’s worth a look.  Enjoy!

Osmosing Data and Leaky Cell Phones

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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.