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Calling Mr. Decimal

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If you’re looking to renew your knowledge of Dewey Decimal classification–which can be a drag, but plenty of libraries continue to use it and it’s a good skill to retain over the long haul–then you might want to take a look at the WebDewey Tutorial over at OCLC’s web site.  They cover Dewey in a fair amount of detail.  From the web site description:

WebDewey offers easy-to-use, World Wide Web-based access to the Dewey
Decimal Classification (DDC) and related information, with searching
and browsing capabilities; Library of Congress Subject Headings (LCSH)
intellectually and statistically mapped to Dewey numbers; and links
from the mapped LCSH to the corresponding LCSH authority records. You
can also add your own notes to WebDewey and display them in context,
which allows you to both record valuable information about local
classification practices and have it available for ready reference.

The only problems that I can see is that the tutorial won’t work on any Macintosh or UNIX system and it’s selective as to which PC browsers it works with. You may have to tweak your preferences a bit.

Enjoy!

The Hertz Lady and a Poem

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I’m downloading version 4.2 of DiMeMa’s contentDM Acquisition Station to match our update of the online database to the same version.  It’s a sizable download and it’s taking a while.  But in the mean time I notice that I got a quote in to Andy’s website.  My quote is here–a story from my days as a software retailer– and the story I responded to ("The Hertz Lady") is here.

From George Ure over at the Independence Journal:

"Experts say this is the worst day of the whole year –
a sort of cosmic bummer when all the bills come in from the holidays
and more.

 

But not to fret – In the event you’re bummed, let me share this
short bit of poetry/advice from Poet of the Yukon,
Robert
Service – long one of my favorites – because it can really help:

 

The Quitter


When you’re lost in the Wild, and
you’re scared as a child,

And Death looks you bang in the
eye,

And you’re sore as a boil, it’s
according to Hoyle

To cock your revolver and . . .
die.

But the Code of a Man says:
"Fight all you can,"

And self-dissolution is barred.

In hunger and woe, oh, it’s easy
to blow . . .

It’s the
hell-served-for-breakfast that’s hard.


"You’re sick of the game!" Well,
now, that’s a shame.

You’re young and you’re brave and
you’re bright.

"You’ve had a raw deal!" I know
— but don’t squeal,

Buck up, do your damnedest, and
fight.

It’s the plugging away that will
win you the day,

So don’t be a piker, old pard!

Just draw on your grit; it’s so
easy to quit:

It’s the keeping-your-chin-up
that’s hard.


It’s easy to cry that you’re
beaten — and die;

It’s easy to crawfish and crawl;

But to fight and to fight when
hope’s out of sight —

Why, that’s the best game of them
all!

And though you come out of each
gruelling bout,

All broken and beaten and
scarred,

Just have one more try — it’s
dead easy to die,

It’s the keeping-on-living that’s
hard.

Source:
Gutenberg eText of
Service’s "Rhymes of a Rolling Stone"  And, if you don’t know about all
the fine works at the Project Gutenberg site, and you haven’t flashed them into
your head with a Vortex Reader from the
www.HalfPastHuman.com  folks (see the bottom of the page), you’re
missing a fine opportunity for self improvement."

Dawkins on Life and Death

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I admire Richard Dawkins’ mind very much.  His delivery, well, not as much. That said, this observation is sheer brilliance:

"We are going to die and that makes us the lucky ones. Most people are
never going to die because they’re never going to be born. The
potential people who could have been here in my place, but who will, in
fact, never see the light of day, outnumber the sand grains of Sahara.
…In the face of these stupefying odds, it is you and I, in our
ordinariness, that are here. Here’s another respect in which we are
lucky. The universe is older than a hundred million centuries. Within a
comparable time, the sun will swell to a red giant and engulf the
earth. Every century of hundreds of millions has been in its time, or
will be when its time comes, the present century. The present moves
from the past to the future like a tiny spotlight inching its way along
a gigantic ruler of time. Everything behind the spotlight is in
darkness, the darkness of the dead past. Everything ahead of the
spotlight is in the darkness of the unknown future. The odds of your
century being the one in the spotlight are the same as the odds that a
penny, tossed down at random, will land on a particular ant crawling
somewhere on the road from New York to San Francisco. You are lucky to
be alive and so am I."

Read the interview here.

Remember Howard Beale

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This past Friday beheld the start of the third National Conference over Media Reform in Memphis. Bill Moyers was one of the main speakers, and being Moyers, he let the media establishment have it point blank:

Veteran journalist Bill Moyers on Friday challenged
3,000 progressive activists and communicators to take back the telling
of America’s story at the National Conference of Media Reform in
Memphis. He put his finger squarely on the deep vein of discontent with
the way mainstream media is ill-serving American democracy.

Moyers, who is president of the Schumann Center for Media and
Democracy, went through a sordid litany of corporate media malfeasance,
from the lackluster and largely non-skeptical reporting of the Bush
administration’s launch of the war in Iraq to the lack of attention
paid to a domestic landscape of increasing economic disparity and
racial segregation. Virtually uncontrolled media consolidation over the
past decade, he said, has meant a loss of independent journalism and
created “more narrowness and homogenization in content and perspective,
so that what we see on our couch is overwhelmingly the view from the
top.”

It is in this environment that the Bush administration can, for
example, can “turn the escalation of a failed war and call it a surge,
as if it were a current of electricity through a wire instead of blood
spurting from the ruptured veins of a soldier,” Moyers said.

On the domestic front, “the question of whether or not our economic
system is truly just is off the table for investigation and discussion,
so that alternative ideas, alternative critiques, alternative visions
never get a hearing,” he said.

“It is clear what we have to do. We have to tell the story ourselves,” he said.

One thing I noticed much further down in the article (the last paragraph, in fact) was a reference to Sidney Lumet’s Network, possibly one of the best movies ever made about the broadcast television industry:

The intense interest in this conference is a reflection of the
thousands of Howard Beales on the left who are as mad as hell and are
not going to take dumbed-down, homogenized, corporatized,
power-subservient media any more.

Everyone remembers Howard Beale telling people to stick their heads out their windows and scream their ire at the world, possibly because that scene happens early in the movie.  Nobody remembers that by the end of the film, Howard has become "the only prime time anchorman to ever have been killed over lousy ratings."  So my meager advice to those who would defend the world from the main stream media might be this: the machine is plenty bigger than you, has no morals whatsoever and has an enormous head start.  In other words, both strive for change and  watch your back.  Always.   

Democrats Push ‘Net Neutrality

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From Variety, the most hopeful news I’ve heard all year (the whole 10 days):

Democrats push ‘Net neutrality

Internet Freedom Preservation Act is introduced


WASHINGTON — Democrats, who all but sank major communications reform
legislation in the previous congressional session over the issue of
so-called ‘Net neutrality, marked the first day of the new Congress by
introducing a bill that will mandate ‘Net neutrality, which is intended
to guarantee the equal accessibility and flow of content over the
Internet.

The
Internet Freedom Preservation Act, sponsored by Sens. Byron Dorgan
(D-N.D.) and Olympia Snowe (R-Maine), "would ensure that broadband
service providers do not discriminate against Internet content,
applications or services by offering preferential treatment," according
to a statement by Dorgan.

Without a federal mandate for ‘Net
neutrality, Dorgan said, broadband providers could be "gatekeepers
capable of deciding which content can get through to consumers, and
which content providers could get special deals, faster speeds and
better access to the consumer."

The bill "marks another step
toward ensuring the fate of the Internet lies in the hands of its users
and not the hands of a few gatekeepers," Snowe said in a statement.
"The tide has turned in the debate between those who seek to maintain
equality and those who would benefit from the creation of a toll road
on the Internet superhighway."

Last year, the GOP-controlled
Senate tried to move a massive communications reform bill that included
changes to national video franchising rules. Democrats tried but failed
to attach a ‘Net neutrality amendment to the bill while still in
committee. While some Republicans supported their effort, Democrats
took the lead in threatening a filibuster should the bill come to a
floor vote without any provisions for ‘Net neutrality. As a result, the
bill never made it to the floor.

Legislation requires broadband
service providers to operate networks in a nondiscriminatory manner,
while leaving them free to protect the security of the network or offer
different levels of broadband connection to users.

Consumer
groups hailed the bill. "This bill will help ensure that consumers will
continue to enjoy the competitive and affordable services that
broadband has brought them and that big telecommunications companies
cannot use their networks to hinder consumers’ access to those
services," said Jeannine Kenney, senior policy analyst at Consumers
Union, in a statement.

Opponents of ‘Net neutrality say a federal
mandate is a solution in search of a problem "that doesn’t exist," said
Peter Davidson, Verizon senior VP for federal government relations.

"Most
policymakers will focus on how to increase broadband deployment, and
wonder how ‘Net regulation advances that goal," Davidson added. "It’s
ironic that this bill is introduced at the same time the Consumer
Electronics Show is filling the news with broadband-enabled
innovations. There is a disconnect between consumers’ desires for new
products and services and the stifling effects of this bill."

Both
the Motion Picture Assn. of American and the Recording Industry Assn.
of America declined to comment on the bill. Officials at the MPAA have
said that member companies are still split over whether ‘Net neutrality
will be good or bad for business.

Co-sponsors of the bill include
Dem Sens. John Kerry (Mass.), Barbara Boxer (Calif.), Tom Harkin
(Iowa), Patrick Leahy (Vt.), Hillary Clinton (N.Y.) and Barack Obama
(Ill.).

A Very Big Deal indeed.  Call/write/e-mail your congressfolk and let them know you want them to support this baby.

News from the Human Genome Project

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See, here’s the thing.

The Human Genome Project is without doubt one of the most ambitious, important, and just plain  brilliant ideas put forth by the science establishment ever.  The guys over at the American Society for Microbiology explain why better than I can:

With the help of new techniques and powerful computers, scientists
have finally pieced together in order the entire human genome. This
means that they have strung together in the correct order all three
billion (that’s 3,000,000,000) or so biochemical rungs of our spiral
ladder-shaped DNA molecule. What we now have is the entire book of life
for making a human being.

This is a hugely big deal!
Why? Well, much of what happens in our bodies is the result of
molecules called proteins doing their thing. And proteins are made from
recipes called genes that are contained in our DNA. (The sum total of
all the genes in a living creature is called its genome <gee-nome>.)
By having all the genes spelled out in the right order, researchers
will now have an easier time figuring out which genes make what
proteins. This in turn will help in figuring out which genes are
responsible for or have an affect on different diseases when they get
messed up. That may lead to better ways of tackling some diseases.
Also, knowing the human genome sequence may help scientists figure out
just what makes humans "human."

       

Which makes it all the more interesting when I read something like this in what appears to be a rather (ahem) different conclusion:

Scientists Find Extraterrestrial Genes in Human DNA

It looks like a real article.  It feels like a real article.  And it goes a few places I just do not want to follow for purely emotional reasons, one of which being that for the past 20 years, I’ve been making enormous fun of people who swore we were bred from aliens.  I can’t find any other source for this discovery, however that doesn’t mean it’s not real, just that there have been no responses to it yet.

If it turns out to be true, I’ll apologize to the people I made fun of.  And wonder if our DNA was in fact crafted by some unknown (and perhaps unknowable) intelligence somewhere in the universe I’d like them to explain why they did such a crappy job of it.  I mean come on, we can’t hear, we can barely see, we can’t smell anything.  We’re amazingly vulnerable to viruses and bacteria of every size and description, and worst of all, we are prone to malfunctioning outside of a very narrow range of temperatures and atmospheric content. Not exactly Timex watches, are we?  The only reason we’re still here as a species is because there are so darned many of us–it takes a lot more to wipe out 6.7 billion people than it does 500 million, and there are times during past ice ages where there were decidedly fewer than 500 million human around.

Oh well. I’m waiting to see what kind of response this announcement induces.  There may not be one.  I hope there is, though, because if it’s true then this is a Very Big Deal.  We shall see.

Never Too Late to Return Books

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SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER
http://seattlepi.nwsource.com/national/1110AP_Overdue_Book.html

Sunday, January 7, 2007 · Last updated 7:12 a.m. PT

Library book returned _ 47 years overdue

THE ASSOCIATED PRESS

HANCOCK, Mich. — Robert Nuranen handed
the local librarian a book he’d checked out for a ninth-grade
assignment – along with a check for 47 years’ worth of late fees.

Nuranen
said his mother misplaced the copy of "Prince of Egypt" while cleaning
the house. The family came across it every so often, only to set it
aside again. He found it last week while looking through a box in the
attic.

"I figured I’d better get it in before we waited
another 10 years," he said after turning it in Friday with the $171.32
check. "Fifty-seven years would be embarrassing."

The book,
with its last due date stamped June 2, 1960, was part of the young
Nuranen’s fascination with Egypt. He went on to visit that country and
54 others, and all 50 states, he said, but he never did finish the book.

Nuranen now lives in Los Angeles, where he teaches seventh-grade social studies and language arts.

The library had long ago lost any record of the book, librarian Sue Zubiena said.

"I’m going to use it as an example," she said. "It’s never too late to return your books."

The Changing Role of Librarians

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Two articles that are making the rounds this morning are from the NY Times ("Lock the Library! Rowdy Students are Taking Over") and the Wall Street Journal ("The Changing Role of Librarians".)

I’ve put the Journal article behind the cut.  I think it’s worth reading if only because it validates something I’ve observed in the years since I got my MLS: librarians are leaving the public sector for the private sector.  That makes sense to me.  In the private sector the money is better, the work might be better tailored to an individual’s interests, and talent and exprience generally find rewards.  That’s not always true in the public or non-profit sector.  But the article doesn’t say much about the 60+work weeks private enterprise sometimes demands of its employees, nor what kinds of benefits those fancy higher-tech jobs have to offer prospects.  (In a few cases, only the truly ambitious or masochistic need apply.)   Still, the WSJ is still an 800-pound gorilla in the business world, and maybe library directors will read it and think of ways to lure and keep talented librarians on staff.

I’m less sure of what to think of the Times article.

It’s easy to see it as a rant about how the nasty librarians can’t control the kids in the library–or, if you’re a librarian, as a rant about how the nasty kids won’t just shut the f&%k up in the library–but if you dig down a couple of layers, the writer does point out (near the end) that this happening in a well-to-do suburb and these kids have literally nothing else to do in their area except hanging out at the library. Are there no parents in suburbia? Youth centers? Anything? Hello?
Maybe growing up in the city spoiled me as a kid (I don’t know) but library visits were a big deal in my family. We were taught to revere the places–heck, libraries were much holier than Shabbat services at the synagogue. Raising your voice was something we just did not do. Ditto talking back to librarians, running around, etc. Clearly I’m part of an older generation. Maybe we were too polite for our own good. We had good libraries, though. And parents who taught us to care about them.
Well, what do I know? Read the article. Let me know.

[Read more…] about The Changing Role of Librarians

Happy New Beer!

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It’s 2007, so rejoice! That’s 365 more days (well, 363.5 as I write this) in which to learn a new skill (I’m going to learn how to brew beer) or improve a skill you already have.  It’s also  365 days in which to kiss your spouse, hug your kids and tell your parents and friends how much they mean to you.  They’re days in which to lose weight (or not), run a five-minute mile, or become an "informed investor" whatever that really means (I’m in the middle of John Bogel’s The Battle for the Soul of Capitalism" and yeah, "informed investor" is a bit of an oxymoron.)  Or, they’re days in which to read up to 365 new books.  Book reviewer Digby Diehl swears he reads a book a day, but I can’t hope to compete with that kind of productivity–I’m happy with a book a week, so 52 new books this year is my goal.  But if productivity is your goal for the new year, you’ll want to read what Mike (in Tokyo) Rogers has to say on the subject.  (I’ve ordered his picks from Amazon.)

If you need a few more helpful hints on where to start all this new reading, I’d suggest you first take a look at George Ure’s Independence Journal website (I’ve set it up as a typelist).  It’s not my only source of news in my daily reading but it’s worth the trouble.  Scott Burns from the Dallas Morning News has a few suggestions on financial reading material.  If you take his  advice about reading Andrew Tobias’  book (which I’d also recommend) you might also want to take a look at his website which  is more of AT’s great writing style.  He even works some  decent financial information in there once in a while. 

Next, you might investigate AlterNet’s Top 10 Most Popular Book Reviews for 2006.  I admit to not reading every book on their list, but AlterNet is generally good people. Read everything that Bill Moyers ever wrote.  Ditto for Carl Sagan, but you can start with Cosmos (the TV series is on DVD and everything.)  And take a look at what Library Journal book reviewer Marylaine Block has to say about various volumes on her Book Bytes web page and her Exlibris library e-zine.

Lately I’ve taken on an enormous personal project–I’m inheriting a huge collection of old science fiction tomes from my father-in-law’s best friend.  What I’ve seen so far is absolutely amazing, but that’s for another post to be written after I organize what I have.

The bottom line for me is (and always will be) that the world is filled with books, so Read! READ, for %$@* sake!

In Case of Zombies, Break Glass

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I’m actually on vacation this week but I also turned 40 a couple of days ago. Two birthday presents stood out, when my brother and sister-in-law presented me with copies of the Zombie Survival Guide and World War Z: An Oral History of the Zombie War, both by Max Brooks (aka, Max, son of Mel.) Both are excellently written and they’re both quick reads (I finished WWZ in a couple of days, but as I said, I’m on vacation). Most importantly, they’re fun to read.

Zombies are in right now. And they’ll probably continue to be in for a while because zombies are genuinely creepy monsters. Granted, doomsday fiction is always fun because for most of us it’s actually a relief to imagine a place that’s recognizably here but without the crush of 6.7 billion neighbors and the attendant crime, pollution, and stress that living with them produces. Zombies are particularly democratic beasties for that matter because if you’re breathing, you’re a target. They don’t discriminate except on the basis of  "living" or "dead." You’re either with them or against them. (Hmm, that sounds familiar . . .)

I’m not going to say much on the history of the zombie as a movie monster, that’s been done. Actually, if you want a zombie primer, you can go here. You can even go here but something tells me they’re not talking about flesh-eating ghouls per se. I found this site last night while finishing up WWZ and I admit I wasn’t sure I cared for what they had to say in their review section–they didn’t approve of 28 Days Later which I really liked–but their FAQ changed my mind. (You’ll see why about half way down the web page.)

If you’re not a zombie fan yourself, you might be a little disturbed by the nature of some of the arguing that goes on among different fan groups. The director of the 2004 remake of Dawn of the Dead, for example, couldn’t seem to keep a certain amount of defensiveness out of his DVD commentary track. "We all know that in real life, zombies don’t run that fast," he says near the beginning, "but it made for a creepier monster and, we thought, a better movie."  You hear that sentiment a few times throughout the film. It sounds strange but it’s not unusual. One of the pet peeves that Zombiedefense.org guys had against the Zombie Survival Guide is the enormous amount of "misinformation" the book contains, including equipment lists with far too much stuff and the supposedly incorrect nature of zombies: a virus that Brooks identifies as "Solanum." They conclude that Brooks wants his readers to be loaded down so the zombies will eat them, thus improving his chances for survival. Well, okay.

One thing that I admit always confused me is how it is that every world that seems to have a zombie outbreak (whatever the cause) also seems to be populated exclusively by people who have never seen a zombie movie. I’ve seen one exception to that, a recent SciFi channel original movie called "dead and Deader." It was filled with with  jokes that would only make sense to hardened zombie geeks–and Star Wars geeks–and Superman geeks (the lead actor played Superman on Lois and Clark). There’s even a scene that does nothing but pays homage to George Romero (aka, Father of Zombies Films.) At any rate, it’s clear that zombie geeks wrote and directed that movie. Nowhere is this weird effect worse than in the Walking Dead series of graphic novels, which is strange because reading the foreword of the books makes it clear that these are also the works of zombie geeks.  At any rate, in the Walking Dead books the characters mean well (or not) but they don’t seem to get it inasmuch as when the dead rise, pretty much all bets as to what constitutes normalcy are off and all rules of polite society go out the window. The basic rule is this–if your spouse or kids get bitten, they’re going to eventually start gnawing on you and not in the cute endearing way that living spouses and children do. Zombie bites hurt like hell and are 100% fatal. If you get bitten, you’ll start doing the same to those around you. The only solution is literally dying before the infection kills you. Which is why zombies make such good monsters–nobody really wants to take a club or shotgun and blow the head off of their family members–at least, nobody you’d want as a family member in the first place. The mental gymnastics that the characters need to go through to adapt to the abrupt change in world view, including an equally abrupt change in the world is what makes these works of fiction fun, or sometimes just frustrating. (Sometimes they’re both.)

Anyway, regardless of how seriously you take your preparations for the upcoming zombie holocaust, Max Brooks knows his zombie subject matter and can tell a good story that’s more than slightly disturbing.

EPA Library Closures Could Threaten Public Health

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E.P.A. Library Closures Could Threaten Public Health

By Leslie Burger, AlterNet
Posted on December 14, 2006, Printed on December 14, 2006

http://www.alternet.org/story/45494/

This piece originally ran in the New York Times.

If you
needed to find out how much pollution an industrial plant in your
neighborhood was spewing, or what toxic chemicals were in a local
river, where would you go? Until recently, you could discover the
answer at one of the Environmental Protection Agency’s 29 libraries.
But now the E.P.A. has obstructed the American public — as well as its
own scientists and staff — by starting to dismantle its crown jewel,
the national system of regional E.P.A. libraries.

Until now, any
citizen could consult these resources, which include information on
things like siting incinerators, storing toxic waste and uncovering
links between asthma and car exhaust. E.P.A. staff members and other
scientists have counted on the libraries to support their work. First
responders and other state and local government officials have used
E.P.A. information to protect communities. In the age of terrorism,
when the safety of our food and water supply, the uninterrupted flow of
energy and, indeed, so much about our environment has become a matter
of national security, it seems particularly dangerous to take steps
that would hinder our emergency preparedness.

Although lawmakers
haven’t yet agreed to President Bush’s proposed 2007 budget, which
includes $2 million in cuts to the agency’s library system, the head of
the E.P.A. has already instituted cuts. The agency’s main library in
Washington has been closed to the public, and regional E.P.A. libraries
in Chicago, Dallas and Kansas City, Mo., have been closed altogether.
At the Boston, New York, San Francisco and Seattle branches, hours and
public access have been reduced.

Anyone who needs to understand
the environmental impact of, say, living downwind or downstream from a
new nuclear power plant, or the long-term public health impact of
Hurricane Katrina, cannot afford to find the doors barred to
potentially lifesaving information. But neither can the rest of us,
whose daily lives and choices will be affected by global warming. We
all have a right to be able to get access to information about our air,
water and soil.

"Libraries and their professionals are integral
to the work of E.P.A. toxicologists," says an agency toxicologist,
Suzanne Wuerthele. "Without access to their expertise and extensive
collections, it will be difficult to explain to the public, to state
agencies, industry and to the courts how and why E.P.A. is protecting
the environment over time."

Some members of Congress have begun
to bring these cuts to light. The Senate minority whip, Richard Durbin,
urged the president to reopen the libraries and rethink his budget
request. Eighteen senators sent a letter to the Senate Appropriations
Committee asking it to make the E.P.A. keep the libraries open.
Representatives John Dingell, Bart Gordon and Henry Waxman recently had
the Government Accountability Office start an inquiry into the closings
and requested that the E.P.A. administrator, Stephen Johnson, cease the
destruction of library materials immediately.

The E.P.A. cannot
hide behind the fig leaf of fiscal responsibility. While the agency
says the closings are all part of a commitment to modernize and
digitize, we are not assured that its public plan is adequate or its
skills sufficient. Users within the E.P.A. and the American public need
information specialists, like librarians, to manage paper collections
and to help them get access to digital material and organize online
information.

Fortunately, there’s still time to reverse this
dangerous threat to a healthy future. The administration could
immediately reopen the closed libraries. Congress could conduct
oversight hearings to reverse these decisions and prevent any more
E.P.A. libraries — all of them containing invaluable information about
our environment, all of them paid for by our tax dollars — from
closing. The American public deserves no less.


Leslie Burger is President of the American Library Association.

Don’t forget to check out this article from Mark Clayton or this one by Kelpie Wilson on the same subject.  They’re all well worth reading.