I like the Center for American Progress. I really do, for the sheer level of research they utilize when writing any given bulletin they send out. I am in awe. Having said that, I’m not sure how I feel about their latest posts on what they call the Two-Tiered Internet. The NY Times has a better written account of what it means and why.
Cool Times Tool & the Patriot Act
I know I’m a day late and dollar short with this, as I am with everything I write here, but it’s Wednesday and this caught my eye.
Linking to the NY Times is always problematic because of their new NY Times Select subscription package, but this makes linking to non-subbed articles a lot simpler. In fact this tool is so darned useful that i stuck the link in the Reference Resources TypeList, so take a look at it.
And so, instead of pulling a whole story down from the Times (violating copyright in spirit if not in letter) or hoping that the link I post today is still good two weeks from now as the story gets archived behind a firewall, I can just post this link to this story about how a slightly revised Patriot Act just got passed in the Senate by a 95-4 vote. The good news is that there are new curbs on who can be spooked and under what conditions–not to mention limits on spooking library patrons–but the bad news is that the new limits aren’t all that great.
Oh, and "spooking" is "to spy on," for the three readers who didn’t already know. Enjoy!
Google Search Tidbits
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)
The Life & Death of Public Records
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
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.
Russ Feingold in MARC
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
In The News
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
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!
Vonnegut’s Blues for America
Another quote from Kurt Vonnegut’s latest:
‘The blues was a gift so great that it is now almost the only reason
many foreigners still like the USA. Foreigners love us for our jazz.
They don’t hate us for our
purported liberty and justice for all. They hate us for our arrogance.’’
I stuck another excerpt behind the link. Enjoy!
The Worst Word
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 …)
Real Estate and Satellite Images
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.
We Are Right and They Are Wrong
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.