Jason Griffey is the Director of Strategic Initiatives at NISO, where he works to identify new areas of the information ecosystem where standards expertise is useful and needed. Prior to joining NISO in 2019, Jason ran his own technology consulting company for libraries, has been both an Affiliate at metaLAB and a Fellow and Affiliate at the Berkman Klein Center for Internet & Society at Harvard University, and was an academic librarian in roles ranging from reference and instruction to Head of IT at the University of TN at Chattanooga.
Jason has written extensively on technology and libraries, including multiple books and a series of full-periodical issues on technology topics, most recently AI & Machine Learning in Libraries and Library Spaces and Smart Buildings: Technology, Metrics, and Iterative Design from 2018. His newest book, co-authored with Jeffery Pomerantz, will be published by MIT Press in 2024.
He has spoken internationally on topics such as artificial intelligence & machine learning, the future of technology and libraries, decentralization and the Blockchain, privacy, copyright, and intellectual property. A full list of his publications and presentations can be found on his CV.
He is one of eight winners of the Knight Foundation News Challenge for Libraries for the Measure the Future project (http://measurethefuture.net), an open hardware project designed to provide actionable use metrics for library spaces. He is also the creator and director of The LibraryBox Project (http://librarybox.us), an open source portable digital file distribution system.
Jason can be stalked obsessively online, and spends his free time with his daughter Eliza, reading, obsessing over gadgets, and preparing for the inevitable zombie uprising.
While I have been far too quiet here on PatRec, I have been writing bits and pieces elsewhere. I just had a post go up over on ALA TechSource on Netbooks. Go take a look!
I’m also trying to catch up from being behind on my upcoming book on Mobile Technology and Libraries. So if PatRec remains a little quiet for the next couple of months, well…that’s why. 🙂
Just a quick note to follow up on my previous post about Pseudoscience and vaccines. While I’m certainly not going to suggest that we take our medical advice from our legal system, it looks like the latter at least got the former right this time.
Special court rejects autism-vaccine theory
The three federal judges who convincingly rejected the theory that vaccines cause autism delivered a devastating blow to crank science today. The battle will go on in the blogs and in the courts. But the most important arena has always been the space between the ears of parents who are deciding whether it’s safe to vaccinate their kids. This decision could do a heap of good by stemming the tide of vaccine-shunning that has led to outbreaks of preventable disease.
…“Petitioners’ theories of causation were speculative and unpersuasive,” wrote Special Master Denise Vowell in the case of Colten Snyder v. HHS. “To conclude that Colten’s condition was the result of his MMR vaccine, an objective observer would have to emulate Lewis Carroll’s White Queen and be able to believe six impossible (or at least highly improbable) things before breakfast.”
While I don’t think for a moment that this will stop the crank beliefs revolving around autism and vaccinations (science is still not our friend in the US; witness that in a recent poll only 4 in 10 American’s say that they believe in the Theory of Evolution, a fact that makes me want to claw my own eyes out) it does make me happy that the legal system won’t be participating in further arguments around this (non-)controversy.
This week, ebooks were all over the tech news, and there were at least two huge announcements. Well, one announcement, and one not-so-secret launch coming Monday.
The announcement was the Google Book mobile service, which gives users access to 1.5 million books from the Google Book scanning project OCR’d and formatted for mobile screens, like those of the G1 and the iPhone. In one fell swoop, Google has made these platforms the home of the largest electronic book library in the world…the Amazon Kindle store currently has 230,000 books, while Project Gutenberg has just over 100,000.
The upcoming announcement is that almost certainly on Monday, Amazon will announce the Kindle version 2. Leaked photos make the v2 look sleeker, more updated, and with much better physical form-factor. What I’m most excited about is the possibility of v.2 of the software, which better UI and possibly more features. As long, of course, as the software is ported back to the original hardware.
Are these the things that will finally push ebooks firmly into the public consciousness? Time will tell, but I can hope.
Robert Heinlein famously said:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects.
In the spirit of the myriad “25 random facts” and such, I’m going to suggest that we see how close some of us are to Heinlein’s ideal. Here’s the quote again, with things I’ve actually done in bold, things I think I could do in italics, and things I can’t do in regular type:
A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly.
I must admit, I’ve never actually butchered a hog, but I’ve seen it done, and I’ve butchered both deer and squirrel, and I’ve dissected everything from a small pig to rats and mice. So I think I could handle that. I’m helping to design a library right now, so I think that counts. And yes, I’ve shoveled manure in my time…cleaning out barn stalls.
So I still need to figure out how to conn a ship, fight efficiently, and die gallantly. I’m pretty sure I could plan an invasion, but don’t really want to find out. I’ve never built a wall, but I understand basic physics, so I think I’m good there. I’ve taken umpteen first aid classes, and had extensive physiology/anatomy classes, so setting a bone could be done, I’m pretty sure. Fighting and dying are both not really something I want to try out. But that’s not too bad a reckoning, right?
This is just awesome. I love the details in the reporting, like the fact that it takes 2 hours for the newspaper to download! Shows how far we’ve come.
Also, I <3 acoustic couplers.
The proposal that I put forward for a 1 hour class for incoming freshman at UTC was accepted! Here’s the title and description:
COURSE TITLE: Digital Revolution: Everything is different than everything before
COURSE DESCRIPTION:
The rise of the Internet and the conversion of popular media to digital forms (TV becomes YouTube, CD’s become iTunes) does far more than just make information portable. It effects the way we interact with it, create it, share it, and use it in our daily lives. This class will help you understand the ways that digital information changes the world you live in, and how the future might look given these changes. The class itself will be driven largely by student interests, but topics will include why the Internet is different than everything before it, what social information does to traditional publication models, and how the world is changing (or not) to meet the new information revolution.
Awesome! Can’t wait to get back into the classroom, even just a little.
I have so much hope for the country on this day…Obama, in his inaugural address, spoke to both the need for Science to be put back in place as a good and positive thing for the country and the world AND spoke to the fact that there are non-believers in the US, contrary to the beliefs of many. Am so, so, so happy right now.
I realized that not everyone who is attending Midwinter might be aware of the _awesome_ calendar of LITA events that is available via BIGWIG. So here it is, freely shared and embeddable and such.
Click on the day in question, and you’ll get a list of ALL the LITA events. Subscribe via RSS, or link up via iCal, it’s all there. And if it’s not, send me your gmail address and I’ll add you to the editors and you can add the thing you’re interested in. 🙂
As a part of the reappointment process at UTC, we’re required to be reviewed yearly by the Reappointment and Tenure Committee to ensure that we’re on the path to Tenure. One of the pieces of paperwork that they ask for is a Philosophy of Librarianship statement. I’m not sure how common this is with other academic institutions, but I thought that if anyone was wondering what something like this looked like, well, here’s mine.
WARNING: No library content is involved in this post. Thank you.
Nothing gets my hackles up more than the current fashion in the US of denigrating science as something to not be trusted. The list of absolutely insane beliefs that people cling to here in the US would take hours to enumerate, but for parents to threaten a scientist because he is doing good science is just…*boggle* Read this article in the NYT about Paul Offit and see what I mean.
It’s not that I don’t have sympathy for parents who have autistic children…I do. My heart breaks, and if I discovered that Eliza had a genetic disease I would be destroyed. But my emotional reaction to it doesn’t change the science, and the science says that vaccines don’t cause autism. On the contrary, vaccinations are arguably the single most important development in children’s health of the last 100 years.
There’s a lot of emotion around this subject. But the fact of the matter is that vaccinations save children’s lives. If you are a parent, please, please, please: Have your children vaccinated.