I hope that everyone will enjoy their Burns Night!
Just a bit of “to the haggis” for you…
Ye Pow’rs, wha mak mankind your care,
And dish them out their bill o’ fare,
Auld Scotland wants nae skinking ware
That jaups in luggies;
But, if ye wish her gratefu’ prayer
Gie her a haggis!
I’ll be in me kilt….
Here’s another in the long string of things that I find to disagree with Michael Gorman about. At the Online Information Conference in London, he came up with a few more priceless gems of wisdom (from Information World Review):
Controversy has broken out over the Google digitisation project with Michael Gorman, outspoken head of the American Library Association , slammed it as a waste of money. Speaking at the Online Information Conference in London, Gorman also attacked librarians for being “too interested in technologyâ€.
“…too interested in technology.” Perhaps he hasn’t noticed, but….that’s the way that our patrons are interacting with the information they need these days. I suppose we could go back to card catalogs, but I’m guessing we’ll get some pushback from our users.
His comments have met with opposition from librarians. “The Google project has been enthusiastically embraced and I think that is a mistake. I am not speaking on behalf of the ALA. That has no position on the Google digitisation project. I, on the other hand, do,†said Gorman.
Christ on a cracker…Gorman, the reason you’re invited to speak at things like the Online Information Conference is because you’re the ALA president. It certainly isn’t because you are forward-thinking and innovative.
“So we digitise – I would prefer to say atomise. Very little-used books are reduced to a bunch of paragraphs, searchable by free text searching, the very worst kind of searching.â€
I’m sorry…I can barely parse that last sentence. The very worst kind of searching? Being able to search the full text of a work…the “very worst” kind of searching? *boggle* I’ll give him that full-text searching with no ranking or other evaluatory device behind it might be bad…but that’s certainly not what anyone will be doing. Google certainly isn’t going to digitize thousands of works and then return full-text searches with random results based on the fact that the word “otter” is on page 5. It’s going to make very complicated ranking decisions, weight them, and return results with other factors taken into account. What are those factors? Could be lots of things, including bibliographic metadata or the last thing you clicked on…but it will be a damn sight better than current OPAC results. If you haven’t had a chance yet, Mr. Gorman, I recommend you take a look at the Univ. of California’s BSTF Final Report for a good summary of how our current OPAC/Bib. Services need to be altered.
“Google Book Search is not an effective way of finding books – it is better to go to a library catalogue or Amazon ,†he said
*sigh* Either of those might be decent choices if you know what you are looking for. With a title in hand, a syphilitic monkey could find a book on Amazon. The issue comes when you don’t have a title or author…just a topic or question. How good is your library OPAC at locating books based on topics, when the searcher isn’t knowledgable? I’m betting that Google Book Search will outperform many OPAC searches when doing an unsophisticated search. I wish my OPAC were as easy to use as Amazon.
Hope that everyone has a great 2006. I was going to follow Justin’s lead and take a look at the “most popular” posts and such for the year, but I swapped web providers midway through, and only have the more recent info. Plus, I’m lazy. And I’m in the middle of updating to WordPress 2.0. So that will have to wait.
Here’s hoping the 2006 kicks 2005’s ass. Cause 2005 wasn’t very kind.
Out of town for the holidays for the next few days, visiting family. Hope that everyone has safe travels, and I’ll see you all in a week or so.
Just a quick note to those that may have noticed a few odd posts over the last couple of days. I’ve set up a script via del.icio.us that feeds my blog my del.icio.us links on a daily basis, partially for my own edificiation, and partially to note on the blog what I’m interested in/researching each day. I’m using del.icio.us more and more every day it seems, and thought it might be interesting to have them posted here.
If it becomes too busy, or if anyone has any thoughts about it, let me know.
…but this is just too good to not post.
Here’s just one very, very small piece of this brilliant rant:
And guess who’s stealing Christmas, according to Gibson. Go on — guess. “A cabal of secularists, so-called humanists, trial lawyers, cultural relativists, and liberal, guilt-wracked Christians — not just Jewish people.†(Emphasis mine. Pure, unadulterated anti-semitism, his.) A cabal? Are you fucking kidding me?
and
But you boys at FOX still freak out every year about how everyone’s out to get your special trees. This is really the most important thing you have to talk about? Whether Target says Happy Holidays or Merry Christmas? Here’s a brainstorm: there’s a fucking war on. Our soldiers are out there dying while you guys do your 14th live feed of the day from WalMart to show us what good little consumers we are. What Would Jesus Do? He’d jump over that newsdesk and kick your ass for that shit. Are you sure you want to hang your journalism credentials on a story about what some guy calls a tree?
I’ve been a fan for years, but Penn just keeps saying what he believes, and I just keep loving it. Their show on Showtime, Bullshit!, is amazing, and one of these trips out to Vegas I’ll actually get to see them live. For now, I’ll just be blown away by the manner in which he sums up his wordview worldview (and mine) for NPR:
So, I’m saying, “This I believe: I believe there is no God.”
Having taken that step, it informs every moment of my life. I’m not greedy. I have love, blue skies, rainbows and Hallmark cards, and that has to be enough. It has to be enough, but it’s everything in the world and everything in the world is plenty for me. It seems just rude to beg the invisible for more. Just the love of my family that raised me and the family I’m raising now is enough that I don’t need heaven. I won the huge genetic lottery and I get joy every day.
Believing there’s no God means I can’t really be forgiven except by kindness and faulty memories. That’s good; it makes me want to be more thoughtful. I have to try to treat people right the first time around.
Believing there’s no God stops me from being solipsistic. I can read ideas from all different people from all different cultures. Without God, we can agree on reality, and I can keep learning where I’m wrong. We can all keep adjusting, so we can really communicate. I don’t travel in circles where people say, “I have faith, I believe this in my heart and nothing you can say or do can shake my faith.” That’s just a long-winded religious way to say, “shut up,” or another two words that the FCC likes less. But all obscenity is less insulting than, “How I was brought up and my imaginary friend means more to me than anything you can ever say or do.” So, believing there is no God lets me be proven wrong and that’s always fun. It means I’m learning something.
Believing there is no God means the suffering I’ve seen in my family, and indeed all the suffering in the world, isn’t caused by an omniscient, omnipresent, omnipotent force that isn’t bothered to help or is just testing us, but rather something we all may be able to help others with in the future. No God means the possibility of less suffering in the future.
I’m currently sitting in the Marriott Anaheim Convention Center, beside the Starbucks. I have a couple of hours to kill since I took an earlier flight than the people I’m meeting here, so I thought to myself: “Self…why don’t you pop open the ol’ laptop and get a little reading/browsing/work done in the meantime.” So I proceed to, confident that no hotel chain is still stupid enough to charge for wifi in their lobbies.
Of course, much like Space and Time, there is no limit to stupidity.
Not ONLY do they charge for WiFi access in the lobby, and not only do they ALSO charge for wired connections in their rooms…no one has the slightest clue about how the wifi works, charges, etc. I had to boot up and actually check the login page to see prices since no one in the hotel lobby had a clue.
This hotspot is controlled by some company called Ibahn, and even after getting to the page, my questions didn’t stop:
As you can see, there are two top choices: 24 hours for $9.95, or 1 day for $9.95. This left me pondering what possible difference there might be between the two that necessitated both choices. Do they not mean consecutive hours? 24 random hours? 24 hours of my choosing? You’d think that question might have come up a few times, and been answered….but no. Not anywhere in the terms of service, not anywhere I can find on the page at all. Just two choices that seem identical, but can’t possibly be since they are both there.
Ah well. I bit the bullet, since this will be paid for by the company I’m out here for eventually anyway. But boy could these guys use a lesson in the economics of wifi and the value of usability testing.
