Geek hobbies

It seems that this list of the top 10 geek hobbies is making its way around the Internet, so I might as well join the swarm of links.

I'm proud to say that only five of them apply to me. How glad I am that they didn't include model railroading. I'm not sure how one would assess its "damage to sex life" rating. "I'll be your steam engine, baby" might have a certain kind of sex appeal, but I doubt that very many women derive erotic thrills from talk of lost-wax castings, weathering with chalk and acrylic paint, or wireless DCC. Almost by definition, anything discussed on Slashdot can't be good.

Authors' Guild objects to Amazon fulltext searching

Others have commented on Amazon's recent addition of full-text searching to its website. The Authors' Guild doesn't seem to be impressed, and objects that the publishers do not have the right to supply full text access without the authors' permission. More discussion here, and here, and at the Volokh Conspiracy. One of their concerns is that students and others will use Amazon's fulltext snippets as a way to look up essays, chapters, or statements from books and print or otherwise use them without buying the book.

Yes, these are the same folks who pettishly whined a while back about Amazon offering used books for sale. Perhaps this time they will have a legal leg to stand on, at least until book publishers incorporate mandatory surrender of all electronic full text rights into their "boilerplate" contract, as many periodicals publishers did after the Tasini v. New York Times decision.

My own thoughts about the usefulness of this feature are mixed. I can imagine plenty of situations in which this kind of search might be useful, but in many other kinds of searches it's just plain annoying. "Googling" full text via Amazon may help find forgotten titles featuring a certain character, or referring to some specific person, place or thing, but as any librarian knows, there are times when it's more useful to search only within data fields of limited scope but particular importance, like "subject" or "author". Just imagine trying to look through every book that casually refers to, say, Abraham Lincoln. Wouldn't it be more useful, if you want information about Honest Abe, to limit your searching only to books that list him as a major subject heading? Or contained enough lengthy passages from his speeches and papers that he was listed as an author?

For example: when I searched Amazon for "Frisco Railroad", I got "Where the Red Fern Grows" as the number-one result. Now, it's very nice that that fictional boy and his fictional dogs went walking between the Frisco Railroad and the Illinois River, but it hardly gives me the maps of Newburg Yard or the diagrams of the 1306-class freight locomotives that I'm looking for. The phrase occurs only once in the book, according to Amazon, so it appears that they're ranking the search results at least in part according to popularity and/or sales. This is not necessarily good.

Spurious Patent Follies of 2003

Oh, look. "Southern Michigan University" is among the universities targeted by Acacia Research Corporation, which, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education, Volume 50, Issue 8, Page A38,

...holds 5 U.S. patents and 17 international patents in digital-media-transmission technology. The patents cover not technological details but concepts like transmitting video on demand from servers to users' machines.

Acacia has sent patent-infringement letters to an unknown number of colleges across the country, offering to overlook past infringement in exchange for the institution's signing on to "a special royalty rate of 2 percent of gross revenue from each online course that includes digital audio and/or video content."

Must remember: Books Are Bad. Books Are Bad. Everything's On The Internet....

After All, Everything's On The Internet Anyway

It turns out that the library at "Southern Michigan University" has at least one feature noteworthy enough to have been mentioned in the Chronicle of Higher Education. (Names have been changed to protect the innocent.)

First developed for the warehouse industry, the retrieval system is a vault, with books sitting in bins and arranged according to size, not subject, to save space....

.....A handful of college libraries have installed such automated systems, some more enthusiastically than others. "Southern Michigan University"'s was the second academic library in the country to set up a retrieval system, in 1998. (California State University at Northridge's was the first.) The library stores about 500,000 items -- more than half of its material -- in what staff members call the Automated Retrieval Collection.

"B", who chose the system as dean of learning resources and technology, says the university saved more than $8-million in construction costs, which would have gone toward bookshelves, but instead helped to pay for group-study areas, computer banks, and a television studio.

Asked how the system affected book circulation, he says: "I have no idea, and I don't care." The effectiveness of the library can't be judged on the basis of circulation, he argues, "because that's not what happens here anymore." Faculty members go to the nearby ... (name of institution omitted)... for serious research, and undergraduates do all of their research online now, he says.

Sigh. Wish me luck. At least I'm forewarned not to volunteer any information or ideas that contradict the Official Doctrine that Books Are Bad because Everything's On The Internet.

A glimpse into the Library of Dream

The American Library Association's catalog of posters and other library-publicity materials arrived today, and it includes a nifty poster and bookmark featuring Morpheus, the Lord of Dreams in Neil Gaiman's popular Sandman series of graphic novels. The poster looks good, but where's Lucien? He's the librarian of The Dreaming, after all!

The perils of freebies

The Washington Times today carries an article about the Council for American-Islamic Relations and its recent campaign of donating books to libraries. CAIR says the books are intended to promote harmonious understanding of Islam; critics charge that the books are pro-Islamic propaganda that deliberately obfuscate harsh passages from the Qu'ran and other elements of Islamic doctrine and practice.

I haven't seem the particular books in question, but I do recall seeing some materials that were donated to my former employer's library by an organization based in Riyadh, Saudi Arabia, and which raised similar issues. The books were quite clearly biased, and included strained reasoning which I would consider quite unconvincing coming from the mouth of a high school debater, much less a purportedly scholarly source. For example, one of the books, Woman in the Shade of Islam, justifies sex-based restrictions on women with the metaphorical argument that, if a ship had two groups of passengers who were assigned to different decks of the ship, it would be foolish for the group assigned to the lower deck to insist on drilling holes for water. The book also asserts that Islam is superior to other religions because it protects women from "being exposed to places of iniquity" such as nightclubs, theaters, etc. I've known more than one woman who would gladly eschew such "protection".

Despite this, I was disappointed that the library refused to make them available to the public. Flawed as they are, they offer a useful glimpse inside a mindset that has substantial significance in the modern world, just as the tracts and other materials put out by fundamentalist Christian churches and publishing houses in the U.S. are important sources for understanding the worldview of those who write them and read them. The danger would be in allowing only materials of this type to represent Islam, or Christianity. Or of excluding them entirely, and thus distorting the collection by omission.

The article also refers to Jehovah's Witnesses, Scientologists, Mormons, et al, who are also frequently eager to "help" the library by donating copies of their latest tracts, or in the case of Mormons, offering to "update" the library's collection by replacing old copies of the Book of Mormon or other documents with "newer", "more attractive" editions. This is one area where caution is justified, and older materials should not be blithely discarded. See Jerald and Sandra Tanner's analysis of changes in the Book of Mormon for an understanding of how such offers are not entirely motivated by charity. Religions which retroactively alter their scriptures while simultaneously claiming that those scriptures are infallible have a vested interest in removing public access to older editions.

Joe Bob would be proud

Interesting doings at the Kansas City, Kansas, public library: the 14th Annual Bad Film Festival.

Attention skywatchers

The gse-aa listserv predicts heightened auroral activity in coming days:

The Earth has been in a sector of the solar wind that is conducive to
the production of active aurora. Aurora should be visible near
midnight from the northern US, Iceland, Scotland, Southern
Scandinavia, Northern Russia, Tasmania, and Southern New Zealand.

This will continue through the weekend. The first solar flare in 52
days occurred yesterday the 19th. The main effects of this flare are
directed away from Earth, but the side effects should be enough to
increase activity by the night of the 22nd.

With any luck, I'll have something pretty to look at as I drive back north from Southern Michigan University on Thursday night.

Yet another crisis

Seems the media conglomerates' lobbyist-termites that infest our political system are active on yet another front in their ongoing war against fair use, public domain, and other traditional characteristics of enlightened intellectual property law.

As reported by IP Justice, the proposed "Free Trade Agreement of the Americas" would substantially modify intellectual-property laws in most Western-hemisphere countries. Among the mandatory changes to those nations' domestic laws which are incorporated in the draft intellectual property chapter of the treaty are the following:

* Mandatory adoption of the U.S.'s terms of copyright protection (life-plus-70 years, or 95 years for corporate media -- Part II, Section 3, Article 10)
* Mandatory adoption of prison-term penalties for "copyright piracy" (Part III, Article 4.1)
* Mandatory adoption of DMCA-type prohibitions against analysis or discussion of electronic security features (Part II, Section 3, Article 21)

There's also a reference to inserting the language of something called "Articles x to xx of Treaty for the Protection of Non-Copyrightable Elements of Databases - placeholder;]", which sounds like it was probably written by the same lobbyists who are pushing for HR 3261 to be rushed through the US Congress so that your local telephone company can copyright your telephone number and encyclopedia compilers can sue your local library for letting you look things up without paying them for a personal subscription .

I haven't read the whole thing yet, and probably won't, but I've spot-checked enough items from the IP Justice analysis to be confident that they're right to regard it as a threat to effective intellectual freedom. At best, it's a bullying attempt to impose Hollywood's demand for perpetual monopoly protection on an entire hemisphere without ever consulting the people upon whom it's being foisted. In the case of the "database protection" element, this may be the people of the United States itself, a fallback ploy in case people find out about HR 3261 and persuade their sometime representatives to consign it to a well-deserved place in legislative Gehenna.

Preemptive gratitude

Yours Truly recently received a valuable keepsake in the mail: a "signed" photograph of George and Laura Bush, along with an effusive note practically begging me to "become one of the first to join the Bush-Cheney '04 Team as a Charter Member in Michigan". After all, "Only with [my] help can the Bush-Cheney '04 campaign create a viable grassroots organization". Also included was a "Presidential Photo Receipt Confirmation Form", complete with checkboxes for my suggested donation of $100, $50, $25, or "other $".

A "grass roots" organization, "created" by an incumbent president's campaign staff? Sounds like Astroturf to me....

As flattered as I am that Mr. Bush and Mr. Cheney find my attention and my money so indispensible, I think I'll pass on the offer. The photograph ("suitable for framing!") may be useful as a prop should I be invited to interview at Thee University, though.

Don't call him a librarian!

The University of Texas at Austin is advertising on the Texas Library Association's jobline for a "Knowledge Gateway Metadata Analyst". It requires a master's degree in library science and two years of library experience, but heavens no, we can't call him a "librarian"!

You'll take what I give you and like it.

The following e'mail from Michigan's State Librarian, as sent to the MichLib-L listserv, serves as a good indicator of how libraries can expect to be treated by database publishers. Bear it in mind when considering the likely effects of HR 3261, discussed below, or the wisdom of making library services entirely dependent on such services. Ancestry.com obviously feels no obligation whatsoever to honor its contract in this case.

This message is from State Librarian Christie Brandau.

ANNOUNCEMENT REGARDING REMOTE ACCESS TO ANCESTRYPLUS

Ancestry.com, owner of the genealogical database AncestryPlus, has
terminated access to the database remotely (from your home or anywhere
outside a library building) through the Michigan eLibrary (MeL)
beginning Sunday evening, October 19. This announcement from
Ancestry.com came abruptly and without warning to the Library of
Michigan. When contacted, the company cited an increase in usage and
customer abuse as reasons for discontinuing the contracted provision.

The announcement from Ancestry.com is surprising and extremely
disappointing. However, AncestryPlus will still be available for
patrons to use free via MeL in local libraries.

Feel free to contact the company at Ancestry.com, 801-705-7000.
Ancestry.com is a part of Myfamily.com, Inc., 360 W. 4800 N, Provo, Utah
84604. They may also be reached at
http://ancestry.custhelp.com/cgi-bin/ancestry.cfg/php/enduser/ask.php.

Down the well-greased ways of paid political influence

HR 3261, a bill to allow database publishers to exercise monopoly control over the information cited in their databases, is obviously on a specially-prepared legislative fast track, and has already been rushed to approval in the House Judiciary Subcommittee on Courts, the Internet and Intellectual Property. Votes were party-line, with Republicans in favor of paying off the the well-monied publishing industry by approving the bill and Democrats opposing.

In an embarrassingly cowardly "I've-got-mine-Jack" moment, the Association of American Universities, the American Council on Education, and the National Association of State Universities and Land-Grant Colleges withdrew their opposition to the bill after legislators consented to throw them a bone by exempting universities and research labs from the prohibitions on disseminating information from databases.

The intent of the bill may be judged by the fact that an amendment offered by Rick Boucher, a Virginia Democrat, which would have exempted other libraries from such prohibitions, was explicitly voted down.

Allow me to repeat that for the benefit of those who were not listening. AN AMENDMENT PERMITTING LIBRARIES TO DISSEMINATE INFORMATION FROM DATABASES WITHOUT BEING SUED WAS EXPLICITLY VOTED DOWN.

Not exactly subtle, are they?

This information was primarily drawn from an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education, which does not (yet) have the power to sue me for discussing events and information that I read about there.

A heartwarming tale

The Chronicle of Higher Education today contains a wonderful account of a fellow who got his Masters' in Library Science and walked from there straight into a job as collection development specialist for Yale's literature collections. Isn't life wonderful?

Of course, he first got a PhD in English literature and spent five to ten years working the slave-labor disposable-adjunct track before giving up on what he had really wanted to do. No offense to anyone is intended here, but I'm beginning to get the impression that college libraries hire permanant staff only from the pool of PhD's who couldn't get a steady job in their first choice of profession. People who were interested in libraries from the start aren't welcome.

I.P.-o-mania

Plenty of intellectual-property issues in the past few days to comment on, from trivial inanity to potentially serious bills proposed in the Congress. Here we go:

Ghettopoly

Some of you may have heard of the controversy over Ghettopoly, a repulsive ripoff of Monopoly in which "playas" compete to "pimp ho's", sell crack, and put up crackhouses and "projects" instead of houses and hotels.

Obviously this is going to be offensive to many people on grounds of race, and there have been protests against the game in Philadelphia and other places. Personally, I find it just as offensive that the game frivolously glorifies stupid and destructive behavior like robbing banks, beating up "ho's", etc. As a clinically certified First Amendment fanatic, though, I can't justify supporting attempts to ban it because of its content. However, offensiveness is not the only problem here. It's also a pretty unimaginative ripoff of the venerable Parker Brothers' game, which blatantly imitates its structure and gameplay and clearly trades on its widely-recognized appearance and name for commercial gain. This led me to wonder whether Parker Brothers or the current holder of their trademarks would have standing to sue on intellectual-property grounds. Sure enough, it looks like Hasbro is doing so. It'll be interesting to see what develops. I have to admit that I find myself wondering whether I'd feel so supportive of Hasbro in this matter if their target weren't so unattractive.

Thanks to Loreen for mentioning it and inspiring me to go digging for more information.

Copyrighting facts

Traditionally, US courts have held that information itself, that is to say, isolated facts, as opposed to a unified work of creativity, cannot be copyrighted (Feist Publications v. Rural Telephone Service Company, Inc., 499 U.S. 340 (1991) ). That will change if industry lobbyists have their way and get HR 3261 , the so-called "Database and Collections of Information Misappropriation Act", through Congress. The bill may make it possible for database publishers to prohibit libraries from publicly disseminating information from their databases -- a deathblow to libraries which have made themselves dependent on such databases, and a significant restriction on citizens' access to information through local libraries or state-level library consortia.

From the bill:

SEC. 3. PROHIBITION AGAINST MISAPPROPRIATION OF DATABASES.

(a) LIABILITY- Any person who makes available in commerce to others a quantitatively substantial part of the information in a database generated, gathered, or maintained by another person, knowing that such making available in commerce is without the authorization of that person (including a successor in interest) or that person's licensee, when acting within the scope of its license, shall be liable for the remedies set forth in section 7 if--

(1) the database was generated, gathered, or maintained through a substantial expenditure of financial resources or time;

(2) the unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner and inflicts injury on the database or a product or service offering access to multiple databases; and

(3) the ability of other parties to free ride on the efforts of the plaintiff would so reduce the incentive to produce the product or service that its existence or quality would be substantially threatened.

(b) INJURY- For purposes of subsection (a), the term `inflicts an injury' means serving as a functional equivalent in the same market as the database in a manner that causes the displacement, or the disruption of the sources, of sales, licenses, advertising, or other revenue.

(c) TIME SENSITIVE- In determining whether an unauthorized making available in commerce occurs in a time sensitive manner, the court shall consider the temporal value of the information in the database, within the context of the industry sector involved.

More commentary here, and here, and here, and here. The Association of Research Libraries has a timeline of legislative and political activity on this issue here.

Thanks to the clever folks at ALAWON for mentioning this in their newsletter.

Black Box Voting

Diebold, the company that manufactures and heavily lobbies for the use of computerized voting machines, is using the DMCA to squelch discussion of flaws in its machines, according to the current issue of Library Juice. EFF to the rescue!

This has been an ongoing issue. Many commentators have noted flaws in the machines' security, which raise the ugly specter of elections being decided by which political party's black-ops teams hire the better team of hackers. With phantom electronic votes, of course, there would be no embarrassing paper trail to be re-counted. Whoever hacked into or otherwise controlled the machines could simply declare a winner. Diebold has, according to documents published here and elsewhere, left gaping holes in the security features of their voting machines' auditing routines, the very feature that guards against such tampering, and appears determined not to fix them.

I don't know about you, but when I have something that absolutely, positively must be preserved in an undisputably accurate form, I print it out. Hanging chads or no hanging chads, a hard-copy paper trail is at least auditable and re-countable.

Whining works, Part Two

This whining stuff is amazing. I got another call for an interview yesterday, this one at a place I'll call Southern Michigan University, which is located in one of those "great festering urban masses" that I referred to yesterday. The Fates must be snickering.

Your Tax Dollars At ... oh well. Never mind.

The Great and Sovereign State of Michigan has decided, in its wisdom, that it will no longer produce the simplified EZ tax form. Furthermore, it will no longer distribute tax forms through college libraries. No doubt the student population will appreciate this wisdom. I wonder whether they'll rate Governor Granholm "hot" as a result? From the Michigan Electronic Library's Government Documents Specialist, via the MichLib-L listserv:

The MI Dept. of Treasury sent out a second letter to academic institutions
totally dropping them from the program. In other words, colleges and
universities in Michigan will not receive ANY paper forms, reproducibles,
etc. What they will get is a poster.

As we pointed out to Treasury, students, faculty and staff who still want
paper forms will now be sent to the public library for tax materials. So,
while supplies of forms for public libraries are being cut by 25% or more,
the demand for forms will only grow. And academic libraries are left high
and dry.

That better be one impressive poster.

I'm not sure why this surprises me. After all, this is the same state that recently decided there was no need for unemployment-office locations in the entire upper peninsula. After all, we all know how stable the jobs are in the industries which dominate the upper peninsula. Tourism. Logging. Mining. (Not to mention, um, education.)

But from a political standpoint, the great festering urban masses of the lower peninsula are where the votes are. So I guess that's the most profitable place to pander.

From the Department of Unsurprising Discoveries:

The Chronicle of Higher Education discovers, to its dismay, that college students evaluate their professors for superficial reasons:

* GOOD-LOOKING PROFESSORS consistently outscore less attractive
ones on student evaluations of teaching, a new study finds.
--> SEE http://chronicle.com/jobs/2003/10/2003101501c.htm

Ratemyprofessors figured this out some time ago, and included "pepper" ratings on its website so that lovestruck, vengeful, or disgusted students could express their views on whether professors were "hot or not". Mercifully, they do not add up and display negative "hotness totals".

Whining works, apparently.

After whining piteously about my boring life yesterday, I received another request for a telephone interview, this one from a place I'll call Big State University. It's a state university with 17000 undergraduate students, located in a flat, rectangular midwestern state best known for agriculture and limestone, one well known to Carlos.

The telephone interview with Down East State U. was fairly informal. I think I avoided blurting anything terribly embarrassing. Interestingly, one of the four people on the search committee was a student. This is something I saw at a previous interview at a small junior college in Wisconsin, but I haven't seen it yet at the university level.

No news

Pablo recently mentioned that it seems I'm spending a lot of pixels discussing politics and events rather than myself lately. There happens to be a rational reason for this. My life is pretty d*mn boring right now. Last weekend, in between marathon sessions of Alpha Centauri, I got correction letters mailed out to all the places I applied to in the month of August, along with a couple of new applications for positions advertised in the last week. I note, however, that I have already received thanks-but-no-thanks letters in response to many of the August applications, so I wonder whether it's worth the trouble of delving further back into the July applications.

One glimmer of interest: I have an upcoming telephone interview with a place I'll call Down East State University. This was one I had given up on a while back, since their original position description referred to a start date of September 1. Perhaps their first choice backed out on them?

Downeast appears to be in one of the few places in the eastern contiguous United States that can compete with northern Michigan for remoteness and frigidity. It's about as far north and east as you can go without treading salt water or becoming Canadian. I searched the Chronicle of Higher Education and found about five articles that mention them, the most entertaining being a description of their athletic program's remarkably rigorous winter fitness exercises, which apparently involve running for two hours at a time in snowshoes.

On the other hand, they do seem to have some strong environmental and ecological study programs, and it looks like it could be an interesting small-town area with remarkable scenery and surroundings. And it pays better than my current gig.

One of the local theaters is showing American Splendor, and it sounds like it might be interesting enough to see. If anyone has seen it and has comments, thoughts, or rotten tomatoes to throw, let me know.