The God of the Gaps shrinks (again)
Ever since the Victorian era, when scientific discoveries such as Darwin's theory of evolution first started to seriously threaten established religious beliefs, a certain subset of people who are not comfortable with either outright atheism or dogmatic Creationism have adopted the fallback position of asserting that belief in God is necessary because, after all, human science can't explain everything. This is sometimes called the "God-of-the-gaps" position. The problem is, of course, that such a God is destined to shrink ever smaller as the gaps in human knowledge which He serves to fill in like so much metaphysical Bondo continue to shrink.
Consider, for example, this story from USA Today, which describes how a research group has managed to create a virus that reproduces itself, thus infringing on territory -- creating life -- which has heretofore been cited as an exclusive province of the God-of-the-Gaps. Creating a virus that reproduces itself is admittedly less spectacular than producing men from clay or women from spare ribs, but it does appear that the Gap just shrunk by a noticable amount.
Saturday, November 22, 2003
Happy Pills for everyone! (Or, It's Something In The Water)
It appears that before long we'll all be on Prozac, whether we want to or not.
According to the article, a researcher at Thee U. made these disturbing discoveries in a reservoir near Denton, Texas. I've lived in both places. No wonder I'm weird.
It appears that before long we'll all be on Prozac, whether we want to or not.
According to the article, a researcher at Thee U. made these disturbing discoveries in a reservoir near Denton, Texas. I've lived in both places. No wonder I'm weird.
Linkstorm!
The fact that I haven't been blogging much does not indicate that I've failed to notice any interesting news stories. It just means I haven't taken the time to post anything about them. So the next five or six postings here are going to be various news stories that have caught my eye over the past week. Feel free to comment. Or not.
The fact that I haven't been blogging much does not indicate that I've failed to notice any interesting news stories. It just means I haven't taken the time to post anything about them. So the next five or six postings here are going to be various news stories that have caught my eye over the past week. Feel free to comment. Or not.
Returning from orbit
It hasn't been my intention to let the Hill devolve into desuetude, or to once-a-week posting. Unfortunately, working until 9 or 9:30 p.m. two or three times a week, and then having to get up and moving by 8:00 a.m., has severely diminished my supply of that most basic raw material of blogging, idle time. Perhaps matters will change as I get re-accustomed to life as a wageslave.
It certainly appears that social life will not interfere with blogging. Other than work acquaintances, with whom any personal interaction must be limited due to the ephemeral nature of the job and the common-sense admonition "don't sh*t where you eat", I know only one person in the entire southeastern portion of the state, and she lives about an hour's drive away. There's a group of people from the library who meet weekly for dinner at various local restaurants, which is a pleasant way to sample the many nearby culinary offerings, and there is a modular model railroad club which I will probably join. Other than that, so far, zilch. (Although there are plenty of young and attractive undergraduates of the opposite sex around, such are verboten fruit to faculty members, especially lowly untenured ones!)
In some ways, the town I've moved to resembles what Walker Percy called a "non-place". That is to say, like Covington, Louisiana, where Percy made his home, it has little dramatic local history, no flamboyant eccentricities, no unusually beautiful or hideous natural surroundings or any other characteristics that demand attention. Perhaps this will have the salubrious effect of encouraging me to concentrate my efforts on career advancement and/or personal development. Perhaps.
It hasn't been my intention to let the Hill devolve into desuetude, or to once-a-week posting. Unfortunately, working until 9 or 9:30 p.m. two or three times a week, and then having to get up and moving by 8:00 a.m., has severely diminished my supply of that most basic raw material of blogging, idle time. Perhaps matters will change as I get re-accustomed to life as a wageslave.
It certainly appears that social life will not interfere with blogging. Other than work acquaintances, with whom any personal interaction must be limited due to the ephemeral nature of the job and the common-sense admonition "don't sh*t where you eat", I know only one person in the entire southeastern portion of the state, and she lives about an hour's drive away. There's a group of people from the library who meet weekly for dinner at various local restaurants, which is a pleasant way to sample the many nearby culinary offerings, and there is a modular model railroad club which I will probably join. Other than that, so far, zilch. (Although there are plenty of young and attractive undergraduates of the opposite sex around, such are verboten fruit to faculty members, especially lowly untenured ones!)
In some ways, the town I've moved to resembles what Walker Percy called a "non-place". That is to say, like Covington, Louisiana, where Percy made his home, it has little dramatic local history, no flamboyant eccentricities, no unusually beautiful or hideous natural surroundings or any other characteristics that demand attention. Perhaps this will have the salubrious effect of encouraging me to concentrate my efforts on career advancement and/or personal development. Perhaps.
Saturday, November 15, 2003
www.sacred-texts.com
A site which may be of some interest to Carlos, Pablo, and others. Perhaps Pablo won't have to drive back to Archer City for that multi-volume set of the Babylonian Talmud after all.
(Link ripped from current issue of Library Juice.)
A site which may be of some interest to Carlos, Pablo, and others. Perhaps Pablo won't have to drive back to Archer City for that multi-volume set of the Babylonian Talmud after all.
(Link ripped from current issue of Library Juice.)
Matchmaker, Matchmaker....
Thanks to Louise for this "plain-dealing" response to Dennis Kucinich's well-publicized quest for a prospective First Lady to go with his presidential aspirations.
"First of all: Never, ever, ever entrust your romantic life to Fox [television] ...."
Thanks to Louise for this "plain-dealing" response to Dennis Kucinich's well-publicized quest for a prospective First Lady to go with his presidential aspirations.
"First of all: Never, ever, ever entrust your romantic life to Fox [television] ...."
PhD's in libraries redux
The estimable John Berry III sounds off in Library Journal about the tendency for university libraries to favor PhD's over MLS's. An interesting counterpart to the Chronicle of Higher Education article that I mentioned on October 17. Yale University figures prominently in both articles.
The estimable John Berry III sounds off in Library Journal about the tendency for university libraries to favor PhD's over MLS's. An interesting counterpart to the Chronicle of Higher Education article that I mentioned on October 17. Yale University figures prominently in both articles.
Well, I'm back
After a period of what Carlos would call "desuetude", the "Hill" is once more active. It doesn't seem like a week since I last updated the blog, but I suppose that lack of time for weblogging and personal communications comes with being employed. I suppose I'll have to get used to it.
The job at "Huron State" is quite different from my previous gig. To begin with, there's no nice, enclosed office for me, only a Dilbertesque cubicle located between the departmental coffee machine and the copier. Fortunately, this means that I get to eavesdrop on incautious gossippers. Unfortunately, it means that blogging or checking personal e'mail from work is even more inadvisable than normal.
The office coffee machine, by the way, is an olive-green monstrosity, held together with rubber bands, which splutters and smokes like an ailing steam locomotive and has the interesting habit of dribbling coffee everywhere but into the pot. Worse, it's usually empty. Note to self: Buy el-cheapo coffee machine that works, install it in cubicle, set timer to make coffee automatically at 8:50 a.m., watch popularity soar! (Beware of time-wasting conversations, though...)
Reference duty here is quite different from at my previous employer. "Huron State" depends even more on electronic resources than they did, and makes it more difficult to access older printed materials. The fact that students do not have mandatory laptop computers is to some extent balanced out by the fact that the library does not (yet) charge money for printouts of electronic documents.
The "Information Desk" here is located in a three-story-tall central atrium, close to the circulation desk and an extensive bank of computers for student use. The printed reference collection and a few specialized non-circulating collections (law, business, maps, and university theses) are the only printed materials on the first floor, and they are all located far enough from the reference desk to make it awkward to use them during a typical reference query. The publicly-shelved periodicals, government documents, and books are all on different floors, which makes it difficult to refer users to them if the user is not already familiar with the layout of the building. At my previous job, where most of the printed periodicals, government documents, maps and reference books were within sight of the reference desk, I could simply walk with the patron over to the shelves that held the desired journal article or reference book, and in the process make sure that it really was what they needed. Not so here. As a result, I never feel quite sure that that patron I sent up to the third floor with the list of call numbers actually found what he/she wanted, or just got lost, wandered around for a while, and gave up. (I suspect that any day now, we'll find one of those poor students wandering around the second floor gov-docs shelves with glazed eyes and symptoms of severe dehydration, twitching and moaning and mumbling disjointed pieces of SuDocs call numbers.)
I mentioned before that this institution had made the controversial decision to place 50% of its printed collection in storage rather than on publicly browsable shelves. This does not turn out to be quite as horrible as it sounds, since such materials are findable through the online catalog and (at least nominally) retrievable in 15 minutes or less. This is accomplished through the use of a huge, two-story-deep vault in the basement of the building, where the books and old journals are stored in tubs according to size and automatically retrieved by robotic devices whenever requested through the online catalog. The electronic "request" procedure, which requires the use of a university ID number or a guest "courtesy" number, is somewhat confusing and probably deters a significant number of users. And as I mentioned before, it makes it extremely difficult to browse the library's holdings in an organized fashion.
This was demonstrated a couple of days ago by a fellow who came to the desk wanting biographies and other materials on Cervantes. After showing him a couple of entries in literature reference sources and checking the online catalog, which assured me that the library owned several biographies of Cervantes, I sent him upstairs to the appropriate Library of Congress call number. (LC, unlike the Dewey system, shelves biographies and criticism of authors with their works, rather than hiding them in a rarely-visited separate section of the library.) Unfortunately, it seems that the biographies of Cervantes were among the items exiled to the Robotic Dungeon, so the student was shortly back at the ref. desk informing me that he had found only copies of Don Quixote and some collections of criticism, but not a single biography of the author. A quick course in storage-retrieval requests followed, as well as a mental note to myself that I couldn't make the same kinds of assumptions about browsing the shelves here that I could in other libraries.
On the positive side, it's better than discarding them, and a 15 minute retrieval time is far, far preferable to the week-long waits that I've experienced elsewhere. But if you don't know what to ask for, or if the catalog record is skimpy or screwed up, you'll never know what you missed, since it's not on a publicly-viewable shelf where you could see it.
Another positive note: In looking up a number of books mentioned in the current newsletter of the state historical society, I found that Huron State has purchased most of them already, and has another one on order. Ironically, they're doing a better job of acquiring recently published materials on upper-peninsula and Great Lakes history than my previous employer, despite the latter's location. This may be a result of having a healthier acquisitions budget, or it may be a result of the fact that Huron State actually has permanent staff librarians who are interested in history, as opposed to my previous employer, where none of the permanent reference staff seemed to have any particular interest in that discipline, and acquisitions in that field lagged to such an extent that the history faculty eventually started discussing ways to establish their own departmental library so they could get the information they needed for their research and publishing.
After a period of what Carlos would call "desuetude", the "Hill" is once more active. It doesn't seem like a week since I last updated the blog, but I suppose that lack of time for weblogging and personal communications comes with being employed. I suppose I'll have to get used to it.
The job at "Huron State" is quite different from my previous gig. To begin with, there's no nice, enclosed office for me, only a Dilbertesque cubicle located between the departmental coffee machine and the copier. Fortunately, this means that I get to eavesdrop on incautious gossippers. Unfortunately, it means that blogging or checking personal e'mail from work is even more inadvisable than normal.
The office coffee machine, by the way, is an olive-green monstrosity, held together with rubber bands, which splutters and smokes like an ailing steam locomotive and has the interesting habit of dribbling coffee everywhere but into the pot. Worse, it's usually empty. Note to self: Buy el-cheapo coffee machine that works, install it in cubicle, set timer to make coffee automatically at 8:50 a.m., watch popularity soar! (Beware of time-wasting conversations, though...)
Reference duty here is quite different from at my previous employer. "Huron State" depends even more on electronic resources than they did, and makes it more difficult to access older printed materials. The fact that students do not have mandatory laptop computers is to some extent balanced out by the fact that the library does not (yet) charge money for printouts of electronic documents.
The "Information Desk" here is located in a three-story-tall central atrium, close to the circulation desk and an extensive bank of computers for student use. The printed reference collection and a few specialized non-circulating collections (law, business, maps, and university theses) are the only printed materials on the first floor, and they are all located far enough from the reference desk to make it awkward to use them during a typical reference query. The publicly-shelved periodicals, government documents, and books are all on different floors, which makes it difficult to refer users to them if the user is not already familiar with the layout of the building. At my previous job, where most of the printed periodicals, government documents, maps and reference books were within sight of the reference desk, I could simply walk with the patron over to the shelves that held the desired journal article or reference book, and in the process make sure that it really was what they needed. Not so here. As a result, I never feel quite sure that that patron I sent up to the third floor with the list of call numbers actually found what he/she wanted, or just got lost, wandered around for a while, and gave up. (I suspect that any day now, we'll find one of those poor students wandering around the second floor gov-docs shelves with glazed eyes and symptoms of severe dehydration, twitching and moaning and mumbling disjointed pieces of SuDocs call numbers.)
I mentioned before that this institution had made the controversial decision to place 50% of its printed collection in storage rather than on publicly browsable shelves. This does not turn out to be quite as horrible as it sounds, since such materials are findable through the online catalog and (at least nominally) retrievable in 15 minutes or less. This is accomplished through the use of a huge, two-story-deep vault in the basement of the building, where the books and old journals are stored in tubs according to size and automatically retrieved by robotic devices whenever requested through the online catalog. The electronic "request" procedure, which requires the use of a university ID number or a guest "courtesy" number, is somewhat confusing and probably deters a significant number of users. And as I mentioned before, it makes it extremely difficult to browse the library's holdings in an organized fashion.
This was demonstrated a couple of days ago by a fellow who came to the desk wanting biographies and other materials on Cervantes. After showing him a couple of entries in literature reference sources and checking the online catalog, which assured me that the library owned several biographies of Cervantes, I sent him upstairs to the appropriate Library of Congress call number. (LC, unlike the Dewey system, shelves biographies and criticism of authors with their works, rather than hiding them in a rarely-visited separate section of the library.) Unfortunately, it seems that the biographies of Cervantes were among the items exiled to the Robotic Dungeon, so the student was shortly back at the ref. desk informing me that he had found only copies of Don Quixote and some collections of criticism, but not a single biography of the author. A quick course in storage-retrieval requests followed, as well as a mental note to myself that I couldn't make the same kinds of assumptions about browsing the shelves here that I could in other libraries.
On the positive side, it's better than discarding them, and a 15 minute retrieval time is far, far preferable to the week-long waits that I've experienced elsewhere. But if you don't know what to ask for, or if the catalog record is skimpy or screwed up, you'll never know what you missed, since it's not on a publicly-viewable shelf where you could see it.
Another positive note: In looking up a number of books mentioned in the current newsletter of the state historical society, I found that Huron State has purchased most of them already, and has another one on order. Ironically, they're doing a better job of acquiring recently published materials on upper-peninsula and Great Lakes history than my previous employer, despite the latter's location. This may be a result of having a healthier acquisitions budget, or it may be a result of the fact that Huron State actually has permanent staff librarians who are interested in history, as opposed to my previous employer, where none of the permanent reference staff seemed to have any particular interest in that discipline, and acquisitions in that field lagged to such an extent that the history faculty eventually started discussing ways to establish their own departmental library so they could get the information they needed for their research and publishing.
Saturday, November 08, 2003
Thoughts of a Rent-a-Librarian:
I'm blogging tonight from a cheap apartment near a place I'll call "Huron State University", where I've just begun a six-month temporary contract. I can't regard this as an end to the job search, but perhaps it will stop the financial bleeding for a while.
Now if I can only find a REAL job.
On the positive side, the surrounding city has several thousand college students and faculty and a correspondingly large number of theaters, bookstores, and other ways to spend money productively. Unfortunately, this university feels no particular need to pay a decent salary to term employees. That honor, in academia, is apparently reserved for stellar performers like the former president of my former employer. After running it into the ground financially and announcing that, as a result, the university would lay off hundreds of staff and abolish several departments and programs (including the only public radio and television stations within 150 miles), she made a tearful, public pledge to forgo all future salary increases from said employer. True to her word, within two months she jumped ship to a larger university, where she's currently receiving a cool quarter-million a year and free use of a university-supplied house and Lincoln Towncar. (See last paragraph in this story.)
Isn't it nice to see Virtue Rewarded?
That's all for now. I'm off to see whether the local repertory-theater company can do a creditable job with George Bernard Shaw's Candida. Of course, I won't get any staff or faculty discount, since the university's bureaucracy is still claiming that I don't exist because I'm not in the computer network, and therefore can't have a university ID.
I'm blogging tonight from a cheap apartment near a place I'll call "Huron State University", where I've just begun a six-month temporary contract. I can't regard this as an end to the job search, but perhaps it will stop the financial bleeding for a while.
Now if I can only find a REAL job.
On the positive side, the surrounding city has several thousand college students and faculty and a correspondingly large number of theaters, bookstores, and other ways to spend money productively. Unfortunately, this university feels no particular need to pay a decent salary to term employees. That honor, in academia, is apparently reserved for stellar performers like the former president of my former employer. After running it into the ground financially and announcing that, as a result, the university would lay off hundreds of staff and abolish several departments and programs (including the only public radio and television stations within 150 miles), she made a tearful, public pledge to forgo all future salary increases from said employer. True to her word, within two months she jumped ship to a larger university, where she's currently receiving a cool quarter-million a year and free use of a university-supplied house and Lincoln Towncar. (See last paragraph in this story.)
Isn't it nice to see Virtue Rewarded?
That's all for now. I'm off to see whether the local repertory-theater company can do a creditable job with George Bernard Shaw's Candida. Of course, I won't get any staff or faculty discount, since the university's bureaucracy is still claiming that I don't exist because I'm not in the computer network, and therefore can't have a university ID.
Saturday, November 01, 2003
A belated note
Since I mentioned the new look of The Librarian's Rant recently, I should also mention that Carlos's Biblioblog also has a new and spiffy look (now with added Weatherpixie!)
Since I mentioned the new look of The Librarian's Rant recently, I should also mention that Carlos's Biblioblog also has a new and spiffy look (now with added Weatherpixie!)
A trip down memory lane : M.U.L.E.
Yesterday, while pondering on things geekish, I found myself absentmindedly humming the theme from a computer game I haven't played for ten or fifteen years: M.U.L.E.
Ah, the memories: the blocky Commodore-64 graphics.... the skanky carpet and sofa of a friend's family's game room.... the salty snacks and gallons of whatever sugary, caffienated carbonated liquid happened to be on sale from Skaggs Alpha-Beta or Brookshires... the bleary-eyed buzz of stumbling outside and navigating home in the eerie quiet of 3 a.m. in suburbia, or the pale light of impending dawn....
Taking this as the sign from the gods that it clearly was, I did a bit of websearching and found that I am not the only one to fondly remember this long-unavailable game. Earlier this year, Salon published an article about the game's creator, Dan/Dani Burten, which is as much an indictment of the electronic gaming industry as it is the story of one person's tragedy. A planned re-release of the game in the 1990's was apparently dropped when Burten refused to accede to the boardroom boys' demands for "guns and bombs", an incredibly clueless demand in dealing with a game whose unique and defining characteristic was its simple but very nearly pure theoretical model of classical economic competition. It's not as if there's any shortage of guns and bombs in the putrid swamp of indistinguishable, interchangable first-person-shooter games that have flooded the market. (Considering that Burten was at that time undergoing a sex-change operation, the demand for "guns and bombs" was also a particularly unfortunate double-entendre.)
As a result, although the game is fondly, even reverently, remembered by gaming geeks, it is effectively lost in the multiple morasses of corporate indifference, superceded computer systems, and vague confusion about who owns the intellectual property rights. There is a website, World of M.U.L.E., with information about the game and various copycats and clones, and a Dani Bunten Berry memorial webpage with information about Burten and his/her best-known creation, but apparently no readily available version of the game which is compatible with contemporary computers. The closest copycat seems to be something called "Space Ho.R.S.E.", which supposedly is downloadable in a free demo version, but the download didn't go so well over my dialup connection.
Oh well, at least I can still enjoy the cheesy but still oddly catchy theme music.
Yesterday, while pondering on things geekish, I found myself absentmindedly humming the theme from a computer game I haven't played for ten or fifteen years: M.U.L.E.
Ah, the memories: the blocky Commodore-64 graphics.... the skanky carpet and sofa of a friend's family's game room.... the salty snacks and gallons of whatever sugary, caffienated carbonated liquid happened to be on sale from Skaggs Alpha-Beta or Brookshires... the bleary-eyed buzz of stumbling outside and navigating home in the eerie quiet of 3 a.m. in suburbia, or the pale light of impending dawn....
Taking this as the sign from the gods that it clearly was, I did a bit of websearching and found that I am not the only one to fondly remember this long-unavailable game. Earlier this year, Salon published an article about the game's creator, Dan/Dani Burten, which is as much an indictment of the electronic gaming industry as it is the story of one person's tragedy. A planned re-release of the game in the 1990's was apparently dropped when Burten refused to accede to the boardroom boys' demands for "guns and bombs", an incredibly clueless demand in dealing with a game whose unique and defining characteristic was its simple but very nearly pure theoretical model of classical economic competition. It's not as if there's any shortage of guns and bombs in the putrid swamp of indistinguishable, interchangable first-person-shooter games that have flooded the market. (Considering that Burten was at that time undergoing a sex-change operation, the demand for "guns and bombs" was also a particularly unfortunate double-entendre.)
As a result, although the game is fondly, even reverently, remembered by gaming geeks, it is effectively lost in the multiple morasses of corporate indifference, superceded computer systems, and vague confusion about who owns the intellectual property rights. There is a website, World of M.U.L.E., with information about the game and various copycats and clones, and a Dani Bunten Berry memorial webpage with information about Burten and his/her best-known creation, but apparently no readily available version of the game which is compatible with contemporary computers. The closest copycat seems to be something called "Space Ho.R.S.E.", which supposedly is downloadable in a free demo version, but the download didn't go so well over my dialup connection.
Oh well, at least I can still enjoy the cheesy but still oddly catchy theme music.
Friday, October 31, 2003
Scary thought for Halloween
Earlier today I referred to Google not being as Evil(TM) as Some Other Companies. Maybe I spoke too soon.
Say it ain't so, Sergey!
Earlier today I referred to Google not being as Evil(TM) as Some Other Companies. Maybe I spoke too soon.
Say it ain't so, Sergey!
More sound and fury about scholarly periodicals
According to the most recent issue of Library Juice, a group of researchers in the University of California system are calling for a boycott of Cell Press, a subsidiary of academic uber-publisher Elsevier which produces an array of astonishingly overpriced scientific journals. ( $90,000 ?!? )
Will boycotts like this, aided by constructive acts of rebellion like Public Library of Science, which recently inaugurated a free, peer-reviewed online biology journal, alleviate the crisis? Stay tuned.
(Thanks to Carlos for letting me know about PLOS: Biology.)
According to the most recent issue of Library Juice, a group of researchers in the University of California system are calling for a boycott of Cell Press, a subsidiary of academic uber-publisher Elsevier which produces an array of astonishingly overpriced scientific journals. ( $90,000 ?!? )
Will boycotts like this, aided by constructive acts of rebellion like Public Library of Science, which recently inaugurated a free, peer-reviewed online biology journal, alleviate the crisis? Stay tuned.
(Thanks to Carlos for letting me know about PLOS: Biology.)
Here today, gone next budget year
From time to time people accuse me of being a Luddite because I express skepticism about the permanance of "electronically-archived" documents. Those people should note that, according to ALAWON, the newsletter of the American Library Association's Washington office, a bill currently before the Congress, HR 2989 as approved by the Senate, would remove funding for the National Archives' Electronic Records Archive, which was intended to "capture, make available, and preserve crucial electronic government information", especially the digital-only documents which make up an increasing percentage of government records and which cannot be collected or preserved in the traditional fashion by the government-depository library program.
Of course, that's not the politicians' and bureaucrats' problem. They'd just as soon the records of their activities disappeared before the next election anyway, and any number of industry lobbyists would be very happy indeed if information embarrassing to their employers disappeared from the public record.
The House version of the bill has apparently retained this funding, meaning that the conflict will have to be worked out in a conference committee.
From time to time people accuse me of being a Luddite because I express skepticism about the permanance of "electronically-archived" documents. Those people should note that, according to ALAWON, the newsletter of the American Library Association's Washington office, a bill currently before the Congress, HR 2989 as approved by the Senate, would remove funding for the National Archives' Electronic Records Archive, which was intended to "capture, make available, and preserve crucial electronic government information", especially the digital-only documents which make up an increasing percentage of government records and which cannot be collected or preserved in the traditional fashion by the government-depository library program.
Of course, that's not the politicians' and bureaucrats' problem. They'd just as soon the records of their activities disappeared before the next election anyway, and any number of industry lobbyists would be very happy indeed if information embarrassing to their employers disappeared from the public record.
The House version of the bill has apparently retained this funding, meaning that the conflict will have to be worked out in a conference committee.
Google, Amazon, what's the difference?
Publisher's Weekly reports that Google apparently is pursuing plans to supply fulltext searching of books. Amazon is not alone, although Google is not (yet) a major competitor in the book/media retail business.
It's fortunate that the folks at Google seem to be less Evil (TM) than certain other computer-'n'-internet-related companies. Otherwise I'd be scared that they were about to Take Over The World (TM).
Publisher's Weekly reports that Google apparently is pursuing plans to supply fulltext searching of books. Amazon is not alone, although Google is not (yet) a major competitor in the book/media retail business.
It's fortunate that the folks at Google seem to be less Evil (TM) than certain other computer-'n'-internet-related companies. Otherwise I'd be scared that they were about to Take Over The World (TM).
Wednesday, October 29, 2003
Another solar flare
Another alert from the gse-aa mailing list, for those who might be interested:
A major solar event occurred at 1102 GMT on Oct 28th, facing the
Earth. It was three hours long and left the sun at 1200 to 2000 km
per second. The shock should arrive at Earth as early as the
afternoon of the 29th in Europe (4 PM GMT)and as late as 2 AM GMT on
the 30th.
Europeans will be able to see the aurora probably as far south as
Southern France, since it should be over Paris by midnight.
It will be night in Australia and New Zealand if it arrives at 1100
GMT. This flare is probably large enough to approach mainland
Australia and be visible from the North Island in New Zealand, so it
may be worth staying up to see.
Russia, north of 50 deg latitude will be well placed on the night of
the 29/30 to see the aurora from this flare.
Observers in the USA should not be discouraged that it will arrive
during the day of the 29th. This flare is of a magnitude that should
lead to aurora visible over the entire continental US on the evening
of the 29th. It may be on the northern horizon for those in Florida,
Texas, and Southern California, but it should be visible.
The best viewing is from a dark area, even your back yard, with a
view to the northern horizon. Look out at the sky every half hour.
Typically, an intensification occurs every two hours, lasting about
1/2 hour. The maximum activity is usually around 11pm to midnight.
Prediction by [Chuck Deehr]
Another alert from the gse-aa mailing list, for those who might be interested:
A major solar event occurred at 1102 GMT on Oct 28th, facing the
Earth. It was three hours long and left the sun at 1200 to 2000 km
per second. The shock should arrive at Earth as early as the
afternoon of the 29th in Europe (4 PM GMT)and as late as 2 AM GMT on
the 30th.
Europeans will be able to see the aurora probably as far south as
Southern France, since it should be over Paris by midnight.
It will be night in Australia and New Zealand if it arrives at 1100
GMT. This flare is probably large enough to approach mainland
Australia and be visible from the North Island in New Zealand, so it
may be worth staying up to see.
Russia, north of 50 deg latitude will be well placed on the night of
the 29/30 to see the aurora from this flare.
Observers in the USA should not be discouraged that it will arrive
during the day of the 29th. This flare is of a magnitude that should
lead to aurora visible over the entire continental US on the evening
of the 29th. It may be on the northern horizon for those in Florida,
Texas, and Southern California, but it should be visible.
The best viewing is from a dark area, even your back yard, with a
view to the northern horizon. Look out at the sky every half hour.
Typically, an intensification occurs every two hours, lasting about
1/2 hour. The maximum activity is usually around 11pm to midnight.
Prediction by [Chuck Deehr]
On the "librarian shortage"
From the September 2003 issue of College & Research Libraries, p. 391-392:
In 1993, Library Journal reported that 20 percent of all recent library school graduates could not find full-time employment. By the mid-1990's, recent graduates were turning to nontraditional positions in the technology industy, such as Web design or online systems administration. Propelling this migration from librarianship was the average starting salary for nontraditional positions, which was 4.5 to 7.6 percent higher than traditional library positions. As recent graduates migrated toward careers in information technology, libraries gradually increased starting salaries, and in 1997, entry-level salaries surpassd $30,000 for the first time. In 1996, the average librarian had realized a salary increase of less than one percent over the previous year, but between 1997 and 1998, the average starting salary for all new hires was up 6.8 percent and then up another 4.4 percent in 1999 to $32,837....
Never fear, though. There's a government program for everything, including ensuring that library administrators will always have a vast pool of qualified but unemployed jobseekers whom they can hire for starvation wages, thus counteracting this unpleasant recent trend toward rising salaries. A press release from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services yesterday announced a $10 million subsidy to recruit yet more newbies into the grinder... er, I mean, the library profession.
Qui bono?
From the September 2003 issue of College & Research Libraries, p. 391-392:
In 1993, Library Journal reported that 20 percent of all recent library school graduates could not find full-time employment. By the mid-1990's, recent graduates were turning to nontraditional positions in the technology industy, such as Web design or online systems administration. Propelling this migration from librarianship was the average starting salary for nontraditional positions, which was 4.5 to 7.6 percent higher than traditional library positions. As recent graduates migrated toward careers in information technology, libraries gradually increased starting salaries, and in 1997, entry-level salaries surpassd $30,000 for the first time. In 1996, the average librarian had realized a salary increase of less than one percent over the previous year, but between 1997 and 1998, the average starting salary for all new hires was up 6.8 percent and then up another 4.4 percent in 1999 to $32,837....
Never fear, though. There's a government program for everything, including ensuring that library administrators will always have a vast pool of qualified but unemployed jobseekers whom they can hire for starvation wages, thus counteracting this unpleasant recent trend toward rising salaries. A press release from the federal Institute of Museum and Library Services yesterday announced a $10 million subsidy to recruit yet more newbies into the grinder... er, I mean, the library profession.
Qui bono?
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