Browndom

medicateandmeditate:

she just started grooming it

Any investigation into San Francisco’s jazz heyday of the 1950s requires a stop at the Club Hangover. Operated by bandleader Doc Dougherty on Bush Street throughout the decade, the club became a Dixieland jazz headquarters.

Now home to an adult movie theater, the club is long closed. The music lives on however in recordings made at the time, which are now available online, much of it for the first time ever, in complete, unedited recordings.

Using tapes preserved by radio station KCBS, jazz broadcaster Dave Radlauer has archived KCBS broadcasts of Hangover sessions from 1954-58. On-air host Bob Goerner interviewed musicians from the KCBS station using a dedicated phone line that delivered a signal from the club on Nob Hill. Goerner preserved the show tapes, which are now housed in the Stanford University Braun Music archive.

Radlauer makes the archive available as .mp3 files, including one particularly historic jam session starring Louis Armstrong. The story goes that in January, 1951 Armstrong was in San Francisco to visit his friend clarinetist Pee Wee Russell in the hospital and decided to throw Russell a fundraiser. He brought together a masterful group including pianist Earl “Fatha” Hines, credited with helping transition jazz piano from stride to swing. The place was packed and $1,500 went into the kitty for Russell’s medical bills. You can listen to Armstrong’s rehearsal and performance below.

Rehearsal:

Performance:

“Fatha” Hines was quite a performer himself. A popular headliner, his music ranged from Dixieland to bop. Another favorite at the Hangover was Muggsy Spanier, a cornetist known for his emotional solos and masterful use of the plunger mute.

These guys lived in the Bay Area: Hines was a resident of Oakland, Spanier lived in Sausalito and trombonist Kid Ory raised chickens for a time in Petaluma.

via Metafilter

Kate Rix writes about education and digital media. Visit her website: katerixwriter.com.

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New Jazz Archive Features Rare Audio of Louis Armstrong & Other Legends Playing in San Francisco{POSTLINK} is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

(Studying is hard by =lieveheersbeestje)

It’s been nine days and we know nobody is coming out alive anymore. But family members still wait outside hoping for at least a body.

Nearly 1,000 garment workers remain unaccounted for in the worst industrial accident Bangladesh has ever seen. Since the collapse of the building known as Rana Plaza, student volunteers from Jahangirnagar University compiled a list of the missing, more than 1,350 names. As of today, only 425 bodies had been recovered.

These are some of the stories of those who have been waiting:

Karina Begum, 25, is one of the many who has been waiting for rescue of her husband Isarif from the very first day of the building collapse. Now she is almost sure that her husband won’t return alive.

“At the very least, I want his body so my 2-year-old son can see the graveyard of his father,” she says.

She stands in front of the building clutching a photograph of her husband. Begum was also working in the same building the day it collapsed. “We were in third and fourth floor of the building. I could come out unhurt during the incident, but my husband couldn’t,” she says.

Both hope and grief pervade in Bangladesh. AP Photo/Wong Maye-E

Zillur Rahman has been waiting to find his wife Lipi Akter, who worked in one of the factories housed in the building. He has been looking for the past week.

Rahman tried to enter the rubble even as a rescue operation was going on with heavy equipment. A dog squad has also been dispatched to find bodies.

“We have no lands in the village. Both of us wanted that our son will get good education. So, we left home for this capital to get a job,” says Rahman. “But the elusive dream has made my son an orphan.”

Some have taken it upon themselves to scour the rubble for lost loved ones. AP Photo/Kevin Frayer

Jahid Sheikh, father of garment worker Amena Khatun, stood near Jurain graveyard with her voter ID card and photograph in hand.

“I live in the village. My daughter has been working as machine operator in a Rana Plaza factory for the last 2 1/2 years. Seeing the news of collapse of the factory building, I came here seven days ago but couldn’t trace her,” said Sheikh, who lives in Gopalganj district.

“I know I won’t get her alive after eight days of the incident,” he says. “But I want to make her burial myself if the dead body is found.”

With scores still unaccounted for, many victims will not be afforded a proper burial. AP Photo/Wong Maye-E

Family members of Fahima Akter, another worker in the building, identified her decomposed body yesterday—as it was brought to the graveyard for a mass funeral.

Her brother, Siddique, and sister, Farida, have been running between the collapse site and nearby hospitals to find her. Her body was at Dhaka Medical College Hospital earlier in the week, but they couldn’t identify her. Then they brought her to the graveyard. She was not recognizable but, “when the government people brought her body for burial, we could identify her by seeing the dress,” Siddique says.

Akter was the fourth among six siblings. She previously worked at Tazreen Fashions, the site of the deadly fire in November that killed 112 workers. Three days before the fire, she reported to a job at Rana Plaza.

We welcome your comments at ideas@qz.com.

A new report from Citizen Lab, a Canadian research center, shows surveillance software sold by FinFisher, a “governmental IT intrusion” company owned by the UK-registered Gamma International, is now active in 36 countries. That’s up from the 25 countries reported two months ago.

Gamma’s product, which it sells exclusively to governments, infects computers and mobile phones through devious means. These include posing as Mozilla Firefox and the (frankly quite elegant) ruse of using a “right-to-left override,” which is typically used to render writing in Arabic but can work in any language. This helps it foil users trained to look out for suspicious file extensions by hiding, say, an “.exe,” and making the file appear to be an image with a .jpg extension instead.

Once the file has been installed on a machine, the “command-and-control server,” which does exactly what it sounds like it would, can be used to monitor the infected computer.

In the past, intelligence agencies have used the program to infiltrate “internet cafes in critical areas in order to monitor them for suspicious activity, especially Skype communication” and to target members of organized crime groups, according to a FinFisher brochure released by Wikileaks.

The product may also have been used in the past by repressive nations hoping to monitor dissidents. In his new book, Eric Schmidt mentions “a raid on the Egyptian state security building after the country’s 2011 revolution [which] produced explosive copies of contracts with private outlets, including an obscure British firm that sold online spyware to the Mubarak regime.” Gamma denied that it had supplied the regime with its program, which its agents were hawking for a piddling $560,000.

Gamma is far from the only such company. Governmental surveillance is a thriving market—worth about $5 billion annually, according to the Wall Street Journal. Firms such as the German Trovicor and Vupen, from France, also deal in “government grade exploits.”

The business is necessarily discreet, but it’s still legitimate. The use of such software is legal in many countries. None of which makes a presentation called “Governmental IT Intrusion: Applied Hacking Techniques Used by Governments” any less creepy.

Researchers say that newly discovered bones suggest the first permanent English settlers in North America turned to cannibalism.

I bought an ebook copy of Walt Crawford’s new book The Big Deal and the Damage Done and have read or skimmed it all. It analyzes serials and monograph spending from all types of academic libraries every which way. Chart after chart demonstrates the dramatic restructuring of library budgets most likely because of one relatively recent publishing model, the Big Deal. It lends some quantitative support to my contention that Big Deals screw the humanities, and really anything else that isn’t a STEM ejournal. The final paragraph:

What I do believe: If things continue along the same line as they have from 2000 to 2010, the damage done may become irreparable, as a growing number of academic libraries become little more than subsidized article transfer mechanisms. That would be a shame.

If you’re at all interested in the issue, definitely get a copy. I’ll be writing more about it in my Academic Newswire column for next week, so I won’t say more about it now.

scottbot shared this story from Boing Boing.

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Elisabeth Lecourt recycles old maps and turns them into beautiful dresses and shirts. I don't imagine they're wearable, but they'd look lovely on the wall nevertheless.

Elisabeth Lecourt | Les robes géographiques: (via Crazy Abalone)

Cat Roomies Save Space With Bunk Beds

It may seem a little juvenile, but bunk beds are all the rage for young professionals with a high cost of living. Chester and Conrad share a one-bedroom apartment on New York City’s Lower East Side, but they maximize their space with stackable mattresses.

“There’s no way they could afford a two-bedroom on cat salaries,” says Shelly Tegan, a resident in the same building. “Not in this neighborhood anyway.”

Via Solid_Wife.

"The Antichrist is a Christian concept based on interpretation of passages in the New Testament. [..T]he term "antichrist" occurs five times in 1 John and 2 John, once in plural form and four times in the singular. In traditional Christian belief, Jesus the Messiah appears in his Second Coming to Earth, to face the emergence of the Antichrist figure. Just as Christ is the savior and the ideal model for humanity, his opponent in the End of Days will be a single figure of concentrated evil." [W]

"[T]he idea of an Antichrist is central to the apocalyptic world view that sees human history as a struggle between God and Satan for the fate of mankind.

According to most Christian prophesies of the End Time, the Antichrist will act as Satan's chief agent on earth during this period. The Antichrist -- a sort of evil twin of Jesus in many ways -- will forge a one-world government through promises of peace. But when Jesus returns, he will expose the Antichrist as an impostor, defeat him in the battle of Armageddon, and reign with the Christian martyrs for a thousand years on earth.

Robert Fuller, in his book 'Naming the Antichrist', notes that modern apocalypticists believe the Book of Revelation "contains much information about the Antichrist -- who will emerge as a 'beast from the sea' to be Satan's ally in a last, desperate assault on Christ and his church." This 'parody and mirror opposite of Christ' will be identifiable in a number of ways:

• · Promising peace to those who follow him, he will rise to a position of great power.
• · With the help of his own false prophet, the Antichrist will gain control of the world economy, by forcing each person "to be marked on the right hand or the forehead, so that no one can buy or sell unless he has the mark, that is, the name of the beast or the number of its name . . . six hundred and sixty-six"
• · One of the heads of the beast also "seemed to have a mortal wound, but its mortal wound was healed, and the whole earth followed the beast with wonder.' "

[Frontline (PBS) - apocalypse! show webpages]

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'Der Antichrist', by Johann Pruss, was published in 1482 and is available online courtesy of the Bavarian State Library. [click 'Miniaturansich' for thumbnail pages] The illustrations above are slightly cropped.
Worldcat entry.

There is virtually zero information online about this incunabulum. There is a little bit more commentary about the book's producer: "Johann Prüss worked as a printer, publisher, and book dealer at the house "Zum Thiergarten" in Strasbourg from 1480 until 1510."

ADDIT: Thanks to Allen G from Musica Ficta for pointing out this wonderful example of 16th century German printing.

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Please allow me to introduce myself
I'm a man of wealth and taste
I've been around for a long, long year
Stole many a mans soul and faith
And I was round when jesus christ
Had his moment of doubt and pain
Made damn sure that pilate
Washed his hands and sealed his fate
Pleased to meet you
Hope you guess my name
But what's puzzling you
Is the nature of my game ...
[Jagger/Richards]


Sympathy for the Devil
{Rolling Stones, live. ?2009}

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Regular readers will have noticed a long period of downtime around here lately. I've always believed this site functions best when I'm feeling most motivated rather than by schedule, so publishing times have always tended towards the irratical. A family dilemma a couple of months ago took up a lot of my time and it paved the way to something of a lazy hiatus from preparing material for BibliOdyssey. There's certain to be ongoing fallout in my life from that family event, so I won't make promises about the future of this place. But I certainly have no plans for quitting. New posts will appear - per usual - when they are ready which usually means when I've had enough of the reading and the writing and the tinkering. You're always welcome to write with suggestions, tips and/or questions [gmail peacay]. I am and have remained active on Twitter. And thanks to those who have contacted lately to check on me and to offer support.

Cat’s Embarrassing Library Record Made Public

Scandal is brewing in the tiny town of Sea Crest, South Carolina where local newspaper The Sea Crest Breeze has publish the library lending record of a one Milo the cat. Residents were shocked to see a number of lurid titles, including 50 Shades of Fur and Live Nude Cats, on the list.

“This pretty much kills any chance of running for political office,” said Jessica Buchanan. “Then again, I guess, look at Mark Sanford.”

The newspaper is not source of the library record. Milo could not be reached for comment.

Via pallagao.

Personal finance is a numbers game. As much as I like to vouch for the “personal” part of personal finance, it’s only half of the story—“finance” is part of the phrase, too. In the end, you’re still looking at the dollars and cents on your paycheck, on your income tax forms, on your investments, in your retirement accounts, and so on.

This is a guest post from The Simple Dollar.

A long time ago, I wrote a post called Everything You Ever Really Needed to Know About Personal Finance on the Back of Five Business Cards. Since this post went up more than five years ago, I’m sure many of you don’t remember it, so here are those five cards.

The first four cards really just focus on one specific thing: the gap. I consider the size of that gap to be the most important number in personal finance.

In more straightforward terms, the “gap” refers to the percentage of your income that you save for the future.

Here’s a quick way to figure out your “gap,” and it’s pretty timely since most of us have this information sitting in front of us thanks to tax season.

First, figure out exactly how much your family earned in 2012. You can use either net (after taxes) or gross (before taxes), whatever makes you feel more comfortable, as long as you’re consistent about it. If you use gross for this calculation, always use gross. I usually suggest excluding any big one-time income streams from this calculation—for example, a big one-year bonus can really mess up this calculation.

Second, figure out exactly how much your family saved in 2012. How much of the income that was brought in by your family is now sitting in a savings or investment somewhere? For this info, you might have to look at bank statements and investment account statements.

Then, merely divide the amount saved by the amount earned using your calculator or a spreadsheet, then multiply that by 100 if you prefer to work with percentages. This will tell you the percentage of your income that you’re saving for the future. The bigger that number is, the better you’re doing financially. I haven’t found a single number that so accurately reflects how powerfully a person is working to improve their finances than this single number.

It works for any income level. A person that earns $18,000 a year and saves $1,800 is doing just as well as a person who saves $10,000 on an income of $100,000. Why? They’re both saving 10% of their income, and that 10% is going to have a similar profound life effect on each of them, though it will show up in different ways. It also leads toward self-sufficiency at exactly the same pace for each of them.

You can cause improvement in the number via both frugality and increased earnings. If you earn more without increasing your spending, the amount you save will go up. If you spend less without a change in income, the amount you save will go up. You can tackle this number from both sides if you wish, or focus on just one side or another. It’s also an incredible motivator. Want to push yourself to improve your finances? Focus on finding ways to beat your savings percentage from the previous year.

For us, our percentage has remained almost exactly the same for the last four years—about 35%. Over certain stretches of months, it’s been as high as 50%, but during other stretches, it’s been lower (thanks to vacations and so forth). My focus is mostly on maintaining this number. Another tip—debt repayment accelerates the growth of this number. Paying off a debt early makes it much easier to start saving a higher percentage of your income sooner rather than later.

Where should you be saving? The answer to that question depends heavily on your lifestyle and your goals. A single twentysomething who wants to be “set for life” at the first possible second is going to save in different ways than a family in their thirties with lifetime career goals. If you’re not sure how you should be saving, sock money away in a savings account for now and start studying up, then use that saved money to set things up as you see fit.

Your “gap” (or savings percentage) is a vital number. The bigger you make it, the better off you’ll be.

The Personal Finance Number That Matters Most | The Simple Dollar

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The Simple Dollar is a blog for those of us who need both cents and sense: people fighting debt and bad spending habits while building a financially secure future and still affording a latte or two. Our busy lives are crazy enough without having to compare five hundred mutual funds – we just want simple ways to manage our finances and save a little money.

Image remixed from Galyna Andrushko (Shutterstock).

Want to see your work on Lifehacker? Email Tessa.

Many of you probably saw the article in Slate a couple of weeks ago arguing passionately that nobody should go to graduate school to study literature. The author’s experience is typical for most people who graduate with PhDs in literature in that she hasn’t gotten a tenure-track job. She earned her PhD in German literature in 2010, so she might some day find that elusive TT job, but it doesn’t sound like she’s planning to stick around academia working for below minimum wage as an adjunct instructor. And good for her. The week after brought this insightful analysis at Aljazeera of the “adjunct crisis,” from another recent PhD who also can’t find a TT job. It’s much more analytical and less emotionally wrought than the Slate article, including speculation (and that seems to be all that’s available on the subject) of why presumably intelligent and well educated people would submit themselves to adjunct conditions.

One political scientist argues that it’s “path dependence and sunk costs.” Once people have spent so much their lives and money aiming for the TT job, it’s apparently hard to realize that you rolled the academic dice and came up craps and should just move on. Indeed, that analogy is rather poor, because if the 6% chance of finding a TT job in literature that the Slate article estimates is correct, you’ve a far better chance of beating the house at craps than you do of getting that job.

The Slate author provides a psychologically devastating alternative to relying on statistics:

During graduate school, you will be broken down and reconfigured in the image of the academy. By the time you finish—if you even do—your academic self will be the culmination of your entire self, and thus you will believe, incomprehensibly, that not having a tenure-track job makes you worthless. You will believe this so strongly that when you do not land a job, it will destroy you, and nobody outside of academia will understand why.

My only criticism of the statement is that I believe she put in the second person what was obviously a personal experience. I’ve known people with PhDs and no TT jobs and none of them thought themselves worthless, regardless of whatever bitterness they might have had about the experience. Several of them were philosophers, so maybe that makes a difference.

Based on a lot of people I’ve met, it’s not that they view themselves as worthless; it’s that they view any other work than traditional professorial work as worthless, or at least beneath them. This attitude shows up occasionally in librarianship, where people with PhDs who will never get TT teaching jobs sometimes decide to “settle” for librarianship. One person told me to my face that with his PhD in philosophy he couldn’t get a decent teaching job, but since he was willing to settle for being a philosophy librarian he wanted my advice on getting one of those jobs. Talk about rhetorically challenged. I didn’t feel particularly resentful, because I have a great job and he doesn’t. I told him there really weren’t many jobs for philosophy librarians as such, and I probably should have added that with that attitude he probably wouldn’t get any available ones anyway.  Tens of thousands of highly educated people with that attitude would rather work for low wages and no benefits than do anything else.

That attitude puzzles me, but then again I never had the sense of entitlement some people seem to have about graduate school. It’s that entitlement that provides me with brief moments of irritation in what is generally a sympathetic assessment of the plight of adjuncts and what their plight says about higher education, namely that it’s being priced out of the market for the vast majority of Americans while its quality is being reduced by reliance upon poorly paid contingent instructors the universities view as disposable. If there’s an economic term for something that’s increasing in price while decreasing in quality I’d use it, but I don’t know what it is, unless it’s “scam.” Or, more likely, “bubble.” Regardless, it’s hard to feel sympathy for someone so obviously intelligent and well educated who then whines and complains about how much worse her life is for pursuing that education.

It’s also difficult to understand how someone could have begun a PhD in 2005 without knowing what was going on in higher education, but that seems to have happened. It puzzles me that so many people finish humanities PhDs and only then realize they won’t get jobs, because people not getting jobs was the most obvious part of my graduate school experience. I started grad school at a top-20 English department in 1992. By 1994 two things were obvious to me: first, I found the study of literature increasingly boring, and second, that even if I finished a PhD I almost certainly wouldn’t find a good TT job. I didn’t have William Pannapacker around to clue me in. All I had to do was look at the jobs people in my department were getting, or not getting. One year the best job someone acquired was in Arlington,Texas. There’s nothing inherently wrong with Arlington as far as I know, except that it’s hot as blazes down there in the summer and I’d left the south partly to get away from the excruciating summer heat. But when you’re on the academic job market, you don’t get to think about things like that. You go wherever you’re fortunate enough to land a job. Another person got a job teaching a 5/4 load at a regional university in a much cooler state. I wouldn’t have minded at all going to that university, but a 5/4 load? That’s brutal, especially when every class is going to have 25 or more students. No, thanks. And most of the people weren’t getting TT jobs at all.

This wasn’t some hidden conspiracy. Everyone knew about it early on in their graduate school career. Is that not the case now? Heck, my first year in grad school the department had a meeting of faculty and grad students just to talk about the problem. (Besides the general sense of malaise, the only thing I remember clearly about that meeting is that some sexagenarian associate professor hired in the 1960s complained that new assistant professors were making more than he was. He didn’t get a very sympathetic hearing.) Given that a lot of programs don’t publicly give out their placement statistics, it might be understandable that someone would start a program with a naive hope for the perfect TT job, but once you’re in a program all you have to do is look around. Are people getting jobs or not? It’s an easy question to answer, and your likely fate should be pretty clear. Someone should do a study on why so many people continue while knowing the odds are against them rather than just speculate.

It was very clear that my chances of getting a job I’d want in a place I wouldn’t mind living were almost nil. So I desultorily finished my MA work and started teaching rhetoric as an adjunct while also working halftime at the local public library as a circulation clerk. I didn’t feel bad about myself, or feel that it was somehow beneath me to have an MA and be checking out videos for $10/hour alongside people with high school educations. A job’s a job. I also didn’t resent the department I left. They let in a lot of grad students every year to teach first-year courses, many more than could ever find TT jobs. It was a bit of a racket. On the other hand, I got a lot of good teaching experience and a few years free to read a lot. I didn’t make much money, but then again I didn’t need much money. I’d never had any money anyway. And it certainly never occurred to me to be resentful of the system as such, even though it puzzled me why so many people stayed the course, finished their PhDs, and then stayed there teaching as adjuncts making the same thing I made teaching as an adjunct, all the while complaining about not getting a job.

There was possibly no resentment because I didn’t bother finishing a PhD and didn’t “settle” on being a librarian. I just sort of stumbled into it since Illinois’ library school seems to suck in a lot of humanities grad students looking for something to do. The years I spent teaching and studying have been highly useful for my library career, so it would be foolish to resent the fact that while I at one point wanted to be a professor, and still think I would have made a pretty good one, academia didn’t owe me a TT job. Graduate school turned out rather well for me. I had no money when I graduated college, and neither did my parents. I was able to go to school for free, get some experience, find a wife, make some friends, and get paid $10K a year to teach four courses. It seems like a pittance, even though 20 years later it’s still what a lot of adjuncts make who aren’t in their early twenties as I was. Because of that opportunity and the ways I’ve exploited it, I’m a first generation college student from a poor family in the south who works at an Ivy League university library. My wife, an ABD dropout from the same program, now works as a test developer for ETS. There are worse fates. Almost up until she died, my mother would ask me whether I thought grad school in English was a waste of time. My answer was always definitely not, even during the time I wasn’t quite sure what I was going to do with the rest of my life. Education is always good. You just have to know what to do with it.

So all this overheated rhetoric about how foolish it is to go to graduate school doesn’t do much for me. By smart people doing foolish things, I don’t mean that the foolish thing is to go to grad school or even earn a PhD in a field without jobs, but to feel sorry for yourself and complain about it afterward. To turn the historically rare privilege of advanced education into an excuse to complain shows a lot of arrogance but not much perspective. A couple of years ago someone was asking around for advice about her daughter going to grad school in some humanities field. My advice: if she’s interested in the subject, the school supports her with a stipend or assistantship, and she can get a degree without going into debt, go, but assume that a tenure-track teaching job is not going to happen and plan accordingly. Graduate school is only a negative experience if your expectations for where it leads differ from the well known statistical likelihood that you won’t get a TT job, and even humanities grad students should have a basic grasp of statistics. There might be social, ethical, and political issues with the increasing use of contingent adjuncts in higher education, but seeing grad school education itself as the problem is a personal issue. I never thought I’d say this, but going to grad school in English was one of the best decisions I ever made.

Dave Warlick, 2¢ Worth, April 22, 2013

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This sentence struck me as especially relevant: "I had always been destined for college, not a factory." As though the former is of value, and the latter not so much. Now I happen to think that work in a factory is dignified and worthwhile (I frequently think of the workers in Alliston, Ontario, who made my Honda - thank you all). But the problem isn't simply that there are too many university graduates, but also too many factories, many of them producing less and less meaningful products. In general in society worldwide we have too many people for the work that needs to get done, which leaves many of us underemployed or unemployed. This isn't a problem we solve in the educational system. The waste we create in society is not the result of too much education. We need to work less, consume less, and spend our time more meaningfully, which will not happen without a more equitable distribution of incolme. [Link] [Comment]

StackLife demonstrates one way a group independent of the Digital Public Library of America can create its own way of browsing its collection, using the information made openly available by the DPLA. 

DPLA StackLife.

Guinea Pig Builds Own Gaming PC

Florida guinea pig Max isn’t content to purchase his computers off the shelf or from a website. The tech hobbyist likes to build his towers from scratch using the best parts he can buy and afford. Why?

“Mostly for gaming,” says friend and fellow PC builder Jonathan Tegan. “His current PC is a pretty sweet rig: NVidia graphics, 8 gigs of RAM, quad-core processor. He spent a little money on this one.”

But on average, Max ends up saving about $800 by purchasing individual components online, rather than a retail machine. So what does the piggie play when his rig is up and running?

“Mostly Minesweeper,” says Tegan. “You obviously don’t need a dedicated graphics card for a dumb game like that. But I know Max likes to have power under the hood, just in case.”

Submitted by Dori Emerson.

I volunteered to do Bad Chart Thursday today. I found this fantastic bad chart showing the results of the presidential elections from last Sunday in Venezuela. I had it all planned out in my head. I was going to show you the video that aired a few weeks ago on Venezuelan public TV of Hugo Chavez arriving in heaven and being greeted by Che Guevara and other historic figures from the Latin American left. I was going to talk about how Nicolás Maduro, the presidential candidate who is Chavez’s political heir (and his self-proclaimed son), said The Commander [Chavez] blessed him through a little birdie. I was going to comment on how Maduro put a curse on those voting for his rival, and I was probably going to make a snarky comment about his sartorial choices and his tiny constitution (featured image). I was going to call it ¡Viva la Distortion! and show you the chart Venezolana de Televisión, the main public TV station, decided to go with on their website the day after the election:

Yes, it is a ridiculously truncated chart. So ridiculous that they had to change it soon after hilarity ensued on Twitter.

But something happened that made me remember that most Bad Charts are created to purposely mislead the public: 7 people were killed in the protests following the election.

As a person who can read a chart (or numbers), you can tell that the results of Venezuelan elections were a really close call. So close, that the opposition candidate, Henrique Capriles, demanded a vote by vote recount, a position backed by the Organization of American States and the United States. People have gone to the streets to show support for their candidates, which is what lead to 7 people being killed on Tuesday, plus dozens injured, hundreds arrested, and property damage, including several universities. Capriles had to call off the rally planned for yesterday to demand a recount in fear of further violence. Instead he asked his supporters to go out to the streets every night at 8pm and bang pots and pans to show defiance. In response, Maduro asked his supporters to throw fireworks at the same time.

You can call me Debbie Downer in the comments if you like.

Featured image: EFE/David Fernandez via eltiempo.com
Bad Chart via Malaprensa

I was scrolling through my feed reader the other day when I stopped on a post that literally made me giggle.  How fun and funky are these necklaces?  Would you believe that they are made from parakeet mirrors?  True story!  Mich L. in L.A. has done it again, turning another mundane and unexpected item into truly fabulous jewelry.  (Don't like the bold, bright colors of the plastic mirror frames?  A blast of spray paint might make them more your style!)  [how to make parakeet mirror pendant necklaces]

Project estimate:

• Parakeet mirror, $1 and up
• Paper, on hand
• Mod Podge, on hand
• Chain, on hand or $1 and up
• Beads, on hand or $1 and up
• Jewelry findings, on hand or $1 and up

Total:  $1 and up

I’m in Namibia to visit staff and partners for our Library Development Program, and over the past couple of days we traveled to the northern part of the country to visit the sites of the new Regional Resource and Study Centres (RSRCs). The work that the Namibia Library and Archives Service and the Millennium Challenge Account – Namibia put into these buildings is evident and impressive. Careful thought went into the building design – loads of natural light, incorporating existing vegetation into the design and landscaping, using thatching to provide shade. I’ve posted a few pictures of the buildings below, and look forward to sharing photos of the RSRCs bustling with people once they’re open.

Filed under: Namibia Tagged: libraries, namibia, photos

Last week I attended the ACRL conference in Indianapolis and have had a lot of thoughts rambling around in my mind since then.

The reception was at the Indiana State Museum. There I discovered that Indiana state history is about as interesting as the history of any other individual state–not very. However, I learned a lot about how state history museums put together exhibits from a librarian who used to work for one. It was very educational. Thanks, Josh!

At the reception, I met two different people whom I had apparently met before and didn’t remember. (Technically three, but one of them didn’t remember meeting me, either.) Saying “I’m bad with faces” might be a reason, but it’s not an excuse. Some people develop techniques for remembering the faces and names of people they meet in passing at conferences and such. I should do that. Anyway, if you’re reading this, sorry about that, and it won’t happen again. At least for you two.

I met someone who introduced herself as a “fan” of this blog. I don’t get that much, and it was rather enjoyable. All writers like to hear from people who like their work. Maybe if I posted a photo of myself on the blog more people who like the blog would see me and say hello. But then there might also be people who see me and say, “So you’re the jerk who said librarians should never learn to code!” [Note: I never said that.]

Hotel bars in Indianapolis don’t seem to stay open past 11pm. For a city hosting a conference of librarians, that just seems wrong.

I kept hearing accents in restaurants and hotels that sounded southern, but I couldn’t place them. Was I encountering southerners who lacked a distinctive regional accent, or is there an Indiana accent that sounds kind of southern? (And for non-southerners who think southerners all sound the same, we/they don’t. Not that I have many remnants of a southern accent. When people find out I’m from Louisiana and ask why I don’t have an accent, I tell them that everyone in Louisiana sounds like me.)

The most poorly represented track was probably Collections. You couldn’t do a whole day going to sessions on collections, whereas you could easily do that for Teaching and Learning. Since faculty and students routinely value the stuff libraries provides over the services they provide, it’s curious that librarians routinely reverse that emphasis. I think I know why it happens. Of course, the ACRL conference doesn’t have to emphasize everything. For librarians interested in collections, there’s always the Charleston Conference.

MOOCs came up a bit, always in a neutral tone. Some librarians are trying to find ways to integrate librarians into MOOCs. I don’t think there’s much future for that, mostly because of licensed content and the sheer scale, but good luck to them. Hopeful academic trendspotters think MOOCs are the higher education of the future. I doubt that. Instead I think MOOCs might be the last semblance of higher education in the future for those below the upper-middle and upper classes who are being steadily priced out of traditional higher education as state governments decide it’s better to slash taxes than educate their citizens. The liberal education necessary to provide free and critical citizens capable of lifelong learning is expensive, and what politician wants free and critical citizens? When we see the children of the rich relying on MOOCs and distance education degrees with no professors and no classes instead of heading to Ivy League universities, I’ll have been proven wrong.

Of the presentations I saw, only one got me thinking, “WTF? They rejected my contributed paper proposal for that?” That’s not too bad a ratio, I suppose. If people are going to get a line on their CV from presenting at ACRL, the least they could do is a little preparation so they don’t offend their audience. After looking through all the presentation descriptions, I also figure that my chances of being accepted would improve if I did something practical and related to information literacy. But everyone else does that, so what’s the point.

One of the more interesting presentations was by Brian Mathews, the Ubiquitous Librarian, who did indeed seem ubiquitous on the program. His talk on The Art of Problem Discovery (longer version here) was thought-provoking. I especially liked that he addressed technological and other disruptions to academic libraries and higher education while avoiding focus on specific trends, skills, tools, etc. Instead, he discussed broader approaches such as ways of thinking about problems, which in the longer article he terms “thinking lenses”: e.g., systems, integrative, design, lateral, agile, and computational thinking. This sort of approach seems much more productive in the long run than getting trapped into specific tools, trends, or skills. Perhaps I find the approach more compelling because I was promoting the same broadness myself when I argued that rhetoric and philosophy were more important “skills” for librarians than many others. In a discussion not about skills, I would instead have talked about rhetorical thinking or philosophical thinking. Indeed, in discussing how to make contacts with units outside the library and persuade people of the value the library can bring to them, Brian was engaging in some rhetorical thinking himself, and it sounds like the “problem literature” is mostly philosophical in nature. Now I’m thinking that if I were more focused and more ambitious, maybe they’d invite me to speak at ACRL. Probably not going to happen.

I didn’t attend the DIY panel, although I have read Brian Mathews’ comparison of DIY with Startup thinking (which was another panel I didn’t attend). Maybe it’s because I was put off by part of the In the Library with the Lead Pipe blog post announcing the topic, particularly this bit (which Brian quotes in the comparison “Survival vs. Reshaping”):

DIY activities are always creative by nature, but DIY culture in libraries is less about creativity and more about basic survival. A traditional library is a dead library. We know this: if libraries don’t change they will fade away, eclipsed by the free, the instant, and the easy. The mantra of twenty-first century librarianship is and must be: change, change, and more change.

DIY might be the latest movement for librarians to get excited about, but two parts of that statement bother me. First is the assertion, “We know this: a traditional library is a dead library” (my emphasis). Do we really know this? How do we know this? Can you prove it? It sounds more like an affirmation of faith than a reflective statement about the future of academic libraries. I gather from a tweet about the panel that someone said: “Academics critically reflect–DIYers don’t. They whack it up into shape, fix it, or move on.” I think I’ll stick with critical reflection.

The second part that bothered me was this statement: “The mantra of twenty-first century librarianship is and must be: change, change, and more change.” I’ve nothing against mantras as such; they can be very soothing. However, the repetitive insistence on “change” is both vague and ahistorical. Everyone seems to think nobody before them had to deal with change. John Cotton Dana published an essay called “Librarians Should Respond to the Changes that Time Brings.” That’s solid advice…from 1925. I realize that responding to the changes that time brings could be considered reactive. How about librarians being “change agents”? That phrase has been in the library literature since at least 1968. Here’s another great reminder that libraries need to change or die:

Any institution which does not change too, adapt itself to the times, and become part of the onward “drive of change,” will be pushed aside to be left perhaps for a time to make a harmless life of its own.

That’s from a 1934 Library Quarterly article. (There’s more of the quote and some writing about libraries and change rhetoric in my post Libraries Never Change.) Believing the claim that libraries are obsolete or dying or whatever is a matter of faith, not reason or evidence. If anything, the lesson of library history shows us that libraries do adapt and change. We can be optimistic about changes in libraries or apocalyptic about the future, but I’m not sure we can do both. I guess apocalypse sells.

If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a cleverly manipulated data visualization is easily good for a few lies.

Question: what’s the easiest way to disguise a hidden agenda? Answer: put it in a chart.

Somewhere during the tsunami-like trend of infographic publishing that has swept the internet in recent years we forgot the important step of verifying (and examining for bias) the data that has been presented to us in visual form.

Call it “shiny chart” syndrome. (Or don’t. No one would hold it against you.) But recognize the phenomenon is real. For evidence (presented in a series of charts) see below:

A New York Times data visualization piece successfully demonstrated how two groups with divergent viewpoints could use the exact same data to present completely different stories.

Here’s the raw data from the September 2012 jobs report:

Here’s the data manipulated to favor the Democratic party:

And here’s the data manipulated to favor the Republication party:

Explains Jake Porway: The difference between the two visualizations, which present the same information, was striking. It’s clear that the spin we’re accustomed to hearing from politicians is now something we’re going to be seeing from politicians as well

The most troubling part of all this is that “we the people” rarely have the skills to see how data is being twisted into each of these visualizations. We tend to treat data as “truth,” as if it is immutable and only has one perspective to present. If someone uses data in a visualization, we are inclined to believe it.

For more, read: The Chart Wars Have Begun on Harvard Business Review

The University of Pittsburgh’s student newspaper, The Pitt News, has dismissed a columnist over conflicts of interest surrounding his membership in a secret society that, according to the paper, has become influential in the university’s student government. The newspaper last week published a two-part series on the activities of the “Druids,” a group founded in the 1920s that employs many of the stereotypes common to such societies. The paper’s editors discovered that one of its staff members was a member of the group, and had written the paper’s endorsement of the student-body president, who is also believed to belong to the society. In a letter to readers published on Tuesday, the paper’s editor in chief said the staff member in question no longer worked for the newspaper. The employee said he had not let his connection to the society influence his views, and said he regretted the appearance of impropriety.

• 
• Source: Post-gazette

Pitt administrators said they’ve seen no evidence of wrongdoing.

“We have no reports that they have broken any university policies, nor have we seen evidence that the Druids — or any members of the SGB — have not been transparent in the performance of their duties as SGB members,” university spokesman John Fedele wrote in a statement. “Members of SGB understand and are committed to their responsibility to represent the needs and interests of the entire non-CGS (College of General Studies) undergraduate student body at Pitt.”

Read more at: www.post-gazette.com

The story has become part of physics lore: A young Richard Feynman, future Nobel winner, was bored with life in the remote New Mexico desert while working on the atomic bomb during World War II, so he amused himself by learning to pick the combination locks in the supposedly secure filing cabinets containing America’s nuclear secrets. As Feynman would later write in his essay, “Safecracker Meets Safecracker”:

To demonstrate that the locks meant nothing, whenever I wanted somebody’s report and they weren’t around, I’d just go in their office, open the filing cabinet, and take it out. When I was finished I would give it back to the guy: “Thanks for your report.”

“Where’d you get it?”

“Out of your filing cabinet.”

“But I locked it!”

“I know you locked it. The locks are no good.”

So the officials at Los Alamos installed cabinets with better locks. But Feynman studied the new ones systematically, and eventually, given a little time, he could open any lock at will. As a joke, he left a note in one cabinet that said, “I borrowed document no. LA4312–Feynman the safecracker.”

I opened the safes which contained all the secrets to the atomic bomb: the schedules for the production of the plutonium, the purification procedures, how much material is needed, how the bomb works, how the neutrons are generated, what the design is, the dimensions–the entire information that was known at Los Alamos: the whole schmeer!

To learn a bit about how Feynman did it, watch this fascinating little video by journalist Brady Haran of the YouTube-funded Numberphile. Haran interviews Roger Bowley, emeritus professor of physics at the University of Nottingham, who explains several of the ingenious methods used by Feynman to solve the problem of cracking a lock with (supposedly) a million possible combinations. And to learn more about Feynman’s adventure as a safecracker, be sure to read “Safecracker Meets Safecracker,” which is included in his book Surely You’re Joking, Mr. Feynman! and can be read on PDF by clicking here.

Related Content:

Free: Richard Feynman’s Physics Course from Cornell (1964)

The Richard Feynman Trilogy: The Physicist Captured in Three Films

Richard Feynman’s Ode to a Flower: A Short Animation

Learn How Richard Feynman Cracked the Safes with Atomic Secrets at Los Alamos is a post from: Open Culture. You can follow Open Culture on Facebook, Twitter, Google Plus and by Email.

I first posted these posters on SocImages in 2008. They are designed to scare teenagers into taking precautions against pregnancy by demonizing teenagers who get (someone) pregnant. The way in which teens are portrayed in these images — labeled cheap, dirty, rejects, pricks, and nobodys — suggests that the organization, the National Campaign to Prevent Teen Pregnancy, doesn’t care about teenagers, only in controlling their behavior.

This is the sentence that runs along the left vertical with the word “reject” extracted in bold: “I had sex so my boyfriend wouldn’t REJECT me. Now, I have a baby. And no boyfriends.”

“Now that I’m home with a baby, NOBODY calls me anymore.”

“All it took was one PRICK to get my girlfriend pregnant. At least that’s what her friends say.”

“Condoms are CHEAP. If we’d used one, I wouldn’t have to tell my parents I’m pregnant.”

“I want to be out with my friends. Instead, I’m changing DIRTY diapers at home.”

In response to ads like these, sociologist Gretchen Sisson has started a tumblr of examples of anti-teen pregnancy PSAs that use fear, shame, and threats as motivators, sent to me by @annajobin.  Here’s the one I found most stunning; I think it goes something like don’t-drink-and-party-or-you’ll-get-raped-and-pregnant-and-your-life-will-be-horrible-and-oh-your-child-will-become-a-rapist-too:

Here are a set of ads that try to convince women not have (unprotected) sex with their male peers by suggesting that the men showing interest in them are bad guys who will inevitably abandon them:

And here are a set that use simple threats to get across their message:

About her tumblr, Sisson writes:

Public service announcements that claim to be about “preventing teen pregnancy” are more frequently about shaming and stigmatizing young parents. This is not a way to encourage young people to take control of their reproductive lives, and it’s certainly not a way to support young families.

Nor is it a way to support teenagers who are negotiating complicated interpersonal terrain and making difficult decisions.  These ads are about getting teenagers to do what we want, not helping them figure out what’s best for them.  They caricature the actual lives of teenagers and make early parenthood into a comical boogeyman.  Moreover, they send a clear message to the teenagers that do get pregnant: “you’re a slut/idiot and your life is over.”  This is not good for young parents and it sets them up to fail.

Lisa Wade is a professor of sociology at Occidental College. You can follow her on Twitter and Facebook.

(View original at http://thesocietypages.org/socimages)

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Starting Analysis and Visualisation of Spatial Data with R | Spatial Analysis.

Last week I ran an introductory workshop on the analysis and visualisation of spatial data with R. The software has become established as one of the best around for statistics and it is becoming increasingly recognised as a tool for data visualisation (I wrote about this last year, also see here) and spatial analysis. Interest in R is increasing all the time but many feel put off by its very steep learning curve. The help files are often complex and there are some slightly idiosyncratic aspects to the language you have use to get R to work. That said there is lot more help around on forums and some excellent introductory tutorials to get  you started. Here are a couple of worksheets I use to introduce the wonders of R.

The Cross-European Survey to Measure Users’ Perceptions of the Benefits of ICT in Public Libraries report presents data and analysis from 17 EU countries on the benefits of free access to ICTs in public libraries. The report also examines key similarities and differences in public perception of ICTs in public libraries across different EU member states.

The study examines how access to ICT through public libraries directly contributes to the objectives of the Europe 2020 growth strategy for smart, sustainable, and inclusive growth, such as  improving access to information for employment, innovation, education opportunities, and social inclusion. EU member states are expected to show actionable steps towards meeting these objectives. This study shows how public libraries within the EU play a key role in meeting specific EU 2020 policy objectives.

From the report:

Public libraries across the European Union (EU) have long played an important role in communities by providing free access to information, guidance from trained librarians, and public meeting space. As meaningful participation in society increasingly requires access to digital information and resources, many public libraries in the EU have expanded their offerings to include access to information and communication technologies (ICTs) like computers and the Internet.

Romania was selected as one of the 17 countries in the study and produced a number of notable results. Biblionet staff in Romania played a key role in collecting and presenting the data for this report. In many areas, Romania produced promising results in public perception of ICT in public libraries, including:

• Up to 70% of public libraries in Romania offer public access to computers and the internet

• Over 75% of Romanian citizens (both users and non-users of public libraries) felt that libraries were either very effective, effective, or fairly effective at meeting the needs of their local community. The EU average is 64%

• 64% of Romanian citizens felt that public libraries merit additional financial support

• Nearly 40% of public access computing (PAC) users in Romanian public libraries had used library computers in the last 12 months to support some employment-related activity

• 43% of PAC users in Romania had used library computers for civic engagement activities in the last 3 months, higher than the EU-wide average (24%)

For more findings on public libraries and ICT in Romania, check out the final country report. Complete datasets and country reports for the other participating countries are available online as well.

Filed under: Romania Tagged: Biblionet, EU, libraries, Romania

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Earlier this week, Mendeley was bought by Elsevier. I posted the announcement on Twitter to state that I would be quitting Mendeley. This tweet sparked a conversation between me and the head of academic outreach at Mendeley (William Gunn) that could only go so far in 140 character chunks. I was trying to highlight that, while I respected the Mendeley team’s decision to do what’s best for them, I could not support them as a customer knowing that this would empower a company that I think undermines scholarship, scholars, and the future of research.

Today, Gunn posted the following tweet: “All you folks retweeting @zephoria know who she works for, right?” before justifying his implied critique by highlighting that he personally respects MSR.

I feel the need to respond to this implicit attack on my character and affiliation. When I’m critical of Elsevier, I’m speaking as a scholar, not on behalf of Microsoft or even Microsoft Research. That said, I get that everyone’s associations shapes how they’re perceived. But I’m not asking people to buy my ?product? or even the products of my employer. I’m making a public decision as a scholar who is committed to the future for research. I believe in making my research publicly available through open access initiatives and I’m proud to work for and be associated with an organization that is committed to transforming scholarly publishing.  I’m also committed to boycotting organizations that undermine research, scholarship, libraries, and the production of knowledge.

I also think that it’s important to explain that there are huge differences between Microsoft and Elsevier.  I fully recognize that I work for a company that many people think is evil. When I joined Microsoft four years ago, I did a lot of poking around and personal soul-searching. Like many other geeks of my age, I spent my formative years watching an arrogant Microsoft engage in problematic activities only to be humiliated by an anti-trust case. Then I watched the same company, with its tail between its legs, grow up. The company I was looking to join four years ago was not the company that I boycotted in college. It had been a decade since United States vs. Microsoft and even though many of my peers are never going to forgive my employer for its activities in the 90s, I am willing to accept that companies change.

There are many aspects of Microsoft that I absolutely love. For starters, Microsoft Research (MSR) is heaven on earth. Overall, MSR offers more freedom, flexibility, and opportunities to scholars than even the best academic institutions. They share my values regarding making scholarship widely accessible (see: Tony Hey’s 6-part series on open access). And, unlike research entities at other major corporations, Microsoft Research has supported me in doing research that’s critical of Microsoft (even when I get nastygrams from corporate executives). Beyond my home division, there are other sparkly beacons of awesome. I love that Microsoft has made privacy a central value, even as it struggles to ethically negotiate the opportunities presented by data mining. I have been in awe of some of the thoughtful and innovative approaches taken by the folks at Bing, in mobile, and in Xbox. Even more than the work that everyone sees, I get excited by some of the visioning that happens behind closed doors.

Don’t get me wrong. Like all big companies, Microsoft still screws up. I’ve facepalmed on plenty of occasions, embarrassed to be associated with particular company decisions, messages, or tactics. But I genuinely believe that the overall company means well and is pointed in a positive, productive, and ethical direction. Sure, there are some strategies that don’t excite me, but I think that the leadership is trying to move the company to a future I can buy into. I’m proud of where the company is going even if I can’t justify its past.

I cannot say the same thing for Elsevier. As most academics and many knowledge activists know, Elsevier has engaged in some pretty evil maneuvers. Elsevier published fake journals until it got caught. Its parent company was involved in the arms trade until it got caught. Elsevier played an unrepentant and significant role in advancing SOPA/PIPA/RWA and continues to lobby on issues that undermine scholarship. Elsevier currently actively screws over academic libraries and scholars through its bundling practices. There is no sign that the future of Elsevier is pro-researchers. There is zero indicator that Mendeley’s acquisition is anything other an attempt to placate the academics who are refusing to do free labor for Elsevier (editorial boards, reviewers, academics). There’s no attempt at penance, no apology, not even a promise of a future direction. Just an acquisition of a beloved company as though that makes up for all of the ways in which Elsevier has in the past _and continues to_ screw over scholars.

Elsevier’s practices make me deeply deeply angry. While academic publishing as a whole is pretty flawed, Elsevier takes the most insidious practices further at each and every turn, always at the expense of those of us who are trying to produce, publish, and distribute research. Their prices are astronomical, bankrupting libraries and siloing knowledge for private profit off of free labor. As a result, many mathematicians and other scientists have begun stepping off of their editorial boards in protest. Along with over 13,000 other scholars, I too signed the Cost of Knowledge boycott.

I see no indication of a reformed Elsevier, no indication of a path forward that is actually respectful of scholars, scholarship, librarians, or universities. All I see is a company looking to make a profit in an unethical manner and trying to assuage angry customers and laborers with small tokens.

Mendeley’s leadership is aware of how many academics despise Elsevier. In their announcement of their sale, they justify Elsevier through some of the technologies they developed. There’s no indication that the “partnership” is going to make Elsevier more thoughtful towards academics. Mendeley’s reps try to explain that the company is a “large, complex organization” full of good people as though this should relieve those of us who are tired of having our labor and ideas abused for profit.

All companies have good people in them. All companies are complex. This is not enough. What matters is the direction of the leadership and what kinds of future a company is trying to create. People may not like either Microsoft or Elsevier’s past, but what about the future?

In Mendeley’s post, they indicate overlap in their vision and Elsevier’s vision as a company. This does not make me more hopeful of Elsevier; this makes me even more dubious of Mendeley. Elsevier has a long track record with no indication of change. It is the parent company. Startups don’t get bought by big companies to blow up the core company. New division presidents or vice-presidents do not have penultimate power in big companies, particularly not when their revenue pales in comparison to the parent company’s. I wish Mendeley employees the best, but I think that they’re naive if they believe that they can start a relationship with the devil hoping he’ll change his ways because of their goodness. This isn’t a Disney fairy tale. This is business.

I genuinely like Mendeley as a product, but I will not support today’s Elsevier no matter how good a product of theirs is. Perhaps they’ll change. I wouldn’t bet on it, but I am open to the possibility.  But right now, I don’t believe in the ethics and commitments of the company nor do I believe that they’re on the precipice of meaningful change. As minimally symbolic as it is, I refuse to strengthen them with my data or money. This means that I will quit Mendeley now that they’re part of Elsevier. In the same vein, I respect people who disagree with my view on the future of Microsoft and choose to not to use their products. I believe in consumer choice. I’m just startled that a head of academic outreach would try to brush off my critique of his new employer by implicating mine. I guess that’s the way things work.

I believe that the next place for me is probably Zotero, but I’m trying to figure out how to get my data (including the PDFs) over there. I’m hopeful that someone will write the scripts soon so that I don’t have to do this manually. If you’ve got other suggestions or advice, I’m all ears.