Weibel Lines

A Note of CyNNicism

I'm leaving Japan today, after a three month stay that has been a truly extraordinary experience.  The title of this post has nothing at all to do with that experience, except that I stayed at the hotel near Tsukuba Station last night, and I'm a bit hungry for English language news, so I turned on CNN.  Mistake.  First of all, the news is dreadful... the American political cycle is charging up, and it is too ugly to behold.  But even THAT, reason for cynicism that it is, is not what this post is about.  It is CNN's so called Campaign for Freedom -- their battle against the modern slavery -- sexual exploitation.

Let me be clear that I am not writing in support of such exploitation, and in fact, I would be inclined to applaud CNN's position -- Shining light on this dreadful expression of the human condition is the first and most important step that can be taken to address the problem.

What, then, is my complaint?  The self-aggrandising tone of their adverts on the subject reek of hypocrisy and promotion more than genuine desire to fix the problem.  "We won't leave until they [the victims] can" is their tag line.  Oh really? 

Raise your hand if you believe that this sort of exploitation is truly going to disappear as a result of CNN's efforts?  I do not suggest that inaction in the face of the intractable is the right course.  Not at all.  The victims of such heinous exploitation deserve earnest systematic effort, and some of them will benefit.  But forgive me if I am skeptical about their staying power, or even their motives.  It won't be hard for CNN to crank out a regular series of feel-good stories that they help to make happen, and not make the smallest dent in the real problem, which lives largely, I suspect, in complicit governments awash in poverty.

One of these days, CNN will tire of this particular campaign, and launch another... who knows... maybe to end war as we know it?  No one has tried that one for a few years.  I'm guessing there will still be a few victims around that can't leave.

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Izu snail.  easy does it

 

100 Books

Via  @james3neal in my Twitter feed: The Guardian's list of 100 greatest non-fiction books. We love these lists, probably because they incite us to challenge them and think of the alternatives, and the Guardian at least is up front in encouraging us to do so:

but there's bound to be the odd omission.

Yikes... a bit of confident British understatement, that!  Still... not many of us will read the comments proposing those alternatives (414 when I looked). 

Such lists are also inclined to make us (well, me, anyway) feel ignorant, by virtue of the small number of items that I've actually read, even though I can see many on the list that have almost certainly had their influence.  I took the smallest measure of consolation in at least recognizing the ironic error in the list -- McLuhan's The Medium is the Massage.  Or perhaps they are toying with us?

My commentary on the ones that I have, or almost have, read:

Silent Spring by Rachel Carson (1962) 

This book actually marked my first real understanding of man as destroyer, and the foolishly optimistic notion that reason might be the antidote.

Hard Times: an Oral History of the Great Depression by Studs Terkel (1970)

I didn't actually read this, but I heard Terkel tell many stories from it on the radio.

The Electric Kool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe (1968)

I think I read this, but I was stoned at the time.

The Uses of Enchantment by Bruno Bettelheim (1976)

I didn't read this, but Marguerite did about the time that our children were enchantable, and spoke fluently of it.

Godel, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden Braid by Douglas Hofstadter (1979)

Like many, I read parts of this, and understood parts of it (I think).  My first real engagement with recursion.

The Diary of a Young Girl by Anne Frank (1947)

FInally... one that I can say I read and remember with stunning clarity.  And visiting the house in Amsterdam... goodness.

Critique of Pure Reason by Immanuel Kant (1781)

In philosophy class.  Water off a duck's back.

The Double Helix by James Watson (1968)

I'm so old, I actually knew someone who had a date with James Watson.  I think the Life magazine redux of this theory was probably as influential as the Sputnik scare in promoting science education in America.

In Cold Blood by Truman Capote (1966)

OK, I think I read this, but I know I saw the movie.  Sharon Nicholson wanted to see it, and I agreed against my better judgement.  It contains the single most traumatic scene in my movie history, and I wish I'd never... yeah, I bet you know the one.

News of a Kidnapping by Gabriel García Márquez (1996)

I have no knowledge of this book at all, but Marquez is magical, and I learned from his autobiography (Living to Tell the Tale), that Love in the Time of Cholera, which I love, is actually about the love of his parents.  Non fiction without excessive obeisance to facts.

Passage to Juneau by Jonathan Raban (2000)

Wow... I don't even know this book, but I hoped to write it next year... or at least sail the route in my own boat.  This goes to the head of the reading list.

The Structure of Scientific Revolutions by Thomas Kuhn (1962)

A huge impact, this one.  Old theoreticians never change their minds... they just die.

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A koi in a pond on the Izu Peninsula.

Library Robotics

Japan, more than most places, enjoys a cultural fascination, and even comfort, with robots.  The home of Astroboy and Mobile Suit Gundam is a fertile place for both imagination and innovation in robotics (try this YouTube video at home for an anime take on the subject: hostile work environment alert!). In Tsukuba, there is a new robot zone, wherein one can, I gather, soon expect to encounter independently roaming robots of an experimental nature [more on this intitiative here].  In most places, I'd be alarmed, but in a country where the buildings don't fall down in 9.0 earthquakes, and civility is a national pasttime, I'm not so worried about Schwarzeneggerish robotic perturbations. 2001: a Space Odyssey could never have been conceived here -- robots would never be so presumptuous as to address their minders by their given names!

My experience with library robotics goes back to my days as a graduate school at The Ohio State University.  A new health sciences library opened at about the same time as I arrived in 1971 to begin my doctoral studies in pharmacology.  The core of the building (literally) was a large mechanical contraption that moved boxes of books (roughly the size of today's recycling bins) along conveyors in response to a 'get' request.  For patrons, initiating that request required looking up the citation in a catalog (cards, as I recall), writing a 12 digit number on a slip of paper, giving it to a staff member who would then re-key said number, initiating the retrieval of one of the boxes that, theoretically, would have the volume of interest.  Sometimes it did.

Two opportunities for transcription errors in a long number so far, assuming the the machine was working (often it was not).  If a book was 'reshelved' incorrectly -- in a box other than its own -- it was lost forever.  Well, not forever... only until the RandTriever, some years later, was dismantled.  I admit to a small measure of hyperbole here, but not much.  Short of a system-wide inventory, there was no way to reconnect an errant book to its home.  Barcoding was just entering the grocery marketplace at this time, so this critical tool was unavailable to assist in book handling.

My first and last experience in this building as a graduate student involved two hours, a request for about 10 references, 2 of which were satisfied.  Facing an uprising, the College of Pharmacy agreed to allow graduate students to request materials via interlibrary loan for items not available in our own small, but effective, library.  If memory serves, the RandTriever was the 4th installation of its kind in the States.  As far as I know, it was the last, but that may be my own wishful surmise.  Anyone know of others?

During my stay in Japan I have visited two libraries with automated stacks: the Kansai Kan branch of the National Diet Library has one (a big one!), and the Hokkaido University Library is loading their new one as part of their soon-to-open library rennovation.   There are more than 100 such installations in Japan, with four hardware vendors.  Having seen two in action, they are fast and quiet, but they don't look radically different than the mechanical beast I came to loathe 40 years ago.  The differences, in fact, are large indeed.  These work.  Each box and book has a barcode identifier, and the binding between the two is dynamic.  The system maintains the list, and one of the consequences of this is that the collection sorts itself such that more commonly used materials migrate to boxes nearer the 'front.'  That translates to shorter transaction times (probably insignificant) and lower energy costs over time.

Bibliophiles everywhere love to browse stacks, and this aspect of library patronage is lost, but it is disappearing as the result of the migration towards digital content as well.  And the premium on space in a country as dense as Japan trumps a lot of other factors.

I have no information about the overall reliability of the current technology, but I have 40 Honda-years under my belt, and 38 of them were virtually trouble free.  And they don't teach teenagers how to drive (or go on dates) with the book robots.  At least, not directly.

Back in Columbus, they eventually extracted the beast from the heart of the building, rebuilt the library, and named it after the 'visionary' who oversaw adoption of this immature technology.  I bet no one capitalized the retirement costs in the initial cost estimates, but at least they eventually found all those lost books.

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New sign in the center of Tsukuba warning of possible robotic encounters.  They don't call it Tsukuba Science City for nothing!

Uncommon Cause: Schema.org and the Semantic Web

Like many others, I view the emergence of schema.org with a jaundiced eye... another example of large, powerful companies wielding their influence without regard to an open standards process.   This particular case is interesting because it brings together the arch-rivals of search -- Google, Microsoft, and Yahoo -- into uncommon cause.

Standards typically prevail in mature markets where the threat to innovation by convergence has declined, and it is in the best interests of companies to share at least certain aspects of their infrastuctural specifications.  This is far from the case in search -- the black arts of SEO have long since entered the stage of personalization, the secrets of which are perhaps among the most closely held in all of information technology.

So, it is surprising that the giants have agreed on a common approach to structured (meta)data, and unfortunate that the agreement has turned away from the open standard of RDFa and towards an alternative, internally-created approach authored within Google.  But they don't call it free enterprise for nothing, and if the Giant stretches and rolls over, squashing a few thousands of person-years of open standards work in the process, the ground on its other side will open up in fertile opportunitites for those nimble enough to invade the resulting ecosystem.  And the fields of technology are nothing if not fertile and nimble.

There is nothing much new in this -- the library community has been struggling for years to snuggle in close to the thrashing giant without being squashed, with indeterminate degrees of success: the jury is still out.  So, what will happen?  There will be winners and losers, of course... The poor will always be with us, but so too, the rich.  But who will the winners and losers be?

As far as I can tell, the people screaming loudest about schema.org are the semantic web folks (of whom I count myself one).  Dublin Core, my own deepest professional engagement, is positioned as an important vocabulary for semantic web use, and I was in the room with three other people (Dan Connelly, Jim Miller, and Bill Arms) when the RDF course was initially set.  If all of the past 15 years of semantic web ennabling infrastructure is washed away by the the few, I won't be happy.  Except that that isn't what will happen.  RDF and Dublin Core may turn out to be casualties... we'll see. But the trajectory of the thinking, the deployment, and the exploitation of all that work is as inevitably a part of the future of search as it was a month or a year or five years ago.

If Schema.org is successful (likely, given the importance of SEO), there will still be metadata spam (more sophisticated than ever).  There will be the difficulty of effective deployment of a complicated ontology that will require some of the organizational insights and arcane ontological skills of library backrooms. 

Is your average webmaster going to become a knowledge organization specialist?  Well, they already are in one sense, and pattern recognition (and replication) are basic to the skill sets of programmers and system managers.  So, we can expect templates to be perfected and promulgated in areas of eCommerce and in the backrooms of large content purveyors, and they will probably improve search and display of search results on the Web.

Will they achieve semantic web goals?  Perhaps incrementally, but I suspect not a lot.  The goal is to sell more stuff, and optimization will be based on that.  To expect semantic value to ooze from the seams of commercial advertising (no matter how structured) seems unrealistic.

It is disappointing that the ennabling infrastructures for these functions will not be the same (or, if they become so, it will have been at the expense of open standards development).  But it may be that the nominal reasons offered by schema.org for growing their own technology are legitimate to a degree -- RDF took too long, and is too complicated for wide deployment (15 years is an eternity in web development cycles).  It may also be that the schema.org approach will prove inadequate for the challenging tasks of expressing semantics (as opposed to simple search optimization).  Or it may be that the elusive goals of wringing semantics from machine-to-machine data exchange is still far from our grasp.

Whatever happens, nothing about schema.org will magically make data coherent.  That still happens in the minds of the people who practice the art of semantic declaration, and we have a long way to go to see those arts commodified.  I suspect schema.org may contribute, but I hope I may be forgiven an inclination to root for the underdogs along the way.

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Prayer plaques at a local shrine.  Many years ago I purchased such a plaque and profanely scribbled "World Domination for Dublin Core" on the back.  As metadata goes, we came close enough I suppose.

Apple Polishing

Apple's WWDC (World Wide Developer's Conference) keynote was an interesting show with lots of small, and a few major, announcements about the upcoming operating systems (Lion and iOS 5) and Apple's foray into serious cloud computing.  I watched live blogging of the event, being awake in the middle of the night, and found myself both engaged and put off.

Over the last decade, I've purchased no fewer than 7 Mac laptops, a desktop machine, three iPhones, an iPad, and iPods too numerous to keep track of.  I guess I'm a fan.  For several years I lived with a foot in each camp, having a work PC and a personal Mac. I am not among those who believes Apple does everything right, and that functionality on the Mac platform is in all respects superior to the PC.  A few things work dramatically better (networking connections, for example -- or at least they did when last I touched a PC).  Its been years.  But Apple does boneheaded things too.

The esthetics of the MacOS platform, however, have always been far superior to the PC's in my eyes, and that matters to me. The level of integration (things work pretty much the same in every application) means that learning curves are far lower as well.

The 'walled garden' which has been a cornerstone of Apple strategy keeps users safer, makes the computing environment more stable and predictable, and, well, in Jobs' parlance "just works".  Especially if you're happy with the Ap Store as your content censor and holder of all your personal credit information (and raker of hefty royalties for every piece of content you buy). Two hundred and fifty twenty five million one-click credit cards, and counting.  Mine is there.

Its all going to "just work" even better now.  Across MacOS and iOS-5 devices, anyway.  Apple will be more polished, more integrated, smoother, mouse-less, and siren-call-enticing than ever.  Their $100/year still-born MobileMe attempt at cloud computing has been reborn as iCloud, and, Google-like, is now free.

I'm a GMail and Google-docs fan, and have been for a long time, but when every application has seamless access to the iCloud service, it will be very difficult to muster the additional key-strokes and effort necessary to save content to an alternative.  We, the People, are slothful and lazy, mostly.  And even if we're not, keeping track of stuff in multiple places with multiple access regimens (and the horror of uncountably many passwords) is a particularly noxious element of today's computing environment, and it will be easy to seduce people to a "just works" alternative.

But of course, there are no free lunches.  Or clouds.  Google trades heavily on the data they collect from our searching and mail-profiling.  And while I am a GMail user from the start, there is always the nagging fear that someday I'm going to be faced with a draconian data-rescue choice denominated in currency, or effort, or time, that will be painful to pay off.  And the price will be higher in proportion to the cube of the degree of integration. 

I learned this by accident a few months ago when my Flickr account expired.  As advertised, my pictures were still there.  In one, long stream.  All my effort at organizing in sets and providing location metadata was hidden.  Still there, but hidden, to be unlocked at my reinstatement to their good graces (account paid up).

I actually think this is reasonable -- After all, they didn't consign my largish stash of images to the bit-bucket the day after my account expired.  But when we blithley take up yet-another 'free-or-cheap service', we seldom read the fine print or anticipate what the price for losing it might be.  And when our entire digital lives are concentrated in one place, and that place changes its terms of service, or pricing structure, or vanishes in a natural or business maelstrom, its going to hurt.  My image file metadata is now, and always, hostage to Flickr's account fees.

So, replacing a clunky, $100 dollar a year cloud service (MobileMe) with a 'free', highly integrated, super-convenient cloud service that unifies content and services over the entire spectrum of our digital devices is likely to be very successful, and will assure that its users are lifetime one-click customers.  Its brilliant, and it will work.  I wish I'd held onto my Apple stock.

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The dragon fount at a local shrine on the east side of Tsukuba.  Looks like he's drooling, doesn't he?  And why do we always assume that drooling entities are male?