I was watching an episode of "Obsessed" on A & E online when I realized I really couldn't watch it. While it speaks to my inner OCD tendencies it was set a little too close to home for me. OK, the lady on the show doesn't like germs - I mean seriously doesn't like germs - but I am actually not that crazy about germs myself. I am a person with hand sanitizer in every vehicle, in my purse, on my desk (you get the picture?). Off went the show.
I was perusing a list of phobias on The Phobia List and was intrigued to say the least. For instance, Hippopotomonstrosesquipedaliophobia is the fear of long words. You would be afraid even to say the the name of your syndrome. How do you get help for that?
I have a friend who confessed to me as we were walking down the street once that she was afraid of clowns - Coulrophobia according to the phobia list - and as we walked along who turned the corner and came toward us but someone in a clown costume. Now I ask you, what are the chances of that!???
Some phobias would be easy enough to avoid, Auroraphobia- the fear of Northern lights or Consecotaleophobia the fear of chopsticks, for instance. Just don't go to Alaska or Chinese restaurants. Some would be a real downer, Euphobia, the fear of hearing good news, as an example. This would at the very least be a problem when people are sitting around telling jokes. "I've got some good news and some bad news." "No, no, only give me the bad news" kind of takes the punch out of a joke.
As a person prone to motion sickness I think that Aeronausiphobia, the fear of vomiting secondary to airsickness, is a legitimate concern. One held by many seat mates I have had over the years as well. As a mother I can advise young parents that Ephebiphobia, the fear of teenagers, is not to be underestimated.
When is a phobia not really a phobia? Lilapsophobia, the fear of tornadoes and hurricanes, seems pretty darned normal to me. It's all of those people without Lilapsophobia who are out there chasing big storms with their home video cameras or leaning into the surf in a raincoat on The Weather Channel. These are the people acting all smug about conquering Lilapsophobia and throwing it in our faces.
The mother of all phobias is Phobophobia, the fear of phobias. Well, that is something I need to ponder.
7.09.2009
6.28.2009
Mowing as an act of love
Note to self: NEVER again minimize Joe's contribution to household labor when it involves mowing.
I mowed the grass today for the first time in many years. This is a task I only take on when Joe is out of town for more than 2 weeks. Last year he didn't go to Ecuador and the year before I shamefully got my 79 year old father to do it for me. I never really thought that much about it. After all it is just pushing the mower around, right? How hard can it really be?
I think of all the times I complained when Joe mowed down the wild achillea, the clover, the violets, whatever.... OK, I am officially sorry.
My mowing experience began with starting the mower. It is hard to start. I admit I am kind of a girly girl and it takes some strength and persistence to get it going. The whole time I was trying I was thinking about when he tried to show me how to do it before he left. I stupidly said (yes actually said), "How hard can it be? I just pull the string, right?" He told me to hold the lever that pulls the throttle at the same time. "OK, I've got it."
Yeah, right. I held one of the two levers and pulled. Nothing. Repeated several times. Still nothing. Is that the lever to the throttle? What is a throttle anyway? Maybe I have to hold the other lever at the same time? So I held both. It finally started after several pulls. The problem is that the 2nd lever is the one that makes it go - self-propelling it turns out. Whoa!!!! Mower and me going - fast. Sheesh.
I completed the task. But achillea, violets, clover are completely mowed down. Mowing along I could see them coming but avoiding mowing over my precious plants was next to impossible. I now fully appreciate the patch of clover by my beehives that Joe carefully avoided mowing.
No wonder he has a plan for replacing all grass with ground cover and herbs. Great idea! I am fully 150% on board. I vote for clover and other short bee friendly plants.
I think that couples in committed long term relationships should be required to do the other person's tasks at least once or twice. And then shut up. Would make for smoother sailing. Next week is our 34th wedding anniversary, so a special note to the love of my life....I love you, too.
I mowed the grass today for the first time in many years. This is a task I only take on when Joe is out of town for more than 2 weeks. Last year he didn't go to Ecuador and the year before I shamefully got my 79 year old father to do it for me. I never really thought that much about it. After all it is just pushing the mower around, right? How hard can it really be?
I think of all the times I complained when Joe mowed down the wild achillea, the clover, the violets, whatever.... OK, I am officially sorry.
My mowing experience began with starting the mower. It is hard to start. I admit I am kind of a girly girl and it takes some strength and persistence to get it going. The whole time I was trying I was thinking about when he tried to show me how to do it before he left. I stupidly said (yes actually said), "How hard can it be? I just pull the string, right?" He told me to hold the lever that pulls the throttle at the same time. "OK, I've got it."
Yeah, right. I held one of the two levers and pulled. Nothing. Repeated several times. Still nothing. Is that the lever to the throttle? What is a throttle anyway? Maybe I have to hold the other lever at the same time? So I held both. It finally started after several pulls. The problem is that the 2nd lever is the one that makes it go - self-propelling it turns out. Whoa!!!! Mower and me going - fast. Sheesh.
I completed the task. But achillea, violets, clover are completely mowed down. Mowing along I could see them coming but avoiding mowing over my precious plants was next to impossible. I now fully appreciate the patch of clover by my beehives that Joe carefully avoided mowing.
No wonder he has a plan for replacing all grass with ground cover and herbs. Great idea! I am fully 150% on board. I vote for clover and other short bee friendly plants.
I think that couples in committed long term relationships should be required to do the other person's tasks at least once or twice. And then shut up. Would make for smoother sailing. Next week is our 34th wedding anniversary, so a special note to the love of my life....I love you, too.
6.18.2009
6.03.2009
It's all about discovery
These are some of my thoughts that are the result of reflecting on a presentation by Dan Clancy, engineering director @ Google: Google Book Search Project: Present Status and Next Steps for the Google Book Search Project. Presented at Archiving 2009, May 2009.
Some impressive statistics were revealed at the beginning of this talk – I think these numbers should cause the library world to sit up and take notice (if they haven't done so already). Of the 10 million items included in Google Book Search every month users preview 81% of content contributed by the partners and 78% of the public domain content. The daily numbers are equally impressive: users preview 40% of content contributed by the partners and 17% of the public domain content. That is every day. Most of the traffic comes from Google.com.
That really puts a spin on the notion of the long tail. The backlist is heavily used because of discovery. It is all about discovery. Having full text available and searchable makes it discoverable.
I was interested in what Clancy had to say about quality assessment (QA). This has been an issue that has plagued our group since we started with our first film to digital books project, Beyond the Shelf. We treated those images as if they were precious objects. We scanned and did QA on about 1,000 books. We really wanted the page images to look great. That speaks to our obsessive compulsive nature, I think. We wanted perfection. Eventually it hit us in the face that there was a huge cost to this approach and that was quantity. We had fantastic discussions about cost, scalability, feasibility as it related to the number of searchable page images that we could make available.
Clancy observed that as projects want to get to a 99.9% confidence in the quality of the image/ocr that each “9” leads to an order of magnitude in cost.
This reflects our experience as well. While we really want excellence across the board at some point we have to cave to quantity and develop a good workflow for correcting errors as they are reported.
Clancy said that Google Books Search is doing this…they strive for as good of an initial capture as possible and then have developed good QA to catch errors. They also fix problems as they are reported. They have committed to: a. keep making software smarter, b. keep taking user input, and c. fix things as needed. It is cheaper to fix errors because it is a small problem.
I think this is really the bottom line for those of us creating digital content. It is about quantity and developing methods and processes to create the content faster and cheaper. Here at Kentucky we have learned to do one of the hardest types of content – newspapers. (here is a link to information about our NDNP participation) We are looking at developing efficiencies and balancing quality and quantity – is there a happy medium? Newspapers present the added challenges of small fonts, reading order problems, publishing errors (metadata problems for the most part), etc. If we can make newspaper digitization faster and better it is all to the good.
As we examine what else we choose to digitize it seems to me that we can look in our collection for the unique items and start there. There is no point in us duplicating efforts of those libraries already participating with Google. As we mine our collections I believe that we will discover a great deal of unique material in our special collections. Adding those items to the corpus of digital, discoverable content will be good for everyone. Let’s get going!
Some impressive statistics were revealed at the beginning of this talk – I think these numbers should cause the library world to sit up and take notice (if they haven't done so already). Of the 10 million items included in Google Book Search every month users preview 81% of content contributed by the partners and 78% of the public domain content. The daily numbers are equally impressive: users preview 40% of content contributed by the partners and 17% of the public domain content. That is every day. Most of the traffic comes from Google.com.
That really puts a spin on the notion of the long tail. The backlist is heavily used because of discovery. It is all about discovery. Having full text available and searchable makes it discoverable.
I was interested in what Clancy had to say about quality assessment (QA). This has been an issue that has plagued our group since we started with our first film to digital books project, Beyond the Shelf. We treated those images as if they were precious objects. We scanned and did QA on about 1,000 books. We really wanted the page images to look great. That speaks to our obsessive compulsive nature, I think. We wanted perfection. Eventually it hit us in the face that there was a huge cost to this approach and that was quantity. We had fantastic discussions about cost, scalability, feasibility as it related to the number of searchable page images that we could make available.
Clancy observed that as projects want to get to a 99.9% confidence in the quality of the image/ocr that each “9” leads to an order of magnitude in cost.
This reflects our experience as well. While we really want excellence across the board at some point we have to cave to quantity and develop a good workflow for correcting errors as they are reported.
Clancy said that Google Books Search is doing this…they strive for as good of an initial capture as possible and then have developed good QA to catch errors. They also fix problems as they are reported. They have committed to: a. keep making software smarter, b. keep taking user input, and c. fix things as needed. It is cheaper to fix errors because it is a small problem.
I think this is really the bottom line for those of us creating digital content. It is about quantity and developing methods and processes to create the content faster and cheaper. Here at Kentucky we have learned to do one of the hardest types of content – newspapers. (here is a link to information about our NDNP participation) We are looking at developing efficiencies and balancing quality and quantity – is there a happy medium? Newspapers present the added challenges of small fonts, reading order problems, publishing errors (metadata problems for the most part), etc. If we can make newspaper digitization faster and better it is all to the good.
As we examine what else we choose to digitize it seems to me that we can look in our collection for the unique items and start there. There is no point in us duplicating efforts of those libraries already participating with Google. As we mine our collections I believe that we will discover a great deal of unique material in our special collections. Adding those items to the corpus of digital, discoverable content will be good for everyone. Let’s get going!
4.17.2009
4.12.2009
Favorite iPhone apps
I do not know what I did before iPhone. Apparently many others feel the same as Apple is approaching a billion app downloads. In honor of the impending milestone I am making a list of my faves. Here they are - not in order...
Tweetie - one of many Twitter apps available. It is straightforward and easy to navigate.
Shazam - not only can it listen to songs (on the radio, cd's, etc.) and identify them, but then you are linked to performances on YouTube and links to iTunes to purchase.
SnapTell - take a picture with your phone of any book, DVD, CD and within get a rating, desription and links to Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. Handy for comparison shopping and for remembering items that you see.
iNeedStuff - My favorite shopping list. Add items that you need to the list. When you use it to shop the geolocator feature of the iPhone identifies the store where you are and the application learns what items are where in the store. There is a desktop application so you can sync your phone to that master list.
NowPlaying - what movies are on? Also geolocates.
Games - Drop7 and Wurdle - I was completely addicted to Drop7 (described as tetris meets sudoku) until I played Wurdle. I have spent countless hours trying to beat my scores on both games.
Amazon Kindle - Book reader for the iPhone. I can access all of my Kindle books from my iPhone and it syncs to the last page I read on my Kindle! And vice versa.
Tipulator - figures tip amount on a check and can split the check, too.
Evernote - Helps you remember anything in your life. Notes, photos, recordings. I use it to capture web snippets, tweets, wine labels, where I left my car at the airport, directons, loyalty program numbers (who really carries all of those cards), emails, receipts, recipes, restaurants. Makes my life searchable. Syncs to the cloud and to my desktop. Word recognition makes all searchable. In conjunction with the Griffin Clarifi case you can get good photos of business cards (for instance) and have them all searchable in Evernote.
Apple FTW
Tweetie - one of many Twitter apps available. It is straightforward and easy to navigate.
Shazam - not only can it listen to songs (on the radio, cd's, etc.) and identify them, but then you are linked to performances on YouTube and links to iTunes to purchase.
SnapTell - take a picture with your phone of any book, DVD, CD and within get a rating, desription and links to Google, YouTube, Wikipedia, etc. Handy for comparison shopping and for remembering items that you see.
iNeedStuff - My favorite shopping list. Add items that you need to the list. When you use it to shop the geolocator feature of the iPhone identifies the store where you are and the application learns what items are where in the store. There is a desktop application so you can sync your phone to that master list.
NowPlaying - what movies are on? Also geolocates.
Games - Drop7 and Wurdle - I was completely addicted to Drop7 (described as tetris meets sudoku) until I played Wurdle. I have spent countless hours trying to beat my scores on both games.
Amazon Kindle - Book reader for the iPhone. I can access all of my Kindle books from my iPhone and it syncs to the last page I read on my Kindle! And vice versa.
Tipulator - figures tip amount on a check and can split the check, too.
Evernote - Helps you remember anything in your life. Notes, photos, recordings. I use it to capture web snippets, tweets, wine labels, where I left my car at the airport, directons, loyalty program numbers (who really carries all of those cards), emails, receipts, recipes, restaurants. Makes my life searchable. Syncs to the cloud and to my desktop. Word recognition makes all searchable. In conjunction with the Griffin Clarifi case you can get good photos of business cards (for instance) and have them all searchable in Evernote.
Apple FTW
4.05.2009
Taiga Provocative Statements
I received a tweet last week with a link to the 2009 Taiga Provocative Statements that came out of the Taiga Forum held in January in Denver. The Taiga Forum is a group of Library AULs and ADs. The statements all begin with "Within the next five years...". The draft version has an item about Google meeting virtually all of the information needs for both students and researchers, but is item was struck before the final version was released.
You can find links to this year's statements as well as the 2006 list. Information about the process can be found in the press release located here. This is a list that all librarians should sit up and pay notice to. Very interesting.
Examples:
2. ... collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron driven. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.
6. ... libraries will provide no in-person services. All services (reference, circulation,instruction, etc.) will be unmediated and supported by technology.
9. ... the library community will insist on a better return on investment for membership organizations (e.g., CRL, DLF, CNI, SPARC, ARL, ALA). All collaboration of significance will be centered around either individual entrepreneurial libraries (e.g., HathiTrust, OLE), or regional consortia.
10. ... 20% of the ARL library directors will have retired. University administrators will see that librarians do not have the skills they need and will hire leaders from other parts of the academy, leading both to a realignment of the library within the university and to the decline of the library profession.
You can find links to this year's statements as well as the 2006 list. Information about the process can be found in the press release located here. This is a list that all librarians should sit up and pay notice to. Very interesting.
Examples:
2. ... collection development as we now know it will cease to exist as selection of library materials will be entirely patron driven. Ownership of materials will be limited to what is actively used. The only collection development activities involving librarians will be competition over special collections and archives.
6. ... libraries will provide no in-person services. All services (reference, circulation,instruction, etc.) will be unmediated and supported by technology.
9. ... the library community will insist on a better return on investment for membership organizations (e.g., CRL, DLF, CNI, SPARC, ARL, ALA). All collaboration of significance will be centered around either individual entrepreneurial libraries (e.g., HathiTrust, OLE), or regional consortia.
10. ... 20% of the ARL library directors will have retired. University administrators will see that librarians do not have the skills they need and will hire leaders from other parts of the academy, leading both to a realignment of the library within the university and to the decline of the library profession.
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