LibraryLink

On this blog we talk about books, publishing, research and such matters, but we are also supposed to be looking at some info-tech developments as well, in a not too deep and geeky fashion, but in an intellectually respectable one all the same. It’s hard to hold the balance, and at times we swing this way, at other times, that. It seems to me we need to catch up on the geek side of things a little, so here’s another story from Technology Review. This one is a very good discussion of the current state of Internet speed as affected by the enormous increase in video downloading. You Tube and other services like it come to mind, but commercial broadcasting networks make streaming video versions of their season’s hits available online and this is one big element in the total bandwidth “consumed” by net users. Some analysts see the torrent of video use paralyzing the net, while others are not so gloomy, at least in the short term. But, discussions are going on about what measures should be taken to keep things running, despite the huge increase in video services’ traffic. One obvious answer is to charge, a lot, for video use past a certain bench mark. Other approaches involve charging, but in different ways for different things. The TR article also provides a good review of the way things are handled right now, and of where and how choke points can arise, slowing transmission. It also contains a quick but understandable summary of the concept of “net neutrality”, which has become a hot buzzword in the industry and even in Congress. Some of the examples of amateur video that have become popular are rather puzzling to these old eye, but I never cared much for home movies even way back in the 8mm days. I don’t get the cell phone either. What can all these people be saying to one another? What is there to talk about? It must be me.
Choking

Facebook and My Space offer what’s called “social networking”. These two services are, I think, the largest of the social networking entities, but there are others, some of which deal with specialized sub-groups, such as scientists. Facebook and My Space have attracted the attentions of social scientists and anthropologists, because they seem to offer ideal natural laboratories in which to observe how humans structure their interactions and relationships. From the technical point of view however, running these services presents a serious logistical challenge, since the number of subscribers is very large…in the millions…and the amounts of data these people want to present and exchange is considerable. The subscribers also have definite ideas about how quickly all this should work. Technology Review
has an instructive article detailing “under the hood” aspects of one of the prime social networks, Facebook. The story surveys the computing power and data storage requirements of the system and provides an explanation of how it all works. Face
While you there, take a look at two other articles that also discuss aspects of social networking. One asks who owns the data on these networks, which is a very good question, and the other is a discussion of the business aspects involved, including some wondering about whether they can make any money.

“Nothin’ say luvin’ like somethng in the oven”, as the old commercial went, and nothing says modern like the Web. Right? What could be more modern? What could be more divorced from, well, say, early 20th centurgy Belgium, with starched collars all around and inkwells, and touch typists and file clerks padding quietly around immense card catalogs? Well, hold on a second. Today’s New York Times has a long, a really long, story in the Science section on the work of one man who, after having been largely overlooked or even forgotten, is the subject of considerable attention, as a person who thought about, figured out and implemented a number of the features we think only came into being with the advent of the Web.

The man in question was Paul Otlet and the small Belgian city of Mons is home to an archive and museum which is planned to memorialize his work. Otlet was the son of intelligent parents, who “homeschooled” their child, in the conviction that ordinary schooling stifled intelligence and creativity. Their main teaching tool was the family library, and Otlet got the bug, spending the rest of his life hanging around libraries, a fact that obviously makes him our kind of guy. Otlet’s work foreshadowed innovations such as hyperlinks, but added a feature to make them “intelligent” in some sense. He planned a colossal network (reseau), in which searchers would make use of what he called “electronic telescopes”, something like our computers, to look for and retrieve information from all over the world on all sort of topics. And he got it going too. Belgium was interested in becoming the seat of the League of Nations, and Otlet pitched tihe idea of his world brain to the Government. Figuring that it would strengthen their bid, the politicians supported the idea and quite an operation was launched, reviewing thousands of documents and generating millions of index cards. He even started a fee for service answering branch. People could write or telegraph requests for information and the team in Mons would try to locate materials on the topic. Answers were copied from the originals and sent to the requestors. When Belgium lost out on the the League headquarters bid, the government lost interest also, and dropped the funding. The Depression came along, and then WWII, with the German occupation. A great deal of the materials gathered were destroyed when the Nazis grabbed the building as a site for an exhibition of “Aryan art”. Otlet died in 1944, well before anything like the computers his schemed called for were available. But his descriptions and sketches seem to have caputured pretty much all the theoretical basis that his “reseau” would need to function when the available technology came along.
I can’t include a link to the story, since it won’t work for most of our readers. But Look in the Times for 6.17 and hunt this down. It’s worth the effort. On the Times site, there are also some graphics and a video that help explain what the guy was up to.

PS: There is a link to the Otley story via Scitech Daily Review;
Otley

Today is Bloom’s Day. June 16, 1904 is the day on which the events recounted in James Joyce’s pathbreaking novel Ulysses take place in Dublin. And, in honor of the great Irish writer’s great creation, celebrations of Bloom’s Day, great and little, take place all over. In some cities, there is a marathon reading of Ulysses, which would be a real work-out. In other places, there are modifications, in which various key portions of the novel are read aloud, or even dramaized. There is a foot race in Spokane and celebrations in Szombathely,a town in Hungary, since that was the place in which the father of one of the main characters in the book, Leopold Bloom, was supposed to have been born. On the one hand, I don’t imagine too many of the racers and revellers have actually read the book. On the other hand, what a great excuse for a party! So, go someplace, have a drink, toast the Shade of Ireland’s greatest novelist, and relax a bit. It’s hot.
PS. Here’s a post from the Public Library of Science (PLoS) blog on Bloom’s Day:
Bloom

It’s time for for the Blogging Grouch to lead the Troop on another stroll through the woods, to see what’s new in there. We live in odd times, for sure. But, interesting things, or at least ideas about interesting things, keep popping up, and a lot of those things pertain to what we want to do in this blog. so here goes:
The June 12 issue of Nature has a couple of items on transformational or translational research. One piece talks about the reaction by NIH to comments on its proposed new peer review process. An interesting aspect of this reform is the effort to fund “blue sky” but high pay-off projects. And David Goldston in A Delicate Balance decrypts some of the buzzwords being used in the effort to get more product out of NIH’s research investment, and get it faster. The distinction between “translational” and “transformative” is one key notion. Declan Butler, one of Nature’s senior editors, offers a backgrounder on the gap between the NIH research effort, generally considered to be first rate, and the arrival of the breakthtrough therapies that many feel should be pouring out of the labs and into the clinics. If you can only read one of these, read Butler, but by all means read them all if possible. Things are changing and those old horses who are used to treading the same path that worked well for their funding in the past may be in for a rude shock when renewals are due.
Balance
Peer
Butler

One of the canons of scientific policy is that you cannot direct basic research. Science progresses best when investigator pursue the objects of their own curiosity without any attempt to make something tangible or useful come directly out of the research. A problem yields when the scientific basis for the solution emerges, often out of quite surprising sources. I think NIH would be unwilling to say they are trying to “direct” research, but it sure looks that way, at leat a little, around the edges. Who can blame them? Tens of millions of Americans are heading into retirement and the prospect of keeping up with their care, if all that can be offered them is more of what we have now, is very daunting. So, get a move on, and start producing those cures. We’ll see what happens.
Let’s flit over to Boston so that we can get straightened out on the true meaning of The Butterfly Effect. Peter Dizikes, the author, claims that the BE has become a staple of popular culture, which is fine, excep for the fact that it’s usually misunderstood by the people who are talking about it. The true meaning of BE centers on the difficulty of prediciting outcomes when the initial conditions are uncertain. But, most folk talk about BE to mean that great effects can be result from small causes. Well, yeah. A dead Archduke causes WWI? No, not at all. But, we have been BE’ing around for a while now, and it’s good to be put right.
Butter
Technology Review has some good summaries of what’s going on in the world of Busines IT. That’s a little rubbery, and even vague, the “business IT” part I mean. Something that developed with a business slant to it might turn out to be generally useful, but I digress. There are capsules describing new ways of archiving email, making computer centers run more efficiently, chip architecture, image search, and on one man’s view that the Artificial Intelligence effort is floundering rather badly because what it want’s to do is impossible, so it’s time for a rethink.
Artificial
If you’ve ever wondered about Stonehenge, and who hasn’t, there are two new books that will try to set you straight. I guess the quick answer is nobody knows and that it will be bloody hard to prove. The reviews are in The Telegraph:
Stones
We’ll do one more and then head back to camp for the night.Antonio Melechi has written a good overview of the Victorian era’s fascination with hypnotists, mediums and similar creatures in: Servants of the Supernatural: the Night Side of the Victorian Mind. It’s an oft-told tale. The Great Nineteenth century saw stupendous advances in understanding of the material world, and in turning that understanding into something like Baconian mastery of it. But the other side of the coin was a tremendous growth in phonus-bolonus metaphysico-myterioso movements, cults and organizations which seemed to push in exactly the opposite direction. The Grouch does not doubt that these phenonmena are related, but will leave the unpacking of the relationship to nimbler minds. OK that’s it. Inside and lights out.
Boo!

We posted a story here yesterday about some difficulties Microsoft is encountering, and in so doing, I forgot to include an item from the New York Times for May 24, noting that the company had decided to stop its work on a rather large project to digitize the content of many books and scholarly articles, and distribute these on the web. According to the Times piece, the announcement about the end of the book digitization project came on a company blog. The article states that Microsoft had already completed work on 750,000 books and 80 million journal articles. One of the entities most seriously affected by the action is the Internet Archive, a non profit digital archiving service that Microsoft was using to conduct the actual work. Some academic libraries, such as that of the University of Toronto, were also affected, and will seek support elsewhere for the continuation of the digitization effort. In all, it seems that Microsoft is throwing overboard those projects it considers marginal in its fight to finish with Google. It’s still too early to tell, but we may be about to watch a major shift take place in the computer and information technology arenas. Microsoft seems to be punching hard, but not hitting, and the departure of Chairman Bill only adds another element of uncertainty to the brew. Watch the stock price.

All empires come to a point at which there’s no place to go but down. Rome, Persia, Spain, Microsoft….Microsoft? Well, look at it this way. Things have not been going so well for the Behemoth from Redmond. The attempt to buy or otherwise take over Yahoo! didn’t go anywhere. The VISTA operating system was a flopperoo of Broadway proportions. Despite a very high pressure PR campaign that nattered on about VISTA, the the reviewers were harsh because of compatability problems, and sales pretty poor, as users decided it was prudent to hang on to their money and wish Mr. Gates and associates a hearty Better Luck Next Time. Now the newest release of Windows, labeled SEVEN, was vetted at the All Things Digital trade show and conference, without generating more enthusiasm than common polliteness would require.
We try to follow Info Tech in these pages, but, to be frank, we have our limitations and have to recognize them. So, I’ll pass the reader on to a report that appeared in the techie blog Ars Technica and let that reader decide. I think the writer is seized mainly by the emotion of disappointment. It’s not the case that SEVEN is a bad product.(Or for that matter, neither is VISTA). The feeling seems to be that a lot of what was demonstrated had been shown before and apart from some “Ooh Ah” about touch screen manipulations and finger painting, the show didn’t make the case. In the 1920s Oswald Spengler wrote a long and gloomy meditation called The Decline of the West, and the title pretty much tips the author’s hand. Maybe Herr Professor Doktor Spengler’s lucubrations extend to the software giant also.
Ars Technica

The British are nuts about gardening, right? It’s risky to generalize but probably safe to say that very many of the inhabitants of the British Isles are enthusiastic gardeners, and always were. Well, no. Not that last part anyway. The root (pun not intended, but it came out rather nicely) of the enthusiasm for gardening over there in Albion can be found rather late in history, in the Eighteenth Century in fact, and we colonials played a big part in it. Three men were pivotal in getting the whole thing going, and their lives and work are detailed in a new book by Andea Wulf, a German national living in the UK: The Brother Gardeners: Botany, Empire and the Birth of an Obsession. One of the three was Sir Joseph Banks, who has come up in these pages before. The other two were Phillip Miller and Peter Collinson. Miller was the guy who litterally did the “spade work”, planting, arranging, preserving. Collinson was a business type who had a partner in America, John Bartram. Bartram did a lot of botanical tramping around the colonies and gathered numerous plant species to interested enthusiasts in the Olde Countrie. The sum total of their work established gardening first as a past time for aristocrats, and then for the lesser orders. They were all interesting guys in their own way, but it’s hard to edge out Banks as an object of study. Rich, handsome, famous after his voyage around the world with Captain Cook, he was a mainspring of scientific study in Britain, lashed on constantly by his own immense curiosity. He backed it all up with his money, which he spent generously, even lavishly on research and in helping out other investigators. Wulf contrasts his character to that of Linnaeus, who comes out as dictatorial and mean-spirited. She reports that a favorite trick of his was to find a plant with an unpleasant smell or other ugly feature and name it after a rival. The whole Eighteenth Century thing can make your head swim; so much going on, so many fascinating people, such wealth, such misery, such brilliance, such degradation. This study seems like a good way to get a strong dose of Eighteenth Century. The review in The Guardian is at:
Gardens

The NIH has issued an updated FAQ on the policy mandating deposit in PubMed Central of final manuscripts reporting on research funded by NIH grants. The FAQ document itself is rather lengthy and contains links to the text of the policy statement and to supporting resources, such as the list of those journals which automatically deposit the manuscript without further action by the author(s).
FAQ

Gary Marcus, a prof at NYU, has written a book called “Kluge: The Haphazard Construction of the Human Mind,” in which he argues that our brains are far from being the cause for self-congratulation that our species often displays. In fact, the ole Bean is a pretty sorry lash-up of compromise and “JGE” (just good enough) solutions to various problems that have arisen in our evolutionary history. The blog 3Quarks Daily has a post about the Marcus book, with a link to a longer precis by a writer for Newsweek. The brain, the mind, consciousness are all hot topics in serious publishing today, with books such as Stephen Pinker’s How the Mind Works enjoying bestseller status. The more the better, I say. Somebody may actually figure it out someday, although, frankly, it doesn’t seem to me that they are even close. But the point I want to raise here concerns the word “Kluge” (rhymes with Huge). I thought that the word had a “d” sound in it…kludge I remember reading it as a term of abuse among computer types for an inelegant, awkward, unworkmanlike piece of programming or equipment. I looked in the OED, and kludge is there roughly in the meaning I remember, and linked etymologically to the German adjective “kluge”, meaning smart, clever, wise or prudent. But, d or no d, we may be fated to work out our days relying on a unit that’s a mass of compromises and so-so engineering.
Sorry Lashup