I had a fantastic time at BookCamp Toronto. Was honored and pleased to meet most of the organizers the night before, and to mingle with publishers, software developers, XMLers, and others. Also pleased to add quite a few book/tech nerds to my twitter feed and greader.
I’ve organized my toots and some other background info from the (un)conference in a google doc, for general consumption. Go see my notes.
Pneumatic tubes are one of my favorite 19th century technologies.
A friend passed along this O’Reilly TV video wherein Molly Wright Steenson, aka girlwonder, talks briefly (and quickly) about how pneumatic tubes formed the proto-Internet, particularly in 19th century Paris and in the early 20th century in the US.
Unrelatedly, YouTube seems to have begun allowing video imbedding that doesn’t require people viewing the embedded video to save cookies. As a result, you shouldn’t get any YouTube cookies for watching this video here, but if you click on the video and go to its YouTube page, you’ll get cookied. Interesting.
I’ve published the notes I took at Internet Librarian 2008 as a Google doc. I promise I’ll do some more thinking and writing on the topic once I get some freelancing stuff out of the way this week.
I’ll be posting my unadulterated notes today, I hope, but in the meantime, here are some things to tide you over.
Addendum: I suppose in light of sharing the conference itinerary, it might be helpful for me to say what sessions I attended.
Track A: Information Discovery & Search
Track B: Outreach & Marketing Public Libraries in a 2.0 World
Track C: Web Design
Track D: Digital Libraries
On Monday night I also attended a “dine-around” with an excellent group of weird librarians. I say weird because we all didn’t fall into the usual bucket. We were law librarians, engineering librarians, business librarians, embedded librarians, in higher education, in law firms, in state legislatures. In theory we were supposed to be talking about the future of information professionals, but I think the theme just drew together interesting people.
Track A: Enterprise Trends
Track B: Innovation & Change
Track C: Learning
Track D: Solving Problems
Track A: Digital Operations
Track B: Social Media
Track C: Virtual Worlds & Gaming
Track D: Planning
I sort of regret skipping the closing keynote, because I learned today that there was discussion of crafting but, frankly, free passes to the aquarium were worth it.
I’ve been taking lots of notes this week, and I hope to discuss them here in the next few days. Wireless has been iffy at the convention center, so I’ve got a mix of paper and Word. I’ve had some excellent food and met a lot of very interesting folks from a wide variety of libraries.
Tonight after sessions end I’d like to visit the farmer’s market and perhaps talk a walk down to the wharf, and I’m planning to visit the aquarium tomorrow after the last day of talks.
Stay tuned.
I’ve been reading an excellent book by Rosalind Williams called Notes on the Underground: An Essay on Technology, Society, and the Imagination. I’m a sucker for anything that involves sci fi and horror tropes, particularly 19th century sci fi, which forms the core of her thesis.
Much literature and folklore paints the underground as either hell or some sort of hidden fairy cave paradise. Much sci fi writing and film examines what it would mean to live underground, after a nuclear holocaust, for example. The book discusses the place of “the underground” as a concept in the human imagination, and how attempts to explore (physically or figuratively) the underground tends to result in some measure of technical innovation, as well as sometimes high doses of moral questioning and fear. Williams takes the idea of treating a piece of technology not as an object to manipulated, but an environment.
In college I took a class called “London Underground,” the purpose of which was to look at 19th century London, the quintessential Western modern city, through the lens of its metaphorical underground: crime, disease, immorality, etc. We read social criticism and literature that exemplified the palimpsest effect of the city—physically and figuratively. (The paper I wrote for the course ended up being on Victorian museum culture and the view that an empire is a kind of collection. The main works I used were The Picture of Dorian Gray and “The Wasteland” (which was almost cheating). Lots of death and decay and tragedy.) I got a bit obsessed. If I ever go back to school, a thesis on such a topic might be an option.
Anyway, one of the works discussed in the Williams book is L’Eve future, a French novel written in the 1880s. The grad library had a couple copies, and the one that was available is a 1957 clothbound edition with a beautiful clear overlay and a good deal of historical material. The book is in French, and I’m actually looking forward to exercising that again.
The purpose of this post, before I nerded out, was to show you the overlays. I’d like to get some good quality photos of them at some point, but for now here’s the idea:
A couple of weeks ago I wrote to my Representative and Senators about the FISA Bill.
Carl Levin, Democratic Senator for Michigan, has issued a very well written email sent, presumably, to those constituents who urged representatives to vote no on the bill.
The email:
Thank you for contacting me regarding modifications to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA). I appreciate hearing your thoughts on this very serious matter.
On August 5, 2007, the President signed into law a temporary bill, the Protect America Act (P.L.110-55). This law contained a six month time limit in order to give Congress the opportunity to carry out a thorough, thoughtful examination of how to utilize complicated new technologies in the surveillance of suspected terrorists without invading the privacy of innocent Americans. In the months following the signing of P.L.110-55, Congress worked in a bipartisan manner to consider the best course forward to make permanent changes to the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act.
On January 23, 2008, the Senate began consideration of the FISA Amendments Act (S.2248). Title I of this bill would provide the Intelligence Community with the necessary authority to collect intelligence information on suspected terrorists. I supported this section of the bill because the collection of that intelligence is important to securing our national security. Title I is based on an amendment Senator Rockefeller and I introduced during consideration of the Protect America Act, which was filibustered at that time.
Title II of S.2248, however, would grant retroactive immunity to telecommunication providers who disclosed customers’ communications and other confidential information at the request of government officials. This would eliminate accountability for such unlawful actions after the fact. Title II also would require the dismissal of lawsuits brought by persons claiming injury from interception and disclosure of their communications, even if the disclosure violated the constitutional rights of individuals whose personal information was illegally disclosed. Unlike Title I, there is no bipartisan agreement on Title II.
Retroactive immunity is not fair because it leaves American citizens who may have been harmed by the alleged unlawful conduct of these providers without any legal remedy. Many have expressed deep concern that if Congress were to agree to immunize private parties who participated in a program that appears to have been illegal, others might be encouraged to engage in such illicit activities in the future. In a free society, illegal activity cannot be excused on the grounds that government officials asked you to carry it out. There must be accountability for illegal acts.
There is, however, a way to protect telecommunication providers, who acted in good faith, based on the assurances of appropriate administration officials, without depriving American citizens of a legal remedy. I cosponsored an amendment to S.2248 that would have substituted the United States for the telecommunications providers as the defendant in lawsuits based on the actions of those providers. It is appropriate that the Government be liable rather than the telecommunications providers, since the disclosures were allegedly made in these cases at the request of senior executive branch officials to help safeguard U.S. security with assurances that the providers would be protected from liability regardless of the requirements of law.
This amendment would have protected the telecommunications providers from liability just as effectively as the retroactive immunity language in Title II of the bill. However, unlike the retroactive immunity language of Title II, it would not have left those who can prove they were victims of unlawful actions without a remedy. Unfortunately, this amendment was defeated in the Senate.
Although I supported Title I, of the FISA Amendments Act, I voted against the because it included retroactive immunity for telecommunications providers. The Senate passed S.2248 on February 12, 2008. The House is currently working on its own version of the bill. Any differences between the House and Senate versions will need to be reconciled.
Thank you again for contacting me.
Sincerely,
Carl Levin
Thank you, Senator Levin, for your candor on this issue.
Thanks also to Senator Dodd of Connecticut for his work to prevent this bill and other legislation like it from being passed.
Politicians: These men should be your models on this most fundamental of issues.
The ever-vigilant Edward Vielmetti alerted locals over twitter and plurk that The Deuce has been added to the collection of cities with Google Street View.
The covered area is pretty much all the contents inside the major highways: 14, 23, and 94.
I thought I’d feel more weirded out than I do. There also don’t seem to be a lot of people out.
I know it’s old news, but now that it’s in my backyard, literally, I wonder what you folks think about Street View.
The root of the big bang, the basis of all we know, has been called the God particle.
There is a project that is attempting to recreate the conditions of the big bang. It’s called the Large Hadron Collider.
There is a show on the BBC called Horizon that does a full show on it and the amazing telescopes that have helped us see billions of years into our past.
You should watch it.
