The Invisible Library

Free Culture Guru, tech savvy superhero and all around mensch, Larry Lessig is considering a run for Congress.

We need guys like Lessig in Congress. For far too long, elderly Ludites like Ted “Series of Tubes” Stevens have been drafting our policies on everything from Telecom regulation to how copyright laws are altered to keep cultural icons in the hands of corporations, rather than in the public domain where they belong. Lessig is a clear and smart voice who could help change all that.

If you live in California’s 12th District, drop by the Lessig 08 website and show your support. And if you don’t live in CA 12, write your Rep and tell them you want them to be more like Larry and less like Ted and that if they don’t change, you’ll find someone who will.

It’s VP day! Farhad Manjoo at the Machinist Blog has the definitive Mac vs PC article which finally gives the only answer you’ll ever need: buy a Mac:

The present article is an attempt to prove to you that, on price alone, the Mac is not the BMW of computers. It is the Ford of computers. I am not arguing that the Mac is cheaper only if you consider the psychic benefits conferred by its quality. Rather I’m going to illustrate something more straightforward: Even though you may pay a slight premium at the cash register for a Mac over a comparable Windows PC (a premium that gets slighter all the time), it will cost you less money — real, honest-to-goodness American dollars — to own that Mac than to own that PC.

Why this should be has to do with an economic truth that has not recently mattered much in the computer industry, but that, in an age of eBay and unyielding obsolescence, is now crucial. It is resale value. Macs fetch far more on the aftermarket than do PCs — and after years of use, you can offset that cash-register premium by selling your Mac for a better price than you could your PC.

Consider this example: Last Thanksgiving, you could have purchased a fairly well-outfitted Windows desktop — the HP Pavilion Media Center A1640n — on sale from some retail outlets for $699. The machine came with 2 gigabytes of memory, a 250 GB hard disk, and it ran on a quick 1.86 GHz Intel Core 2 Duo processor.

Around the same time, you might instead have picked up Apple’s top-of-the-line Mac Mini, which came equipped with a processor slightly less powerful than the HP’s (a 1.83 GHz Intel Core Duo), a far smaller hard disk (80 GB), and less memory (512 MB). The Mac Mini would have set you back $799, or $100 more than the HP.

A good way to gauge the current market value of a computer is to check how much buyers have been willing to pay for similar models in auctions recently completed on eBay. Doing so for the HP shows prices ranging from $236 to $257 — let’s say a rough average of $250. Sales of the Mac Mini, meanwhile, go from about $445 to $550. Let’s assume you can unload yours for $500.

If you used your HP for a year and then sold it, you would have spent $449 to own it — that is, your purchase price of $699 minus your sale price of $250. The Mac Mini, for the same year, would have set you back far less: $799 minus $500, or just $299.

I ran such comparisons on many Windows and Mac systems sold during the past four years, and in nearly every one — whether the machines were laptops or desktops — the Macs sold by enough of a premium over comparable Windows machines to make up for the greater amount you would have paid when buying them.

I have a 4 year old G4 Powerbook 12″ with 40 Gigs of memory and 256 Megs of RAM. I used it to build this blog, write a novel and it got me through grad school– and it’s still kicking ass. The only repairs it’s ever needed were a few freeware patches, a replacement battery ($80) and a replacement AC adapter ($20) and those needed replacing only because they wore out.  I upgraded twice, first to Panther, then to Tiger with zero problems or bugs. A quick perusal of eBay tells me I could sell this thing for between $400 and $600. I purchased it for around $2000. Now sure, with wear and tear, maybe that would knock a hundred bucks off the price. But could you imagine a Dell or HP laptop selling for 40% it’s cost after 4 years? Hell no. Most PCs don’t even last that long because, as Farhad points out, they get eaten alive by spyware and viruses long before they ever have a chance to be resold.

So. Buy a Mac. It’s not only pretty and (mostly) virus free, but if you have a need to resell it, you’ll get your money’s worth. Not that you’ll need to resell it; Elvira and I have three Macs at home, all between 3 and 5 years old and they all work brilliantly. We’ll be using them for years to come.

And I had this great post half written in my head, all about how Sputnik changed the world and all the technology we use today, from cell phones, to GPS to the Internet wouldn’t exist if it weren’t for a beeping little basketball that the commies launched into orbit fifty years ago today. Then I saw that Phil Plait went and wrote all that and then some. So go there and read.

Emily over at Library Revolution brings up a point that relates, tangentially, to something I mentioned recently in regards to Michael Gorman and his fear of a user-contributed world:

My husband and I recently took our son to the Bronx zoo, where we were in for a treat – se got to see an Okapi up close and personal. Apparently, even in the zoo it is rare to see an Okapi up close – they usually hide in the back of the exhibit. But that day the Okapi was interested in being social and was right there up by the glass.
After talking to one of the zoo guides about this interesting and unique creature and the fact that it is unusual to get such a good look, I was curious. So when I got home I took a few minutes to look up the Okapi online. I just wanted to get a little bit information, so I ended up on Wikipedia, of course. There I learned a few facts about its habitat and behavior, including the interesting fact that they like to eat the burnt wood left over from a lighting strike.

And that was enough for me. It’s all I wanted or needed to know.

So when I have conversations with librarians concerned that people are using the internet to get fast, basic information instead of coming in to the library for “real” research, I have a hard time thinking that is always a bad thing.

Don’t get me wrong. Students need to use good, reliable sources for their research, and a quick Wikipedia reference just isn’t going to cut it. Medical questions, financial questions, and other really important topics should be handled carefully and researched in much more depth. There are plenty of times when there is just no replacement for good, solid library research with the help of an information professional.

But this wasn’t one of them. And there are lots of instances when basic information gained quickly is more than sufficient. I didn’t need (or want) to delve into great tomes of zoological knowledge to learn detailed Okapi facts. I didn’t need to access scientific journals via complex databases or double check the citations and cross references for multiple sources.

This is an important development that often gets overlooked, not just by librarians but by most people in general when discussing the web: people know how to use it to find basic facts and figures that they otherwise wouldn’t. They may not be expert searchers but– and this is the real kicker– they don’t have to be. 9 times out of 10, people use the Internet to find out some basic info on Okapi, or the name of that actor, the one who plays the Lead Tenor in ‘Springtime for Hitler” in the Producers. He looks really familiar, but what’s his name? It’s easy to find out– grab the laptop, jump on line and go to IMDB. (He’s John Barrowman, better known as Captain Jack Harkness from Doctor Who).

Ten years ago, this answer would have been a lot harder to find out. Sure, you could wait for the credits to roll and pause the VCR, squint and go, “John Barrowman? Well great, I know his name, but what else has he been in?” You would have then had to have gone to the library, asked for a movie guide and hoped they had an up to date one, which they probably didn’t. Now, a few clicks of the mouse and you’re informed. Maybe it’s trivial information but you now know something you didn’t before and more than that, you know where to find information like that, again. Most information needs are like this, which is the dirty secret reference librarians don’t tell you. I do five hours a week on the reference desk and most of my questions are: Can I borrow your stapler? Where are the periodicals? and Why doesn’t my login info work on this computer? Every once in a while though, you get a meaty little research question. I had one recently that made my pulse jump because it was actually interesting: Are their any manifestos about Earthworks and nature installations? A student was writing a paper on Earth Art, like the Spiral Jetty or the Gates and wanted to know if there was any document that laid out the reasons and theories that motivate artists to create these works. She was interested in the history of them as well but wasn’t sure where to draw the line. Did Earth Works go back only to the Sixties or should she include ancient works like the Nazca Lines or Stonehenge? This is the sort of question that involves doing complex searching on databases and looking for books on the topic, a job that requires searching skills. Finding out about John Barrowman’s acting career? Not so much. Knowing the difference between the two types of information is important but recognizing that most people these days can find the easy stuff on their own — that’s huge.

Not satisfied with mangling facts and figures about Google, Information Retrieval Systems or the Internet in general, in his latest rant, Michael Gorman sets his sights on the big fish: Wikipedia. It’s really always been about Wikipedia for him. Trashing Google, bloggers, and Burst Culture is just a side project. He’s really pissed off about Wikipedia and what it does to authoritative credibility in general but his in particular. As his posts have been hosted thus far by the Britannica Blog, that’s no real surprise, seeing as how they’re primary competition comes form Wikipedia:

All the central institutions of Western society have responded in a similarly reactive and alarmed manner. Many of these institutions are driven by the middle aged and old acting in a domain that is widely perceived to be the province of the young. This discontinuity is not helped by reliance on a series of urban myths about the supposed uniqueness of the young generation based on the idea that its members have no useful memory of the pre-Web life. Let us leave aside the fact that the “uniqueness of the young” has been proclaimed every 15 years or so for almost the past century—from the energetic flappers of the1920s to the lethargic slackers of the 1990s.

He’s finally become that stereotypical cranky old man, ranting about young people on his lawn. And flappers. I’m not going to parse the rest of his two part rumination on why Wikipedia, and by extension the whole entire Web, sucks. And flappers. It’s more of what we’ve already seen: over simplifications, generalizations and straw men of unusual size.

Wikipedia works. This isn’t just a fan speaking, or some dirty webified Youtubian. I did graduate work on Wikipedia and found that it works pretty well, applying the peer-review concept on a larger scale. An article published in Nature two years ago reached the same conclusion: Wikipedia is just as good as Britannica in most places, better in some but could use a little more attention paid to the more complex, technical articles, a fact that Wikipedians have mentioned and addressed frequently. And, as we say on the Web, it’s just as easy to fix Wikipedia as it is to bitch about what’s wrong with it. But of course, Wikipedia won’t cut Gorman a check for his work, so why bother? No pay, no play for our Serious Academic.

Michael Gorman is still showing his ass to the world over at Britannica Blog. This time he demonstrates that he hasn’t got a clue how Google works:

Information retrieval systems have been studied for many decades. In the course of that study two important criteria have been developed to evaluate such systems—those criteria are recall and relevance. The first measures the percentage of pertinent documents retrieved from a database (for example, if there are 100 documents on Zambian agriculture in a database and a search on that topic retrieves 76 of them, the recall is 76%). The second measures the supposed appropriateness of the documents that have been retrieved (for example, if you retrieve 100 documents when searching for Zambian agriculture and 76 of them are actually about Zambian agriculture, the relevance is 76%).

Information retrieval systems achieve high recall and relevance rates by the use of controlled vocabularies (indexing terms, etc.) and present the results of complex searches in a meaningful and usable order. By any of these criteria, Google and its like are miserable failures. A search on those engines on anything but the most minutely detailed topic will yield many thousands of “results” in no useful order and with wretched recall and relevance ratios. However, even when the documents retrieved by a search engine are on the subject sought, the quality of the material - often community-generated material that pops up high on a hit list because the material is free and easily accessible — is shoddy or irresponsible.

Let’s unpack some of the misconceptions that Gorman is, once again spreading heedlessly.

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I received an e-mail yesterday from Doctor Solomon, an author of several fascinating books on diverse topics such as “How to Find Lost Objects” (1993), “Japan in a Nutshell” (1997) and “How to Make the Most of a Flying Saucer Experience” (1998). What’s even better than learning a tried and true method for locating misplaced objects, is that three of his books are free for download as PDFs.

Charlie Stross has a great essay up about the futility of Space Colonization:

This is not to say that interstellar travel is impossible; quite the contrary. But to do so effectively you need either (a) outrageous amounts of cheap energy, or (b) highly efficient robot probes, or (c) a magic wand. And in the absence of (c) you’re not going to get any news back from the other end in less than decades. Even if (a) is achievable, or by means of (b) we can send self-replicating factories and have them turn distant solar systems into hives of industry, and more speculatively find some way to transmit human beings there, they are going to have zero net economic impact on our circumstances (except insofar as sending them out costs us money).

He does, however make a strong and pertinent distinction between Space Exploration and Space Colonization, the former being relatively easy, cheep and doable (since we are doing it and have been for the last fifty years)as opposed to the latter, which is nearly impossible, (whatever Gene Roddenberry had to say on the matter to the contrary). He also makes the point that the practical walking, working and moving about in space should be done by robot probes and satellites, a notion to which I heartily agree.

The news about the spot of bother on the International Space Station this week got sidelined, what with Paris Hilton having a courtroom meltdown and A dozen Republican Would-be-Kings shootting themselves in the foot over immigration. But if it hadn’t been for a couple of computers, we would have had a lot of dead Astronauts and an inoperable Space Station hovering above our heads. Putting people’s lives in the hands of computers is silly, criminal and wrong. Charlie Stross also points this out, that a manned mission to An extra-solar planet, given the current state of technology, might be considered a crime against humanity, given the horrible conditions they would be subjected to for decades.

There will always be a romantic idea about going to the Moon or Mars and maybe, just to go there and come back would be a worthwhile endeavor but living in Outer Space, is foolish and deadly. Besides, we can learn more from one robot probe on the moon than a hundred moon walking monkeys.

Please, won’t you think about the monkeys?

Link via Cory Doctorow at Boing Boing.

Over at Salon, they have an interview with David Weinberger, whose new book, Everything Is Miscellaneous: The Power of the New Digital Disorder, is making quite a stir. Towards the end of the interview (all of which is great) he has a revolutionary idea:

So should you believe what’s in Wikipedia? Jimmie Wales, its founder, would say no, not without checking. But I don’t think that’s going to be the final answer. Because we don’t have time to do more work. Today we work to believe what’s in the encyclopedia, tomorrow we have to work to believe what’s in the newspaper, what the sports score is, whether the recipe we just found online will in fact kill us. So we will evolve trust mechanisms that will give us the shortcuts we need.

We’ve already evolved tons of them, but these will occur at the metadata level. So, for example, there’s no reason that the International Astronomical Union couldn’t go through Wikipedia, find the articles about astronomy, and find the versions of those articlesthat it thinks are right. Can’t find one? Fix it up and make it right and point to that one. And it would build its own astronomical Wikipedia that is nothing but a metadata level. And if you’re a school kid and you want to know the truth about Jupiter, you go to the IAU Wikipedia, which only contains the pages that they certify. So there’s the authority again, but it’s pointing at other stuff.

We get so caught up in the arguments over whether or not Wikipedia or the Britanica is a resource worthy of our praise and use, that we forget to actually use it. Wikipedia, like any encyclopedia, is a basic level resource. It’s there to collect facts in one place so you don’t spend years trying to figure out what day Bonnie and Clyde were killed. It’s right there. Maybe some of the details are obscure but for your basic fact checking, everything you need is there. Why not, in the case of more complicated ideas, do what Weinberger suggested and make a topic-centered critical version of Wikipedia?

This is clearly the next step. Take what Wikipedia has done and expand it into a hybrid; an authoritative wiki. we don’t need just one that replaces the crusty old Britannica– we need dozens, one elaborate cooperative wiki, built and maintained by professionals in a given field to help the public and themselves keep abreast of what’s going on in that field. Wikipedia will always be there if you want a recap of the latest Doctor Who episode but when you want to know why Pluto is no longer a planet, wouldn’t it be great to have an IAU Wiki with an article by Neil deGrasse Tyson? Or perhaps an article by Stephen Hawking explaining the latest information on the Big Bang? Now, imagine that we have dozens of these authoritative wikis on every subject and field imaginable. We’d be the smartest monkeys in the universe.

Fortune Magazine:

Free software is great, and corporate America [And real people] loves it. It’s often high-quality stuff that can be downloaded free off the Internet and then copied at will. It’s versatile - it can be customized to perform almost any large-scale computing task - and it’s blessedly crash-resistant.A broad community of developers,from individuals to large companies like IBM, is constantly working

toimprove it and introduce new features. No wonder the business world has embraced it so enthusiastically: More than half the companies in the Fortune 500 are thought to be using the free operating system Linux in their data centers. But now there’s a shadow hanging over Linux and other free software, and it’s being cast by Microsoft (Charts, Fortune 500).The Redmond behemoth asserts that one reason free software is of such high quality is that it violates more than 200 of Microsoft’s patents. And as a mature company facing unfavorable market trends and fearsomecompetitors like Google (Charts, Fortune 500), Microsoft is pulling no punches: It wants royalties. If the company gets its way, free software won’t be free anymore. [emphasis added]

Anyone who has used Microsoft for any great length of time knows that this is an absurd claim. Open Source software works better than Microsoft, across the board, not because the developers are hacking Microsoft’s patents but because they’re taking Microsoft’s half baked ideas and making them work.

Here’s a better idea: Microsoft subsidizes Linux and Mozilla, ensuring that they get their name associated with products that work. They won’t make any more money off the top, but they’ll at least build up good will among users, who for once, will see Microsoft’s name on a piece of software that functions as advertised. I know, I might as well have suggested that Microsoft subsidize research into creating flying monkeys.