Your Library or your Toes?

An archeologist named Timothy Taylor has published a book with an intriguing premise: humans and our technology can't be separated. Humans didn't evolve to use tools, so much as we evolved because we used tools.

As someone studying to be a librarian, I find this a startling notion. Taylor seems to be saying we're some kind of primitive Borg-esque species. If you take away our technology, there is no "us". Or, to put it more concretely, there is no human species without our information. This takes the form of everything from stone tools to books to, yes, even e-readers.

He argues that our early prehuman ancestors used tools to make other tools. This process of "entailment" allowed us to develop further than Darwinian evolution could take us. For example, females who walked upright would expend enormous energy carrying their young because they couldn't lug their kids around the way chimps do. So they used stone tools to fashion simple slings, not unlike the ones we have today.

This led to several things, in Taylor's view. Females could now carry their young upright using far less energy. But more fundamentally, babies' brains could keep growing after they were born. Because walking upright led to a smaller pelvis, this limited how large a head--and brain--our ancestors could have. But if it could keep growing after we're born, we'd have larger brains than simple evolution would suggest.

In this New Scientist interview, Taylor makes an interesting statement. He believe that our brains have actually been getting smaller over the last several thousand years because we can store more of our intelligence outside our heads. Since we have computers--and books--we don't have to keep so much in our brains. And he (hopefully) jokingly suggests we'd probably give up our toes to keep our libraries.

Don't let the many local governments considering library cutbacks see this, because it may give them ideas.

Belts, Transmissions and Bibliographies

After the "catastrophic" failure of its serpentine belt made my car unusable, I found myself in a fix because I can't drive a stick shift.

This made me curious. Am I at a disadvantage as a driver because I can't do this? Just how many cars on the road in the US have a manual transmission anyway?

The most current information I was able to dig up dates back 10 years. Wards Auto World produced graphs showing that in 2000, about 10% of light vehicles on the road in the US had manual transmissions. That was down from a little over 15% five years earlier.

Mark Rechtin wrote an article in Automotive News around the same time possibly explaining this pattern. He attributed increasing adoption of automatic transmissions to reasons such as people needed to drive in traffic, using their vehicles as mobile offices, and talk on the phone in the car. He also notes manual transmissions didn't provide as much of a fuel economy or cost premium as they used to. Also, having a stick shift reduces a vehicle's resale value. The (increasingly smaller) savings of buying a manual transmission is canceled out by the lower price it fetches in the used car market.

Being confronted by this mini-crisis made me think about how I deal with situations I don't understand. I decided to find out, using information instead of guesswork, whether or not being unable to drive a stick shift put me at a disadvantage. It seems that since fewer than one in 10 cars on the road has a manual transmission, it doesn't.

Of course, if that one out of 10 is in your household, and you're stuck because you can't drive it...

Interestingly, Cox et. al found in a study that teenage boys with ADHD who drove a manual transmission-equipped vehicle where more attentive to their driving than ones who used an automatic.

So there's that I guess.


In case you want to do some more reading, I found these references helpful:

Checking the auto world's pulse. (2001). Ward's Auto World, 37(11), 16. Retrieved from Full Text PDF PDF: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/jumpstart.jhtml?recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e4741fae46b91d0b7ac1fff1a8705886e0b8459d630c3849026e23a87614ffdc4&fmt=P


Cox, D., Punja, M., Powers, K., Merkel, R., Burket, R., Moore, M., Thorndike, F., & Kovatchev, B. (2006). Manual transmission enhances attention and driving performance of ADHD adolescent males. Journal of Attention Disorders, 10(2), 212-216.

Rechtin, M. (2000). Sticks hit the skids: Automatic transmissions are replacing manuals as the people's choice. Automotive News, (5856), 34+. Retrieved from HTML: http://vnweb.hwwilsonweb.com/hww/jumpstart.jhtml?recid=0bc05f7a67b1790e4741fae46b91d0b7cc67023b1846996cc43391d27d7f82dfab409b871fd0d36e&fmt=H

Weiss, M. J. (2001). Departments - THE GRID - SHIFTING GEARS: Where to find owners of manual transmission cars. American Demographics., 23(3), 72.

The Social-powered Network

The tech world has been moving for decades away from a centralized model managed by folks in the middle, to a decentralized one. Interactions increasingly spring up and grow directly between people, as they use new social networking tools to manage their interactions instead of depending on someone else.

For example, an application called SocialVPN allows people who don't know each other to securely set up connections between their computers over the Internet, with no centralized management to make it work. If you're not familiar with the term, VPN stands for Virtual Private Network, and is a way for people, groups or companies to make private, secure connections over the public, untrusted Internet.

SocialVPN makes it possible to do this with no central IT department in the middle setting everything up. So if you're friends with someone on Facebook, for example, you can use that to exchange all the information you need to set up a secure, trusted connection directly between the both of you that is resistant to eavesdropping by anyone in the middle. Such connections can be used for private chat, photo exchanges, or even secured voice calls with Voice-over-IP (VOIP).

Librarians--but especially patrons--could really use this. Imagine a patron somewhere on the Internet making a secure connection to a reference librarian to get help on any topic. Someone who is too shy or isolated to walk into a library in-person and ask about sensitive topics could use a librarian's published details to make a secure connection. The librarian could then help the person using chat or even by talking if they're using VOIP. Things like this are what Michael Stephens, in his article "The ongoing web revolution" calls "Library 2.0". He cites Darlene Fichter's definition of Library 2.0 as:

Library 2.0 = (books 'n stuff + people + radical trust) X participation

Tools such as SocialVPN could allow patrons and librarians to directly engage with each other, without ever having to meet in person. In fact, a librarian could even anonymously provide services to patrons. In the era of National Security Letters, I find that thought reassuring.

If you want more information after looking at their web site, the creators of SocialVPN published a paper about it:

Juste, P. S., Wolinsky, D., Oscar Boykin, P., Covington, M. J., & Figueiredo, R. J. (2010). SocialVPN: Enabling wide-area collaboration with integrated social and overlay networks. Computer Networks, 54(12), 1926-1938. doi:DOI: 10.1016/j.comnet.2009.11.019

Shooting out the lights

I've been following discussions in Congress on providing more Federal aid to state governments as a way to stimulate the economy and prevent further layoffs. It seems the holdup has to do with some in Congress believing paying states to keep teachers, firefighters, and yes, librarians on the job doesn't stimulate the economy.

While I think that's wrong for a lot of reasons I won't go into, it also misses the point. Republicans know full-well that state and local governments provide vital services. Particularly when it comes to education and information, though, I believe these people are ideologically opposed to the idea of people being well-informed and thinking for themselves.

Just look at the highly effective conservative message machine. From Fox "News", to talk radio, to Sarah Palin's Facebook page, conservatives have a monolithic worldview which they want to be uniformly adopted by their faithful. Its almost like the scene in Die Hard when the thieves shoot out the lights the LAPD has set up trying to isolate them. Republicans want us to be in the dark so they can get back to running what amounts to a global political machine, not unlike the ones which existed a hundred years ago in places like Chicago and Kansas City.

Public services such as libraries are a threat to this because they provide people with the help and information they need to cut through the "approved" message and get the story themselves.

It also doesn't help that most public sector employees are unionized and therefore seen by Republicans as a Democratic constituency to be defeated.

Sadder still is the realization that many people are quite happy to be told what to think. Just look at all the lies and misinformation spewed out by the Tea Party folks, such as "death panels". Mother Jones has a sobering interview with former congressman Bob Inglis of South Carolina, who lost his seat because he wouldn't automatically call President Obama a "socialist" and reinforce the Tea Party's paranoid worldview, in which they think mysterious bankers have already bought and sold people based on they Social Security numbers.

The prevalence of such paranoid conspiracies show how badly some people need an independent voice to help them sort fact from fiction. Librarians are equipped to do this.

Unfortunately, though, I think the folks who are getting their information fed to them in an increasingly cocooned world of cable news and Internet conspiracies are not interested in stopping by the reference desk for help on where to look online for the actual details about such things as the federal deficit or the condition of Social Security and Medicare.

What's gonna work?

When I hear the word "teamwork", I automatically think of Nickelodeon's The Wonder Pets. Why? As the parent of any toddler can tell you, their signature song is "... what's gonna work? Teamwork!". Using this mantra, they manage to save animals that find themselves in trouble.

But instead of focusing on the James Bond-like gadgetry they use, such as a hypersonic flying machine made only from parts found in a daycare, I'd instead like to think about what teamwork means.

Teamwork is a basic value of today's society. At least, its something we THINK we should be doing. The trouble is, though, we don't often live up to our own ideals.

So how can we, whether we work in a pet store, daycare or even a library, be better at teamwork?

I thought about this question as I listened to a colloquia presented by Dr. Ken Haycock, who is the director of San Jose State University's School of Library and Information Science.

Dr. Haycock mentioned a few things about teams which struck me as very useful.

First, teams have a group goal but individual accountability. I don't think I've ever heard it stated so succinctly. As he points out elsewhere, a good amount of work is taken up by teams parceling out blame for the team's failure. Such failures could be avoided if the team leader did a better job.

The team leader's main responsibility then, according to Dr. Haycock, is moving the team through its "life-cycle", which consists of:

Forming

In this stage, everyone is getting to know each other, and feeling a little apprehensive about working together. Complaints are common, because people are getting their arms around the notion of working with people they probably haven't collaborated with before. I would guess that library school teams form slowly because many people attracted to LIS have, like me, introverted personalities.

Storming

This phase is where it starts to get interesting. Now members have to get down to the nitty-gritty of working on the project, and dissatisfaction starts to set in. It can also be marked by defensiveness, because people are not used to having to defend themselves to strangers. It is imperative the team leader take charge to keep the group from spiraling out of control. As he also mentions, successful teams have to have ground rules on how the team works.

Enid Irwin, a lecturer at SJSU says, lays out what the ground rules help address when she writes that students are afraid their teammates won't contribute, or that they have nothing to offer. Fear of "getting it wrong" is prevalent here too according to her, as well as the worry that other members will take control of the team.

Norming

Things start to come together in this phase. Competition between members gives way to cooperation, because people see the benefits of working together. Dr Haycock mentioned that some teams never get this far, instead bumping around in the Storming phase until they limp over the finish line of turning in an assignment. Irwin suggests this could happen because team members don't have the skills, enthusiasm and trust which teamwork needs to succeed.

Performing

This is the pinnacle of teamwork, where everyone is contributing and working together to make sure the team accomplishes its task. Its what The Wonder Pets do every day.

So, I'm happily getting indoctrinated into the LIS lifestyle. As Enid says, teamwork is a real-world skill, and how I work through my degree program will help define my career.

Who is a "Real" American Anyway?

Following the Civil War, the 14th Amendment to the constitution defined anyone born in the US as a citizen.

But now, some right-wing types believe that needs to be changed. Supposedly because the country is being taken advantage of by Machiavellian third-world mothers who specifically come here to have so-called "anchor babies", thereby ensuring them a lifetime supply of that sweet US welfare state lifestyle. :)

Let's break this down a bit, to unpack the layers of idiocy and bigotry.

First, "anchor babies". The term itself it offensive and dehumanizing. Because these aren't actual children, in the right-wingers' eyes. Instead, they're tools, a means to an end. If we're to believe such people, poor women are willing to get impregnated, pay thousands of dollars to a criminal gang to smuggle them into the country at extreme risk of rape, injury or even death, just to get, what? Food stamps?

More generally, it seems to me such people are trying to redefine who is an American. The Constitution clearly states that anyone born here is an American, period. But they don't like that, probably because they see America as a "white" country, and to really be an American, you have to be White. Such a view was pretty much explicitly articulated by Sara Palin, to the extent she's capable of rational expression, during the Presidential campaign. How else can we interpret her calling rural, very white places "real" America?

I know much of this is political theater, drummed up by the continuing persistently terrible job market and the upcoming midterm elections. But it does allow to to finally see behind the curtain of today's Republican party doesn't it?

It Begins

As you probably don't know, since I haven't blogged about it, I have just started grad school. In a few short years, I'll be able to call my self a librarian.

I'm attending the program from San Jose State University has one of the largest ALA-approved Library and Information Science programs in the world, and is done completely online.

I'd especially like to welcome all (any?) of you coming here as part of the LIBR 203 class in the program.

Can you believe we're going to get paid to do this someday? Hopefully, at least...