The Scroll of Bifurcating Considerations

Auguste Blanqi - Astral Systems

2012-01-24T13:12:00.003+09:00

Dead Media: "Think of it this way..."

2012-01-04T15:47:00.001+09:00

http://alamut.com/subj/artiface/deadMedia/dM_Manifesto.html

The Blues - Ninja Pop Filming Style

2011-12-28T02:44:00.001+09:00

Under the Rug

2011-12-23T07:47:00.001+09:00

From the "Big Book of Fun" I checked out from the library recently. I had to return it today, but I simply could not part with it, without scanning this "game".

I don't even need to extract quotes, it's all priceless. And mean-spirited. The 1930's sounded harsh.

I'll be darned , HathiTrust strikes again: http://babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=mdp.39015066022800;seq=246;size=100;view=image

a quote...

2011-12-13T05:02:00.000+09:00

From a little tidbit about analyzing linguistics churning forth in the Wikiepedia tumults:

"You realize that a fast answer is better than no answer, and that this kind of work is inherently iterative and changing."

And it got me thinking, about information, about what interests me most. You know those people that wanted to be a mechanical engineer when they were little? Or the ones who always knew they wanted to write? perhaps the doctors, the hobos, the nurses. These jobs have existed for quite some time. What then, is one to make of information science? of statistically parsing and analyzing large linguistic sets? What does that mean? and how quickly should I adapt? how long can I expect to love this stuff? what will change? what will not?

So this above quote really kind of pulled a Tonya Harding on me, bent backwards my philosophical knees on conceptualization, intoxicating insight, fearless unknowing. Nothing has ever seemed so serene to me as taking a problem, and just sitting there and staring at it. Not talking, not moving, just letting the billions of synapses in our wondrous helmet do their thing, making causal leaps no computer has yet learned to do. But this process takes time, in fact, its very richness and merit, much like the strength and general all-around lovelinesss of wood is derived from concentric growth, comes from time. Time, like water, is solvent. How interesting it is to me that water is one of the most solvent known chemicals in the universe, yet we are quite literally made of it. Such is the passage of time; no conceptual chasm is too great that time cannot whiddle opposing cliffs into a gentle sloping cradle.

Is this true: "a fast answer is better than no answer"? Is it telling that it was phrased as, "You realize that..."? Do we realize this? Or are we told this?

Sorting Algorithms

2011-12-12T05:46:00.001+09:00

These might be a couple of the coolest videos I done seen.

Bike Power

2011-12-06T02:57:00.001+09:00

Folks in... one of the Occupy Movements... has developed a maddingly awesome system of using exercise bikes to power high-capacity boat batteries. I want to do this.

Sensitive Dependence on Initial Conditions

2011-12-01T09:13:00.001+09:00

Paramilitary Policing

2011-11-21T12:23:00.001+09:00

"The paramilitary bureaucracy and the culture it engenders—a black-and-white world in which police unions serve above all to protect the brotherhood—is worse today than it was in the 1990s. Such agencies inevitably view protesters as the enemy. And young people, poor people and people of color will forever experience the institution as an abusive, militaristic force—not just during demonstrations but every day, in neighborhoods across the country."

http://www.thenation.com/article/164501/paramilitary-policing-seattle-occupy-wall-street

???

2011-11-16T00:57:00.001+09:00

Metadata schemas can GROW, but cannot as easily be culled DOWN.

Asteroid 2005 YU55

2011-11-06T04:00:00.004+09:00

(click it - it moves!)

"Asteroid 2005 YU55 is one of about 8,500 near-Earth objects to be catalogued to date. What makes this space rock special is that its orbital path carries it safely past Earth within the moon's orbit in early November 2011. The trajectory of 2005 YU55 is well understood. At the point of closest approach, it will be no closer than 201,700 miles (324,600 kilometers), or 0.85 the distance from the moon to Earth. The last time a space rock as big as 2005 YU55 came as close to Earth was in 1976, although astronomers did not know about the flyby at the time. The next known approach of an asteroid this large will be in 2028."

http://www.nasa.gov/mission_pages/asteroids/overview/yu55.html

The Coffee Hourglass Experiment

2011-11-06T02:30:00.000+09:00

The goal was simple - to construct a coffee brewing machine from two Ball jars. After seeing some beautiful siphon style brewers this past summer in San Francisco, and recently learning about the Chemex setup,I was inspired to try my hand at making one.

This is the first iteration.

A filter is placed in what will be the lower jar.

The middle section of the two-part Ball jar lids are drilled and screwed together; in this way, the two jars can be screwed together.

The apparatus hard at work, with a stopwatch to determine how long the process would take. It turns out, the stopwatch did not have enough digits. The setup above produced but a trickle of coffee. While I realized air would have to travel from the empty jar to the one containing hot water, I thought the holes drilled would be sufficient. Such was not the case.

Still yearning for a cup of coffee, the picture above shows required steps for consumption.

Mirror Man

2011-11-03T00:20:00.001+09:00

From humble beginnings rose the masterpiece that is Mirror Man. Below is a video I recently stumbled of him reflecting through Zurich.

More info here: http://mirrormanblog.com/

Hallo-old-Skool

2011-10-30T09:51:00.004+09:00

Epic Mount St. Helens Sunrise

2011-10-27T12:47:00.003+09:00

From King 5 News - sometimes disaster news serves a purpose...

Pumps and Kins

2011-10-23T08:37:00.000+09:00

I would rather sit on a pumpkin and have it all to myself than be crowded on a velvet cushion. ~Henry David Thoreau

It's been too long online scroll...

2011-10-15T14:45:00.001+09:00

100,000+ books into the digital ethers...

2011-10-07T00:30:00.000+09:00

Does a tattoo hurt if no one is around to feel it?

2011-09-28T11:58:00.000+09:00

Troubling Question:

Does metadata irreversibly alter the very object it hopes to describe?

Think of a tattoo going on to a tattoo-less arm that reads, "This signifies this arm has a tattoo."

3 logicians walk into a bar...

2011-09-28T04:14:00.002+09:00

Open Library Flickr Account

2011-09-27T21:36:00.003+09:00

Astronomy!

Lovely cover indeed - wish I could sit in that tree and sip some Turkish coffee.

Crosswriting? What the deuce.

The caption is worth a gander...

There is nothing, well many, things quite as satisfying as a good writing utensil.

Coral, the building blocks of the ocean floor.

Sperm whales, the other end of the food chain.

Median Age vs. Population Density

2011-09-25T01:38:00.001+09:00

Good for you Google, supporting animated gifs.

In the picture above, we see Median Age vs. Population Density in the greater Seattle area.

Those old people don't like others.

You're a Hopeless Romantic.

2011-09-24T06:49:00.002+09:00

From Ray Bradbury's new, and personally authorized and penned, version of Fahrenheit 451, one of my favorite pages/passages:

I hardly know where to begin with how awesome this book was, and how well it comes across in this new version.

1) How different is cutting the spine from a book, running it through a scanner, then uploading the remains to Google Books than setting fire to a house full of the same?

2) How apt was the prediction that television would supply our "family", and force-feed us knowledge at a rate so quickly we have little time to digest or question what we're fed?

The list goes on, HIGHLY recommended for an afternoon coffee and read.

A $7,000 Hog.

2011-09-24T00:22:00.001+09:00

Spaceship Earth

2011-09-23T23:58:00.000+09:00

From a review of the fantabulous "PC Globe" software circa 1991:

"As the fate of fragile Spaceship Earth continues to unfold, I heartily recommend that concerned passengers acquire the fingertip-availability of facts and figures in PC Globe's menus and grapple with its resulting questions while awaiting the next issue of The Social Contract."
-http://www.thesocialcontract.com/artman2/publish/tsc0103/article_49.shtml

Computer Snapshot --> Virtual Machine

2011-09-23T22:51:00.001+09:00

"For example, NASA has a unique problem. Any interplanetary mission takes a long time to reach destination. Software loaded and used on earth and on the probe needs to be able to function together 5-10 years from now when the probe arrives at its destination."

The Library of Congress's Digital Preservation Blog "The Signal", recently had an interesting post about using Virtual Machines to recreate "snapshots" of an entire operating system hard at work. The behind this mad-scientist endeavor, is the preservation of software in its natural habitat.

The link: http://blogs.loc.gov/digitalpreservation/2011/09/toward-a-library-of-virtual-machines-insights-interview-with-vasanth-bala-and-mahadev-satyanarayanan/

When I was reading this post, my mind immediately went to the once popular Viennetta ice-cream cake, as it often does. The concept of a "snapshot" or a "slice" is near and dear to my heart, as it relates to non-linear dynamics and mathematics.

A snapshot is a conceptual moment in the relentless onslaught of time. Much like the delicious slices of the Viennetta cake above, where you can see the layers of ice-cream and chocolate as it runs the length of the cake, the above fractal is a similar beast. Though I very much doubt the equations used to generate this fractal are actually representing a 3D space (Actual equations at the bottom, courtesy of one of the internets best gems: complexification.net), it nonetheless bears an uncanny resemblance to smoke: think of a prepared slide sample for a microscope, but instead of skin cells, it's a cross-section of a dynamically moving and changing 3D smoke cloud.

The cake does not change much (though it does a little...) as it runs the length of the cake. But this smoke fractal, a cross-section of a non-existent cloud, would be vastly different than a cross-section even a foot away; not only are these images wildly different in physical observation, but also temporally.

What has this all to do with virtual computers and aging NASA software? What this blog post from the LOC touches on, is that software, charts - and thus our very ideas - often rely on a particular computer environment to run properly. I fondly remembering learning about the world through a late 80's program entitled, "PC Globe". While the code for this program is still as logically sound today, as it was then, there's a very good chance it would not run on my newer Windows 7, 2ghz machine - quite literally millions of times faster than that original computer.

The inability to run PC Globe, while tragic in its own right, is not necessarily paramount to our species continued existence. This post is not really about selection, or migration vs. emulation, but more the philosophical underpinnings behind the technicalities of this strategy. By taking a "snapshot" of a computer - from the code of the software all the way down to the operating system - we get save much more than just the software we are gunning for. I would argue, for a project like this, the end game is a sum greater than its parts.

If they collected enough of these "snapshots", much like Google does for language translation, maybe we could compare and cross-search them to fill in gaps where snapshots had not been taken. Example: we take a snapshot of a Tandy x086 computer with MS-DOS 5.0, and we have a snapshot copy of WordPerfect that we believe would run in MS-DOS 5.0. By using both snapshots, we could create a virtual machine of a machine that never really existed...

I've strayed from the cakes, from the virtual machines. It's a really exciting idea, the idea of a library of virtual machines that we might have access to. They are snapshots of time, temporal extractions we might be able to illicit the same beauty and deliciousness as the fractals and cake above.

And as promised, the Fractal equations:
x_n+1 = sin(a y_n) - cos(b x_n)
y_n+1 = sin(c x_n) - cos(d y_n)

Update (minutes later): PC Globe advertisement from an old magazine on Google Books:

ISS Night fly-over of Earth

2011-09-19T00:55:00.001+09:00

Quite honestly, one of the cooler videos I've seen. Check out the lights, the lightning, the Aurora Borealis. Awesome.

Spegy n Mrbals

2011-09-17T03:51:00.004+09:00

The Fuedal Houses of Data

2011-09-15T05:46:00.001+09:00

"Goble and Wroecleverly frame the challenges of ontology building as a conflict betweencomputer scientists in the role of the House of Montague, whose interests arein logic and languages, and life scientists in the role of the House of theCapulets (the feuding families in Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet), whoseinterests lie in the more pragmatic aspects of scientific application. Computerscientists in their project wanted to build a perfect ontology as an end initself, whereas the life scientists wanted simple solutions that workedimmediately, even if they were imperfect."

Borgman,Christine L.. Scholarship in the Digital Age : Information, Infrastructure, andthe Internet.

Cambridge, MA,USA: MIT Press, 2007. p 213.

http://site.ebrary.com/lib/umich/Doc?id=10194165&ppg=213

Postal Service Graph

2011-09-15T00:46:00.000+09:00

An ode to parallels equally unknown

2011-09-12T06:52:00.002+09:00

"[The archivist] exists in order to make other people’s work
possible, unknown people for the most part and working very
possibly on lines equally unknown to him: some of them perhaps
in the quite distant future and upon lines as yet unpredictable.
His Creed, the Sanctity of Evidence; his Task, the Conservation of
every scrap of Evidence attaching to the Documents committed
to his charge; his Aim, to provide, without prejudice or
afterthought, for all who wish to know the Means of Knowledge."
—Jenkinson (1948)

Furthermore:
"The essential principles supporting the archival perspective are
as follows:
• the sanctity of evidence;
• respect des fonds, provenance, and original order;
• the life cycle of records;
• the organic nature of records; and
• hierarchy in records and their descriptions."
-Gilliland-Swetland

Data Professionals

2011-09-08T05:01:00.002+09:00

"In some fields, the researchers themselves may be at the forefront of efforts
to meet these data challenges, but in many fields the challenges are met at least
in part by what we call in this report “data professionals.” These individuals
have a very wide range of responsibilities for data analysis, archiving, preservation,
and distribution. Often, they are the leaders in developing new methods
of data communication, data visualization, educational outreach, and other key
advances. They also often participate in the development of standards, formats,
metadata, and quality control mechanisms. They can bring new perspectives on
existing datasets or new ways of combining data that yield important advances.
Through their familiarity with rapidly changing digital technologies, they can
enhance the ability of others to conduct research. They also are in a unique position
to make digital data available to the broadest possible range of researchers,
educators, students, and the general public. Educational opportunities, viable
career paths, and professional recognition all help ensure that data professionals
are in a position to make needed contributions to research."

-Ensuring theIntegrity, Accessibility, and Stewardship of Research Data in the Digital Age:(Executive Summary. (2009). National Academics Press, Washington, DC.

Onward and Upward: Data Creation vs. Storage

2011-09-08T03:24:00.001+09:00

Mr. Bones

2011-09-02T13:51:00.002+09:00

Irene

2011-08-29T22:41:00.004+09:00

SUPER high resolution image:

Common Picnics

2011-08-26T03:07:00.002+09:00

A guy walks into the Flick Commons looking for a picture of a picnic basket...

(It's in Keene, New Hampshire! The fabled land of "The Dogs of March" and "A Little More than Kin")

Great Hopkins

2011-08-25T13:58:00.002+09:00

Digital Provenance and Organic Metadata

2011-08-25T05:50:00.006+09:00

Provenance is a subtle beast.

The word, and concept, of provenance stems from the Latin word, “provenire” which means “come forth, organize”. Provenance is a fundamental principle to archival theory in that to understand what a thing is, there is a need to understand from where it came, where it’s been, and what it’s done. At face value, the concept doesn’t seem overly complicated, something almost akin to an item’s history, or it’s story. But when we as human beings begin to pick apart any “history” or “truth”, we often find there is no objective reality or truth behind stories and constructs we create. In this way, provenance ceases to be an objective and unadulterated “truth” about an item’s evolution through time, but more like that of a debate, a trial, a story.

Provenance is often used to prove, a word I detest, “trustability” for an item; ideally it serves to prove that an item is in fact what it appears to be. What intrigues me about this concept, and is likewise troubling, is that I don’t believe an item ever is the same item as it once was. We’ve all heard Heraclitus’ famous assertion, or at least a variant on the theme I like, “No man ever steps in the same river twice, for it's not the same river and he's not the same man.” With every intrepid bound into post-modernism, it becomes more difficult to assume we can ever, with any certainty, identify something as it is, let alone as it was.

There is little doubt that the great Leibowitz’s shopping list, found centuries later by information mongering monks, was the same list he penned originally (at least in the Canticle of Leibowitz para-verse). Leibowitz may have written “eggs”, and 300 years later it still said “eggs”. But as that list moved through time, and probably space, its informational content evolved with the world around it. On one hand, I am not the same Graham I was in a picture showing a tanned and smiling 6 year old I recently came across. I have grown taller, hairier, and probably stupider since then, as did I also procure battle scars mysteriously absent from the picture. But just the same, I am the same Graham. Identity is a construct we – particularly for ourselves –very successfully assimilate and create; it’s an essential function of making sense of the world. And yet we claim that an item, or potentially even more complex, an event, can remain unchanged, that we can point to its “provenance” and say, “See? It looked like that then, and it looks like that now. Frank had it then, Susie has it now. So we’re good.”

But for the moment, and post-modernist madness aside (though I do love it so), let’s assume provenance in the physical and analog realm worked previously well. And to be fair, provenance is not simply an authoritative tale of an item’s history, but often more of a fluid relationship of an item to its surroundings. Provenance will often dictate where a particular letter sits in relation to a handful of other letters, whether a photo should remain with the letter, or grouped with other photos; in an effort of objectivity, provenance is an attempt to take a conceptual snapshot of an item’s inception and caretaking.

Enter the digital.

Below is a link to an interesting TV archive the Internet Archive has created about 9/11, particularly around minute 48:00 :

http://www.democracynow.org/2011/8/24/the_9_11_tv_news_archive

In this discussion, on Democracy Now!, Brewster Kahle and Rick Prelinger talk about the notion of provenance in a digital realm, where timestamps, identity, and the potential for material doctoring is a constant conundrum. This got me thinking about digital provenance, specifically how descriptive metadata could, or should, in some way evolve with the item itself. When Grandma wrote, in beautiful ball point cursive on the back of the aforementioned photo, “Muncie, IN 1989”, that was essentially metadata about the picture. Where it diverges from the metadata we think of today, EXIF tags and removed XML files, is that is what is inextricably linked to the item itself; the fading of the ink, the idiosyncratic spellings, the position and/or absence of coffee stains, constantly “updated” this metadata and contributed to a stronger understanding of provenance with regards to the object. Nay is not often the case in the digital realm.

My question: in what way can we evolve metadata with an object? what does it mean that digital objects don’t “age” in ways we are accustomed to? what advantages might there be to breaking away from the notion that we can preserve an item as-it-was, and moving instead towards fostering an environment where items can evolve as-they-will-become?

Light-Night

2011-08-24T15:03:00.002+09:00

A lovely summer morning here in Michigan.....
But wait a minute...... is that lightning?

Euler's Identity

2011-08-24T10:01:00.003+09:00

Sun.

2011-08-24T02:04:00.003+09:00

Ground, bearing West.

Parking Garage vantage, bearing West

I must say, pretty effective.

Gotta love the sand and grime on the lens.

An Internet Send-Off

2011-08-14T13:25:00.005+09:00

The tree may set the stage.

The Oxford English Dictionary has for "Fantastic" this as their first definition:
"a. Existing only in imagination; proceeding merely from imagination; fabulous, imaginary, unreal (obs.)"

I've re-written this a few times. Either there were too many commas, too many quotes, or not enough sense. Or a combination of the three.

What intrigues me about this definition, and the Internet Archive itself, is the concept of something "proceeding merely from imagination". For tell me dear OED, from where else should we expect our ideas? our manifestations? Certainly you don't suggest they be purely logical; mired in the confines of what has been done, what should be done.

I feel as though we use "fantastic" to describe something almost sensual, quietly eschewing the logical. A meal is fantastic, a song is fantastic, a sunset is fantastic. An experience is fantastic, and having been experienced, leaves the human condition better for the wear. In the pursuit of the fantastic, I think there is real creativity and innovation, and can't help but feel the Internet Archive has that in spades.

So okay, that tree didn't say sh%$. But I like it, and I like its silent wisdom on the mater, and I walked by it everyday on the way home.

Front and Back temperatures of the Petabox.
Numbers from the page:

A few highlights from the fourth generation Petabox storage system:

Density: 650 TeraBytes / rack
Power consumption: 6 KW / PetaByte
No Air Conditioning, instead use excess heat to help heat the building.
Raw Numbers as of December 2010:
- 4 data centers, 1,300 nodes, 11,000 spinning disks
- Wayback Machine: 2.4 PetaBytes
- Books/Music/Video Collections: 1.7 PetaBytes
- Total used storage: 5.8 PetaBytes

The nodes are safe, apparently I missed the handle.

The organist hard at work on the Archive's massive pipe organ. The building was formerly a Christian Science church (I believe...).

$12 bucks to get slapped in the face? I have friends that'll do that for free.

Datum in the Great Room - 6 Petaboxes hot off the presses.

The Great Room.

And, datum rockstar. Table/Pod neighbor Julie, kind and brave enough to convince me to bring my camera upstairs.

The Buckshot. Green arrows indicate the last piece of chicken fried bacon.

More on these Petaboxes later. And all things metadata. The internal, and decidedly not solid state, hard drives are just spinning up.

Horse Crash

2011-08-12T05:33:00.002+09:00

http://heritage.noblenet.org/items/show/15385

A Seattle portrait

2011-08-12T01:24:00.004+09:00

Gracing the website for an article about Seattle cutting its carbon footprint down to zero by 2050, I came across this photo of downtown Sea-town (under CC license mind you). Sometimes a picture comes along that just zaps to the mind's eye and agrees with what it finds there. This is such a case.

The "Union Catalog"

2011-08-10T07:00:00.003+09:00

"One of the astounding facts printed in Dr. Putnam’s 1930
report is the fact that they have a separate list
of 643,750 items of non-located books. This
means that this huge number of books have not
so far been located in any library in the United
States. This collection of non-located books
represents a library the size of that of Prince-
ton University. Some of these non-located
books are probably in your libraries."
-"Our Duty to the Union Catalogs", Howard Seavoy Leach, Lehigh University Library, 1932

At the time of this article's publication (1932), the National Union Catalog was in the 10-11 million realm of printed catalog cards. That's such an astronomical number of physical things it almost defies comprehension.

For some comparison, let's look at the facts:

CD thickness = 1.2mm
1.2mm x 11,000,000 = 132,000,000mm
132,000,000mm = 13,200m
13,200m = 43,307.0866 feet
43,307.0866 feet = 8.20208333 miles

That means, if each record were as thick as a slim CD, mashed together in an endless stream, this card catalog would stretch from Downtown Seattle to White Center, West Seattle, a third of the way across the English Channel, or only four miles shy of international waters from any point on the US coastline. Eight miles is a long way.

So while we praise ourselves and pat each on the back for millions of records created and shared, I think the occasional nod to the metadata technicians of yesteryear are in order.

Hands on Hips

2011-08-06T14:46:00.000+09:00

Defrocked, or I Think, Therefore

2011-08-02T15:37:00.002+09:00

"I think; therefore I am. But when I think about who I am, I am not being who I am; I am thinking. If I just do it, I don't have the satisfaction of knowing I have done it until I think about having done it, and then I am no longer doing it, and since I am no longer doing it, the understanding I have about the experience of having done it (the satisfaction) is, at best, slightly inaccurate. These, my words, constitute the impossible dream of trying to catch up with this me that was." -Henri Scratch

Earth's Gravity Field - the geoid

2011-07-31T14:25:00.002+09:00

With data from the GOCE (Gravity field and steady-state Ocean Circulation Explorer) satellite, as of May 31, 2011, we have the most up-to-date model of the Earth's gravity field, or its "geoid".

Pretty awesome.

WeatherUnderground - Personal Weather Stations

2011-07-31T10:56:00.007+09:00

(pictured, 1296 "regions" or cities, each with a host of more specific weather stations)

Oh, where to begin. How about from the top.

The Internet Archive, in the interest of accurate and localized weather information recently installed observation equipment on the roof of two major data center locations. These "weather stations" were then registered with weatherunderground.com, where the data is now freely available. We're talking up the second/minute updates, very cool.

But it got me thinking, how many of these "personal weather stations (PWS)" are out there and registered with weatherunderground? With XML data available for each, it was must be a trove of fun weather data to swim around in.

A munster cheese and rustic sourdough sandwich and 81 lines of python scripting later, the answer is right around12,655, reporting from a respectable 1,296 "cities"; though I like to think of them more as arbitrary regions.

Without a comprehensive list of all the stations, this first run was more an exercise in iterating through the list of US cities, and then through their individual weather stations. This is excluding airport data picked by weatherunderground.

Also in the first run, as kind of a test element, temperature in Fahrenheit (temp_f) was grabbed from each station as well. When graphed, these 12,000+ temperature readings from late afternoon / early evening produced a remarkably clean curve:

It shouldn't be terribly surprising that the fewest number of readings would be either >100 or <60, but with such festive and well-formed hooks on either end of the "temperate" middle, it was pretty neat to see. Emergent information, the very best.

Which got me thinking, could you sort the data by longitude, and given some North/South bouncing around, move from West to East in a graph? Here's the results:

If I were hard pressed, I would chalk the spiky action on the left to the mountain ranges that run from Canada down to Mexico (Cascades, Sierras, Rockies, etc.) On one side of a mountain range, it may be a cool 65 with clouds, on the other, 104 with booming sun. As you move East, the variances start to settle down a bit as you meander across the plains. A few little landing bumps from the Appalachians and Smokies, and your back to the ocean.

What's next? Each station also records wind speed and direction, and though not in the XML (sadly, sadly), also has it's lat/long coordinates on record. Might it be possible to generate trace wind throughout the day? Perhaps. Or rain accumulation, pressure in millibars, the possibilities are endless.

Some links:
Weather Stations: http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/index.asp
Internet Archive station (300 Funston, San Fran): http://www.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXDailyHistory.asp?ID=KCASANFR128
Same station in XML: http://api.wunderground.com/weatherstation/WXCurrentObXML.asp?ID=KCASANFR128

2011-07-30T17:26:00.000+09:00

Pictionary {value}

2011-07-30T15:16:00.004+09:00

Google Earth - 3d Bar Graphs of Spoken Languages

2011-07-30T03:32:00.004+09:00

Pretty amazing, next on the to-do visualizing agenda....

SFPL - Historical Photos

2011-07-30T03:04:00.003+09:00

http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1027487

Main/Downtown Branch circa 1960's, when typewriters ruled the land.

http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1020545~S0

Blocks from my house, the lovely Park Branch circa 1909. One of the older branches in the city, it opened in 1895; in this picture, it was still a young buck.

http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1020714~S0

Park Branch Interior

http://sflib1.sfpl.org:82/record=b1020673~S0

Sunset branch interior circa 1918.

Fog

2011-07-29T14:05:00.000+09:00

Ethics of Digital Librarianship

2011-07-28T13:23:00.003+09:00

From 1992, Brewster Kahle of the Internet Archive outlines some concerns and considerations for moving forward with the dissemination of digital information. For almost twenty years ago, some of this is just right on.

URL: http://www.archive.org/about/ethics_BK.php
******************************************************
Brewster Kahle
Thinking Machines (now brewster@archive.org)
February 1992
Distributed with the freeware WAIS releases

"As digital librarian, you should serve and protect each patron
as if she were your only employer."

As more of us become involved in serving information electronically to other users, we so-called "digital librarians" must become conscious of our ethical responsibilities to protect the privacy of our the users being served. Since computers are being used by many more people to find answers from diverse information sources, we librarians that operate these servers are coming exposed to the exact questions and interests of people we do not know. This information has power, a power that can be abused and thereby thwart the usefulness of the tools we promote. In this essay, I will use the Wide Area Information Server system as an example of a system of digital librarians to show what information is collected and used. With this example, I hope to illustrate some of the dangers and help list some of the rules of etiquette for this emerging class of information providers.

The Wide Area Information Server (WAIS) system is an electronic publishing system that allows end-users to ask questions of remote information sources. The system encourages people to ask questions in natural language so that the server system can try its best to find appropriate documents. Therefore the operator of the server can collect the questions, and importantly, collect what documents the users thought were worth looking at. This combines to portray exact interests of the users. While the identity of the user is not trivial to determine since only the machine that the query came from is accessible from the server logs, as personal computers become networked, the identity of the machine will approximate the identity of the user.

On the positive side, this means that the server operator (the "digital librarian") can use that data to refine the database and the search techniques used in the system. On the negative side, this is exposing many remote operators to private information that may not be consciously given by the users.

This surrender of information is not new to librarians; and the responsibility is taken very seriously by the professionals in the field. Through training in library schools and by an intuitive sense of ethics, reference librarians do not betray their patron's interests to others that are curious or devious. This ethical code is not coded in law as it is with psychiatrists, so these records can be extracted through subpoena, but this level of demand is usually required to pry the information from librarians. From the patron's point of view, having a librarian know what she is interested in can be a great value because the librarian can help select and route useful information in the future.

The same type of information is available to the digital librarians of the WAIS system. I operate the directory of servers in the WAIS system, and as such, I know what users are requesting access to what what type of servers. I know, for instance, every time Mitch Kapor uses the system, and what he asks for (he specifically allowed me to include his name here). At this point this is not a problem since few servers are of a personal nature yet, but as the system grows to include entertainment, employment, health and other servers, it is easy to imagine the types of information that will be accessible through operating such a server. Furthermore, I know when particular users are at their machines, and therefore know where they are and when.

The abuses possible with this information are often not as direct as other offenses, but should not be discounted. People will act differently if they think they are being watched. Most people will try not to look silly or ignorant in public, and therefore might be less willing to try something new, to learn about a subject that they know nothing about. If using a WAIS server feels like raising one's hand in school, then people will craft their questions more carefully than if it felt more like browsing through a new book. Often people say "I have nothing to hide," which may be true, but if a stranger approaches on the street and knows quite a bit of personal information, then the innocent will likely take that person more seriously than if a cold stranger approached. Even with nothing to hide, most people feel they should who knows what about them. The personal nature of information access makes distributing collected questions a bit unnerving.

The information collected by the digital librarians have some different characteristics from physical librarians which can make abuse easier and more widespread: more people can be served, these people are often in other organizations, and the digital librarians rarely have personal contact with these users. Therefore, the patrons seem further away and therefore less real as human beings. Since the computer networks that are being used with WAIS span the globe and span company boundaries, the information collected can be useful in knowing what is important to a distant, and possibly competitive group. The lack of human contact can lead to the decay in social relations as has been documented in studies of electronic mail where the language and nature of relations tend to be stripped of grace, etiquette, and often respect [cite Sherry Terkle]. This detached nature of electronic interaction might lead librarians to not respect their patrons interests where they would if they knew them personally.

On the other hand, the information collected from patrons can be very useful to the digital librarian to refine and enhance the server. An example of this is a reporter at a financial newspaper. She is in the business of collecting information from corporate contacts, finding the trends in that information, throwing out the proprietary details, and selling it back to that same population. If the reporter published too many details, then her contacts would not be forthcoming the next time, and if she sanitized the information to the point of uselessness, similarly, her contacts would not invest the time. Therefore, it is precisely the interaction with the users that builds the information that is sold. This example shows another facet, and that is value of the contacts invest in the reporter for their own benefit. The digital librarian is a less extreme case, but still she is being invested and entrusted with what the users want, and if this information is misused or not used, then the users will not be as well served as could be. Thus, the users will want to be able to be served better by the librarian through feedback on services rendered.

While there are some technological mechanisms to obscure the identity of the patron, such as encryption and redirection, hopefully these will only be used in extreme cases. Encryption can be used to protect packets in transmission and also be used to sign packets so that they can not be forged [cite Whitfield Diffie]. This can be useful in a system where the transport media is insecure, such as radio transmission. Redirection is a server forwarding technique that would concentrate all the requests from one trusted host so that the individual requesters are more difficult to determine. Combinations of these techniques have been contemplated to provably obscure requesters while still providing accountability for charges, but hopefully these techniques will not be the norm if most server operators will act in good faith towards their patrons.

To try to list a code of ethics for this field is difficult since the technology keeps changing, but I will offer a principle that can be used to test a code. As digital librarian, you should serve and protect each patron as if she is your only employer. Therefore each patron should be served and protected individually. In terms of WAIS, I feel it is safe to suggest:

Dont give away user logs except for scholarly use. Consider sanitizing the records before any transfer is undertaken.
Take the job of information serving seriously. This means to provide a consistent, reliable service and represent the service provided accurately.
Count on wide use of the information served, for good uses and bad, so be proud of the information and the collection.
Completeness is important. Users learn as much from a question that has no answer as from the ones with answers. This requires a complete and up-to-date collection.
Assume that the patron will not know the your affiliations, and therefore do not tempt patrons to use a service they would regret if they new more about you.
Respect your patrons. The opinion that users are "rocks with arms", as said by a colleague years ago, will not lead you to become a very helpful digital librarian.

In conclusion, the rewards from being a digital librarian are numerous and can be evident from notes from users from remote countries and companies. This electronic publishing revolution allows anyone with a personal computer and a modem to be a publisher will have far reaching effects on the structure of our society. Being a good digital librarian is a concrete way to create a future we all want to live in.

OAI-PMH: An exercise in succinct definition

2011-07-28T08:01:00.002+09:00

“The OAI protocol is a request-response protocol layered over HTTP that allows one computer to collect metadata incrementally over time from another computer - this is commonly known as harvesting. The requests have a minimal number of parameters and correspond to HTTP GET or POST operations.”

From: http://www.dlib.org/dlib/september01/suleman/09suleman-pt2.html

4th of 7th in the 206

2011-07-27T13:59:00.006+09:00

4th of July in my beloved Emerald City (and the general 400 mile radius), with a bunch of beloved folks.

In no particular order.

buddies.

Hours before these lights untimely demise.

In-between lake and eating, riverdance is occassionaly practiced in the alley

Beyond delicious encrusted salmon, a la Patrick.

Baby Evan! And Momma Eden!

Books + Building

A moment of delight and tranquility before veering 15 lanes over to get on the right highway, heading the right way.

A handful of rolling around the Duncan Isle / Whiskey Creek lands.

A rare peek of Sasquatch. Moving at the speed of light, kind enough to share his home, his company, and the finest food this side of the next dimension to some weary travelers, Sir Pippinger.

Baby Evan! Auntie Rachel!

Switzerland (Noah) and, may I someday pronounce this right, Rekke.

Planking.

Evbo.

A-Jbo.

Mid another incredible dinner from the talented Ms. Oliver.

Bday crab and champagne, life isn't bad.

Francesca Stardust

Just look at that face. Would you just look at it?

Bbqing on the back porch is standard fare; not quite as standard, cakes to celebrate another blessed soul's sling around Sol.

And, of course, the requisite tribute to Loki's completly and mind-boggling amazing fresh salmon. The Gods never ate this well.

Open Library Slideshow - Kohacon 2010

2011-07-26T13:31:00.001+09:00

Kohacon 2010

View more documents from George Oates

I would have been blown away by this had there been nohttp://www.blogger.com/img/blank.gif slides from one of my favorite iterative artists/websites out there, complexification.net, but lo and behold, there was.

Seattle: Pre Montlake Cut Tidal Lands

2011-07-26T07:43:00.003+09:00

(http://content.wsulibs.wsu.edu/u?/maps,115)

From Washington State University's Early Maps collection, a "map of Seattle showing tide lands to be filled and canal to be constructed by the Seattle and Lake Washington Waterway Company (1895)".

You'll notice between "Lake Union" and "Union Bay" there is only land. Not anymore, not after the completion of the Montlake Cut.

Vacuum Coffee Maker, in the flesh.

2011-07-26T01:36:00.004+09:00

How do you make coffee when it's $30 a pound? Like this:

I'm not going to sit here and say it's the best coffee I've had, nor will I claim this to be a preferred method; with so many options and rich and creative techniques for brewing one of life's little pleasures, surely no one way is the only way.

But I will say, it's damn cool looking. That's a halogen rocking the heat below the glass. This would probably be step 3 1/2, where the water is just now being pushed up through the coffee filter and into the top basin.

For a visual explanation of the process:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_coffee_maker#Gallery_of_process

Base Reflectivity (4 days)

2011-07-24T16:20:00.001+09:00

Updated, now with four days.

"Hello World" - a Conversation

2011-07-24T14:16:00.004+09:00

Asteroids and comets peppered Earth’s surface, while primordial ooze simmered at the ocean’s lapping edges.

Not long thereafter (on the astronomical scale), air respirating creatures meandered out of the ocean in search of lunch.

Soon, horses pulled settlers and their wagons across harsh wintered mountain ranges. Nomadic people tied their domesticated camels up to posts while they snuggled beneath skins to keep warm during a cool desert night. Naked, free divers surfaced along side hollowed out tree trunks, their arms full of abalone.

In a blink, buildings that scraped the heavens were erected, torn down, and re-made. Manifestations of logic, a series of “on’s” and “off’s”, twinkled, beeped, and hummed from every corner of the globe. Upright creatures sang, drank fermented beverages, ate well, and had sex for fun.

After all that, the now familiar human din went quiet.

Around this time, on Venus, asteroids and comets peppered the Venetian surface, while primordial ooze simmered at the lapping edges of a liquid Methane expanse.

Time passed, the lights and vibrations went out, much like on Earth.

Translation:
Earth says, “What’s the good word Venus? How you doing?”
Venus responds, “Good good... and you?”

Back on Earth, algae and amoebas begin to cluster and form communities...

Nuggets of XML Wisdom

2011-07-23T07:57:00.003+09:00

"Superficially XML is nothing more than a standardized syntax used to express arbitrary hierarchical data in human readable form."

"If you've ever used XML to describe data and wondered whether you should use an element or an attribute, you're not alone. Nobody can really figure this out and doing it right tends to be black magic rather than science."

-http://www.defmacro.org/ramblings/lisp.html

Hungarian Petrol Station

2011-07-22T12:22:00.000+09:00

Just about breathtaking:

ARCHIVE PHOTO INSERTS FROM MOTALKO from Miklós Falvay on Vimeo.

OAI Server - And we're getting there....

2011-07-22T07:10:00.001+09:00

At-risk? Don't forget the metadata.

2011-07-20T02:50:00.004+09:00

(Example of GOES-WEST visible satellite imagery generated daily. These images are constantly streaming in, but as quickly as they come in, so are they deleted. Only two weeks of images are online and accessible at any given time. - http://www.atmos.washington.edu/images/vis/201106301730.gif)

Just finished a project identifying, and creating a powerpoint presentation about, "at-risk" materials with Michele here at the Internet Archive for a NDSA/NDIIPP conference workshop hosted by our supervisor. What I assumed would be a quick little project, finding some examples, turned out to be a mind expanding foyer into trying to know what you don't know. But a week and 50+ slides later, I think we created a pretty solid little presentation of at-risk materials, at least one that will spark some debates and discussion as it was primarily tasked to do.

And what does this have to do with metadata (though I'd like to pose: what doesn't have to do with metadata)? Access and Discoverability. Time and time again, I found myself dredging up examples of "at-risk" materials, that while their corporeal existence was safe, their intellectual condition was shaky at best. Should no further action to describe, organize, and disseminate them, their existence as an understandable and re-renderable object was therefore "at-risk". For a presentation, this was more difficult to get across in a powerpoint slide than, say, some moldy books under a chicken coop, or brittle newspapers languishing on the shelves of a small town archive. But with some slides about GIS layers, or the interoperability of science data and software, the central role of metadata bravely shone forth.

As I continue my project creating, transforming, and sharing metadata in various formats, this project, and some of the examples therein, are a great reminder as to at least one reason metadata is important: to understand, organize, and caretake information we've already spent time creating and digitizing.

Alien Civil War? or Velcro?

2011-07-18T14:16:00.004+09:00

Reflecting on the Ephemeral Nature of Science and Observational Data

2011-07-15T02:52:00.004+09:00

Image created from Base Reflectivity Radar images on 7/13 in Seattle, WA. These radar images, given another week, another few hundred images created and stored, will be digital dust in the wind as the relentless onslaught of new information creation continues.

While working on a project to identify "At-Risk" materials, I stumbled across the University of Washington's "Northwest Observational Data" page. For science data, particularly non-research based data, the window for its existence is often short.

Many of these recording devices and/or infrastructures are set up to monitor the skies, the heavens, just in case a momentous event should go down. But assuming one doesn't? It's the big delete for the old files, as new images/movies/readings keep pouring in. This makes these valuable observed information incredibly not only "at-risk", but downright "slated-for-destruction".

For some fun pre-made, week old or newer, time lapse movies...
http://www.atmos.washington.edu/cgi-bin/listnew.cgi?webcam0_movies

Riches and Just Means

2011-07-03T02:36:00.001+09:00

"Having only riches enough to be able to gratify reasonable desires, and yet make their gratifications always a novelty and a pleasure, the family occupied that just mean in life which is so rarely attained, and still more rarely enjoyed without discontent."

-I ripped this out of an article, can't remember which one.

Kearney Barton - The Studio, The Man

2011-07-02T05:32:00.004+09:00

From the UW's Kearney Barton collection page:

"Seattle recording engineer Kearney Barton has been crafting sounds since the early 1950s. His portfolio arcs over genres: rock, opera, jazz, folk, bluegrass, classical, cabaret, gospel, and even the occasional accordion-infused Nordic novelty song. Most significantly, Barton is recognized with shaping the “Northwest Sound.” As Peter Blecha writes: "Seattle's Kearney Barton is the man whose audio engineering work can be credited with forging the powerful aural esthetic that became widely known as the 'original Northwest Sound'" (historlink.org).

As a result of his many decades of work, Barton amassed thousands of analog reel-to-reel recordings at his home studio. In April 2010, the Libraries Media Center received a grant from the American Music Partnership of Seattle (AMPS)* to preserve and describe a portion of these recordings."

Some pictures from a related post about sifting through the gold:

Headphone Tree

Tapes and Tapes and Tapes and tapes and tapes and tapes and tapes and tapes and tapes and tapes and tapes and tapes....

The man behind the window - Kearney Barton.

HIGHLY recommended:

http://lightintheattic.net/releases/325-kearney-barton

Zeke the dog.

2011-06-27T09:29:00.001+09:00

My folks recently adopted this pup, goes by the name of Zeke, and I can hardly contain how excited I am to make his acquaintance in person.

OAI-PMH. The Interoperable, The Outdated, and the Visionary.

2011-06-25T06:58:00.004+09:00

For the past few weeks, I've been researching and learning about OAI-PMH, Open Archives Initiaive - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting. To be honest, I'm remembering that I've posted things here and there already, so I'll refrain from an all out overview. I did, however, want to share some thoughts and visions for the future. Above, an overview model I whipped together to keep my head straight.

And a disclaimer: I can't believe I'm making these kind of models/graphs. There was a time I swore I'd never do it; I saw them as tools, trickery, smoke, mirrors, and the chicanery of the un-imaginative. But damnit, they're helpful. Particularly in colloborating on complex and/or abstract ideas with others. Particularly abstract ideas.

These things are not real! To be fair, one can make the equally compelling argument that nothing is real, that our experience of "thing-ness", itself an abstraction to satiate the mind. But these things are really not real.

The model below, which now includes a SOLR server (based on a Lucene Index), begins the push the limit of my abstraction abilities.

These are their stories (bum bum):
1. OAI-PMH servers are a way of filtering and generatin interoperable, standardized metadata records in XML.

2.SOLR is a server built on the powerful and lightning fast Lucene index that allow for HTTP queries. It too can be configured to generate XML documents containing metadata records for given digital objects, from a page, to a book, to a catalog.

3. The particular flavor of OAI-PMH I'm looking at is called OAIcat, a Java based one.

4. SOLR is Java based.

Where things get weird, is that exchange between the seemingly autonomous OAI-PMH sever and SOLR. Where is the distinction? Where does one end, and another begin? In fact, might this not become a more common theme and problem as Open and Linked Data becomes ever more pervasive?

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Just as we once lost traditional archival materials to brittle pages, rat infestations, floods, and the over-zealousness of the sun, so now might we lose information to the to brittle XML wrappers, hosts of spamming and corrupting viruses, floods (still), and potentially the greatest threat, the blinding and radiant pulse of The All.

And I'm not talking the white-bearded old guy All here, I'm talking the semantic and hyper-linked (wow, that concatenation was completely accidental) world of data. Is there too much of a good thing? of a good concept? Is digital information equally at the mercy of our great hourglass, Entropy? Is digital information inherently entropic?

the Traverse City Tale

2011-06-23T15:32:00.008+09:00

While editing the results of some light rays bouncing around inside of a plastic box and ending up on a photovoltaic array in the form of a picture today, I got to stumbling around other pictures I've yet to photoshop-pretty-up and upload. These below are from a little jaunt to Northern Michigan this past April; at least Nothern in the lower peninsulan sense...

It be here:

View Larger Map

Beach beyond a lighthouse in the one of the peninsula "fingers", as I like to think of them, jutting up from Traverse City.

Pretty much just off the chain and hook beautiful up there.

A gullen form.

Fish in Leland - the water (and requisite NB's).

Fish Town in Leland - the goods.

Yeah beach - The goods, later that day.

My namesake.

Just unfathomably big, hundreds upon hundreds of feet tall.

Beachwood (I think...) forest just behind the dunes, purported to be what the landscape look like without massive logging, hotels, and other intrusions into this natural wonderland.

Maple holding on for dear life to the ever-shifting dunes.

Dune savannah?

Fish Town in Leland.

After some cool and some clouds, a beam of Sol.

Traverse City was a hotbed during the White Pine logging days of Michigan, and apparently, the river that flows through it carried hundreds of millions of logs (billions of board feet) out to the lake.

I also just so happened to do some archival research about logging, specifically the Log Marks used to identify them while they were floated down river to the mills. If interested in a little light reading about Michigan Log Marks, here's my two cents.

Sweet tilework.

Cold chilling.

Local artistry.

And finally, a metallic disc embedded in the pavement in Traverse City; it's function and origin, eluding and haunting me to this day...

LED Snowmelt into the San Francisco Bay

2011-06-23T14:36:00.007+09:00

From an impromptu bike trip to Saulsalito today, just across the bridge from The City, I stumbled across a warehouse sized scale replica of the entire San Francisco bay delta (thanks to Mr. Gregory for the heads up, might have rolled right on by otherwise). The model was originaly built by the Army Corps of Engineers to determine how dredging would affect tidal currents and depths, used as a laboratory, but is open to the public now.

Link: http://www.spn.usace.army.mil/bmvc/

From their website:
"The Bay Model is a three-dimensional hydraulic model of San Francisco Bay and Delta areas capable of simulating tides and currents. The Model is over 1.5 acres in size and represents an area from the Pacific Ocean to Sacramento and Stockton, including: the San Francisco, San Pablo and Suisun Bays and a portion of the Sacramento - San Joaquin Delta."

Truly awesome. This was a little LED setup showing the snowmelt from the mountains into the delta.

Pro Tip: To view larger, right click (or for a Mac, figure it out) and choose "view image"

Local Instance: Arabic

2011-06-19T04:26:00.003+09:00

What wonderous thing is a good night's sleep. After days of throwing me for loops, and not the good for/in kind, my local test OAI-PMH server is spitting out records. In Arabic if need be no less.

Booyah!

Digital Public Library of America Steering Committee: Point / Counter-point

2011-06-17T06:58:00.003+09:00

What does the "P" in "DPLA" really stand for?

Do the interests and assets of private academic universities have any place in a National "Public" library?

These questions and more are tackled in a fascinating Point / Counter-Point between David Rotham, arguing that "public libraries and academic libraries have diverging interests", while John Palfrey says, "now is the time for the library community to act in a unified way and not build fences."

Read here: http://www.libraryjournal.com/lj/home/890732-264/a_point-counterpoint_on_the_digital.html.csp

And a little background:

"The dream of a national digital public library is inching closer to the planning stage. The Berkman Center at Harvard University convened a large and diverse group of stakeholders to define the scope, architecture, costs, and administration for a proposed Digital Public Library of America (DPLA). This initiative was launched in December 2010 with generous support from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation. Since then it has pulled together a steering committee, described the initiative, launched a planning initiative wiki, established “workstreams,” elicited a lively and sometimes quite heated debate on the DPLA’s listserv, and given many people hope for the broad, ambitious, collaborative effort."

link: http://newsbreaks.infotoday.com/NewsBreaks/Update-on-the-Digital-Public-Library-of-America-76104.asp

And finally, the watch the initiative wiki jump around, here ye go:
http://cyber.law.harvard.edu/dpla/Main_Page

Local OAI-PMH server on Apache Tomcat

2011-06-17T05:40:00.006+09:00

THAT, right there above, is a successful response from my own OAI-PMH server, running on a local Apache Tomcat server. The amount of birds this simple chunk of XML represents in my learning curve is on the scale of flock.

Now it's on.

And for anyone considering such an endeavor, after countless hours of research and scouring the intertubes for a good introductory narrative on how to install and implement an OAI server, I could not more highly recommend this document:

Setting Up OAI-PMH

There were little tidbits here and there, but following this step-by-step, slaying obstacles as they popped up along the way, has proved elegant and doable.

From the site, an overview:

Twin Peaks, SF

2011-06-16T13:34:00.011+09:00

This afternoon, finding myself with my weekly Wednesday off from interning, I thought I'd explore a "hill" (read: mini mountain) that has caught my eye from every other scenic vantage in the city: Twin Peaks. From Wikipedia: "The two peaks have a north-south orientation and are divided by Twin Peaks Boulevard, which is the only road leading up to the summit. Twin Peaks also form a prominent divider for the summer coastal fog pushed in from the Pacific Ocean. Due to this particular geographical condition, their west-facing slopes generally receive substantial fog and strong winds, while the east-facing slopes usually receive more sun and warmth.^[3] Elevation of the peaks ranges from 600 feet (180 m) to over 900 feet (270 m). Thin, sandy soil is commonplace on Twin Peaks, making them more susceptible to erosion."

And true to this blurb, the winds were blowing fierce like from the West, rolling over the mountains, catching some heat, and dropping their warm gusts into the Mission and Castro below. It was a deliciously beautiful spot, made even better with a block of pepperjack cheese and a 79cent artisan roll.

And now, to tell the tale visually, some a photoshopping tirade:

The "Expired 600" polaroid effect.

This one, I was damn pleased with. Originally, I had shoveled 9-10, 3600+ pixel images into Photoshop's Photomerge extension, and with caution to the wind, hit "okay". A few minutes into the process, with the bar not moving, I decided it was like shoving a 1,000 Redwood through a Troy Built Mulchi-Mower and opted another route. With a couple swift contrast bumps, and a color balance adjustment to account for my camera's questionable automatic white balance, and the icing, an original image resizing, I gave it another go. Photo-stitching technology has come a long way in the past few years. I remember a day with weird distortions, funky color shifts, and the like if one wasn't willing to log a few hours with layers and geometric transformations.

Some absolutely stunningly green weeds, blackberries (though sorry SF, you're no match for the 206 variety), and palms in the background.

And just for good measure, a visual representation from back in the day. Specifically, from the AMAZING David Rumsey Map and Photograph collection, finding a home at Stanford just South of here soon.

link: http://rumsey.mapranksearch.com/

View from Twin Peaks - 1905

View of Twin Peaks, from Noe & Markey - 1905

Twin Peaks to the Sea - 1905

1863 Washington

2011-06-15T08:21:00.003+09:00

From 1863, the swirling waters of the Puget, to the gaping whole of the Columbia.

“Temporal Panopticon”

2011-06-14T07:18:00.002+09:00

The world would be a boring and tepid place without some good humored devil's advocacy:

Abstract
During this talk, Viktor Mayer-Schönberger will discuss his recent book, 'Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age', which looks at the phenomenon of perfect digital memory, and reveals why he believes we must reintroduce our capacity to forget. Digital technology empowers us as never before, but it can also have unforeseen consequences.

Professor Mayer-Schönberger will examine the technology that is facilitating the end of forgetting - digitisation, cheap storage and easy retrieval, global access, and increasingly powerful software - and will describe the dangers of everlasting digital memory, from outdated information taken out of context to compromising photos the Web won't let us forget. He will also explain why he believes information privacy rights and other fixes can't help us, and proposes his own simple solution - expiration dates on information.
-http://www.vmsweb.net/

the book: http://openlibrary.org/works/OL9056957W/Delete

Linked Data

2011-06-11T07:03:00.003+09:00

Uh-oh, OAI-PMH might be dead. What is a person to do?

The "Semantic Web" is here to help, with data linked so extensively, you could rest a hot cup of coffee on the webs of relations.

Just gearing up to munch on this concept, but in the meantime, here are four tenants of the philosophy:

Use URIs as names for things
Use HTTP URIs so that people can look up those names.
When someone looks up a URI, provide useful information, using the standards (RDF*, SPARQL)
Include links to other URIs. so that they can discover more things.

These "rules" are from a little manifesto I stumbled across in my pursuit of a deeper understanding of OAI-PMH, or what is beginning to look like, its imminent demise.

I gotta say, I kind of really like the cut of this jib so far:
http://www.w3.org/DesignIssues/LinkedData.html

Over the past week or so, since really looking into metadata crosswalking, OAI-PMH implementation, harvesting, and standardization, and XML parsing in earnest, I've had some doubts, some reservations about the route to information we so happily and blithely commute down. And so while this Linked Data is exciting, I'm going to withhold judgement until further flushed out...

Code vs. Indents, the Technical vs. Policy

2011-06-11T05:42:00.005+09:00

One might argue that software/programming code is akin to a technical problem, or solution, that one might employ in the digital preservation realm.

By contrast, at least with a programming language like Python (disclaimer: been trying to parse some XML ALL DAY, it's on the brain), where indents are utilized to enhance the nesting of code, the metaphor is more akin to a general - institution wide, you will - policy. These indents, without actual actionable code or concrete tasks to be performed are mere empty rules, nothing-ness. But when combined with code, in fact unleashing the fury and potential of the lines, they play an integral role in the success and efficacy of the program as a whole.

I just got done perusing a most impressive and illuminating article about Hathi Trust, an institution I should know better than I do, as it graces the very plains I've been frequenting; but better late than never. But it was these few lines from the interview, while getting lost in the meaning and value of a generating some metadata metrics, that really struck me:

“You mentioned "policy challenges"—such as?

Fogel: They are legion. Copyright and access rights. Fair use. Duplication within the repository between partners. Balancing the needs of all 50+ partner interests. Collection development. Quality of books and quality of services. All of these are complex issues, and there are many more.”

The moral here: it's the indents and overall structure that often offer up the richest and most lucrative challenges, not line 40 that keeps returning a "None" value when you know there's a web collection title right there..

(screenshot of an honest-to-goodness OAI-PMH feed going under the knife)

Dublin Core --> MODS

2011-06-07T07:22:00.002+09:00

The Beach - San Francisco Edition

2011-06-06T11:48:00.002+09:00

A little HDR, courtesy of Photoshop's HDR merger...

deux

At this point, hearing the waves, smelling the sea, and feeling sand crunch beneath my feet, as I was almost rabid with anticipation.

This, is something I would like to do someday.

And just for good measure, a pentagonal magnetic fabric made with amazing magnetic balls.

Preservation: Now vs. Then

2011-06-04T08:18:00.003+09:00

The images is from:
"Inge Angevaare's blog over duurzame toegang tot digitale informatie in Nederland en daarbuiten - Blog of the coordinator of the Dutch Digital Preservation Coalition NCDD"

And pretty true. It's a great series of posts from the recent conference in Estonia:
http://digitaalduurzaam.blogspot.com/2011/05/aligning-digital-preservation.html

Lost Landscapes of Detroit

2011-06-04T05:21:00.008+09:00

From the Internet Archive:
"Compilation of historical images of Detroit, Michigan (1917-1970), edited by Rick Prelinger for presentation at Museum of Contemporary Art Detroit (MOCAD) on February 10, 2010."
(XML Metadata)

"Nice Package.... ha ha HA...."

2011-06-03T13:19:00.001+09:00

To a Mouse - Robert Burns

2011-06-03T08:51:00.003+09:00

Ever wondered where the expression, "Even the best laid plans..." comes from? I did.

"To a Mouse", by Robert Burns:

"Wee, sleekit, cowrin, tim'rous beastie,
O, what a panic's in thy breastie!
Thou need na start awa sae hasty
Wi bickering brattle!
I wad be laith to rin an' chase thee,
Wi' murdering pattle.

I'm truly sorry man's dominion
Has broken Nature's social union,
An' justifies that ill opinion
Which makes thee startle
At me, thy poor, earth born companion
An' fellow mortal!

I doubt na, whyles, but thou may thieve;
What then? poor beastie, thou maun live!
A daimen icker in a thrave
'S a sma' request;
I'll get a blessin wi' the lave,
An' never miss't.

Thy wee-bit housie, too, in ruin!
It's silly wa's the win's are strewin!
An' naething, now, to big a new ane,
O' foggage green!
An' bleak December's win's ensuin,
Baith snell an' keen!

Thou saw the fields laid bare an' waste,
An' weary winter comin fast,
An' cozie here, beneath the blast,
Thou thought to dwell,
Till crash! the cruel coulter past
Out thro' thy cell.

That wee bit heap o' leaves an' stibble,
Has cost thee monie a weary nibble!
Now thou's turned out, for a' thy trouble,
But house or hald,
To thole the winter's sleety dribble,
An' cranreuch cauld.

But Mousie, thou art no thy lane,
In proving foresight may be vain:
The best laid schemes o' mice an' men
Gang aft agley,
An' lea'e us nought but grief an' pain,
For promis'd joy!

Still thou are blest, compared wi' me!
The present only toucheth thee:
But och! I backward cast my e'e,
On prospects drear!
An' forward, tho' I canna see,
I guess an' fear!"

(For the "Standard English" translation)

Archiving Email

2011-06-03T06:06:00.004+09:00

On archiving email, an excerpt:

"Diverse email applications and personal email management practices at the University of Michigan have long posed obstacles to the archives’ ability to accession, appraise, and preserve electronic mail of long-term value. The MeMail Project sought to overcome these challenges by pairing records management tools and techniques with outreach and education directed towards records creators. To gather background data on email usage and potential preservation strategies, archivists interviewed staff from several campus units, analyzed business practices, and reviewed relevant policies, regulations, and laws. This research led archivists and ITS staff to conclude that an appropriately priced electronic records management system (ERMS) would permit UARP to preserve the correspondence of a target group of 1,500 administrators and prominent faculty. To streamline the identification of significant content prior to accession, UARP planned to educate records creators in the use file plans to self-select email of value and/or have ITS develop functionality to automatically weed out spam. UARP defined functional requirements for the capture, identification, maintenance, secure storage, and dissemination of email and associated metadata, and ITS drafted technical requirements for a commercial system. The partners then issued a Request for Proposal (RFP) to 18 vendors in mid 2009.

Of the two bids in response to the RFP, the most promising system cost over $500,000. While the partners had expected an ERMS to be costly, this amount exceeded the project budget and would have required university-wide participation and commitment. To compound matters, the University of Michigan launched an IT reorganization in late 2009, which eventually led to the consolidation of email services and other IT resources on campus.[ii] Rather than pursue a large investment in the midst of this changing environment, UARP developed an interim solution that would permit archivists to selectively capture email of value and allow for the possible integration with an ERMS at a later date. As of April 2011, UARP has used this revised approach to initiate 10 pilot projects with high-level administrators from across the university.

The “mailbox method” requires ITS to establish an archival mailbox for each participant, to which UARP also has access. This mailbox is identified by the participant’s University of Michigan uniquename appended to a Bentley Historical Library prefix (i.e. “bhl-johndoe”) and it appears as a separate folder in the participant’s email client.[iii] Archivists configure the client to ensure that the archival mailbox is both visible and functional, provide an overview of UARP’s collecting policies, and supply guidelines to identify correspondence of long-term value. Pilot participants are then asked to drag/drop, forward, CC, or BCC significant messages (both sent and received) to the archival mailbox for preservation. These messages and associated attachments are stored on IMAP or Exchange email servers (depending on the participant’s email client) administered by ITS. The participants have continued access to content in the archival mailbox and may add or remove messages at their discretion. Although UARP has access to the mailboxes, archivists do not read individual messages and only check the accounts to monitor usage for the pilot project. At an appropriate point in the project, UARP will request permission to export and accession email in the RFC 2822 compliant MBOX file format.[iv]"
Read Michael Shallcross's whole article here:
http://e-records.chrisprom.com/?p=1965

Evil Password Entropy Empire

2011-06-03T02:22:00.004+09:00

Decided to give Google Reader another shot and found this as posted by a dear friend in his feed some months ago (you know who you are...):

Open Archives Initiative - Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH)

2011-06-02T11:02:00.013+09:00

Whew, what a mouthful.

the OAI-PMH protocol is a genius thing, but as a subtle beast, difficult to really appreciate right out of the gates.

The Open Archive Initiative (OAI) is a set of guidelines and standards to help metadata be interoperable between data providers (those with the assets who make the metadata), service providers (those that harvest the metadata and make heads or tails of it for users), and the users themselves. One of their greatest creations is the Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (PMH), essentially a protocol like HTTP that allows repositories and institutions to have their metadata items be "pinged" by service providers, delivering the metadata in well-formed, query specific XML chunks.

A good example is the "Images of Space" myself and some other intrepid peers put together as web collection with the Archive-It tool a couple months ago. Insert shameless plug to this blog entry about text searching within a collection (helpful only if you already have the collection ID, chicken before the egg kind of thing - regardless, metadata is what makes that first discovery possible).

The internal collection metadata begins with this:

Unfortunately, this isn't really searchable, though well-formed, as it is. How would a search engine, or a library catalog like OAIster.org find something like this then? How is it potentially discoverable? Utilizing something like OAI-PMH.

A typical OAI-PMH query for this particular collection would be formed like this:

http://archive-it.org/oai?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=oai_dc&identifier=oai:archive-it.org:archiveit/2470 - (click it, it works!)

And the results would look a little something something like this:

Now this XML isn't exactly searchable at this point, but we're getting there. There are six basic functions when using the OAI-PMH protocol, this one above, "returns the metadata record for collection 2470". Enter the Service Providers, an catalog like WorldCat for instance.

The other functions comprise a suite of tools to discover new feeds, what OAI-PMH metadata types they are, their unique identifiers, and finally the metadata itself.

One useful function might be this one, which creates an XML document of all available items:
http://archive-it.org/oai?verb=ListRecords&metadataPrefix=oai_dc

This form is totally text searchable, and now we're getting to a point where a user could search something, find a web collection of interest in this example, and then using an item specific query (like the one for collection 2470 above), could locate the metadata for a particular collection. I'll admit, it may seem confusing, but it's most likely because it's being explained in a roundabout fashion here; as I myself, am still becoming familiar.

There are some real advantages, maybe not immediately obvious here, to a protocol like this.

Service providers don't have to download a text searchable list like the one above (click that link, it takes a hot second). They can instead download the holdings once, then create targeted queries for new additions and download and incorporate these into their database or user generated lists. Saves a ton of redundant metadata downloading.
Data providers, like Archive-It and the Internet Archive for example, don't have to remember to post new collections or items to a centralized repository, as their metadata records are available through simple OAI-PMH pings. I like to think of these pings kind of like well aimed hooks that dip into a repository's "bucket" (terminology used in a seminal paper entitled, "Smart Objects, Dumb Archivists"), hooking packages of metadata all ready to roll; where the OAI-PMH protocol is the correct placement and creation of the basket such that a hook might find and grab it easily. Once that location and maneuver has been established, the rest is beeps and boops of Perl or Python scripts running their OAI-PMH requests:

More screenshots? You got it.

Example of a request to see what format a Data Provider (think: repository) is offering their metadata in:

Some helpful links:
OAI-PMH Tutorial:
http://www.oaforum.org/tutorial/index.php

Open Archives Initiative:
http://www.openarchives.org/

(disclaimer: while not the pretteist blog post, it seems fitting for a look under the hood of how things get pretty.)

Dungeness Spit - TopArt

2011-06-01T04:04:00.002+09:00

Carnaval and Park Sitting Extravaganza

2011-05-31T04:28:00.007+09:00

216 Rare Earth Magnetic Balls - holy moly, endless fun.

"Ron Experiences a Moment of Unexpected Clarity..."

Badass drumcircle, people were getting down.

The Green edition.

The foot-dragging-while-driving edition.

SF botanical splendor.

This building mural was captivating, it's only the word that seems fitting. This is how all buildings should be.

The same setup the world over, and lovely every time. Also pictured, my new $1 metallic sphere map of the moon, a fantastic recipient of flying rare-earth magnetic balls (see above.)

Dinosaur trunk.

Dolores Park.

The Castro.

Marriage Equality - NYC edition

2011-05-27T12:40:00.000+09:00

When the Village erupted in protest 42 years ago next month, New York—and every other state in the union, save one—still had laws on the books that made same-sex relationships a crime. A couple could go to prison for years, just for being intimate in the privacy of their own home. For men and women of that era, an era many of us remember well, being in a gay relationship meant living in fear:

Fear of police harassment.

Fear of public humiliation

Fear of workplace discrimination.

Fear of physical violence.

Today, in some places, those fears still linger. But as a nation, we have come a long way since Stonewall. Today, two women in a committed relationship—who years ago would have hidden their relationship from family and friends—will instead take part in a wedding ceremony in front of their family and friends. Today, two men who are long-time partners—who years ago would never even have entertained the idea—will adopt a child and begin a family.... Today, a majority of Americans support marriage equality—and young people increasingly view marriage equality in much the same way as young people in the 1960s viewed civil rights. Eventually, as happened with civil rights for African-Americans, they will be a majority of voters. And they will pass laws that reflect their values and elect presidents who personify them.

It is not a matter of if—but when.

And the question for every New York State lawmaker is: Do you want to be remembered as a leader on civil rights? Or an obstructionist? On matters of freedom and equality, history has not remembered obstructionists kindly.

Not on abolition.

Not on women's suffrage.

Not on workers' rights.

Not on civil rights.

And it will be no different on marriage rights."
-NYC mayor Bloomberg, 5/26/2011

Hell yes.

2011-05-27T08:35:00.001+09:00

http://www.openlibrary.org/details/mischiefagain00blytmiss

Topography of the Bird

2011-05-27T07:15:00.002+09:00

From "The Bird Book", by Chester A. Reed, 1914.
http://openlibrary.org/works/OL160798W/The_bird_book

Read online:
http://www.archive.org/stream/birdbookillustra00reedrich

50,000 USGS Maps

2011-05-27T04:00:00.004+09:00

(Olympia, Washington. lat/long 47.07417, -122.97389, elevation 180. http://www.archive.org/download/usgs_drg_wa_47122_a8/o47122a8.tif)

The Internet Archive strikes again. 50,000+ USGS topographical maps for your viewing pleasure.

IA collection: http://www.archive.org/details/maps_usgs
Alternate Search method (Libre Map Project): http://libremap.org/data/

Another fun few:
Seattle North
Seattle South
Mt. St. Helens Dome
Mt. Rainier West

Canonicalization

2011-05-27T02:49:00.002+09:00

From Wikipedia:

"In computer science, canonicalization (abbreviated c14n, where 14 represents the number of letters between the C and the N), (also sometimes standardization or normalization) is a process for converting data that has more than one possible representation into a "standard", "normal", or canonical form. This can be done to compare different representations for equivalence, to count the number of distinct data structures, to improve the efficiency of various algorithms by eliminating repeated calculations, or to make it possible to impose a meaningful sorting order."

The Hotel Eden - Ron Carlson

2011-05-26T11:51:00.002+09:00

Now this is a good read. A book of about 12 short stories, and I can honestly say, for the first three I've torn through, I had no idea how it would pan out. After a few day jaunt through sci-fi territory, it's wonderful to find still mind-expanding notions in the commonest of things.

The Work, the Yard, the Device

2011-05-26T09:19:00.003+09:00

The new working/interning digs for the summer: The Internet Archive

Backyard oasis #1

Backyard oasis #2

And finally, a $37 hunk of wiring and plastic that will soothe the soul, engender great creativity and throughput, and uncork the internets, a D-Link wireless PCMCIA adapter. Thank the high heavenly lords, it's about time I'm not banging my head against the desk anymore waiting for "connecting to server...."

Not to mention a full-halt on battling wireless adapters between my computer and others. I have yet, one wonderful router aside, been able to inhabit the same wireless network as others without computer posturing that results in no one with a decent connection. It's something I found very interesting, not many people (even techy folks) were knowledgeable about, and something sorely lacking from discussion groups on the internet. Just what is going on behind the scenes? Was it Mac/PC battles? Wireless B vs. G vs. N? Who knows.