Chris Boese's Weblog

New Yorkers letting the bed bugs bite?

NEWS FLASH: Bedbugs take Manhattan

My goodness, that's got to be unpleasant. They look so tiny in the picture, I doubt you could take your shoe and hit them 'till they're black and blue.

Link: Just Try to Sleep Tight. The Bedbugs Are Back. - New York Times.

Just Try to Sleep Tight. The Bedbugs Are Back.

Robert Stolarik for The New York Times

Despite the light, a bedbug seized a chance to feed at the American Museum of Natural History in New York.

By ANDREW JACOBS

Published: November 27, 2005

They're the scourge of hobo encampments and hot-sheet motels. To impressionable children everywhere, they're a snippet of nursery rhyme, an abstract foe lurking beneath the covers that emerges when mommy shuts the door at night.

But bedbugs on Park Avenue? Ask the horrified matron who recently found her duplex teeming with the blood-sucking beasts. Or the tenants of a co-op on Riverside Drive who spent $200,000 earlier this month to purge their building of the pesky little thugs. The Helmsley Park Lane was sued two years ago by a welt-covered guest who blamed the hotel for harboring the critters. The suit was quietly settled last year.

And bedbugs, stealthy and fast-moving nocturnal creatures that were all but eradicated by DDT after World War II, have recently been found in hospital maternity wards, private schools and even a plastic surgeon's waiting room.

[...]

Infestations have been reported sporadically across the United States over the past few years. But in New York, bedbugs have gained a foothold all across the city.

"It's becoming an epidemic," said Jeffrey Eisenberg, the owner of Pest Away Exterminating, an Upper West Side business that receives about 125 bedbug calls a week, compared with just a handful five years ago. "People are being tortured, and so am I. I spend half my day talking to hysterical people about bedbugs."

[...]

And that new mattress delivered from a reputable department store, which kindly hauled away your old one? It may have spent all day in a truck wedged against an old mattress collected from a customer with a bedbug problem.

Once introduced into a home, bedbugs can crawl into adjoining apartments or hitch a ride to another part of town in the cuff of a pant leg.

"Anyone who stays in a hotel, rich or poor, can bring them home in a suitcase," said Richard Kourbage, whose company, Kingsway Exterminating in Brooklyn, does about a dozen bedbug jobs a day. "Some of the best hotels in New York have them."

[...]

Let them eat cake?! Is it time to do something about the hurtful waste and absurdities of the super-rich?

Link: Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | It may be beyond passe' - but we'll have to do something about the rich.

This op-ed column in the Guardian describes the issue in terms of British currency, but in the U.S., it is almost as if there are two different economies of scale in certain sectors of the country, Manhattan, Southern California most acutely. The rest of the country in some ways is to those areas what so-called "third world" countries are to the developed world as a whole. Within one nation.

The celebrity-worship culture may protest against criticizing the waste of this new aristocracy, wealth locked into generations with the current climate of looking at inheritances as an entitlement, a relatively NEW philosophy in democracies such as what the U.S. once was historically.

Not only was their extreme wealth not EARNED to the extent that it has piled up (and is hoarded, even when the expensive champagne spills), but for every person who struggles in poverty, who has bankruptcy protection pulled out from under personal disasters, the obscenely super-rich bear very real, direct, and personal responsibility. Every dollar wasted at that extreme Marie Antoinette scale of value is food taken out of someone's mouth, a roof taken away from over someone's head.

Now I have no right to be a hypocrite here. By my reasoning above, every middle class resident of the U.S. who goes on the family Disney vacation, spends oodles to look at fake Main Streets, fiberglass boulders, and animatronic presidents, or whatever sort of thing passes for over-priced waste in any venue (I won't demand a colorless world without art or entertainment, I'm just protesting absurdly overpriced art and entertainment) IS ALSO taking food out of someone's mouth in poorer economies of the world.

It's just easier to get outraged and offended at the actions of the super-rich and stupidly arrogant folks as described below.

Link: Guardian Unlimited | Columnists | It may be beyond passe' - but we'll have to do something about the rich.

Comment

It may be beyond passé - but we'll have to do something about the rich

The gap between extraordinary wealth and desperate poverty is growing steadily wider in Tony Blair's Britain

Jonathan Freedland
Wednesday November  23, 2005
The Guardian

If you want to be deeply unfashionable, just read on. If you want to enter terrain so wildly out of date that mere mention of it has become taboo, then you've come to the right place. Brace yourself. Late last month two bankers strode into Umbaba, one of London's most modish watering holes, and asked the bartender to fix them a drink. Not any drink, you understand, but the most expensive cocktail he could concoct. He set to work, blending a Richard Hennessy cognac that sells at £3,000 a bottle, Dom Perignon champagne, fresh lemongrass and lychees - all topped off with an extract of yohimbe bark, a West African import said to possess aphrodisiac powers. He called it the Magie Noir - and he charged £333 a glass. The bankers ordered two rounds for their table of eight. Their final bill for the night: £15,000.

Those same men, or their colleagues, may well have invested £200,000 in a Bentley or Aston Martin, or they might have paid celebrity hairdresser Nicky Clarke £500 for what the salon describes as an "aspirational haircut". They are the customers sought by the London estate agent who offers a three-bedroom flat in Kensington as a "starter home" for £2.25m. They are the target reader of the newly launched Trader magazine, with its ads for private jets or five-storey yachts (complete with submarine).

This is the world of the super-rich, financiers pulling in salaries and bonuses in the millions, and sometimes tens of millions, of dollars. They are partners in hedge funds and private-equity firms - buying, selling and gambling in jobs that most mortals barely comprehend. They spend money on vast estates or wild fancies. Sometimes the splashing out is literal: a favourite pastime is spraying champagne in the manner of a formula one winner. (In August one London banker fizzed away £41,000.)

[....]

Robert Peston, City editor of the Sunday Telegraph, estimates that this year no more than 200 to 300 hedge-fund managers will carve up $4.2bn of pure profit between them. These sorts of payouts are on a scale unimaginable in the past, at least outside the handful of individuals who either invented a new product or owned a tangible resource: Bransons or Rockefellers. That they should come, as regular as a salary, to those who, by their own admission, create nothing is a new development.

[...]

Does it matter? Some will insist not; only envy could make us begrudge a young man spending five figures on a drinks bill. As long as we're getting by, who cares if Joe Banker can buy a Ferrari the way the rest of us buy a pint of milk?

[...]

When the prime minister was asked in 2001 whether it was possible for anyone to earn too much money, he caught the spirit of the age when he replied, "Not really, no. Why does that matter?"

I know it's frightfully old-fashioned, but I beg to differ. For the story about the £333 cocktails emerged in the same week as Shelter reported that children were being forced to sleep in kitchens, dining rooms and hallways because of cramped housing affecting 500,000 families in England alone.

[...]

To my mind, there is something deeply wrong here. If one man can spend £15,000 plying his pals with a syrupy cocktail, while another lays out blankets for his child to sleep in the kitchen then we know the system is broken. This is not some narrow criticism of the Labour government, but rather a challenge to our assumption that we are a civilised society at all.

For we imagine such gross inequalities to come tinged in sepia. They belong to the Dickensian dark ages, a cruelty so distant we render it now only as nostalgic entertainment: Oliver Twist at the cinema, Scrooge on the West End stage.

But the truth is that the injustice of extraordinary wealth alongside desperate poverty is no museum piece. It is alive and present in 21st century Britain.

The United States got there first, of course. US economists and others have long been worried that their society is returning to the Great Gatsby days of the 1920s: they note that great mansions converted to public use, as nurses' homes and the like, after 1945, are now reverting to private residences once more, as if the pre-1929 plutocrats are back. You can see the same process in Notting Hill in west London: huge structures that would have contained 10 flats a decade ago restored to the single homes of the Victorian age.

[...]

Leo Hindery, the multimillionaire chairman of HL Capital, told the BBC last year: "You're setting up a class system the likes of which we've never seen in the world. The most obvious precedent is the French revolution, where the gap between the extremely wealthy and the middle class grew to be so acute that social unrest ensued."

[...]

Follow-up on Google Print

Link: Google Print gets new name | InfoWorld | News | 2005-11-17 | By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service.

I've written in here previously crowing about the possibilities of Google Print, which was followed by a similar but perhaps more commercial announcement from Amazon, for a service called Amazon Pages, trying to commodify book parts by splitting them into decontextualized page units (lexias?!).

When it comes down to it, they appear very similar ventures, but feel to me vastly different. Maybe it's a distinction without a difference, but I got a bee in my bonnet over this thing, and I'm still stewing on it.

My initial impressions are this: Copyright dinosaurs hate Google Books, but the interface and its conception I think have the capacity to make McLuhan-style alterations in the neural paths of our brains.

Meanwhile, Amazon Pages seem like horseless carriages to the Nth degree. Old media punts its content into the new wineskins.  Instead of making more open rangeland, Amazon goes beyond fencing the wild west and instead starts creating half-acre subdivisions and burbs.

Now can I mix metaphors with the best of them, or what?!

OK, my mangling of language aside (I really need to enter the Dark and Stormy Night contest), am I protesting too much? Is this really a moot distinction?

Really, is Google Print truly the sign of the devil for authors, or only for rich mega-publishers? Do authors want their measly cut of the publishers' megaprofits, or do they want to be READ? What do we lose with all these radically anal constrictions of copyright? (yeah yeah, McLuhan would call those "media reversals") Do we lose a mental download of the Akashic Records? The authoring of a massive collective book of our consciousness?

[my take on locking away content behind firewalls, like with NYTimesSelect: you can MAKE MONEY by locking stuff away, but you LOSE INFLUENCE. If you cast your bread (ideas) upon the waters, you GAIN INFLUENCE, but perhaps LOSE MONEY. Which is of greater value as wampum? Cash currency, or influence?

With TimesSelect, NY Times columnists lost more than 80% of their influence in the world of ideas virtually overnight, as they vanished from public discourse where they once held forth with great power, where they were cited and linked to. Now they are still writing with force in their walled garden, but they might as well be paper tigers, because their influence has disappeared.]

Alternately, what is so evil about what Amazon is doing? I've been a fan of Amazon generally, unlike many of my colleagues who are willing to work harder to support small independent booksellers. I can't help it. I'm in love with good interfaces wherever they might be. The power of what Amazon does for books and the Long Tail (just as what Netflix does for films) to me far outweighs the value of physical bookstores. I live deep in the Amazon backlist, stuff that would never occur to an independent bookstore to stock.

See, I live so deep in the backlist, I want to go to ancient Alexandria, and Google promises to take me there. I think Google has the better interface and better model to deliver me to the Book of All Life. Google could turn itself into the Book of All Life (yes, I know that is a frightening concentration of power), which I could then absorb into my consciousness with instantaneous speed, living partly in those silicon ethers, partly in my carbon-based body.

Amazon not only doesn't want me to do that, it is running in the opposite direction, so far from imagining a giant Book of All Life, a Tower of Babel in Platonic imitation of the Akashic Records that could reach all the way to Heaven (until lightning strikes the Tower card and all our languages get scrambled up again), that instead it wants to build paid portals into millions of little anthills!  Granularity gone mad!

Am I exaggerating? It is one thing to commodify individual songs off musician's "albums," whatever they may be. The "album" as a genre was never as unified as the "song" was as a genre. Should iTunes charge for songs by the musical phrasing? One price for the intro, one price for the first movement, another price for the key change, another price for the diva big finish?

Books as a genre are of course as socially constructed as anything else, and they have natural divisions, from the evolution of the short story to the development of the novel as this big sprawling form. Books have chapters, which, for edited collections, are intended to be contiguous units.

All that makes sense, but page divisions are an arbitrary construct created by a piece of software, the typesetting program. They are not sense-units; they are not "lexias."

Oooh, I know I protest too much, because I am a fan of nonlinearity, made it a banner to wave in my nonlinear hypertextual dissertation. Should hypertextual chunking have any sense units to its divisions, whether created by the author or the readers? (co-authors all, technically)

And also consider that I do defend the decontextualized Xerox method for library research, a practice that saved my ass in many college courses and for a Ph.D., because you really don't want my dyslexic eyeballs trying to copy things out for bib pages and such on those cute little notecards some researchers use. I transpose so many letters and numbers it isn't funny.

But I have a legal right to make those copies in the library for my research. In Amazon's Pages model of the universe, not only would my right to get those "free" (other than the coins I feed into the copy machine) copies, it appears even my right to have access to books in a library would disappear.

If Ben Franklin were trying to start a public library right now, I think he'd be arrested. At the very least, he'd make a terrorist watch list for his unpatriotic and radical ideas about sharing information.

Link: Google Print gets new name | InfoWorld | News | 2005-11-17 | By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service.

Google Print gets new name

Controversial Google Print offering is now called Google Book Search

By Nancy Gohring, IDG News Service
November 17, 2005

Google's controversial Google Print offering has a new name, but even a Google product marketing manager doesn't expect the new name to placate critics.

In a posting entered Thursday to Google's blog, Product Marketing Manager Jen Grant wrote that Google Print is now called Google Book Search. She said that the company has received comments from users excited about the prospect of Google Print making it easier for them to print documents. The service, however, was designed to let users search within books and has nothing to do with actual printing.

The Web site address has changed from http://print.google.com to http://books.google.com.

The new name is expected to help users better understand the service, although Grant notes in the post that the company doesn't think the name change will affect the opinion some people have of the program.

She's referring to the chilly reception Google Book Search has received from certain quarters. Two writers groups, The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, have separately filed lawsuits charging Google with copyright infringement. They say that Google infringes on copyright when it scans in the contents of books, which it does in order to create the database for Google Book Search, without asking for permission from authors or publishers.

 

"...rewrite the history of how history was rewritten in the first place

Great line, isn't it? This comes from Washington Post op-ed columnist Richard Cohen, in an opening paragraph that has plenty of bite:

Link: Ignoring the Facts.

Ignoring the Facts

By Richard Cohen
Thursday, November 17, 2005;  Page A31

In one of the most intellectually incoherent major speeches ever delivered by a minor president, George W. Bush blamed "some Democrats and antiwar critics" last week for changing their minds about the war in Iraq and now saying they were deceived. "It is deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how that war began," the president said. Yes, sir, but it is even more deeply irresponsible to rewrite the history of how history was rewritten in the first place. [emphasis mine]

It is the failure to acknowledge this -- not merely that mistakes were made -- that is so troubling about Bush and others in his administration. Yes, the president is right: Foreign intelligence services also thought Iraq had weapons of mass destruction. Yes, he is right that members of Congress drew the same conclusion -- although none of them saw the raw intelligence that the White House did. And he is right, too, that Saddam Hussein had simply ignored more than a dozen U.N. resolutions demanding that he reopen his country to arms inspectors. When it came to U.N. resolutions, Hussein was notoriously hard of hearing.

[...]

For example, the insistence that Hussein was somehow linked to the terrorist attacks of Sept. 11, 2001 -- a leitmotif of Bush administration geopolitical fantasy -- tells you much more than whether this or that fact was right. It tells you that to Bush and his people, the facts did not matter.

[...]

What's more, there's evidence aplenty that the sloppy thinking, false analogies and bad history that led to the Iraq war remain the cultural style of the White House. The president's recent speech, for instance, conflates all sorts of terrorist incidents -- from Israel to Chechnya -- neglecting that they are specific to their regions and have nothing to do with al Qaeda. Every bombing somehow becomes an attack on Western values "because we stand for democracy and peace." Oh, stop it!

[...]

At the moment, no one can have confidence in the Bush administration. It has shown itself inept in the run-up to the war and the conduct of it since. Almost three years into the war, the world is not safer, the Middle East is less stable, and Americans and others die for a mission that is not what it once was and cannot be what it now is called: a fight for democracy. It would be nice, as well as important, to know how we got into this mess -- nice for us, important for the president. It wasn't that he had the wrong facts. It was that the right ones didn't matter.

The world is about to become a much darker place very soon

I wonder how people on Earth will live with themselves if they let hundreds of thousands of people freeze to death, homeless in earthquake-ravaged regions of Pakistan.

I understand what it feels like to be disaster-weary, but just because one's compassion might be running out doesn't mean the disasters will stop just because humanity needs a break from disasters.

Link: Independent Online Edition > Asia.

13 November 2005  20:15

Survivors of the Pakistani earthquake left to die of cold

Thousands have no shelter with the first snows of winter only days away

By Justin Huggler in Bagh, Kashmir Published: 13 November 2005

At least 500,000 earthquake survivors in Pakistan still have no shelter with the fierce Himalayan winter just days away, international relief agencies have warned. Aid workers are scrambling to get tents to survivors in high mountain areas where snow may arrive any day, but the international relief effort is failing.

The problem is a severe lack of funds. Relief agencies warn that if they do not get adequate shelters to survivors before snow falls, thousands will die.

A desperate plea made to The Independent on Sunday, from a village in the mountains above the Karakoram Highway in Pakistan's North-West Frontier Province, illustrated the scale of the crisis.

"Please tell the British government to help us. Please tell anyone," Mohammed Idris said by telephone. "We have no tents and it is so cold at night. If we do not have tents soon the children will die."

Mr Idris said he was one of 4,000 villagers in Rajmerra with only 20 tents between them. On some nights, he added, temperatures already dip below freezing and water turns to ice. On other nights survivors are pelted with torrential rain, havenothing to sleep under and sit awake all night, shivering.

"We can see the snow on the hills and it will be here any day now," Mr Idris added. "I went to the Pakistan army today to ask for tents but they say they cannot help, as they don't have any. Please tell people we need tents, food and blankets." Rajmerra lies in Battamori district, near Battagaram. Time for them is running out fast.

Much the same situation can be seen throughout northern Pakistan. In the village of Maira, in the hills above Bagh, we found a two-month-old baby named Ariba, sleeping with her mother under a thin sheet of tarpaulin that did not even cover the rope-bed, which jutted out into the rain. At 4,500ft above sea level, temperatures plunge once darkness falls and the snow will be here soon, too.

[...]

At least 500,000 earthquake survivors in Pakistan still have no shelter with the fierce Himalayan winter just days away, international relief agencies have warned. Aid workers are scrambling to get tents to survivors in high mountain areas where snow may arrive any day, but the international relief effort is failing.

The problem is a severe lack of funds. Relief agencies warn that if they do not get adequate shelters to survivors before snow falls, thousands will die.

[...]

What a great birthday at Future of the Book.org!

Link: Institute for the Future of the Book: sidebar.

I've been hanging out with some great folks in L.A. who like to sit and think about the same things I do, not just the future of books, but also the future of blogs, particularly blogs with credibility, blogs by people who have studied different areas and disciplines in depth, in short, experts.

What an incredible cross-disciplinary discussion we had! I'm just all charged up, although still here in CA, getting ready to head to the beach with my bud and her sweet and exuberant doggie.

Here are some links to the cool folks I met (many of their blogs are also linked at the side):

Bob Stein and Ben Vershbow at Future of the Book. Bob and Ben get to have altogether too much fun with new media, and I am sooooo envious, and so glad to get to hear about the cool stuff they're doing. And if they ever need a beta-tester, I hope they know whom to come to.

Virginia Kuhn (postdoc at USC Institute for Multimedia Literacy with the second born digital dissertation). Whooo hooo, a surprise visit with someone from my home discipline! (no comment on how much I enjoyed catching up on gossip)

And other folks like me, who came to incubate our brains under the Annenberg infrared grow lights at USC...

Manan Ahmed, who told me interesting stuff about Pakistan, the Old Man on the Mountain (I'm sorta obsessed about the Assassins and the Templars), and historians who influenced the Iraq war before it ever started.

Danah Boyd. Pretty cool to finally have a chance to meet Danah in person, after having briefly corresponded with her online a few years ago in an FOAF network. She's doing some great research on young people and cybercultures.

Brian Carroll. I've been a fan of Brian's Into the Blogosphere article ever since the collection came out. Who knows, maybe we'll hatch some wacky Georgia citizen journalism venture, or some kind of student project. I hope so!

Juan Cole. You gotta know it's a good day when you get to pick his brain for the better part of a day. While my friends back at CNN are wishing they could have been a fly on the wall in the discussion (that's what they get for pooh-poohing blogging), I'm reflecting more on what it was like to get help holding my chopsticks from the man behind the blog, who is personable and charming, even when delivering hard-hitting analysis.

Jenny DeMonte. Jenny D is taking a turn substitute teaching for Jay Rosen at PressThink while he works on his book. Or is she a substitute reporter? She takes on either role equally well, but I'm hoping she'll shake up the world of education policy.

Brian Drolet. I'd never met Brian before Friday, but geez he's doing some important work, and I've seen a lot of it without knowing him, including Amy Goodman's TV version of "Democracy Now," which  airs on a local station in Missoula. But I've got it in my podcasts anyway. I love the goals of grassroots TV networks, and Brian and Juan Cole had the most fascinating discussion about Iraq over dinner that I will not forget. I'm working on trying to memorize everything I heard.

John Holbo. John came all the way from Singapore just to meet us and rattle our crooked timbers [G], so I hope it was good for him too. His ideas about electronic publishing and an electronic presses really set me to thinking.

Clifford Johnson Wow, I love what his group site, Cosmic Variance, is doing for physics, one of my very favorite topics to stew on as a dyslexic amateur physics nut who couldn't do an equation to save my soul. And hey, look, he's blogging about us on there!

John Mohr. I hope I set this math-inclined sociologist off into a garden of forking paths. He's ready to crunch some numbers in the blogosphere, and I know of some industry folks who are doing a hell of a lot of parsing, but perhaps not in the right way. I'd bet John could set them straight, or maybe do it better.

PZ Myers. PZ and Jenny D taught me what a blog carnival is. Up until now, I'd never heard of one, which makes me suspect it's found more in the land of the academic blogs than in straight tech-wonk-land. I still expect Bakhtin to come waltzing out with some bear-baiting or midget bowling or some such.

Larry Pryor. Larry didn't know I read and send my students to the Online Journalism Review just about every day, or every other day. Sometimes the site feels like my virtual home, along with Poynter Online and PressThink. Great write-up on Jonathan Weber's New West citizen journalism site in OJR this week too.

Karen G. Schneider. I have a soft-spot for blogging librarians, cuz librarians I've known online (like during my dissertation research) do some of the best structuring work in cybercultures. Karen's sensibilities kept bringing us around to an audience or "user-centered" focus whenever we got bird-walking too far afield, and that was a really valuable thing.

 

Amazon selling books by the page?

Here's an oddly serendipitous follow-up to the Google Books beta launch.

Is a battle between two different models for thinking about the public domain, or what? I have a hard time wrapping my mind around it. I'm not really sure who is going to use this service, or why. Maybe I'm missing something, but it seems like Amazon is trying to be the the iTunes of books, but books are an entirely different beast, you know? You either want the whole thing, or you use the library copy machine and get the pages you want for your research project or whatever.

Is it six of one, half dozen of the other?

Or could it be another step on the slippery slope of digital rights management folks' interest in making Xerox copies for personal use illegal?

Link: Amazon's next page earner: Selling books by the page.

Friday, November 4, 2005

Amazon's next page earner: Selling books by the page

By KRISTEN MILLARES BOLT
SEATTLE POST-INTELLIGENCER REPORTER

Amazon.com customers will soon be able to buy their books one page at a time.

When the largest Internet retailer starts its new Amazon Pages service next year, online shoppers will be able to buy their reading material in portions of their choosing.

And for those who buy books in the traditional way -- whole, bound and on paper -- Amazon will also debut Amazon Upgrade next year, giving buyers the additional immediate and perpetual online access to the complete texts of their purchases for an additional fee.

That means that "Harry Potter" fans needn't anxiously await the delivery of the next installment -- they can just buy the Upgrade and read even before the book lands on their doorstep. And if an owner's bound book is lost, the buyer can simply go online to read it.

The cost of Amazon Pages may be as little as a few cents per page, depending on whether the book is a novel or a reference book, according Chairman and CEO Jeff Bezos.

[...]

Amazon's announcement came on the same day Google debuted a large installment of its much-contested online library, opening up the texts of thousands of public-domain books for free online viewing.

The Mountain View, Calif.-based company is facing lawsuits from authors and publishers over its project to scan copyrighted texts from five major libraries without permission.

Google Print, which initially aimed to make copyrighted material available for free public use, currently only features materials that aren't entangled in a copyright battle. Google is touting its Print program as a way for publishers to promote their materials free of charge.

By contrast, Amazon continues to seek permission of the publishers because, Bezos said, "these are copyrighted works, and they are not going to be offered for free."

Amazon's new programs are the next step in its 2-year-old "Search Inside the Book" program, available on half of all the books its sells nationally.

[...]

When asked whether the timing of the Amazon announcement was chosen to dampen the hype around the Google Print debut, he said that his company "announced this now because we had already discussed this and brought so many publishers in the loop that it wasn't practical to keep it under wraps. Too many people already knew about it."

Amazon and Google are not alone. Microsoft Corp. announced plans last week for a book-search service of its own. The company said Thursday that it has worked out an arrangement with the British Library, the United Kingdom's national library, to digitize about 100,000 out-of-copyright books from the library's collection for indexing and searching as part of the MSN Book search service.

[...]

A sea change rumbles through academia

Link: Wired News: Google Library Open for Business.

Google Print launches in beta. It seems quiet, not significant at all. But I tell my students, the late 1990s will one day be known as "BG" and "AG," Before Google, and After Google.

The power of this simple search tool to reshape cyberspace through its interfaces and algorithms is already phenomenal. With potentially every book in the world keyword searchable, that means ENTIRE LIBRARIES, Alexandria itself, is at your fingertips at any given moment, with Google-level speed.

I know it isn't all there yet, but I've gotten a taste of it, and I literally feel almost as if the doors of the Akashic Records had just swung open. Sure, browsing a library is a tactile experience, the binding smell, the trip to the small restroom that just being in a library triggers (I have no idea why, but I get in a library, and within 10 minutes, I gotta go...), and that wonderful feeling that when you are in a library, all is at peace and right in the world.

A myth, I know, and those pages hold violences as well. Histories of them. Fictions of them. The peace is an illusion, but a welcome one.

But the most rejoicing at this new development comes from my aching back. I own WAY too many books, and I move house WAY too often for someone with that many books. Only this past year could I feel myself start to let go of some of them. It was hard, and I had to find a good library, so I could visit them, but I had a feeling, soon, I thought, soon, I could have all 53 beastly heavy boxes on a chip, behind a keyboard. Soon I could travel lighter, MUCH lighter. Wow.

Imagine being Huck Finn, getting ready to play The Fool card in the Tarot, to "light out for the territories." Could you do it without your books? Ooh, I'd be so torn. But what if I could HAVE any of my books, from any place, at any time? I'd start feeling a little better.

Imagine a world of "ubiquitous computing." You think you know what I mean, but I bet you don't. I'm thinking cyborg-land, what Neal Stephenson calls a "gargoyle" in Snow Crash, to be able to roll your eyes to the corner or your glasses and focus on a screen, not only for your email, but to search any book at literally any moment, to have Stephenson's dream "librarian" right there, on call.

Plato would have something to say about all this. After all, he wasn't too happy when thinking and words started losing their portability, when our brains started living, McLuhan-style, OUTSIDE of our heads (Go search Google Print for Phaedrus, Understanding Media (whoops, he's not in there yet!), and for fun, Walter Ong).

Plato wasn't happy about that at all. He liked the oral Greek culture, with those big Greek brains and big Greek memories. Recite all of Homer from memory? Youbetcha! Deliver a long speech in the law court? No problem. Wander through the topoi of the grand mansion of your virtual imagination.

We lost those memories, and Cadmus's soldiers of marching teeth turned into marching alphabetic characters, continuous and c-o-n-n-e-c-t-e-d.

But now, and I swear I'm not exaggerating, our brains could explode. All the great libraries of the world, by keyword, in an instant. Plato could bitch that you aren't doing shit to rebuild those decimated memory skills, but still, it's all there. Way more than Greek bards and orators could hold in their big Greek heads anyway.

Meanwhile, the coin of the realm in academia is the citation. Academic journals locked behind firewalls can go screw themselves (they are anyway), but end-running that with books and the Net, you can search yourself and discover in an instant what books are talking about you, citing your work! Woo woo. Here I am. No great shakes, but I thought it was especially cool to find the book chapter I've got out, a book that is in very few academic libraries. But now if I'm applying for a job, the hiring committee can't say, "Oh, our library doesn't carry that book." NO MORE.

A leveling force, or lead to greater intellectual laziness? I don't know. I just know that the thing that came out today has the power to reshape our heads, our neural paths, our travel plans. Hell, one day it may even affect the amount of my moving bills. It still has a long ways to go, however.

Vanity, vanity, all is vanity. I should tone down my rhetoric a bit. Truth is, I hit that book chapter a few weeks ago, through Google Scholar, and found myself with full access to the book. This time when I hit it, I could only get access to the table of contents. Ah hell, when it comes to copyright vs public domain, I'll always side with public domain.

Link: "Christine Boese" - Google Print.

Can DogCatRadio babysit when your pet is home alone?

I first heard this CD, "Songs to Make Dogs Happy" on NPR and Jeanie Moos did a funny package on it on CNN last year, just before Christmas, I think. I was driving to my grandma's for Thanksgiving, with my dog.

The story made me laugh, and I thought it had to be a joke, until I saw my dog react in the backseat. It was amazing. The squeaky toy song had her up and jumping around, and the sweetly soothing "You're a Good Dog" song had her up licking my ear between the headrest and the window.

So I started paying more attention to my dog's interaction with media. It is true, my late dashchund Oscar was an Internet dog, often sitting on my lap as I surfed, very interested in what was going on onscreen. He registered for all kinds of web sites, particularly newspaper sites with odious registration policies that pissed me off, but nobody ever knew he was a dog.

My big dog never really got into surfing, tho. She'd show some initial interest in the Animal Planet channel on cable, but she really couldn't sustain it.

Then I went on a trip out of town and booked a room in a pet-friendly hotel. I had to go to some professional meetings, and my dog is good, so leaving her in the hotel room wasn't an issue, except that the hotel had a rule against it. I had to make it look like I was still in the room with her, so I left a light and the TV on, on CNN.

Because I was only going to a hotel across the street, I stopped back in to check on her during the day. Each time I came back, she was stretched out between the two queen-sized beds, her paws out in front of her, looking straight at the TV, arranged, you know, like it is in most hotel rooms, right off the foot of the beds. I'd talk with her, bustle around the room, doing stuff, and she'd make eye contact while I was talking, but if I shut up to do something, when I looked back at her, she was back staring straight at the TV.

So that was enough to make me think she might be a little lonely during the day, now that Oscar is gone. I wonder, if you left Internet radio on during the day, would you have to disable your screensaver or autosleep function? Too bad computers use so much power, as regular radio uses very little.

Link: Jumpy Enough to Chew a Chair? Try DogCatRadio - New York Times.

Jumpy Enough to Chew a Chair? Try DogCatRadio

By DINITIA SMITH

Published: November 2, 2005

"Remember, be kind to your mailman," said Jane Harris, a disc jockey. Then she softened her voice until it was a little insinuating: "He only wants to deliver the mail."

It is a message that many of her listeners need to hear. Ms. Harris is a D.J. on DogCatRadio.com, a new Internet radio station for pets. Now dogs, cats, hamsters and parrots can keep the anxiety, the loneliness, the restlessness at bay while their owners are out. It is radio just for them, live 17 hours a day, 4 a.m. to 9 p.m. Pacific time, and podcast for the rest of the 24 hours.

Those who listen to DogCatRadio will find that there is generally an animal motif to the playlist, like "Hound Dog": "You ain't nothin' but a hound dogcryin' all the time."

This Elvis song is a frequent request from listeners (presumably the owners), as are the Baha Men, singing: "Who let the dogs out (woof, woof, woof, woof)."

And Dionne Warwick is also popular, especially her soothing song "That's What Friends Are For": "Keep smiling, keep shining,/Knowing you can always count on me."

[...]

I wonder if they'll run selections from the "Songs to Make Dogs Happy" CD.

Secret CIA Gulag? It's been all over the Nets for some time. Is it breaking into mainstream media?

I've been sent articles and read on blogs about an alleged international series of CIA secret prisons where "ghost prisoners" are sent from wherever they may have been kidnapped by our government, even, although undocumented and speculative, from within the U.S.

The very idea is inflammatory and beyond odious, a national embarrassment, if true. It invokes memories of human rights abuses in nations most often villified, like Central American "death squads" who "disappear" people in the night.

These are people who can never be released, I've heard, because they know too much and would speak publicly about where and how they were imprisoned. And they would probably SUE as well. Which means that, guilty or innocent, they are under a life sentence.

IF true, it means the U.S. has a lot to answer for to the world, for the potential innocents held whose lives are destroyed, for the way such a system would go against every principle the country was founded on (for those strict constitutional judicial "constructionists" to chew on), for the advancing of an "ends justifies the means" argument without adequately defending it in the public square and the U.S. legal system, and for making all U.S. citizens carry a share of responsibility for such actions that happen in secret without any public checks or balances on WHO is imprisoned (we're supposed to TRUST that they only imprison terrorists? Yeah, right. I don't trust anyone with that kind of power).

Not to mention the well-deserved moral reprobation that comes with acting so utterly villainous on a global stage. When you think about the bad karma accumulated by the Soviet Union, you will also have to put the United States in the same club. It strikes me as incredibly ironic that the people who claim their religion gives them a white hat in a struggle between good and evil are so willing, even enthusiastic, to embrace and defend methods, including kidnapping and torture, that are widely viewed as some of the most evil actions committed by nation-states in history.

You could argue that it is a flagrant violation of the social contract under which any government operates.

Link: CNN.com - Report: CIA holds terror suspects in secret prisons - Nov 2, 2005.

Link: CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons.

CIA Holds Terror Suspects in Secret Prisons

Debate Is Growing Within Agency About Legality and Morality of Overseas System Set Up After 9/11

By Dana Priest Washington Post Staff Writer
Wednesday, November 2, 2005;  Page A01

The CIA has been hiding and interrogating some of its most important al Qaeda captives at a Soviet-era compound in Eastern Europe, according to U.S. and foreign officials familiar with the arrangement.

The secret facility is part of a covert prison system set up by the CIA nearly four years ago that at various times has included sites in eight countries, including Thailand, Afghanistan and several democracies in Eastern Europe, as well as a small center at the Guantanamo Bay prison in Cuba, according to current and former intelligence officials and diplomats from three continents.

The hidden global internment network is a central element in the CIA's unconventional war on terrorism. It depends on the cooperation of foreign intelligence services, and on keeping even basic information about the system secret from the public, foreign officials and nearly all members of Congress charged with overseeing the CIA's covert actions.

[...]

While the Defense Department has produced volumes of public reports and testimony about its detention practices and rules after the abuse scandals at Iraq's Abu Ghraib prison and at Guantanamo Bay, the CIA has not even acknowledged the existence of its black sites. To do so, say officials familiar with the program, could open the U.S. government to legal challenges, particularly in foreign courts, and increase the risk of political condemnation at home and abroad.

But the revelations of widespread prisoner abuse in Afghanistan and Iraq by the U.S. military -- which operates under published rules and transparent oversight of Congress -- have increased concern among lawmakers, foreign governments and human rights groups about the opaque CIA system. Those concerns escalated last month, when Vice President Cheney and CIA Director Porter J. Goss asked Congress to exempt CIA employees from legislation already endorsed by 90 senators that would bar cruel and degrading treatment of any prisoner in U.S. custody.

[...]

The Washington Post is not publishing the names of the Eastern European countries involved in the covert program, at the request of senior U.S. officials. They argued that the disclosure might disrupt counterterrorism efforts in those countries and elsewhere and could make them targets of possible terrorist retaliation.

[...]

Possible terrorist retaliation. No kidding. If the world hates you, you can bet you don't want them to know where your secret gulag is kept. It's a vicious cycle.

Notice how the senior U.S. officials, in requesting the names of the countries be kept secret, erase just about ANY doubt that such a gulag exists, despite the fact that the government won't acknowledge it.

Go read the whole thing, and weep at how low a great nation has fallen.