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i have a short weblogi have a short webl0gi have a short webl0g 01/07/2004 05:34 PM sippey's taken some cool-looking pictures of a couple of weblogs, including mine This is a GrokNews Entry: (what is grok?)i have a short weblogGrok Headline matches for i have a short weblogWebl0g Empire: The World's Newest Webl0g
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 The Idea:
Archaeologist-historian-novelist Ronald Wright summarizes and analyzes
six spectacular civilizational collapses from throughout our history,
and reads us the riot act about what we need to do now to avoid
another
collapse, this time a global one.It is impossible to avoid comparisons between Ronald Wright's A Short History of Progress, which was broadcast by CBC last November as the 1994 Massey Lecture series, and Jared Diamond's Collapse, which came out only a few weeks later. Both books describe incidents of civilizational collapse from human history (Wright covers Easter Island, Sumeria, Rome, Maya, Egypt and China), both draw lessons from those stories, and both point out how similar our 21st century global civilization is to these examples just prior to their collapse. Both stress that, for the first time since we arrived on this planet three million years ago, a single culture is so ubiquitous on the planet that its collapse could bring not only the end of a dynasty, but species extinction. Both identify the factors that presage civilizational collapse. The difference (besides brevity -- Wright's book is a mere 132 pages, excluding the 70 pages of exhaustive notes and references, with 90% fewer words than Diamond's) is one of tone. As I reported in my review of Collapse, Diamond lays the responsibility for preventing collapse clearly at the feet of the masses, and asserts it can be done. Wright's tone is considerably darker, and he sees the challenge as considerably greater.
This does not bode well for our ability to think, invent, or collaborate our way out of the crises that threaten to topple today's civilization. We have repeatedly fallen victim to what Wright calls "progress traps" -- collective judgement errors that lead us to believe that if a small amount of X is a good thing, a larger amount must be even better. Paleolithic hunters who killed two mammoths instead of one had made progress, but when they drove 200 over a cliff "they lived high for awhile, then starved". The taming of fire, the perfection of hunting, the agricultural revolution, each have been major lurches forward in human progress, and each has brought with it progress traps. Since the early 1900s, world
population has multiplied by 4 and the economy -- human load on nature
-- by more than 40. We have reached the stage at which we must bring
the experiment [that of a species shaped more by its own culture than
by nature] under rational control, and guard against present and
potential dangers. It's entirely up to us. If we fail -- if we blow up
or degrade the biosphere so it can no longer sustain us -- nature will
merely shrug and conclude that letting apes run the laboratory was fun
for a while but in the end a bad idea.
Wright explains the extraordinary similarities between the culture of Spain and the culture of Mexico when they clashed 500 years ago, after being completely out of touch for at least a millennium, as an indication of the inherent and perhaps inevitable human drive for a very similar and unsustainable vision of progress. He explains that agriculture and civilization were precluded from happening even earlier in our evolution only by the unimaginable instability of climate -- fluctuating wildly from decade to decade -- for a period of half a million years that lasted until the retreat of the last ice age just 12,000 years ago and brought a period of unprecedented climate stability -- which of course we are now threatening. He quotes this extraordinary poem written by Ovid in 60 B.C.: earth...had better things to
offer -- crops without cultivation,
fruit on the bough, honey in the hollow oak. no one tore the ground with ploughshares or parcelled out the land or swept the sea with dipping oars -- the shore was the world's
end.
clever human nature, victim of
your inventions,
disastrously creative, why cordon cities with towered walls? why arm for war? He describes the "unsavoury truth that until the mid-19th century most cities were death traps, seething with disease, vermin and parasites. Average life expectancy in ancient Rome was only 19 years", This is consistent with Richard Manning's research findings in Against the Grain. He explains: Each time history repeats
itself,
the price goes up...In civilizations, population always grows until it
hits the bounds of the food supply, and all civilizations become
hierarchical -- the upward concentration of wealth ensures that there
can never be enough to go around...Human inability to foresee or watch
out for long-range consequences may be inherent to our kind, shaped by
the millions of years when we lived from hand to mouth by hunting and
gathering. It may also be little more than a mix of inertia, greed and
foolishness encouraged by the shape of the evolutionary social
pyramid.
The concentration of power at the top of large-scale societies gives
the elite a vested interest in the status quo; they continue to
prosper
in darkening times long after the environment and general populace
begin to suffer.
Another revelation of the book is the state of the Americas when they were pillaged by Europeans 500 years ago. At that time, civilization was as advanced in the new world as in the old, and the 'conquering' of the Europeans was only possible because of the devastation caused by smallpox and other diseases to which Native Americans had no immunity. "[By 1500] all temperate zones of the US were thickly settled by farming peoples. When the Pilgrims arrived in Massachusetts, the Indians had died out so recently that the whites found empty cabins, winter corn, and cleared fields -- 'widowed acres' -- waiting for their use: a foretoken of the colonists' parasitic advance across the continent. "Europeans did not find a wilderness here", US historian Francis Jennings has written, "they made one". At the end of the book, Wright quotes from Margaret Atwood's Oryx and Crake: One of her characters asks, "As
a species we're doomed by hope, then?" By hope?
Well, yes. Hope drives us to invent new fixes for old messes, which in
turn create ever more dangerous messes. Hope elects the politician
with
the biggest empty promise; and as any stockbroker or lottery seller
knows, most of us will take a slim hope over prudent and predictable
frugality. Hope, like greed, fuels the engine of capitalism.
That takes us to the present day, where the "concentration of power at the top" continues to hoard resources, steal from everyone else, ruthlessly suppress opposition, and prospers as the environment and the general populace suffer. And we, strange creatures of our disconnected and self-made culture, cling desperately to the hope and false assurances that we will be saved by our gods, or our ingenuity, that what we are doing to our world is beyond our control, is not our fault, not our responsibility, and is not so bad in the global scheme of things anyway. The idea that the human race has, under the harsh rules of Darwin, bred compassion out of the gene pool in favour of more 'successful' savagery, and that it is this ruthless and relentless violence, rather than our 'superior' intelligence, that has led to our staggering numbers, is not new. But it casts the lessons of our history in a different, and darker, light. It is serious enough trying to deal with one fatal character flaw -- our propensity to hope things will get better without the need for radical change or the learning of lessons from history. Add a second fatal character flaw -- a preference for murder and genocide over more peaceful and compassionate solutions -- and the outlook gets much bleaker. Perhaps this explains the finding that the best informed people in modern society tend to be the least optimistic. Fortunately, they also tend to be the most determined to make things better. Power struggle, anyone? Postscript: There are two interesting on-line interviews with Wright here and here. |
Microsoft's much anticipated and frequently postponed OS may ultimately lack compelling reasons for customers to upgrade. By Ed Scannell, InfoWorld
On page six of the February issue (PDF) of Cites & Insights (“Rss hub-bub”), Walt Crawford pooh-poohs the idea of ILS vendors providing native RSS feeds out of the catalog. It’s a difficult assertion to challenge because nowhere in his comments does Walt use the word “because,” thereby directly stating his objection(s). There are implications, though, so let’s examine them since they are all we have to go on.
First of all, Walt seems to think that someone has advocated libraries replace their email alerts with RSS alerts. That’s a statement Walt can’t back up, although I’m sure he’ll note it if he has proof of *anyone* ever in the history of the world using the word “replace” or a synonym. If he backs off from that statement, I’ll be curious to know why his first assumption was that the two can’t live happily ever after together, side by side, especially since RSS would be the driving force behind the new titles lists he claims will vanish into the olden days of yesteryear.
In reality, the only time I’ve ever received an email from my catalog is when I had a book that was really, really, really, really, really overdue and I think they were about to send Guido after me. That they’ll email me about. But the convenience notice when it’s a couple of days overdue (or even a couple of weeks or months)? Fuggedaboutit. So SWAN libraries, consider this me begging for email alerts! Oh, and I guarantee you that none of my libraries went to Innovative (or before that GEAC) asking for email alerts. It’s just something that made a lot of sense, the vendor understood what was happening in the outside world, and the code was relatively easy to implement. Just like RSS.
Next, Walt seems to advocate that libraries shouldn’t offer a service for what he asserts is 1% or less of your population. I’m not challenging the mathematical figure, but I can think of lots of services that libraries provide for users that comprise less than 1% of our patrons. Let’s use my home library as an example. They serve a population of about 30,000 people right now. One percent of the current population would be 300 people, and 1% of actual users would probably be closer to 150. So what services do they offer that only 149 or fewer people use? Here’s a list just to name a few:
I don’t think Walt would quibble that these are all valuable, even essential, services, but then he’d probably be basing those decisions on factors other than how many people are using the service. Nowhere in his comments does Walt use any other criterion for RSS, so why the double standard?
In addition, far less than 1% of 1% of a library’s RSS users actually go to the trouble of programming for themselves services the library’s catalog doesn’t offer. However, I can name three off the top of my head (from across North America), the most obvious example being Peter Rukavina who rolled his own RSS but is [rightly] too busy to help the rest of us who would like to provide that service but aren’t programmers. If his home library wanted to, they could download his script and start displaying the list of their new DVDs on their own web site, but they can’t get it natively from their own ILS. What’s wrong with that picture?
Of course, you could also flip this example and argue that you really should be providing a service that your users want badly enough that they resort to hacking your catalog and then noting it on their very public blog. There are at least three examples of users who are running scripts against catalogs, and there are a lot more who have signed up with Library ELF, probably without their librarys’ knowledge. Disclaimer: I love ELF, and I use it myself. I’m willing to give my personal data to a guy in Canada in order to get the email and RSS alerts my catalog refuses to give me. I can’t imagine that Walt thinks that a non-programmer like myself should be forced to do that just to get an RSS feed of what I have checked out, but he also doesn’t seem to care about RSS in the context of patron data. I assure you there is no one at MLS or at a SWAN library that can code this themselves to offer it to patrons, which means we’d be forced to have someone else do this. Why shouldn’t that be the vendor?
But just because Walt doesn’t do it, doesn’t mean I won’t look at other criteria to discuss reasons to implement RSS. In a previous post, I noted that in my library system alone, we could conceivably save 924 hours of actual librarian work each year if our vendor, Innovative, provided native RSS feeds out of the catalog. Let’s take it a step further and come up with the number of potential saved work hours for just half of the 3,700 libraries in Illinois. Let’s say that only half of them might actually take advantage of RSS feeds to change how they display new titles on their web sites. If this saved just one hour per month for 1,850 libraries, native RSS feeds would save Illinois librarians 22,200 hours in just one year.
So even if there was never a single patron that subscribed to a single feed, it would save Illinois librarians 22,200 hours, and let me tell you something: other than funding, the biggest thing we could really use more of is time (which can also be translated into more staffing, but on a personal level, I feel very constrained time-wise). So now we’ve freed up 22,200 hours of librarians’ days, thanks to relatively easy programming on the part of the major vendors. How awesome is that?! And if my vendor can’t understand that kind of savings, then I have to question them as my vendor. Sometimes you really can make a big difference with just “a flip of the switch.”
Other ways I think native RSS feeds would be used, furthering the benefit to libraries:
And yet, Walt doesn’t think it’s exciting that ILS vendors are starting to offer this type of support to libraries. In fact, Walt doesn’t seem to think that ILS vendors should be providing RSS feeds here and now at all. I don’t see any of my member libraries clammoring for Z39.50 compliance with the Bath Profile, but that doesn’t mean Innovative shouldn’t be compliant or working on it (number of patrons who are requesting this or even know about Z39.50: zero). I don’t hear about any of my member libraries doing anything with Dublin Core metadata, but that doesn’t mean they shouldn’t be (number of patrons who are requesting this or even know about DC: zero). Should vendors offer only those services that are formally requested by 50% of library users (the implication Walt makes by noting that even in his high-tech community, less than half the residents probably know about RSS)? What’s the magic number at which Walt would consent to let ILS vendors start working on providing RSS feeds? 40%? 25%? 10%? Hopefully he will leave a comment so the vendors will know when to start.
I don’t know if he was just lobbing a softball over the plate in order to help prove the point that native RSS feeds would be valuable right now or if he truly believes the position he declines to actually support, but either way, this one clearly demonstrates Walt’s bias against RSS. That’s okay, because everyone has their biases. This time, though, Walt’s just asking for trouble.
Link to "The Woman Who Lost Her Head".One morning, she woke up and discovered that her head was gone. She had reached up to pat her hair, or rub the sleep from her eyes, or scratch her ear, and she had realized that her head was nowhere to be found. Where, she wondered, had it gone? She had no idea at all. She could not recall, in fact, very well what had happened the previous evening. She had been at a bar, and she had gotten drunk, and then she had come back home. From what she could remember, her head had still been sitting squarely on her shoulders when she had climbed into bed. Perhaps, she considered, her head had run off at some point during the night while she lay sleeping.
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