Ellen Ullman's Close to the Machine: Technophilia and Its Discontents is one of my absolute favourite techie memoirs -- funny, perceptive and very personal, sometimes painfully so. Almost an anthropological feel to it. It gives a very accurate and interesting insider's view of the programming biz -- I should know 'cause I used to be a programmer myself. I just ordered it for my library -- after checking and *gasp* noticing we didn't have a copy. This is all to say that I find it very interesting to note that Ullman has written a novel about that very same programming milieu, called The Bug: A Novel. I can't wait to read it and when I do, I'll post my thoughts here as well as on my other blog. Ullman has written quite extensively about the high tech world and many of her essays are available at Salon, including two excerpts from Close to the Machine. The ACM's Ubiquity also has a very fine interview with her in it's May 20-26, 2003 issue, v4 i13 -- it's actually that interview that started this whole thread going.

An item from the chicken little file. While I agree that the web has totally changed the way we interact with information -- both publication and discovery -- I think it's going a bit far to say that the whole project has become a kind of "substitute for meaningful thinking." Take a look at "From Thinkers to Clickers: The World Wide Web and the Transformation of the Essence of Being Human" by M.O. Thirunarayanan and tell me if you don't think this person needs to relax and get a grip. I'm sure when Gutenberg invented the printing press, there were all kinds of people who went on about how you can't possibly think properly about a topic unless you spent a couple of years copying out every book on the subject by hand. Yes, we are more impatient. Yes, we are bombarded with more information. We may even be lazier. But, are we -- by definition -- stupider? Sheesh. There's an interesting discussion on the topic in the associated forum. From Current Cites.

Time to start catching up on some of the reading piling up on my desk:

• "Strategic Positioning Options for Scientific Libraries in Markets of Scientific and Technical Information - the Economic Impact of Digitization" by Andreas Geyer-Schulz, Andreas Neumann, Annika Heitmann and Karsten Stroborn. (From FOS News) This is a weird little article written about the future of STM libraries written by people that somehow never seem to have been in one. There are some really interesting ideas in the article -- outsiders often have an interesting view denied insiders. But somehow they seem to think that document delivery is one of our core missions. The idea, in effect, is that we should be less like libraries and more like bookstores, publishers and insurance brokers, or some darn thing. Stimulating and probably all too prescient. This is from the most recent issue of the Journal of Digital Information: v4 i2.
  
• "Computer literacy: today and tomorrow" by Mark Hoffman and Jonathan Blake. Journal of Computing in Small Colleges, v18 i5. Now this is prescient! Now, I'm not sure if this is good news or bad news, but this article describes a model of IL that combines it with, guess what, computer literacy. The idea is that students learn computer skills when they need to and the authors see IL as really a component of those computer skills, which students will learn when they need to. Or maybe not.
  
• "Capricious Class of '94 takes long and winding road" By Michael Valpy from Saturday's Globe and Mail. Perhaps putting some context around the students we see every day. Link will probably decay in a week or so.
  
• "Adding up God's special numbers: Looking for the meaning of life? Do the math" by George Johnson. From Saturday's Toronto Star. I don't usually have much patience for the usual "math is the language of God" article, but this one is rather interesting.
  
• "Dinner with Simon: Featherless Bipeds" is an interview with Nobel winner and AI pioneer Herbert Simon on the Astrobiology Magazine website. And yes, there is a computer chess connection.

Non-conference highlight of my trip to SLA in New York? Easily my quick trip to the American Museum of Natural History. They currently have a great little exhibition on Einstein as well as a fantastic collection of dinosaurs! The blue whale model in the Ocean Life hall is also something that has to be seen to be believed.

Ever wonder what the call number range is of a particular subject? Here's a link to the LoC's summary page for their classification system.

You can subscribe to the Dilbert newsletter here. It's written by Scott Adams and it's actually pretty good. You can also subscribe to the comic itself and have it emailed to you everyday.

Back from a great conference in New York to read an interview with one of my favourite science fiction writers, Michael Swanwick. A quote: "The scientists I know would be very uncomfortable at the thought of themselves or their beer-swilling buddies being heroic. I think admirable is a better word here ... As for the scientific worldview, people have the notion that science is a cold and dispassionate endeavor when, as it's practiced, it's anything but. Scientists often start from an intuition or an emotional preference and work outward from there." Please be aware of an annoyance with the Science Fiction Weekly site: the link isn't static, it always links to the current week's feature interview. There is a side bar menu of previous interviews which will eventually be the place to find the link to the Swanwick interview.

I'm off to the SLA annual conference in New York so I expect to be offline until the end of next week.

In the "what will they think of next" department: "Scientific Computing on the Sony Playstation 2." From Internet Scout Project: Math, Engineering & Technology.

I'd really like to acknowledge a couple of recent mentions of this humble blog:

• Marylane Block's "Neat New Stuff on the Web"
  
• The Internet Resources Newsletter

I really appreciate these mentions, as they are a validation of what I'm trying to do here. As well, they've caused a huge spike in the number of hits I'm getting, so far well over 400 so far this month. That is more than double the number of hits since I started counting in May. Since so many of you seem to be visiting here, I would encourage you to drop me a line with suggestions, input, feedback, greetings, whatever, at jdupuis (at) yorku.ca. (I'm not putting a real mailto link because I've noticed a spike in spam at my yorku account since I started this blog.) (On another note, I'm very happy with eXTReMe Tracker and would recommend it without hesitation.)

Some recent IEEE publications (signing up for the email alerts is a great way to keep up to date):

• "The impact of publicly funded basic research: an integrative extension of martin and salter" by G.S. McMillan and R.D Hamilton in IEEE Transactions on Engineering Management, v50 i2.
  
• "The blog of war" by S.M. Cherry in IEEE Spectrum, v40 i6.
  
• "Web-based surveys for corporate information gathering: A bias-reducing design framework" by J. Burkey and W.L. Kuechler in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, v46 i2.
  
• "Which rules for online writing are worth following?: A study of eight rules in eleven handbooks" by J. Mackiewicz in IEEE Transactions on Professional Communication, v46 i2.

"Too much information: Organizing information—after gathering it in the first place—is the key to actually using it" by Jean Thilmany from Mechanical Engineering Magazine. The closing quote: "The amount of information that engineers can access within minutes can be both a blessing and a curse. But as librarians and researchers know, the way to tame the information is the same way you tame clutter in your home: constantly tossing unused items and organizing the rest." A valuable article which I may very well send to all the scitech professors I liaise with. It's valuable both because it discusses engineering design in terms of information gathering and because it's written from an engineer's perspective. From Mel DeSart via eldnet-l.

A thoughful piece by noted science fiction author Robert Silverberg in the latest Asimov's: "Reflections: When There Was No Internet." It's an interesting meditation on life before and after the Internet, something we should all keep in mind as we deal with hordes of undergrad students stampeding our reference desks: they really don't remember life before the web very well, it's always seemed ubiquitous to them. We who are a bit older can compare how immeasurably easier it is to do research online compared to the old paper-based methods, we can appreciate that if something isn't online, hey, no big deal, the print version is just down the hall. At least it was easy to identify that the article existed. But, the new researcher doesn't make that comparison: her expectation is that the needed information will exist online, that it isn't worth the trouble to get if it isn't. I, to tell the truth, I can't blame them because I've become much the same. They imagine the pre-web days like I imagine the pre-TV days. From Locusmag.

Noted without comment: "Pervasive Computing: Just Can't Get Away from those Darn Things!" by John Dupuis. From the Spring 2003 issue of The Courier, the SLA Toronto Chapter's web newsletter.

Another quickie: Scientific American's Sci/Tech Web Awards 2003.

An interesting article from Publisher's Weekly about the state of university presses in the United States.

Bob Gainey has just been named the new GM of the Montreal Canadiens.

The last two issues (March/April, May/June) of the Bulletin of the Information Technology Division of SLA have mini New York travel guides full of useful tips for those of us heading off to NYC next week. The May/June issue also has a terrific article by Angelica Cortez on the deep web, in other words the database driven part of the web hidden from search engines. It's one of the best such articles I've seen, highlighting several good resources and references. And BTW, if you see me at SLA, please say "Hi!" I welcome any and all questions, comments, feedback and whatever about this blog. And yes, an RSS feed is under consideration.

From the May 2003 issue of the Journal of Academic Librarianship (From SEPW.):

• "Changes in faculty reading behaviors: the impact of electronic journals on the University of Georgia" by Erin T. Smith
  
• "The two cultures? librarians and technologists" by Mark Cain
  

The explosive growth of the Internet over the last decade has created a lot of concerns: privacy, security and many technical challenges resulting from that growth. Rachel Ross of the Toronto Star interviewed three of the Internet's pioneers, Steve Crocker, Robert Kahn and Vint Cerf, and asked them what they would do differently, if only they knew.