I'll Just Google It

Everybody knows how to use Google to find information--right?  Wrong, according to Motoko Rich's article, "Academic Skills on Web Are Tied to Income Level," New York Times, Sept. 24, 2014, at A23.  A new study done by Donald J. Leu that appears in the current issue of Reading Research Quarterly (subscription required) showed "a general lack of online literacy among all students..."  Students may be adept at certain tasks (texting, posting photographs, using social media), but they are far less adept at tasks that require them to find and evaluate information.  This finding cuts across all income groups, but is most apparent in low-income students. 

Despite the higher rates of academic Internet use among the more affluent students in the study, a little more than a quarter of them performed well on tasks where they were required to discern the reliability of facts on a particular web page.  Only 16 percent of the lower-income students performed well on those tasks.

Many grade and high schools are not addressing digital literacy.  Perhaps this is because digital literacy is not a subject that is tested by standardized tests.  It could also be the result of teachers mistaking students' comfort with technology for actual ability to use the Internet for educational purposes. 

 

I was discussing this issue with one of the reference librarians this morning.  We have noted the poor quality of results that students get when they Google, how they rely on questionable sources rather than go to reliable sites maintained by educational institutions and organizations.  Her conclusion was that the librarians don't need to teach students how to Google; we need to teach them how to think.      

Ch-ch-changes -- Landlines bite the dust

More unintended consequences. After Hurricane Sandy, Verizon complained that they really did not want to re-install the copper telephone lines that the storm had destroyed along the New York - New Jersey shore.  For one in four US households, that would not be a problem, according to U.S. Telecom, a trade group that is watching trends in this area.  More households are simply relying on their cell phones and dropping the landline entirely.  However, in rural areas where cell connection is poor, and for people who have medical devices that use telephone connections to "report in,"  landlines are still crucial, according to an AP report.

As with so many technology switch-overs that librarians deal with, this is one more where there is an awkward period between the old and new.  Some folks still rely on the old technology and it's becoming increasingly costly to maintain the old.  In the wake of a disaster like Hurricane Sandy, which destroyed miles of cable, it would cost a very great deal to lay new wiring, which would only be used by a few customers.  Probably even they would only use the landlines for a few years. 

New York state regulators have given Verizon permission to substitute wireless service for landlines in these area.  The result is that folks with pacemakers, shopkeepers and restaurants that need to verify creditcards, fax machines fail.  In June, the New York attorney general filed an emergency petition to halt the switchover in the Catskill Mountains area.  In New Jersey, the state regulators are still considering Verizon's petition. 

In Washington, D.C., the FCC is considering a similar petition from AT&T to switch customers from landlines to wireless. AT&T is not dealing with storm damage, but is looking at long term economics. They want to select trial areas and see how things go.  This seems better to plan and test the market rather than respond to emergency conditions, at least.

The image of an antique, crank telephone is courtesy of http://filmnorthflorida.com/photos/tag_list/crank+wall+telephone/ the film liaison of Escambia County, Florida. The caption for the photo notes it is a 1901 telephone that is mounted on a kitchen wall and is still in operation.

Google Streetview Going to the Galapagos Islands

The Google Streetview folks are going to the Galapagos Islands!  When I heard this, I imagined those little cars bumping disastrously over volcanic rocks and giant tortoises.  But no! They are outfitting hikers with 42 pound computer backpacks (!) and those round balls you see on the cars. Inside the balls are an array of 15 cameras pointing in all different directions to give you the "surround" image you get with Streetview.  These intrepid hikers are called "trekkers," and will give those of us who will probably never tour the Galapagos ourselves a chance to tool around the ocean, beaches, rocks and even a volcano!

See the article I selected from the Washington Post, though there are a gazoodle out on the Internet right now.  The article mentions that they are processing the images right now. But I didn't know that they have already expanded beyond streets, with views of the Amazon rain forest, the ocean floor and Arctic.  Between using the satellite images, and Streetview, it's a very interesting way to explore our world.  The Post article mentions that they are hoping to use this new imaging technology to watch how tourism is affecting the environment in the Galapagos.  Interesting.

The image comes from the Google folks, and appears at multiple news sites. This was downloaded from the Toronto Star http://www.thestar.com/business/2013/05/23/google_street_view_to_add_galapagos_islands.html version of the AP story written by Jason Dearen.

Wiring the future

The Boston Globe for May 19 had an interesting article in the Ideas section, "The Too-Smart City" by Courtney Humphries, in print at pp . K1, 4-5. The article looks at the amazing new ideas that city planners and technologists are coming up with, sometimes without much public debate, for making cities work smoother and smarter.  Some are better known than others, such as the multiple cameras that are being installed in many cities to monitor for criminal activity or watch for those who run red lights, or fail to pay tolls. Others are less well known.

The entire article gave me such mixed feelings, because some of the ideas, such as the lead-off technology, a system to help maximize and ease parking, sound like a WOW! and very seductive sort of thing.  A Boston University professor is testing a technology that helps drivers locate the best parking spot for their purposes in a parking garage at the university.  The system uses a smart phone app to sense when a spot is opening at the optimal location for that driver and alert the person.  Oooh!  Hard to complain about that, it seems. Lots of the technology in the article is designed to make life in cities more efficient, easier, and more convenient. Much of it is designed to make things safer, and easier to manage for the city administrators.

But the rest of the article gives the reader an increasing sense of Big Brother unease, as one reads about cameras, data gathering and storage that one never knew about, and that really wasn't debated. There are issues about First, Fourth and Fifth Amendment rights, though the article does not discuss this in legal terms. There are also problems in terms of sharing data with third parties and protecting the data from hackers.

There are multiple levels of other problems, too, as the author brings up the issue of cities that purchase proprietary software from corporations, for systems on which the city relies:
1)  Without open access to the code, the city becomes completely reliant on the corporation that wrote the code. If the company suddenly increases the subscription fees, the city is trapped. 
2) Or if the company goes bankrupt, there is nobody to update and manage the code. (Does these sound familiar, librarians?)
3) The author also raises the issue, when a city relies on coders to create an algorithm to analyze criminal hotspots, for instance, there is real policy-making being done by that coder.  People need to realize that and ask for the algorithm involved to understand the assumptions being coded into the program.

This is a very interesting article, and I recommend you read it.  One thing that struck me. The author is assuming that crowd-sourcing or at least open discussion, is better for policy-making.  One thing that I have learned about the development of the Internet, is that the technologists who built it actually did a GREAT job of securing the system against the sorts of control that government figures are just now wanting to impose. The very infrastructure of the Internet makes centralized government control and monitoring very difficult.  If it had been set up with the input of the crowd, or planning by governments, the Internet would be a much different place. It makes me have mixed feelings about this author's assumptions that opening these policies up for group discussion is going to be a positive improvement.  I am not sure I like the decision-making as it is; I am just becoming more skeptical about democracy and the wisdom of crowds, I guess.

The decoration is a still from the movie 1984, and of course, Big Brother is watching you!  I am afraid I found the image at http://floridapundit.com/2010/09/your-stimulus-dollars-at-work-big-brother-is-watching-your-garbage/

Technology to Locate Tax Evaders

I ran across a little Associated Press piece in my local paper about Lithuania using Google Streetview to do searches for people who failed to report upgrades to their property for tax purposes. When I searched for the AP report, I found a piece from Baltic Business  about Estonia following Lithuania's example, published December, 2012. 

Tõnis Kuuse, head of the information department of the Estonian Tax Authority, said ... "It’s an additional information source that we can use to check on real estate, for instance in case when a person who has declared minimum income is living in a very valuable house." 

Kuuse explained that Google Streetview is only one of a number of tools the Tax Authority uses to catch tax scofflaws. Like Lithuania's tax officials, they use the streetview snapshot as the basis to alert them to go in person to look at the real estate.  They have discovered instances of property owners who sell, and report the land as unimproved, sold for a much lower price.  Then they spot a new building on the Google Streetview, go to inspect and prove that the plot sold for a much higher price. It's sort of an investigative tool that gives the inspectors a probable cause to look further at the case.

Similarly, I found a report here about Irish revenue officials using Google Streetview and Google Earth to locate similarly under-reported property taxes and real estate sales.  The same blog post mentions that New York had used Google Earth to locate in-ground swimming pools that had not been reported. A report in 2010 also told of the Greek government using Google Earth to locate tax evaders.  In a similar vein, the Pappas Group reported in 2010 on efforts by the Oklahoma and federal revenue officials to use social websites like Facebook and Twitter to catch tax evaders.

And TechnoBuffalo repeats much of this, but adds that the IRS seems to be planning to check citizens' e-mails for evidence of tax cheating. And it seems they believe they can do so without a warrant to uncover evidence of tax fraud. 

Just in time to make you shiver for tax day. 

Are Lawyers Sponges?

Andy Kessler writes in today's Wall Street Journal that lawyers are "sponges," members of a profession that "earned their jobs by passing a test meant to limit supply," i.e., the bar exam. Other "sponges" are "cosmetologists, real estate brokers, [and] doctors," all of whom "need government certification. All this does is legally bar others from doing the same job, so existing workers can charge more and sponge off the rest of us." Ouch. Kessler's analysis appears in his article, "Is Your Job an Endangered Species?", and if he's correct, today's anemic job market for lawyers is not an aberration, but the wave of the future.

Kessler is a former hedge-fund manager and the author of a new book, Eat People and Other Unapologetic Rules for Game-Changing Entrepreneurs. He looks at the terrible employment situation--"26,000,000 Americans are unemployed or underemployed"--and says that technology is to blame. It is "eating jobs." Kessler points to toll takers, bank tellers, phone operators, travel agents, postal workers, stock brokers, and stock traders and says these jobs are "nearly extinct." They have been "displaced by technology and the Web. Librarians can't find 36,000 results in 0.14 seconds, as Google can." Never mind whether anyone really needs or wants us to find 36,000 results!

What other jobs will disappear in the near future? Kessler divides the workforce into two types of workers in order to answer this question.

Forget blue-collar and white-collar. There are two types of workers in our economy: creators and servers. Creators are the ones driving productivity--writing code, designing chips, creating drugs, running search engines. Servers, on the other hand, service these creators (and other servers) by building homes, providing food, offering legal advice, and working at the Department of Motor Vehicles. Many servers will be replaced by machines, by computers and by changes in how business operates. ...

But even the label "servers" is too vague. So I've broken down the service economy further, as a guide to figure out the next set of unproductive jobs that will disappear.

Within the server category, Kessler lists the following subtypes: "sloppers" (people who move things, e.g., government workers who push paper or information around); "sponges" (see above); "supersloppers" (people who mark up prices based on gimmicks, not true market value); "slimers" who work in finance--some will always be needed, but nowhere near the number employed today; and "thieves" who have a government franchise to make money, e.g., phone and cable companies and regulatory inspectors.

Kessler believes that eDiscovery is going to decimate the legal profession because it "scans documents and looks for important keywords and phrases, displacing lawyers and paralegals ... Lawyers, understandably, hate eDiscovery." Far fewer lawyers will be needed, which will eventually result in dwindling enrollment in law school. Kessler is probably correct that the discovery process can be facilitated through the use of technology, and certainly legal research can be as well, but I do not believe that legal reasoning and writing lend themselves particularly well to a technology "fix." I agree, however, with his conclusion that fewer attorneys will be needed in the future.

A Visit to the Morgan

Yesterday, I visited the Morgan Library in New York City and spent a couple of pleasant hours viewing the exhibit on Jane Austen, my favorite author. The exhibit contained a number of treasures, such as the letter describing Jane's death written by Cassandra Austen to a niece. On display were a number of Jane's letters, including one written backwards (shades of Leonardo da Vinci) and another written in "cross hatching," a method used to save precious paper. I did not know this, but the Morgan has the world's largest collection of Jane's letters, most of which were destroyed after her death by Cassandra. The exhibit showcased a collection of first editions of the novels, and also displayed contemporary engravings that were in keeping with the themes of the exhibit. I always enjoy going into Mr. Morgan's study and seeing the three stunning paintings by Hans Memling, and into Mr. Morgan's library, with its sixteenth-century lindenwood statue of Saint Elizabeth holding a book and its Gutenberg Bible. The Morgan actually has three Gutenberg Bibles, only one of which, a copy printed on paper, is on display. There is another copy printed on paper, and a third printed on vellum. The legend that accompanied the Gutenberg Bible read that it was the "book that inaugurated a new era in the history of visual communication."

This is certainly true, and got me thinking about an article I had read in The New York Times last Sunday. The article, entitled "The Children of Cyberspace: Old Fogies by Their 20s," starts with a vignette about the author's two-year-old daughter who refers to his Kindle as "Daddy's book." And to her, of course, it is, because she will "know nothing other than a world with digital books, Skype video chats with faraway relatives, and toddler-friendly video games on the iPhone. She'll see the world a lot differently from her parents." The point of the article is that we will continue to have generation gaps caused by the rapid changes in technology, but they will not be like the generation gaps we've had in the past. Researchers "theorize that the ever-accelerating pace of technological change may be minting a series of mini-generation gaps, with each group of children uniquely influenced by the tech tools available in their formative stages of development." Professor Larry Rosen

has also drawn this distinction between what he calls the Net Generation, born in the 1980s, and the iGeneration, born in the '90s and this decade.

Now in their 20s, those in the Net Generation ... spend two hours a day talking on the phone and still use e-mail frequently. The iGeneration, conceivably their younger siblings--spends considerably more time texting than talking on the phone, pays less attention to television than the older group and tends to communicate more over instant-messenger network.

Dr. Rosen said that the newest generations, unlike their older peers, will expect an instant response from everyone they communicate with, and won't have the patience for anything less.

"They'll want their teachers and professors to respond to them immediately, and they will expect instantaneous access to everyone, because after all, that is the experience they have growing up ... They should be just like their older brothers and sisters, but they are not."

Two questions come immediately to mind: How will teachers meet the expectations of students accustomed to immediate feedback? And how in the heck are we going to keep up with the changes in technology?

Registration for the CS-SIS Web 2.0 Challenge opens today!

Are you interested in learning about applications like blogs, wikis, and Second Life, but don’t have a lot of time?

Take the Computing Services-SIS Web 2.0 Challenge!

The Web 2.0 Challenge — a free, comprehensive, and interactive online course — will use hands-on exercises to introduce law librarians to many kinds of social technologies in just five weeks. The course will take only 1-3 hours per week.

The Web 2.0 Challenge will take place between July 21 and August 18, immediately following the AALL Annual Meeting. The course will focus on:

• Week 1: Blogs & RSS
• Week 2: Wikis
• Week 3: Social Networking and Second Life
• Week 4: Flickr & Social Bookmarking
• Week 5: Next Steps: Web 2.0 @ Your Library

For more information, visit the CS-SIS Web site at http://cssis.org/cssis-web-20-challenge/. See also our brochure (PDF).

Registration opens today, so don't wait. We expect that the course will fill quickly.

If you have any questions, please contact CS-SIS Web 2.0 Challenge Co-chairs Deborah Ginsberg, Meg Kribble, or Bonnie Shucha.

"Online libraries are not libraries at all"

David Weinberger, author of Everything is Miscellaneous, which he dedicated to librarians, has an interesting, if somewhat disjointed opinion piece about libraries up at KM World.

Weinberger thinks that traditional libraries are nothing more than glorified warehouses--gilded in mystique because of their inefficiency and the "awesomeness of librarians." He points to books repeatedly as the source of the problem--they define us in the binary categories of authors and readers, they bind up information that wants to be free, they force us to spend hours meandering in stacks on the hunt.

Online libraries, he thinks, will be more different than similar to traditional libraries. With no bindings, readers will be free to discover and note their own connections among resources using tagging, comments, reviews, and features yet undreamed of. Instead of treating materials with care, Weinberger (noting that he is speaking metaphorically) says

Online libraries want books marked up, taken apart, coated in minty chocolate, and sucked on between innings at Little League games.

I love that.

Yet in the midst of this discussion, he also says that online libraries "won't be Libraries 2.0, a new and improved version with zippy features, albeit lacking the smell of must and varnish." It sounds like he's defining Library 2.0 as the same electronic OPACs and databases we've used for the past 20-30 years! To me, those are more like Library 1.0--or maybe even a beta test, albeit one many libraries have lingered in for far too long. Maybe that's why he can't tell the difference?

For all his admiration of librarians, I think Weinberger needs to spend more time in the biblioblogosphere reading what we think about the future of "online libraries" and how librarians who have at one time or another used the "Library 2.0" buzzword are implementing tags, comments, and reviews in their catalogs and elsewhere, and playing with the current Internet technologies and applications to enable better connections between and among their patrons and resources.