bangersandmash

Over the last couple of days there have been a few interesting posts on the cloud and interoperability. In a usenet post from the Cloud Computing Interoperability Forum (CCIF) Rueven Cohen notes that

Every new cloud service provider puts there own spin on how a user or cloud application interacts with “their cloud”.

The problem I see is each cloud appears be a silo upon itself. By each new cloud providing their own new API, which effectively means that your only real option is to go with the largest player, not the best. API propagation is killing the cloud ecosystem by limiting cloud choice and portability. In order to use Amazon, I am being forced to choose their way of cloud interaction / control over any others including the ability to use my existing data center resources seamlessly. (emphasis added) [source: http://groups.google.com/group/cloudforum/browse_thread/thread/3f8ee602f6617a18]

This highlights several of the issues that should be worrying academic libraries.

The origin of the content.

The content that users will want to store in a cloud system will be a hybrid of their own content to which they own the rights and content from licensed sources where the right to make copies is limited by the license agreement that the library has signed — i.e. journal articles and ebooks.

Who’s cloud?

Many of the users of cloud systems will only be members of a university community for a short, pre-defined period, ie. 4 years. If the library builds its own cloud (to accommodate license agreements), how does the user move their data when they move on from the University. Or, if the University relies on other people’s cloud services, how do they deal with the fact that users will be taking licensed material and storing it on unauthorized servers and sharing it with unauthorized persons?

Service integration

How does a library construct their services to allow a user to work with their choice of could services in the most seamless way? Users shouldn’t have to save an article to a hard drive when the goal is to save it to their own cloud-based service. Will APIs be written to allow such integration of services? There are already a myriad of library-provided online resources that don’t play well with anyone, never mind a user-defined choice of cloud service. Can this be overcome? Will information resources continue to be imprisoned in this way?

Fear of lock-in

No one wants to commit their valuable data to a service where they won’t be able to change their mind later. I may use Google Docs today but later decide to switch to iWork. It is a reasonable expectation that I should be able to move all of my information easily, without loss and without complication. The mere suspicion that I’ll be locked in can be enough to reduce uptake.

Cloud computing has been pushing its way into my consciousness again this week. It reached the point of indigestion with Michael Stephens name dropping the computing meme of 2008 in his “Ten Trends and Technologies of 2009” but the cloud really pushed its way into my consciousness with the introduction of iWork at the Apple Keynote Adress earlier this month.

Copyright

Lets get the big one out in the open early. Copyright. For those who sneer at the use of the phrase “fair use,” the era of cloud computing is going to be your own personal hell. Cloud computing is built around the idea of shared documents and files. Enforcing copyright in the era of the cloud is going to be a nightmare. Freely collaborating with a community to develop and distribute an idea, however, will become easier than ever.

Services like Google Apps, Zoho, iWork and others allow multiple parties to access and share files without purchasing expensive suites of applications. On the surface it looks like a wonderful brave new world, but are we heading for another instance of format wars?

All access, all the time

In his review of iWork Liam Cassidy says:

And here’s the really clever part that everyone who has ever collaborated in an online workspace will love: the ability to automatically make the document available for your Viewer’s to download in all the most common file formats.

Formats. Remember when MSWord couldn’t read a Word Perfect file? When Macs and PCs couldn’t exchange data (easily)? Formats became the poster child for open computing. Programs that didn’t support the right formats became relics and disappeared. But these common file formats refer to traditional desktop computing formats — .doc, .pdf, etc. This is important if you are downloading the file to edit in MSWord, but with cloud computing format should be irrelevant. It will be access that determines the relevance of the service and the extent of the collaboration.

If I write a document in a service such as iWork I can share it with anyone, but if they want to contribute to it they will need to sign up for an account. The Mac vs. PC religious wars could begin to look childish as people wonder why they cannot directly open the iWork document their client created in their Google Docs account. After all, it’s just a .doc file which both can read, why isn’t there a way to take the document that my friend created in Zoho and open it in Google Docs without needing to download it to my computer first? Tribes will form around services as people begin to resent the idea of signing up for accounts — especially paid accounts — or downloading anything to their computers. I fear the cloud because I fear the day someone gets snobby about which service I’ve signed up for. I also fear the day that “the kids” don’t know how to manage local files and can’t ship from one service to the other. Damn kids.

Wan, Z., Y. Wang, and N. Haggerty. “Why People Benefit from e-Learning Differently: The Effects of Psychological Processes on e-Learning Outcomes.” Information & Management 45.8 (2008): 513-21 [UTL]

The article reports the results of a study into the psychological processes related to successful learning in an e-learning program. The study uses social cognitive theory. The investigators considered three types of information communication technologies (ICT) — information seeking, computer mediated communication and online socialization — influenced “virtual competence,” and how virtual competence in turn affected both success and satisfaction with e-learning.

Virtual competence has three dimensions:

1. virtual self efficacy
2. virtual media skills
3. virtual social skills

It is interesting that the data did not establish a connection between experience with ICT and e-learning outcomes. They did, however, establish a connection between high virtual competence — especially the information seeking and computer mediated communication skills — and successful e-learning outcomes.

Their basic recommendation is that pretests be developed to help users assess their own levels and choose the appropriate method of instruction.

This is kind of experimental. I’m just going to start linking to interesting articles that I find. I’ll try to provide two links. Clicking on the title will bring you to the publisher’s page. Clicking on [UTL] at the end will link to the University of Toronto’s online collections. You’ll need a password for these.

The basic tools that I use every day are

1. A browser (leaning towards Opera at the moment…)
2. Skim for reading PDFs
3. Bibdesk for citation information
4. Devonthink 2.0 for collecting everything (notes, images, etc) into a single place and making them searchable in a wiki-like environment
5. Textmate

Basically, I read material using the browser or skim. If something — an entire document or just a passage — it gets copied into Devonthink for later. If it is really useful its citation information gets added to my bibdesk bibliography. All writing is done in Textmate because it integrates so well with Bibdesk. Because various bookmarklets, OSX services and other trickery allow me move data between the applications with a click of a mouse or a keyboard shortcut it feels as though these five tools behave as a single application. Perhaps one day I’ll get around to compiling a video of what this looks like in practice.

Sean Devine has written a piece about the iPhone app store in which he notes that,

The KEY to maximizing iPhone profit is to create very high switching costs for users, just as they did for the iPod via the iTunes Music Store. Apple is using the App Store to create switching costs, and they know that if all of their users have “invested” in many little applications that will only work on the iPhone (a la songs from the iTunes Music Store), they will eventually have users locked in to a long-term investment in the iPhone franchise. [source: Deal Range]

I think he’s on to something here, but I’m not talking about the app store. I’ve recently had an experience where a non-monetary cost of switching caused me to continue using an slightly inferior product.

In mid-December I started playing around the with Opera 10 alpha and the WebKit nightly builds. Incredibly nerdy for someone not in web design but these things interest me. Both browsers are able to render a page incredibly quickly — faster than the current version of Safari that I use. Opera, however, really caught my attention and the more I played with it the more I found it becoming my primary browser.

During my two week winter vacation I found myself using Opera for just about everything and figured that I had once again found myself listed as an Opera convert. Until I had to go back to work. On that fateful Monday morning I plugged in my iPod to sync up all of my important data and suddenly realized that by using Opera I would no longer be able to have my bookmarks updated on my iPod.

I hadn’t been doing much mobile browsing while on vacation so I hadn’t noticed that the bookmarks were out of date. I don’t even use bookmarks very much but this was enough to make me think twice about my little dalliance with a third-party browser. Despite all that I gained by using Opera, the threat of having to type in URLs in mobile Safari was enough to bring my back into Apple’s sandbox.

I’m still wavering on this decision. This isn’t about a purchase making the cost of switching too high (as in Devine’s piece), but about a fairly trivial piece of functionality driving up the cost of switching. I really do need to let myself be comfortable with the fact that Opera is the better browser.

One of my favourite tricks for teaching students how to search the library catalogue is to prepare a list of common subject headings to help students begin navigating through a topic. The subject headings that I use are closely mapped to their essay topics so it is easy to raise the relevance of the session while also having a constructive conversation about headings in a discipline are constructed and how well these subject headings work for a given topic. Here is an example from a recent Canadian Politics class (the essay questions are not included. The student did have to do some intellectual work to figure out which headings went with which of the 50. In some cases an essay topic might require a student to use multiple headings, thus helping them to better understand the scope of their research)

The old catalogue interface supported this quite nicely. The result of a subject search was a list of subject headings that you could browse through. In the new interface the result of a subject search is a list of titles that contain the searched terms in their subject fields. One must click through the detailed record to see exactly what these headings are. There is no ability to browse the headings.

The new interface makes teaching subject searching more difficult because it lacks a browsing feature. I have to fall back on the techniques that I use for teaching subject searching in journal indexes but the two systems are not the same. Indexes usually have abstracts which tends to make them more forgiving when it comes to term selection. The catalogue lacks this nicety.

The new library catalogue interface brings a lot of nice features to the table but the loss of the ability to browse through subject heading hierarchies is a disappointment. I'm trying to figure out a way to use the subject facets to fulfill the same purpose but for now I am not sure that the impact will be the same. Being able to browse the headings allowed people to explore categories of information without being distracted by title lists. There was something powerful in being able to show students that knowledge could be organized and that the system of organization could help them build their understanding of the topic. I'm still not sure how I'm going to fill the void that's been left in my meagre repertoire.

Google Chrome is getting lot of press. I find it amusing that Chrome, like Firefox before it is getting a lot of pixels (formerly: ink) by touting features pioneered by Opera. Opera seems to be the gold standard for new features: tabbed browsing, speed dial, autocomplete, security user stylesheets, privacy features, etc. However, the complaint remains that Opera is relatively closed to community development (said the guy who blogs using Safari). I wonder what would happen if Opera merged their cutting edge user-experience with Firefoxe’s community of plug-in developers?

I used Opera for years but eventually switched back to Safari to take advantage of a couple of mission-critical bookmarklets. However, I continue to regard Opera as the gold-standard of browsers. IE has its hoard-of-lemmings and Firefox has its community of holier-than-thoughs, but Opera is the true innovator. I realise that this is holy-war-class-material for some people but if you exclude the plug-in architecture, closed-source Opera has innovated while others have followed. Now I invite Opera to open up to an established plug-in standard (Firefox/greasemonkey) and truly take over.

Bloomsbury is going to release Creative Commons licensed works concurrently with their print-based work. Fittingly, the work advertised on their website is by Lawrence Lessig. Ironically, a CC-licensed work is not available because:

[t]he Creative Commons (CC) version of the book will be available in May 2009. This is due to pre-existing print and electronic publication rights granted to the originating publisher, Penguin Press, in the USA. Until the CC version is available, all profits from the e-book will be donated to Creative Commons.

Good ol’ copyright gets one last kick at Bloomsbury.

All joking aside, this is a fantastic turn of events. According to their FAQ

[Bloomsbury] will impose the same standards expected of any world-class academic publisher. Manuscripts that pass the editorial selection process will be peer-reviewed, copyedited and formatted. Authors will have their works marketed and sold globally. In addition, Bloomsbury Academic will be at the forefront of promoting the text online.

On other words, Bloomsbury does not believe that making an e-print available will undermine the central tenants of academic publishing. They will continue to deliver a quality product that lives up to the expectations of their community while also attempting to lead the humanities deeper into the digital age.

My only suggestion is that Bloomsbury add a “donate” link. I believe in Creative Commons. I also believe that by making something available to the masses the author and publisher should still have the right to make money directly from the product. Communities are very powerful. Whether they realise it or not, Bloomsbury has just made their works available to a much wider community. The community should have the opportunity to pay them back.

Click image to view larger original version.

Having made many-a-flow chart in my day I just had to share this.

Talented people have trouble writing comedy this good:

Editors had hoped to find an elegant Chinese poem to grace the cover of a special issue, focusing on China, of the MaxPlanckForschung journal, but instead of poetry they ran a text effectively proclaiming “Hot Housewives in action!” on the front of the third-quarter edition. source: independant.co.uk

Don’t blame me if this disappears from your local library.

Storage space is cheap these days. Some are even giving it away for free. For me, however, file size is an important consideration. I use a Macbook as my primary workhorse and I want as much information as possible to be at my fingertips at all times. This means that I don’t want to be working with external drives, CD backups and ‘cloud storage’ (except for purposes of backup, of course) I’ve got an 80 gig drive so I should have lots of room for my materials but once you install a few programs, take a few hundred pictures and put a few gigs worth of MP3s onto the disc you’re left with a lot less room to play with. This is why I’ve gotten fussy about what I save from my research.

Web pages are particularly nasty wasters of space. I recently saved a single article from the New York Times website that took up over 1100k! That’s more than a megabyte for a single article. After I’d taken 20 seconds to cut out the adds, javascript and other useless, irrelevant material that was saved in the web archive I was left with a file of 7k. The New York Times stuck me with 1093k of unnecessary material. Now multiply this across thousands of files and realize just how much drive space could have been wasted.

That’s why I’m thankful for Aardvark and make.text.

Aardvark is a bookmarklet (or plugin if you use firefox) that allows you to highlight the part of the page you’re actually interested in an automatically (or sometimes manually) get rid of unwanted content. This is usually more than enough to get rid of much of the crap that comes along with most web pages. However, make.txt takes this a step further by converting the remaining text on the page into markdown. This step is pure nerdery but it does an excellent job of preserving

• the link to the original source,
• all of the remaining links on the page
• the semantic structure of the original document.

What I’m left with is a small, easily searchable file of unformatted text that can easily be imported into other applications for editing and quoting. And no ads.

From the telegraph:

The study looked at 212 patients, all of whom snored or had related conditions including sleep apnoea, a dangerous disorder in which sufferers make snoring noises and stop breathing momentarily during sleep as their airways close over. Those who suffered from the most serious snoring problems expended around 2,000 calories while resting every day. Those who tended to snore only lightly and less often burned an average of 1,626 calories a day resting, the findings show. source: telegraph.co.uk

Sadly, the news gets more depressing as you read. In the meantime I’m hoping that my insurance company will look favourably upon my new-found leisure activity.

And now it is time to recognize that my first post of my new work-related blog is distinctly not work related. So much for good intentions.

bangersandmash is taking on a more work-related focus. All previous content has been burned.

Over the years bangersandmash has been many things to very few people. I’ve never been good at updating it. I’ve tried writing about what I’m interested in and I’ve tried writing about what I thought others might be interested in. Neither approach worked. So now I’m going to write about what I’m working on. Yes, fellow travellers, this just became a work-related blog. Feel free to tune out.