Information Research Weblog

An item on the Spinster Librarian Weblog caught my attention - it's about library 'wish lists' that are posted on the Amazon site and it made me wonder - with Amazon now linked to, is it Bibliofind, or some other second-hand search site, surely it's pretty easy for Amazon to find the items???

I'm off to Dorset early tomorrow to celebrate David Streatfield's birthday (a big one!), so it's unlikely that there will be any entry in the log tomorrow or Wednesday, unless some brave soul decides to contribute...? :-)

Seeing that it is Sunday...

For the zaniest discussion on the planet at the moment I nominate the response to the item on Slashdot entitled Klingon interpreter needed in Oregon.

True - apparently: the CNN report says:

The language created for the "Star Trek" TV series and movies is one of about 55 needed by the office that treats mental health patients in metropolitan Multnomah County.

This really got the geeks going on Slashdot. Well worth a scan, but only if it is raining and you have nothing more interesting to do.

I'm off to Loughborough tomorrow to talk about 'knowledge management' - again. The one thing I get out of these events is the fact that people want to believe in km - but when asked to distinguish between 'knowledge' and 'information', fail to do so. I wonder if tomorrow will bring something new?

Listeners to BBC4 radio will know of the 'Donald Rumsfeld Soundbite of the Week', but Hart Seely, writing in Slate, has realised that Rummy has been talking poetry all this time. One nice example:

A Confession

Once in a while,
I'm standing here, doing something.
And I think,
"What in the world am I doing here?"
It's a big surprise.

—May 16, 2001, interview with the New York Times

Yesterday was a travel day, so I didn't get round to posting a message. From about 0 Celsius in Sweden, with a couple of inches of snow, I returned to +12 and sunshine - freak weather in both countries, you might say :-)

Here's a couple of sources that may interest people. One is the Newsletter of SCONUL, the UK Standing Conference of National and University Libraries. There's a wide range of topics in the current issue from institutional portals to e-learning. Thanks to Peter Scott's Library Blog for that one.

The other, which I think came to me through a mailing list, is Transformations: liberal arts in the digital age, published by the Associated Colleges of the South (Southern USA of course - not the 'South' generally! Again - mainly for college and university libraries, but, given the interest in technology, something there for others too. The journal doesn't appear to have an ISSN, and who knows how long it will survive? However, good luck to the venture.

Finally, for tonight, news just in from Slashdot - next time to get an insane desire to discover the relative dimensions of star ships, check out Zardalu.styles.net

Orwell's '1984' seems to have hit the USA, a few years behind schedule. The so-called 'Patriot Act' is causing problems for librarians, booksellers and ISPs - and they aren't happy.

Read all about it in the New Jersey Star Ledger, Yahoo! News and elsewhere

More in the Tri-Valley Herald

The Daily Review

The Seattle Post-Intelligencer.

...and more from an Alta Vista news search about the impact on booksellers.

Yes, I know I haven't had a weekly competition before, and I may never have another, but...

No prizes offered for identifying the time, place and person involved in this timeless statement:

The great leader of the ... party, whatever else you may or may not think about him, has at any rate left me in no doubt as to what use he will make of his victory if he should win it. We know perfectly well what to expect - a party of great vested interests, banded together in a formidable confederation, corruption at home, aggression to cover it up abroad, the trickery of tariff juggles, the tyranny of the party machine, sentiment by the bucketful, patriotism by the imperial pint...cheap labour for the millionaire.

Answers to ir-discuss@jiscmail.ac.uk

The history of 'artificial intelligence' is a curious one - bold claims thirty years ago that the problems would be solved in a decade seem to have come to nought and there have been at least two waves of funding that produced very little except a number of commercially sensitive expert systems in the financial services industry.

I was intrigued, therefore, to come across an article in Salon, by John Sundman, about the founder of the Loebner Prize, one Hugh Loebner - manufacturer of restraining ropes for banks and restaurants and roll-up illuminated disco floors, and advocate of the rights of sex workers. Loebner founded the Prize to reward the first programme that could pass the Turing Test ("...Turing put forward the idea of an 'imitation game', in which a human being and a computer would be interrogated under conditions where the interrogator would not know which was which, the communication being entirely by textual messages. Turing argued that if the interrogator could not distinguish them by questioning, then it would be unreasonable not to call the computer intelligent.") The article - a LONG one in two parts, chronicles the problems that have beset the Prize, largely it seems at Loebner's own instigation!

However, the AI protagonists don't come out of the account very well either. It seems that 'artificial intelligence' is no longer the approved term. As one of John Sundman's interviewees says:

"In the professional and academic circles the term Artificial Intelligence is passé. It is considered to be technically incorrect relative to the present day technology and the term has also picked up a strong Sci-Fi connotation. The new and improved term is Intelligent Systems. Under this general term there are two distinct categories: Decision Sciences (DS) and the human mimicry side called Mimetics Sciences (MS)."

Mmmm.

Thanks to Lockergnome for the link.

No doubt everyone on the list reads The Onion from time to time, but, just in case you missed it, it is worth taking a look at the current issue for the story on the 'accidental' funding of the arts in the latest US budget.

Read all about it at http://www.theonion.com/onion3909/congress_approves.html

...in postings to the log by me as I am off to a meeting in Poland (average temperature over the next few days of -6 degrees C - brrrr). I'll probably have some e-mail and Web access, but not much time to input. Back in business on Thursday next.

Tom

I don't know whether this one will make you feel any better, but... http://bushclock.lose.com/