Information Research Weblog

My attention to the Weblog has been limited recently - mainly because of going here and there and starting to get the next issue of the journal ready to go, some time in January. Most recently, it was a trip to Oporto (or Porto to the locals) for one of my usual teaching stints at the Faculty of Engineering. The weather was certainly worth it - clear blue skies and temperatures in the range 15-18C. Today, by comparison, has been 4C and a lot of rain, with snow forecast for tomorrow - yech. So - what with that trip, coming not too long after a trip to Sweden, and the journal contributions to get into shape, the Weblog has suffered. Still - no one will be reading it over the Christmas holidays, I imagine - and no one seems to have missed it. Still - I'll get something going soon.

I still get requests for offprints of my 1981 paper, 'On user studies and information needs', so I've finally got round to digitising it. The diagrams have been re-drawn and there are one or two other small changes and corrections, and I may even get round to adding a commentary one of these days.

On re-reading the paper, while I worked on it, I was struck by the fact that pretty well everyone who has referred to it has missed the significance of Figure 2.

Tom

First entry in the waka competition is from Frank Miller, who chooses an information theme - appropriate, really.

Knowledge is beauty
And can often inform us
But it's not true that
Information is knowing
Why should that confuse us so?

A little light relief for Friday. The allocation of medals at the World Athletics Championships in Paris gave me pause for thought. Great rejoicing in the USA that once again, they topped the table, gloom in the UK at the lack of gold medals and, presumably, great rejoicing in Russia at its haul.

However - I got to wondering. Given the differences in population of these countries, how many medals might they be expected to win - all things being equal, which, of course, they never are.

The answer was quite interesting. I assigned 4 points to a gold, 2 to a silver and 1 to a bronze. Thus, Ethiopia with 3G, 2S and 2B scores 30 points. The total population of the countries in the medal table is 4,099,683,500 and Ethiopia has 1.49% of this population. If it was to win medals on the basis of population from which to draw competitors alone, it should have 5 points - in other words, it actually did six times better than would be expected. The USA - top of the medal table - only did 2.4 times better.

On this basis, the top ten countries would be:

1. St. Kitts and Nevis
2. Qatar
3. Bahamas
4. Jamaica
5. Belarus
6. Estonia
7. Trinidad and Tobago
8. Sweden
9. Lithuania
10. Greece

So let's hear it for the real winners! On this basis the USA would be 24th position and the UK in 32nd.

However, population doesn't tell the whole story - perhaps Gross National Income, indicating wealth, would be a better measure. Again, the points were assigned in the same way, but this time I simply looked at the difference between the 'predicted' points and the actual. On this basis, the top ten countries were:

1. Russia
2. Ethiopia
3. Belarus
4. Kenya
5. Morocco
6. South Africa
7. Sweden
8. Jamaica
9. Greece
10. Cuba

I hear you complain. OK - using the same method of comparison as with population, the top ten are:

1. Saint Kitts and Nevis
2. Ethiopia
3. Belarus
4. Jamaica
5. Mozambique
6. Kenya
7. Estonia
8. Lithuania
9. Morocco
10. Ecuador

Qatar would have been in there, but I couldn't find GNI data anywhere.

And the bottom ten? CANADA, MEXICO, USA, ITALY, GREAT BRITAIN & N.I., GERMANY, INDIA, BRAZIL, PR OF CHINA and JAPAN in 42nd position.

So - it's the old story, really: "it's the rich wot get the pleasure" while the real achievements of the poor go unnoticed.

The Onion's front page story may amuse.

There seems to be a buzz going these days on the applications of faceted classification - it's a little curious that in the days of search engines and the wide belief that they can solve all retrieval problems (even if the IR researchers do not claim this) the 'information architecture' and 'knowledge management' fraternity should be turning to a method I first learnt about almost fifty years ago. I even sat at the feet of Shiyali Ramarita Ranganathan when he made his farewell tour of library schools in the UK. We had spent two days talking with him (conversation was his teaching method - he let you learn things, rather than trying to teach you) and by the time came for him to give a public address, he had lost his voice. It was a little curious to hear the whispered words of Ranganathan repeated in a strong Scottish accent by the then Head of Department! I still have the sheet of paper upon which he wrote the Five Laws of Library Science and then signed his name in English, Hindi, Sanskrit and, I think, Tamil. I went on to teach the subject for quite a few years - including following a number of well-known British teachers to the University of Maryland for a year because the Dean, Paul Wasserman, felt that there was more to classification than the schedules of the Dewey Decimal and Library of Congress classification schemes. The students in those years - between about 1965 and 1970 - were possibly the only ones in the USA getting that treatment.

Now the Weblogs buzz with the novelty of the ideas that Ranganathan first developed in his Colon Classfication of 1933 - yup, seventy years ago.

Links to chase down:

The Knowledge Management Connection - which is very keen to tell us that faceted classification is "Not just a library science technique", almost as though that would taint it.

Ranganathan for IAs

Faceted Movable Type

Ranganathan's rigorous analysis of the principles upon which all classification is based is contained in his 'Prolegomena to library classification' - but you can find a simplified version here:

A simplified model for facet analysis - I only put this one in because I get cited :-) (Only joking)

A tribute to SR Ranganathan, the father of Indian Library Science by Eugene Garfield - who also met SRR. See also Part II of the tribute.

Was Ranganathan a Yahoo!?

Ranganthan ahead of his century.

Ranganathan and Facet Analysis - an unlikely source, perhaps, but he is creeping in all over the place.

You MUST check out this one!

I'm off on holiday on 15th until 5th July, so, unless we have some input from members of the list, the Weblog will be empty.

All you have to do to post to the log is address your message to irweblog-site@free-conversant.com and make the first line of your message "addToWeblog index" - just as this message has that first line.

Bye for now.

Tom

Off to Spain today - I was invited to be "Godfather" at a degree ceremony at the University of Murcia. Not quite sure about whether this means that I turn up in a black hat with a white band around it. Another hiatus in the log - unless others input.

For a quiet giggle see Majority Of Human Discourse Now Occurring In Online Product Reviews at The Onion.

A gap in the proceedings. I'm off to Amsterdam tomorrow to talk to a bunch of policemen about 'information overload' - back on Thursday afternoon, when I may have time to browse my sources for interesting items.

Quite a bit of discussion has been going on today on the IR-DISCUSS list - labelled by some as 'junk', but that's not everyone's opinion :-)

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/