bearing blog

A new class of classification systems.

This article from the Arizona Republic, reprinted in this morning's Cincinnati Enquirer, caught my eye because of the subject matter and the amusing error in the lede:

When the new Gilbert library opens next month, it will be the first public library in the nation whose entire collection will be categorized without the Dewey Decimal Classification System, Maricopa County librarians say.

First one in the nation.  Sure, except for -- all the libraries that use the Library of Congress system.  Come to think of it, what does the Library of Congress (a public library) use?  (Hint:  It's not Dewey.)

The news here is that the library is planning to shelve books more like a Borders or a Barnes and Noble does.   So it's got a new cataloguing system. 

The books in Gilbert's new library will be organized in about 50 sections, then subsections, from sports to cooking, gardening to mysteries.

Apparently the old system is too difficult:

It's just too confusing for people to hunt down books using those long strings of numbers and letters. Dewey essentially arranges books by topic and assigns call numbers for each book.

Indeed, it is complicated to find books about, say, the U. S. Civil War under the Dewey Decimal System.  You'd have to go to the "the history and geography section," (900s) and within that go to the "North America section" (970s) and within that you'd have to find the section devoted to U. S. history (973).  But in this new system it is very different:

For example, a book on the Civil War would be in the history neighborhood and in the U.S. section.

See?  Totally different!

"Nowadays, people are used to going to a bookstore to browse, so we're just trying to create that same atmosphere," Shore said.

"I know Dewey fans are out there. But we haven't changed a lot in so long, and I think we're in a fight for our own survival."

No cataloguing system is perfect.  Different ones work better for different audiences:  that's why scholarly institutions tend to use the Library of Congress system and children's libraries tend to use Dewey.  And there's nothing at all wrong with a library deciding to devise one of its own, assuming that it will be able to work effectively with other libraries using different systems.

But the article doesn't say how a patron is to find a specific book.  Or how librarians know where to shelve a specific book when it's returned.  Or how the electronic catalog will be managed.   Will they all be alphabetical by author?  Doesn't say.   At any rate, this is still a classification scheme, and you'll still have to "hunt for" books, first narrowing it down by "neighborhood" and by "section" and then -- maybe -- needing to know the author's name to find the specific book you want.   A better system for this library?  Maybe, maybe not.

In other news, the U. S. postal service has decided to eliminate those difficult-to-remember house numbers and zip codes.  All mail to me should henceforth be addressed to my full name, followed by "you know, that lady in Minneapolis with the three kids.  The short one with the glasses who talks too much."

Looking for an oddball volunteer project?

I've been having some fun lately doing volunteer proofreading for Project Gutenberg through Distributed Proofreaders. 

Project Gutenberg makes public-domain text available online as e-books.  There are at least 19,000 books available as of this writing.  If there's an old book you've been meaning to read, and you suspect it's in the public domain, it's always worthwhile checking the online catalog to see if it's available.  (For example, I just searched for The Confessions of Saint Augustine, Dostoyevsky's Crime and Punishment, Whitman's poetry volume Leaves of Grass, Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, and Orthodoxy by G. K. Chesterton and found all of them.  Two that I searched for, Newton's Opticks and Andre Gide's La symphonie pastorale, aren't there yet.)

Distributed Proofreaders, aka DP, has in an in-house wiki with all the information you might want about it.  The article "Getting Started" describes its mission:

We rescue out-of-copyright (and frequently out-of-print) books and convert them to "electronic texts" that can be read by people on most computers or on hand-held devices such as PDAs or e-text readers. The books we choose to work on are ordinary books from all over the world; some are classics, some are not. Every one of them was interesting enough that someone — or many someones, like you! — invested a great deal of time scanning, checking and double-checking the text and illustrations before sending it out to the world via Project Gutenberg.

It's "Distributed" because the work of proofreading is spread out amongst our volunteers: anyone can do as much or as little as they please. This site provides a web-based method of easing the work associated with accurately proofreading and formatting Public Domain books. By breaking the work into individual pages many proofreaders can be working on the same book at the same time. This significantly speeds up the proofreading/e-book creation process.

Having worked on four or five different projects now, I highly recommend DP as a volunteer hobby.   

All the annoying bits have been automated.  After a volunteer logs on, he sees a list of links to projects in various stages.  Links to projects on which he's unqualified to work are automatically deactivated until he meets the requirements (e.g., minimum numbers of pages completed, passing of proofreading quizzes).  Some projects are expressly reserved for beginners.

After the volunteer clicks on a suitable project, a multiframe window opens.  One frame is an image of a page scanned from a book; another frame is an ASCII text.  A third contains dropdown menus, buttons, and links. 

The volunteer checks and corrects the ASCII text, which starts as the raw output of optical character recognition (OCR) software.  When the page is done, a single click saves it, sends it to the next "round," and retrieves another. 

Each page passes through several rounds before the whole project is submitted to Project Gutenberg.  A beginner can work only in round "P1," the first round of proofreading, in which he endeavors to catch the OCR software's mistakes (called "scannos" in an analogous if imprecise formation from "typos").  As a volunteer accumulates experience, he can move to round "P2" and then to the formatting rounds "F1" and "F2" where italics, paragraph indents, and other fine-tuning is added.  There are also post-processing rounds, and some special rounds, too, e.g., for material that can't be processed with the OCR software and has to be typed in.  Seasoned volunteers can serve as project managers.

And, of course, anyone can provide content -- all you need is an old book (check first to make sure it's not copyrighted!) and a scanner.

Some of the material is technical in nature and needs to be typeset with LaTeX, which is an area of special expertise with me.  I think I will enjoy working on that, later on.  But alas, I am still a beginner, and need to accumulate more pages! 

Meanwhile, I'm having fun doing a page here and a page there while I surf or blog.  I've worked on a couple of children's books, a literature textbook in French, and a volume of poetry.  Incidentally, you don't have to speak a language to proofread it in the earliest rounds -- I could work on books in Tagalog or Hmong if I wanted to -- because all you need to do is make sure the string of ASCII characters matches the text in the scanned image. 

It strikes me as a worthwhile volunteer project for older kids and teens, especially the ones who might be interested in careers in information technology, editing, or whatever "library science" will be called in coming years.   Such work could also be incorporated into a foreign-language curriculum.

Hey! This'll be useful!

The Compendium of the Catechism of the Catholic Church is now online in English.

Together with the comprehensive, searchable CCC available from several sources (here's one), this'll be a great resource for anyone who wants to know more about the Church and her teachings.  It's slim enough to treat as a reader rather than a reference book. 

The Compendium is truly something to get excited about, as the material in it is presented very simply and directly, with the tried-and-true Q&A format.  It all fits on one page of HTML!   But it retains the structure of the Catechism, which is handy for those who want to turn to the appropriate section in the larger work to find out more.

Here's a sample entry, from the section that's based on the sentences and phrases of the Creed.

“Jesus Christ descended into hell;
on the third day He rose again from the dead.”

125. What is the “hell” into which Jesus descended?

632-637

This “hell” was different from the hell of the damned. It was the state of all those, righteous and evil, who died before Christ. With his soul united to his divine Person Jesus went down to the just in hell who were awaiting their Redeemer so they could enter at last into the vision of God. When he had conquered by his death both death and the devil “who has the power of death” (Hebrews 2:14), he freed the just who looked forward to the Redeemer and opened for them the gates of heaven.

The "632-637" refers to paragraph numbers in the larger Catechism.  So if you go to the table of contents with paragraph numbers, it's easy to find the relevant section where you can learn more.

Paragraph 1. Christ Descended into Hell

632 The frequent New Testament affirmations that Jesus was "raised from the dead" presuppose that the crucified one sojourned in the realm of the dead prior to his resurrection. This was the first meaning given in the apostolic preaching to Christ's descent into hell: that Jesus, like all men, experienced death and in his soul joined the others in the realm of the dead. But he descended there as Savior, proclaiming the Good News to the spirits imprisoned there.

633 Scripture calls the abode of the dead, to which the dead Christ went down, "hell" - Sheol in Hebrew or Hades in Greek - because those who are there are deprived of the vision of God. Such is the case for all the dead, whether evil or righteous, while they await the Redeemer: which does not mean that their lot is identical, as Jesus shows through the parable of the poor man Lazarus who was received into "Abraham's bosom": "It is precisely these holy souls, who awaited their Savior in Abraham's bosom, whom Christ the Lord delivered when he descended into hell." Jesus did not descend into hell to deliver the damned, nor to destroy the hell of damnation, but to free the just who had gone before him.

634 "The gospel was preached even to the dead." The descent into hell brings the Gospel message of salvation to complete fulfilment. This is the last phase of Jesus' messianic mission, a phase which is condensed in time but vast in its real significance: the spread of Christ's redemptive work to all men of all times and all places, for all who are saved have been made sharers in the redemption.

635 Christ went down into the depths of death so that "the dead will hear the voice of the Son of God, and those who hear will live." Jesus, "the Author of life", by dying destroyed "him who has the power of death, that is, the devil, and [delivered] all those who through fear of death were subject to lifelong bondage." Henceforth the risen Christ holds "the keys of Death and Hades", so that "at the name of Jesus every knee should bow, in heaven and on earth and under the earth." ...

IN BRIEF 

636 By the expression "He descended into hell", the Apostles' Creed confesses that Jesus did really die and through his death for us conquered death and the devil "who has the power of death" (Heb 2:14).

637 In his human soul united to his divine person, the dead Christ went down to the realm of the dead. He opened heaven's gates for the just who had gone before him.

There's no search utility on the Compendium online, but it's preceded by a detailed table of contents.   And of course, one could work back from the Catechism, using a search utility to find items of interest and then turning to the corresponding passages in the Compendium for the short-and-sweet explanation.

It's so easy to find out what Catholic doctrine has to say these days.    I wish every religious group (at least those that have a well-defined doctrinal system) would put their stuff up online for everyone to see, study, and compare.  I don't just mean holy books, which are rarely self-evident, but rather developed doctrine.

It's there for a few.  For example, here're some links to the Book of Common Prayer (Anglicans), which of course includes a catechism.  The Lutheran Church, Missouri Synod (LCMS) has a very well-organized set of pages that explain their beliefs and practices through documents both new and old.  I don't know of any others.

h/t Amy Welborn.

My nerdiness is actually multidimensional. Did you know that?

Mark was telling me about some guy he works with who's into geocaching.

"Let me get this straight," I said.  "A person hides some stuff in the woods, notes the GPS coordinates, and gives the coordinates to someone else to find."

"Yeah."

"Like the big pile of gold in Cryptonomicon."

"Yeah."

"And looking for the stuff is called 'geocaching.'"

"Right."

"Shouldn't that be 'geotroving?'"

"Huh?"

"Geotroving.  Hiding it should be geocaching.  Finding it should be geotroving."

"No, see, it's a cache.  You're looking for a cache."

"No, you're not.  If I'm looking for something I hid, like my supplies for the winter, then I'm looking for my cache.  But if I come across someone else's cache, it's not a cache, it's a trove.  I mean, who cares who hid the stuff.  The important thing is that I found it.  Get it?"

"Ah."

"Also it's from the French.  Trouver.  To find."

"Ah.  I see."

"You should tell your co-worker that his sport has the wrong name."

"Yeah."

7 myths about the Challenger explosion.

"It didn't explode, the crew didn't die instantly, and it wasn't inevitable."  Are your twenty-year-old memories accurate?

One of the best articles on the subject was written by Edward Tufte, author and designer of several beautiful and elegant texts on the visual display of quantitative information.  The same material appears in this book.

His story:  Engineers indeed tried to convince managers not to launch the shuttle on such a cold day.  But they attempted to make their points with some very poorly-designed charts and graphs.  Had they used better ones (Tufte provides an example of what might have been), the decision to launch not only would have seemed ill-advised, but would have been shown to be foolhardy.  (To my knowledge the article is not available online, but a sample of the most damning material --- the graphs the engineers made to show to the decision-makers, together with Tufte's reorganization of the exact same information --- appears in a book review here.)

Communication is important.  Very important.  Often we think of communication as a text-based endeavor.  We can evaluate text:  this is bad writing, that is good writing, this one is concise and clear, that one is windy and obscure.  The same accusations can be leveled at quantitative information --- charts, graphs, diagrams, maps.  And yes, lives depend on them, sometimes.

Blogging bearings.

When I first started blogging, soon after I went home, I named my blog Re-engineering and planned it to chronicle my transition: from the career I'd planned in academia, to the part-time work-from home one I would be cobbling together.  For fun I would comment on science and tech in the news.  I congratulated myself for giving my blog such a clever name.

After a little while I found that I didn't actually want to write anything in Re-engineering, at all.  I went days without posting.  I told myself that I was too busy.  Eventually I had to admit that Re-engineering was boring.

But I had already paid for many more months of Typepad.  So I deleted everything I'd written and renamed my blog, and now I look forward to posting.  I wake up in the middle of the night and make mental notes about something or other I should blog about (of course, I never remember them in the morning).    

What's the difference?  I didn't stop writing about engineering.  One thing I like about Bearing Blog is that I still write about technology --- it's part of my makeup by this time --- but under the new name I have permission to let it be a part of me, not the focus of my entire life.   And I do enjoy writing about engineering, mathematics and the like, much more than I enjoyed it when I tried to make it my whole blog.   You'll see it represented up there in the masthead (scroll up), as definition number three.  This was, in fact, the definition of bearing that inspired the name.  I originally wanted to make the title a pun on the term "journal bearing."  But I didn't think most people would get it.

The other definitions of bearing have turned out to occupy much more of my attention:

bear - ing n.

1. the manner in which one comports oneself;
2. the act, power, or time of bringing forth offspring or fruit;
3. a machine part in which another part turns [a journal ~ ];
4. pl comprehension of one's position, environment, or situation;
5. the act of moving while supporting the weight of something [the ~ of the cross].

  I no longer think myself clever for having come up with a good blog name.  Instead I am grateful that my first idea, a bit too obscure for most, led me so unexpectedly to a collection of concepts that I can mine endlessly for material that's fun to write. 

And the funny thing is, these days, bearing seems as good an organizational concept for my life's work as any. 

• I have a character of my own, a bearing, to develop and improve. 
• I am a mother, laboring to bring forth my offspring (and a laborer more generally, hoping my works are fruitful). 
• I want to get my bearings, that is, both knowledge and correct perspective.  Also I'd like to give it to everyone else. 
• I am a Christian: I participate in the bearing of the cross. 
• And because you can take the engineer out of engineering, but you can't take the engineering out of the engineer, I can't resist the machine-part analogy:

I am a part of the Machine, of the System of the World.*  But where some might say we are all cogs,  I say that at least some of us are bearings, supporting weight, cushioning blows, transmitting forces, smoothing the paths of all traveling parts, turning and turning each in our own races, all of us levitating on and enveloped by and anointed in a sheen too fine to see.  That grease comes in from the outside, injected by some invisible technician or watchmaker; but in the end it's the small bearings that transmit the supply from part to part.  More than any other part, we need it to do our job, and our job is to pass it on to whatever parts are nearest.

The title of a blog does turn out to be significant, and not just because it's the name of the link that readers might or might not click on.   Giving it a lot of thought, making it the perfect name for what I wanted to do, didn't work for me.  Instead, I let my name-impulse guide what the blog was to become.  Something to think about, all you newbies.

_____________________

*With apologies to Isaac Newton and Neal Stephenson.

Two different takes.

Ann Althouse brought it up, quoting a NYT story:

The groundswell of single women deliberately having babies reflects their increased ability to support a family. It helps, too, that the Internet has done away with the need to leave the house to find a donor. A woman can now select the father of her child from her living room and have his sperm sent directly to her doctor. It is faster and cheaper than adoption, and allows women to bear their own genetic offspring.

She provoked a heated discussion by titling the post, "Female Autonomy:  Does it frighten you?"   I'm the first in the comments, with Kids need dads.  Either Ann doesn't agree, or she was deliberately provoking her readers.  (If the latter, she succeeded --- and that's fine.  If the former, well, I'm surprised!)  There's some good stuff in the comments.

David Blankenhorn at Family Scholars Blog linked to the same article.   He's less provocative and more critical, especially of the women's claims that, because they chose single parenthood, the problems of single parenthood won't befall them:

I see. None of the traditional problems of one-parent homes apply to these women — (not even the problem of deliberately bringing into this world a child who will never know her father?) — but nevertheless some people are “uneasy” over a practice that “may seem threatening to men’s roles.” Well, that’s one way to put it.

P.S. The more you think about it, the more amazing is this idea that “the usual problems don’t apply.” Right. If there is no father around to begin with, that pretty much does away with the experience (if not the feeling) of “abandonment by fathers.” And if there is only one parent, that certainly means that there won’t be any “parental conflict”! I don’t see how such claims could possibly be any sillier.

Deliberately conceiving a fatherless child or a motherless child is like setting out, deliberately, to genetically engineer and conceive a child with some congenital disability, perhaps something like Down Syndrome, or maybe a missing arm or some kind of congenital blindness, because you've always dreamed of  bravely raising a disabled child.

Of course, most children with Down Syndrome are aborted, presumably to prevent them from suffering.   I am sure there is some irony here.

They should get a better machine.

I decided to Google myself --- the blog, actually --- and Google's black box chewed up  "bearing blog" and spit out this link for No.2:

Nicolas Chaunu, carrying the project Emob, "the effective, dynamic elearning and deeply humanized", informs us of the creation of a bearing blog on the elearning.

The corner of the e-learning was launched one month ago. The other part of the blog relates to the creation of a company which will be born next October and which will be specialized in the creation of contents of multi-media formation on line.

Good corner to exchange with the actors of the field and to make known themselves on the Fabric.

Huh?  Oh, I get it, it's a machine translation from the original French.  The term "the creation of a bearing blog on the elearning" is really supposed to be "the creation of a blog bearing on the subject of e-learning."

By this post I hope to make known myself on the Fabric (Toile).  Does that mean the Web, or the Net?

Bad Science: the definitive piece?

There's a piece by Ben Goldacre in Thursday's Guardian that I can't really add much to.  I wish I'd written it.  I'll excerpt:

Why is science in the media so often pointless, simplistic, boring, or just plain wrong? Like a proper little Darwin, I've been collecting specimens, making careful observations, and now I'm ready to present my theory.

It is my hypothesis that in their choice of stories, and the way they cover them, the media create a parody of science, for their own means. They then attack this parody as if they were critiquing science....

Goldacre gives three classes of bad science journalism pieces, with examples.  They are the "wacky story," the "scare story," and the "breakthrough story."

But enough on what they choose to cover. What's wrong with the coverage itself? The problems here all stem from one central theme: there is no useful information in most science stories.

A piece in the Independent on Sunday from January 11 2004 suggested that mail-order Viagra is a rip-off because it does not contain the "correct form" of the drug. I don't use the stuff, but there were 1,147 words in that piece. Just tell me: was it a different salt, a different preparation, a different isomer, a related molecule, a completely different drug? No idea. No room for that one bit of information...

Why? Because papers think you won't understand the "science bit", all stories involving science must be dumbed down, leaving pieces without enough content to stimulate the only people who are actually going to read them - that is, the people who know a bit about science.

Statistics are what causes the most fear for reporters, and so they are usually just edited out, with interesting consequences. Because science isn't about something being true or not true: that's a humanities graduate parody. It's about the error bar, statistical significance, it's about how reliable and valid the experiment was, it's about coming to a verdict, about a hypothesis, on the back of lots of bits of evidence...

So how do the media work around their inability to deliver scientific evidence? They use authority figures, the very antithesis of what science is about, as if they were priests, or politicians, or parent figures. "Scientists today said ... scientists revealed ... scientists warned."

...The danger of authority figure coverage, in the absence of real evidence, is that it leaves the field wide open for questionable authority figures to waltz in.

...But it also reinforces the humanities graduate journalists' parody of science, for which we now have all the ingredients: science is about groundless, incomprehensible, didactic truth statements from scientists, who themselves are socially powerful, arbitrary, unelected authority figures. They are detached from reality: they do work that is either wacky, or dangerous, but either way, everything in science is tenuous, contradictory and, most ridiculously, "hard to understand".

Apparently Bad Science is a regular feature at The Guardian.  I will have to bookmark it.

Cool new technology saves girl from drowning.

Check out the lifesaving technology featured in this story from the UK:

The system was fitted to the Bangor pool in March 2003 at a cost of £65,000 and involves eight overhead and four underwater cameras.

The Poseidon technology can detect movement, trajectory and texture of underwater objects. It then compares images to a database of thousands of examples of swimmers in trouble.

If it finds a match, it alerts lifeguards using a pager message which also displays a diagram showing the location of the stricken swimmer.

The story details the rescue of a ten-year-old girl in North Wales.