Two employees at the East Lake County Library created a fictional patron called Chuck Finley – entering fake driver’s license and address details into the library system – and then used the account to check out 2,361 books over nine months in 2016, in order to trick the system into believing that the books they loved were being circulated to the library’s patrons, thus rescuing the books from automated purges of low-popularity titles.
Library branch supervisor George Dore was suspended for his role in the episode; he said that he was trying to game the algorithm because he knew that these books would come back into vogue and that his library would have to spend extra money re-purchasing them later. He said that other libraries were doing the same thing.
This is datification at its worst: as Cennydd Bowles writes, the pretense that the data can tell you what to optimize as well as how to optimize it makes systems incoherent – it’s the big data version of “teaching to the test.” The library wants to be efficient at stocking books its patrons will enjoy, so it deploys software to measure popularity, and raises the outcomes of those measurements over the judgment of the skilled professionals who acquire and recommend books, who work with patrons every day. Instead of being a tool, the data becomes a straightjacket: in order to get the system to admit the professional judgment of librarians, the librarians have to manufacture data to put their thumbs on its scales. The point of the library becomes moving books by volume (which is only one of the several purposes of a library), and “the internal framing of users shifts. Employees start to see their users not as raison d’être but as subjects, as means to hit targets. People become masses, and in the vacuum of values and vision, unethical design is the natural result. Anything that moves the needle is fair game: no one is willing to argue with data.”
Software is not objective. The designers of the library’s software made a subjective decision to take the measurements they are taking, and to respond to them in the way they are responding to them. The librarians who’d use the software are treated as adversaries, not allies – they are there to be controlled by the software, not informed by it. Just like the nurses who assign junior staffers to hit the spacebar at 10 second intervals to keep their terminals from re-prompting them for a password, the librarians who could not override the software by executive edict resorted to chicanery to get their jobs done.
That’s the important takeaway here: these librarians didn’t monkeywrench their software for personal gain. They did it because they wanted to make the system better, to teach it how to weight the circulation data to reflect the on-the-ground intelligence and historical perspective they had on their libraries, their collections and their patrons.
Science fiction has grappled with this exact problem in the past: Connie Willis’s 20-year-old classic novella Bellwether features a patron (a social scientist who specializes in fads!) who goes to the library every week to check out titles that she knows to be out of vogue, but significant, to trick the library systems into retaining them.
The problem here isn’t the collection of data: it’s the blind adherence to data over human judgment, the use of data as a shackle rather than a tool. As the article in the Washington Herald hints, this is because “money wars” have made enemies out of the city and its librarians – and as this episode highlights, there is no good way to proceed amidst that enmity. Just as treating teachers as lazy welfare bums who must be measured with standardized tests has lowered educational standards and driven out the best teachers, so will any other system that treats employees as problems rather than solutions engender a continuous, spiraling arms race that will never solve the problem.
As someone who’s struggled with his weight all his life (and who comes from a family with similar problems), I’ve long been fascinated with the science of weight and obesity; many years ago I listened to a Quirks & Quarks segment detailing the theory that the modern obesity epidemic was the result of a bird flu that affected our gut flora and changed our metabolisms to make us hungrier and more susceptible to convert the food we ate to fat.
I’ve not been able to locate that episode since, but the theory has lingered in my memory. This morning, I found this long excerpt from The Secret Life of Fat: The Science Behind the Body’s Least Understood Organ and What It Means for You, Sylvia Tara’s 2016 book about Nikhil Dhurandhar and Richard Atkinson’s research at the University of Wisconsin, Madison on the role of viruses first found in poultry in causing obesity in humans and other animals.
I lost ~100lbs in 2002/3, simply by cutting out carbs – while maintaining a low-activity/high-calorie diet. I’ve kept most of it off since then (though over the years, I’ve had to increase my activity and reduce my calories as I got older). It’s obvious to me that weight is not a simple matter of calories burned and calories eaten – some people gain weight more easily and others do not. Some people need to eat more than others to maintain their weight, irrespective of activity levels and their muscle-mass.
The introduction to Tara’s book was sufficiently interesting to me that I’ve ordered the book. Significantly, it insists that weight is not a moral matter – not a matter of low willpower or other failings.
Jennifer Jenkins writes, “What could have been entering the public domain in the US on January 1, 2017? Under the law that existed until 1978 – Works from 1960. The books ‘To Kill a Mockingbird’ and ‘Rabbit, Run’ the films ‘The Magnificent Seven’ and ‘The Time Machine’ early episodes of ‘The Flintstones’ the musical ‘Camelot’ and more – What is actually entering the public domain this January 1? Not a single published work.”
What books would be entering the public domain if we had the pre-1978 copyright laws? You might recognize some of the titles below.
* Harper Lee, To Kill a Mockingbird
* John Updike, Rabbit, Run
* Joy Adamson, Born Free: A Lioness of Two Worlds
* William L. Shirer, The Rise and Fall of the Third Reich: A History of Nazi Germany
* Friedrich A. Hayek, The Constitution of Liberty
* Daniel Bell, The End of Ideology: On the Exhaustion of Political Ideas in the Fifties
* Arthur M. Schlesinger, Jr., The Politics of Upheaval: The Age of Roosevelt
* Dr. Seuss, Green Eggs and Ham and One Fish Two Fish Red Fish Blue Fish
* Scott O’Dell, Island of the Blue Dolphins
* John Barth, The Sot-Weed Factor
* Jean-Paul Sartre, Critique de la raison dialectique
The books above are but a fraction of what would be entering the public domain on January 1. Imagine them being freely available to students and teachers around the world. Readers interested in iconic stories of courage in the face of racial injustice, or middle class America in the late 1950s, or just great literature, would have something to celebrate. In the current political climate, Shirer’s work, and also those of Hayek, Bell, and Schlesinger, might provide food for thought. And Dr. Seuss’s beloved books would be legally available for free online for children (of all ages).
You would be free to use these books in your own stories, adapt them for theater, animate them, or make them into a film. You could translate them into other languages, or create accessible Braille or audio versions.2 You could read them online or buy cheaper print editions, because others were free to republish them. Empirical studies have shown that public domain books are less expensive, available in more editions and formats, and more likely to be in print—see here, here, and here. Take, for example, The Conscience of a Conservative by Barry Goldwater—like the works listed above, it was published in 1960; but unlike those works, it’s in the public domain because the copyright was not renewed. You can legally download it for free, and the purchase price for an eBook is $0.99, instead of $10 or $20.
Imagine a digital Library of Alexandria containing all of the world’s books from 1960 and earlier, where, thanks to technology, you can search, link, annotate, copy and paste. (Google Books has brought us closer to this reality, but for copyrighted books where there is no separate agreement with the copyright holder, it only shows three short snippets, not the whole book.) Instead of seeing these literary works enter the public domain in 2017, we will have to wait until 2056.
Donald Trump issued the
following tweet on the last day of 2016: “Happy New Year to all, including to
my many enemies and those who have fought me and lost so badly they just don’t
know what to do. Love!”
The man who is about to
become President of the United States continues to exhibit a mean-spirited,
thin-skinned, narcissistic and vindictive character.
Trump sees the world in
terms of personal wins or losses, enemies or friends, supporters or critics.
He hasn’t yet figured out
that a president holds a position of public trust that transcends personal
animus. A president is supposed to represent all Americans, including those who
voted against him and continue to oppose him.
In a democracy, those who
fight against a president’s policies are not his personal enemies; they are
political opponents and critics. A democracy depends on the freedom to oppose
those in power, without fear of reprisal, without being denigrated or labeled
an enemy.
Happy New Year, Mr. Trump.
You have 20 days in which to learn how to act as a president. All of us – even those who oppose your policies and worry about your character – sincerely hope you do.
He’s 70 years-old. He isn’t going to suddenly become a mature, thoughtful, responsible adult.
This is who he is, and our only hope is for Congress to remove him from office before he can inflict real and lasting damage on our country and the world.
What if oxygen is poisonous and it just takes 75-100 years to kill us?
My science teacher said he thinks that’s true actually
Yeah this is actually pretty much exactly what is going on. It’s why anti-oxidants are such a big deal. Bonus fact: oxygen oxidizes stuff in your cells or, in other words, it’s not toxic, just setting you on fire very very slowly.
What if there are aliens out there but they subsist on entirely different substances and they’re just scared as shit of us and our crazy ass hell planet? Once in a while some alien anthropologist type suggests checking out the people on this inhabited planet out towards the galaxy’s edge. The other aliens just look at the naive academic with horror. No!! We do not go to that world. That is where the DEATH BREATHERS live. They recreationally consume poisons and are more or less composed of biological fire. Their atmosphere is made of rocket fuel. We must leave the DEATH BREATHERS in peace. Do not go there. Do not.
I tend to always reblog posts about humans being terrifying weirdos to aliens.
okay but…that is actually what went down on earth about 2.5 billion years ago.
Earth was doing just fine with a mostly nitrogen/carbon dioxide atmosphere and everyone was happy to go on living in anaerobic bliss and then cyanobacteria suddenly hit the scene, altered the atmosphere composition so that there was a ton of oxygen gas and killed practically everything (97% or more of all species on earth).
We are literally descendants of the DEATH BREATHERS and cyanobacteria is our deadly mother.
The cyanobacteria holocaust is so big, it doesn’t even have a cool name; it’s just called “The Great Oxygenation Event”; the *second* most apocalyptic extinction event in our planet’s history is the one that’s called THE GREAT DYING (the Permian-Triassic event, about 252 million years ago).
This shit makes like the rock-throwing that wiped out the dinosaurs look like kindergarten.
The Great Dying is my absolute favorite nickname for an epochal event.
