A post a few weeks back by Rory Litwin at the Library Juice blog asked,

What is the coolest library/info related book or article (or blog post, I guess) that you have read in the past year or so? Post something in the comments here – I am hoping we end up with a nice, interesting list. Feel free to paint outside the lines…

I kind of loathe end-of-year-lists, but I love reflecting, so set about picking out an interesting article to comment on. Unfortunately, Litwin’s post and another of his disappeared, but that’s okay, this would be a hell of a long comment. Most of this is culled from my del.icio.us bookmarks, though it would be heavy on internet-things anyway.

If you read (or have read) any of these, I’m always up for discussion, as well as suggestions for further consumption.

In no particular order, from the last year or so, here is what I’ve read that I found interesting for one reason or another:

articles, etc

Michael Chabon in the New York Review of Books, “Manhood for Amateurs: The Wilderness of Childhood”

Some of my fiction-writer friends make fun of me for liking Michael Chabon. I haven’t read everything he’s written but I did enjoy Summerland, the comic book one and Maps & Legends, his collection of literary criticism. Here he says that as a whole, we are overprotective of children and in doing so we deny them the opportunity to discover the world for themselves through play. It resonated for me as a new parent, which comes with a loss of childhood.

danah boyd at the Personal Democracy Forum, “The Not-So-Hidden Politics of Class Online”

boyd gives ‘em hell again. She shows that there are class differences between users of Facebook and users of MySpace. An organization that chooses one over the other is showing which type of people it thinks is important. She is talking about political engagement, but her argument could apply to any organization interested in reaching out to an online community, say, a library.

James D. Watson in the New York Times op-ed page for August 8. 2009, “To Fight Cancer, Know the Enemy”

Science giant James Watson is worried that too much research into cancer is controlled by big, and risk-averse pharmaceutical and biotech companies. I admit I don’t get all the nuances, but he says the National Cancer Institute should help fund the little guys and encourage firms to “take on the low probability-high payoff projects”. It’s probably the only article about medical research policy I’ve read that doesn’t have the words ’stem-cell’ in it.

Vivienne Waller in First Monday, “The relationship between public libraries and Google: Too much information”

Google’s methods are fundamentally at odds with Public Libraries’ mission. Here’s the entire concluding paragraph:

As publicly funded institutions, public libraries need to serve some conception of the public good. This requires that they be clear–sighted about the differences between what they seek to do and what the company Google does. Libraries need to reassert their identity as providers of balanced and significant information. Of course, this involves making subjective, value–laden judgements, the type of judgements librarians have always made in the past when selecting items for the collection. There should be endless and difficult debates about what is significant information for libraries, and what constitutes a balance. Without these debates, libraries will lose their bearings, swallowed up by Google (or Google’s successor) and spat out into a sea of too much information. They will take hopes of a healthy democracy with them.

Ramin Setoodeh and Andrew Romano interviewing Maurice Sendak, Dave Eggers and Spike Jonze in Newsweek, “A Talk with the ‘Wild Things’ Creators”

Where the Wild Things Are author Sendak and filmmakers Jonze and Eggers talk about their creative differences with their publisher and studio, respectively, and then digress:

Spike, did you have fights like that when you were making this film? With the studio, not with Maurice.
Jonze: Oh, yeah, definitely.

Eggers: No, there were no fights! [Laughter] No! Sorry, go ahead.

Jonze: Yeah. The big disagreement is that they thought I was making a children’s film and I thought I was making a film about childhood, and so, along the way …

Eggers: Keep dancing, Spike!

Jonze: I mean, I think it’s a film—I want children to see it, and it’s not like I made it not for children, and it’ll be on the video shelf under CHILDREN’S, but I didn’t come at it that way. I came at it from the inside out as opposed to the outside in. In the end, though, the studio let us make the movie we wanted to make.

Sendak: It’s really an American problem.

Sendak goes on to echo much of what Chabon says, above, but from a creative perspective instead of a parenting one. We try to avoid scaring children, and that’s terrible, he says. Even Mickey Mouse used to be dangerous:

Sendak: He had teeth.

Jonze: Literally?

Sendak: He had literally teeth.

Jason Scott, presenting at Arse Electronica 2009, “The Atomic Level of Porn“.

Angry preservationist and historian of old computer crap Jason Scott discusses the history of computers, telecommunication and erotic images. He covers teletype, ham radio and video games. Someone else could do the same presentation on sharing files over old-timey networks and leave out the sex, but somehow I don’t think it would be as good.

Paul Ohm, “Broken Promises of Privacy: Responding to the Surprising Failure of Anonymization“, a “University of Colorado Law Legal Studies Research Paper”.

Ohm establishes that “anonymizing” personal information, such as in health records and search engine data is largely a myth. He cites several studies in computer science that prove that many individuals can be identified even from anonymous data. From there, Ohm suggests that gross changes are needed in law and public policy to protect privacy.

Eric Brasseur, “Gamma error in picture scaling“.

In an article from 2007, Brasseur explains why software for scaling images often distorts their color. When the size of an image changes, colors for each pixel need to be re-calculated. Most scaling software (at least up to 2007, I don’t know the state of the art today) ignores the fact that colors and greys are calculated logarithmically. Here is the quick example:

This picture shows all 256 shades, from 0 up to 255:

255 divided by 2 equals 127. At first thought you would believe that gray number 127 has half the luminosity of gray number 255 (=white). That would be a “linear” scale. Actually, the gray that shows half the luminosity of 255 is gray number 186. This is due to the “exponential” scale being used.

Amy Karol in her blog, Angry Chicken, “book copying“.

Karol’s daughter makes copies of her favorite books, changing the story along the way. “She usually adds a sibling and sometimes changes the gender.” Here is a take on one of my favorites:

“Oh child-brain–I love you!”, writes Karol. Me too. In my adult-brain somewhere there is a connection between this and Anne-Marie’s discussion of Emily Strange last year. Wait, why isn’t that post in this list?

Anne-Marie Deitering, in her info-fetishist blog, “comics & copyright, but not comics-specific“.

Deitering illuminates a conversation about whether a phenomenon called Emily Strange violates the copyright of a children’s book called Nate the Great. While the lines of influence seem pretty straightforward, the question of copyright is anything but.

Paul M. Aoki and Allison Woodruff in the Proceedings of the ACM SIGCHI Conf. on Human Factors in Computing Systems, Portland, OR, Apr. 2005, “Making Space for Stories: Ambiguity in the Design of Personal Communication Systems”

Aoki and Woodruff’s research suggest that personal communication systems (such as instant messaging and walkie-talkies) should build in the possibility for people to lie to each other. A communication system that always accurately tells you whether or not a person is available and receiving your message leaves little room for social ambiguity. Rather, communication systems should allow people to save face.

sources

I have a number of new sources for feed-reading this year.

Bruce Schneir writes about all facets of “security” in Schneier on Security. He is sparse on commentary and big on filtering the interesting links.

Wayne Marshall writes about ethnomusicology and “global remix culture” at Wayne & Wax. Besides sharing some of my roots, I find Marshall interesting because he highlights how audio, video and communication technologies are being used around the world as part to create and share culture.

Roger Sutton blogs at Read Roger, and as the editor of a magazine dedicated to reviewing children’s literature, The Horn Book, is often hilarious and insightful on topics of literature and the newfangled-book-technology.

Tavi Gevinson is 14 and blogs about fashion and she’s awesome (thanks Sara!); Style Rookie’s take on high fashion is mostly out of my league, but there is are healthy amounts of nostalgia (for Sassy in particular) and a kid being a kid. Plus lots of things that look cool.

My other fashion reading is Hel Looks, a Helsinki street fashion blog. Some of the clothes are great just for being great, and the statements by their wearers always make my day.

I am now reading and enjoying Achewood (thanks shinylib!); more comic suggestions are always welcome.

Finally, Nicholas put me onto the RSS feeds for the Berkman Center for Internet & Society’s MediaBerkman podcast/vodcast/radio show. Shows are generally an hour and fifteen minutes, and deal with anything having to do with internet technology and law or policy.

That’s what I’m reading lately.