Vacuum

Reciprocity, give and take a little bit

I'm looking forward to reading Adam Grant's book Give and Take (aadl).  Look in the March 31 NY Times Magazine for a preview, featuring a quote from the U of Michigan's Jerry Davis. At the moment I'm 33d on a list of 53 holds at the library for the book; if you're generous, and have finished your copy, please lend it to me!

The table of contents and blurb, from the AADL catalog:

Good returns: the dangers and rewards of giving more than you get -- The peacock and the panda: how givers, takers, and matchers build networks -- The ripple effect: collaboration and the dynamics of giving and taking credit -- Finding the diamond in the rough: the fact and fiction of recognizing potential -- The power of powerless communication: how to be modest and influence people -- The art of motivation maintenance: why some givers burn out but others are on fire -- Chump change: overcoming the doormat effect -- The scrooge shift: why a soccer team, a fingerprint, and a name can tilt us in the other direction -- Out of the shadows.

Using his own cutting-edge research as a professor at Wharton Business School, Adam Grant shows how helping others can lead to greater personal success. He demonstrates how smart givers avoid becoming doormats, and why this kind of success has the power to transform not just individuals and groups, but entire organisations and communities.

I'm particularly intrigued by the notion that there's a distinction that creates "smart givers" that win some unspecified game through a generous strategy that pays off for them.

 

Virtual bookplates

You run a library; it gets donations, from time to time, of books or other materials. Some of the donations are substantial and the donor is recognized. How to best recognize a donor in the digital age?

One approach is the "virtual bookplate", described in this ACRL article written by folks at the U of Florida. The catalog is extended to include graphics that honor the donor of the materials, and the search is extended to make it easy to look up all of the works that were donated by a particular individual. The story goes that a donor was so impressed at how easy it was to see a pretty view of what they had given to the library that they wrote a check on the spot to donate more.

Another perspective on this is the "virtual collection of bookplates". The one of these that I've found is the John Starr Stewart Ex Libris Collection at the University of Illinois, with over 1500 plates collected between 1903 and 1906. The University of Michigan plate in this post is from that collection. 

Writing release notes for a new version of my Michigan FOIA book, using Leanpub

The book is my No-Nonsense Guide to the Michigan Freedom of Information Act (FOIA), which I'm publishing (early) and updating (as its written) using Leanpub. Here's what I sent out to subscribers - all four of them! - this morning.

I'm happy to have a chance to keep working on this, since even the smallest amount of money from new sales covers the direct costs  of coffee to do the writing.

Release Notes

April 9, 2013.

This release updates the first 7 chapters of the book plus the introduction. Most of the changes are to fill in gaps, small reorganizations of the text, and line edits; there's not a ton of new original materials. Chapters 8 through to the end are unchanged.

One of the things that's new in the Michigan FOIA world is that Muckrock (Appendix A) now supports FOIA requests to a number of Ann Arbor cities. My first trial with this worked a little bit well, and I'm going to keep trying to improve how that system works so that I get the best writeup of it.

A document trove from a recent FOIA request is a log of all FOIA requests to the City of Ann Arbor over the span of two months. Look for a future set of edits to expand the "sample requests" considerably based on that collection, since I'm still digesting them.

If anyone has tried the "send to Kindle" feature, let me know how it went.

As always, if you have any questions, contact me at edward.vielmetti@gmail.com or +1 734 330 2465.

thanks

Ed

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LibraryThing as a shadow catalog for books

350 words about LibraryThing as a shadow catalog for books.

The bookshelf in my bedroom is full of books, thanks to LibraryThing. It's been a reliable source for recommendations for works that are the next one to read after I've enjoyed a book. Hopefully I'll be able to read a lot of them before they need to go back to the library.

Unlike some other libraries, the Ann Arbor District Library doesn't have a direct connection to LibraryThing. The Canton District Library does have an installation of LibraryThing for Libraries, their OPAC integration product, which lets you check availability of a book straight from LibraryThing. The lack of a direct link means that to find a book in the AADL that I have on my screen in LibraryThing I have to click a few more times. I suppose that's ok.

Does it make sense to tag and categorize books that you don't own yourself, but only have collected them from the library? There was a time when I tagged things everywhere I found them - photos on Flickr, web sites on Delicious - but these days that doesn't seem so important. I like seeing other people's tags, especially for works that are unfamiliar, but it hardly seems essential to do it for my own use unless there's some list I'm trying to put together. When did tagging cease being fun?

I'm spending some of my time on the site deleting books that I no longer even remember having read or that I no longer wish to remember. That should result in better recommendations, and maybe a chance to reread something that would have been worth remembering. My use of the site peaked in 2008 so there's not as much recent coverage as I'd like.

The recommendations from LibraryThing are really quite good, and they are even better for reflecting which of the books you've already read. The site generates ten recommendations based on other people's reading patterns, and it reminds you that you've read some of the ones on that list with a checkmark.

I wish I read more books and fewer web pages.

 

 

"Red Plenty", Francis Spufford

I just got done reading Francis Spufford's "Red Plenty". In one modestly thick volume, it gave me insights into the Soviet economy of the 1950s and 1960s that an entire semester of college failed to give - the failures of central planning, the strange prices that led to strange decision making, and (most importantly) the optimism of the late 1950s when everything was humming along nicely.

Some other reviews of the work, so that I don't miss them:

Jo Walton: The Glorious, Terrible, Strange USSR: Francis Spufford’s Red Plenty

It’s not SF. It’s not really fiction, though it’s not non-fiction either. It’s something strangely between the two, a fictionalised non-fiction book about the Soviet Dream. Reading it partakes of some of the pleasures of reading especially geeky SF, and some of the pleasure of reading solid well-written nonfiction on a fascinating subject. It’s about history, economics, how technology and ideology interact, and how theory and practice are different, with examples. What it’s most like is reading an extended version of one of Neal Stephenson’s more adorable infodumps, only with footnotes and a proper end. 

Crooked Timber put together a Red Plenty reader with about a dozen essays.

Adam Roberts writes in Strange Horizons, a science fiction review:

To take the first first. When people talk about "science fiction" the science they are thinking of (as it might be) physics, or chemistry, or perhaps biology. But that's a narrow way of taking things. The science in Red Plenty is economics, and reading the book will teach you a tremendous amount about the logic (and illogic) of running a planned economy on the Soviet scale. The speculative portion of the science here is the striking attempt by Vitalevich and Nemchinov to modify the catastrophically inflexible Soviet economic model with a mechanism—"shadow prices"—better able to match supply to demand without simply instituting Capitalist "free" markets. Perhaps it sounds dry, but I found it fascinating, and precisely as science-fictional as a proposed new spaceship drive or cloning technology.

Click clack moo: cows that type

By Doreen Cronin, as read by Youtube's Ginger12691

"Duck was a neutral party."

#digitalvertigo by @ajkeen , a review

Andrew Keen's Digital Vertigo is a follow-on to his earlier The Cult of the Amateur. Where his first work took on Wikipedia as the scourge of knowledge, the current work aims its sights at Facebook and LinkedIn, and is reflectively critical of the online social networks that Keen sees as more harmful than useful.

With a lead-in like this, you might expect that this is one of those books that fits in a long history of media criticism - from Marshall McLuhan to Umberto Eco to Michel Foucault, you'll find a series of quips and quotes from dozens of thinkers littering the pages of Digital Vertigo. With a hefty 40 plus pages of end notes and indexing, there was hardly a page of the work that didn't echo someone else's thoughts.

With everything so carefully indexed and footnoted, I thought I'd skip to the chase and see if the earliest arguments against technology in thought and human relations were also there. In The Phaedrus, Plato relates argument the argument of Socrates that writing is a technology which leads to a diminishing of intelligence and of understanding:

Soc. I cannot help feeling, Phaedrus, that writing is unfortunately like painting; for the creations of the painter have the attitude of life, and yet if you ask them a question they preserve a solemn silence. And the same may be said of speeches. You would imagine that they had intelligence, but if you want to know anything and put a question to one of them, the speaker always gives one unvarying answer. And when they have been once written down they are tumbled about anywhere among those who may or may not understand them, and know not to whom they should reply, to whom not: and, if they are maltreated or abused, they have no parent to protect them; and they cannot protect or defend themselves. (Plato, The Phaedrus)

Keen doesn't quote from Plato, but he does credit himself a "celebrated public speaker". It's important that someone have a reasonable criticism of today's social networks, just so we can understand them better when they inevitably change or fail. This particular text probably reads better as an ebook, with all of its carefully collected citations linked; it might, like the example of Phaedrus, be even better in person delivered by the speaker who can vary his answer to incorporate the changes of the day and defend his thoughts.

A good book for an airplane ride, or a good ebook for a contrarian romp through modern social networks hype or to congratulate yourself for missing the Facebook IPO.

Disclaimer: This review is based on reading a review copy, which was provided gratis.

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm, Wallace Stevens

 

The House Was Quiet and the World Was Calm

The house was quiet and the world was calm.
The reader became the book; and summer night

Was like the conscious being of the book. 
The house was quiet and the world was calm.

The words were spoken as if there was no book,
Except that the reader leaned above the page,

Wanted to lean, wanted much most to be
The scholar to whom his book is true, to whom

The summer night is like a perfection of thought.
The house was quiet because it had to be. 

The quiet was part of the meaning, part of the mind:
The access of perfection to the page.

And the world was calm. The truth in a calm world, 
In which there is no other meaning, itself

Is calm, itself is summer and night, itself
Is the reader leaning late and reading there.



— Wallace Stevens

Somehow, along the way, I also found this Concordances and the Authors' Horizon of Words' Meaning, a way to start looking at how poets use words through tools that include "keyword in context".

discardia for midsummer 2010: paperback swap

The challenge is to get rid of some set of books that have accumulated, while simultaneously fulfilling the need to always have some kind of new reading in the house.  

A new (to me) way to do this is Paperback Swap, a system which works as a trading board for books.  You are entitled to books in the proportion that you send books to others, and every book you request is free to you.  The catch is that you pay postage for the books you send to others.

Because of the sender-pays structure, many of the books listed are lightweight and cheap to mail. There's some calculus in people's minds that probably says "I'm willing to pay the cost of shipping to get rid of this."

I can imagine a lot of other things that could work the same way, looking especially for items that have relatively high value compared to weight, but where you might accumulate unwanted and unused items over time that have more swap value than use value.  It looks like Swap-bot fills some of that need for Etsy-class homemade items. 

More on Discardia from Dinah Sanders.

Sand County Almanac, June: "The Alder Fork - A Fishing Idyl"

We found the main stream to law that the teeter-snipe pattered about in what last year were trout riffles, and so warm that we could duck in its deepest pool without a shout. Even after our cooling swim, waders felt like hot tar paper in the sun.

Aldo Leopold, A Sand County Almanac. This 1989 Oxford Paperbacks edition, ISBN 0-19-505928-X, as an introductory essay from Robert Finch commemorating the 100th anniversary of Leopold's birth.

We see Leopold, the rural sage, tracking a sunk in January, cutting a venerable dead oak, stalking a legendary fish on Alder Fork or an elusive grouse on an abandoned farm, surveying his private unofficial domain before dawn, wrestling with god-like decisions about tree-thinning, or experiencing a "curious transfusion of courage" from his pines in deep winter.

Sand County Almanac is a good book to come back to every month year round.