Going Down with Books

SUBHEAD: It is getting clearer as to how the complex and poisonous system we are riding will fail. 

By Juan Wilson on 4 March 2020 for Island Breath -
(https://islandbreath.blogspot.com/2020/03/going-down-with-books.html)


Image above: View from a full wall home library. It's a start. From (https://images.app.goo.gl/634TXyX3moM2Fcvt5).

Don't count on a last minute reprieve, a bailout, or escape from our current condition. The impending failure of the system we depend on is an on-going process has been accelerated now by a worldwide virus pandemic.

We have become blind to our total dependence on "The System" (or "The Grid") that we see no alternative reality.

As we have discovered the "System" requires massive inputs of resources ans energy and, as a result, huge outputs of waste and pollution.  It also requires that we have no scalable substitutions or alternatives to this dependency but turning to total collapse.

There is simply too many of us and too much our stuff and too little of everything else. Kicking and screaming we will be dragged to the consequences.

How blind are we? Is the best we can come up with for our next president is a contest between Trump and Biden?

These are two fossils who either have no clue of the existential challenge we face or are counting on fleeing with the billionaires to the Alps or some inaccessible tropical island.

Three elements of the perfect storm we are sailing into are:

• Loss of individual, family, or group knowledge of fending for one's own. 
• Uncontrolled debt inflation to finance industrialization and economic growth.
• Ravaging of the Earth for settlements, agland, resources, and places to toss garbage.

For the few who get through the breakdown of the delicate networks of interdependent systems providing us shelter, food, water, and energy it will be best you acquire skills in self-maintained off-grid living.

That would include skills growing food and procuring potable water; experience with building and maintaining the home; knowledge of medical care; and an idea of the principals of general science.

At some point in the not so distant future your iPhone will be about useful as a drink coaster for acquiring and storing these, instructions, and techniques in independent living.

Yes, fifty years ago young people were seriously considering getting "Off the Grid" and taking actions to get back to "The Land" and be self-sustainable. The mantra was from our guru Timothy Leary was "Tune In, Turn On and Drop Out!"

They almost made it but traded bluejeans for polyester bell-bottoms and LSD for cocaine.

It's a good idea to keep acid free paper books on the principals of all of these subjects.

Half a century ago this kind of information was widely published and identified in "The Whole Earth Catalog" and can still be found in  "Back to the Land" books and other publications from the Hippy-Trippy1970's.

Fortunately, not all has been forgotten of the knowledge of the earlier Urban Hippie diaspora.
This survival knowledge can still be obtained from bookstores and online.

Having a printed book library of basic techniques is a crucial resource, just as much as a toolshed of wood working, metal working and garden implements.

Vital information can be found in publications like the US Army Survival Field Manuals and tomes with specifics on the knowledge  required for basic survival, and sustained living independently of the sprawl of suburbia, office parks,  malls, hospitals and supermarkets.

Many libraries offers free older hardcover books of fiction and non fiction as they are rotated off their shelves. Many libraries are still getting rid of entire sets of hardcover encyclopedias.

I recommend that you start building a library of crucial information and reference books... but also collect classic reading material for entertainment. Much is available and there won't be any Netflix, Hulu or Amazon Prime.

Author's note:
One little book (3"x 5" x 3/4")  I would suggest everyone own is "Pocket Ref" by Thomas J. Glover by Sequoia Press. My version is the Third Edition (ISBN 978-1-885071-33-0). It is an encyclopedia of information showing everything from illustrations of a wide variety of rope knots and bends to a listing of all the phone area code numbers by state in North America to the friction loss in pipes of various materials, to the square, cubes, square roots, and cube root of all numbers from 1 to 1,000 to five place accuracy... plus much, much more. You'll be amazed what's in this tiny gem. I got mine at my local Ace Hardware Store.

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Robots culling Libraries

SUBHEAD: Automated software culling endangered titles drive librarians to fake patrons checking out books.

By Cory Doctorow on 2 Janury 2016 for Boing Boing-
(http://boingboing.net/2017/01/02/automated-book-culling-softwar.html)


Image above: Mashup of photo of  PR2 Robot reads the Mythical Man-Month by Troy Straszheim, superimposed on photo of The Leeds Library in Yorkshire, England, by Michael D Beckwith. From original article.

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.

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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 Orlando Sentinel 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.

Dore and library assistant Scott Amey created “Chuck Finley” simply to save certain books from being ditched at the library, according to Dore and inspector’s general’s notes.

Records show that dozens of books were checked out and then checked back in again all in the same hour.

The fictional Chuck Finley was named after “a ballplayer,” according to the inspector’s notes. Chuck Finley is a retired major league baseball pitcher who played mostly for the California and Los Angeles Angels during a 17-year career.

Dore said in interviews with the inspector general’s office that it was happening elsewhere but didn’t provide specifics.

“He did know that other libraries have had ‘dummy’ patron cards and institutional cards,” according to the interview notes. “There was a lot of bad blood between the libraries because of money wars.” The inspector general’s report said creation of a fake library card “amounts to the creation of a false public record.”

See source here:
To save books, librarians create fake 'reader' to check out titles [Jason Ruiter/Orlando Sentinel]



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