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Todd Suomela

DSHR's Blog: Ithaka's Perspective on Digital Preservation - 0 views

  • Second, there is very little coverage of Web archiving, which is clearly by far the largest and most important digital preservation initiative both for current and future readers. The Internet Archive rates only two mentions, in the middle of a list of activities and in a footnote. This is despite the fact that archive.org is currently the 211th most visited site in the US (272nd globally) with over 5.5M registered users, adding over 500 per day, and serving nearly 4M unique IPs per day. For comparison, the Library of Congress currently ranks 1439th in the US (5441st globally). The Internet Archive's Web collection alone probably dwarfs all other digital preservation efforts combined both in size and in usage. Not to mention their vast collections of software, digitized books, audio, video and TV news.. Rieger writes: There is a lack of understanding about how archived websites are discovered, used, and referenced. “Researchers prefer to cite the original live-web as it is easier and shorter,” pointed out one of the experts. “There is limited awareness of the existence of web archives and lack of community consensus on how to treat them in scholarly work. The problems are not about technology any more, it is about usability, awareness, and scholarly practices.” The interviewee referred to a recent CRL study based on an analysis of referrals to archived content from papers that concluded that the citations were mainly to articles about web archiving projects. It is surprising that the report doesn't point out that the responsibility for educating scholars in the use of resources lies with the "experts and thought leaders" from institutions such as the University of California, Michigan State, Cornell, MIT, NYU and Virginia Tech. That these "experts and thought leaders" don't consider the Internet Archive to be a resource worth mentioning might have something to do with the fact that their scholars don't know that they should be using it. A report whose first major section, entitled "What's Working Well", totally fails to acknowledge the single most important digital preservation effort of the last two decades clearly lacks credibility
  • Finally, there is no acknowledgement that the most serious challenge facing the field is economic. Except for a few corner cases, we know how to do digital preservation, we just don't want to pay enough to have it done. Thus the key challenge is to achieve some mixture of significant increase in funding for, and significant cost reduction in the processes of, digital preservation. Information technology processes naturally have very strong economies of scale, which result in winner-take-all markets (as W. Brian Arthur pointed out in 1985). It is notable that the report doesn't mention the winners we already have, in Web and source code archiving, and in emulation. All are at the point where a competitor is unlikely to be viable. To be affordable, digital preservation needs to be done at scale. The report's orientation is very much "let a thousand flowers bloom", which in IT markets only happens at a very early stage. This is likely the result of talking only to people nurturing a small-scale flower, not to people who have already dominated their market niche. It is certainly a risk that each area will have a single point of failure, but trying to fight against the inherent economics of IT pretty much guarantees ineffectiveness.
  • 1) The big successes in the field haven't come from consensus building around a roadmap, they have come from idiosyncratic individuals such as Brewster Kahle, Roberto di Cosmo and Jason Scott identifying a need and building a system to address it no matter what "the community" thinks. We have a couple of decades of experience showing that "the community" is incapable of coming to a coherent consensus that leads to action on a scale appropriate to the problem. In any case, describing road-mapping as "research" is a stretch. 2) Under severe funding pressure, almost all libraries have de-emphasized their custodial role of building collections in favor of responding to immediate client needs. Rieger writes: As one interviewee stated, library leaders have “shifted their attention from seeing preservation as a moral imperative to catering to the university’s immediate needs.” Regrettably, but inevitably given the economics of IT markets, this provides a market opportunity for outsourcing. Ithaka has exploited one such opportunity with Portico. This bullet does describe "research" in the sense of "market research".  Success is, however, much more likely to come from the success of an individual effort than from a consensus about what should be done among people who can't actually do it. 3) In the current climate, increased funding for libraries and archives simply isn't going to happen. These institutions have shown a marked reluctance to divert their shrinking funds from legacy to digital media. Thus the research topic with the greatest leverage in turning funds into preserved digital content is into increasing the cost-effectiveness of the tools, processes and infrastructure of digital preservation.
Todd Suomela

The Internet as existential threat « Raph's Website - 1 views

  • Our medical systems have terrible Internet security… MRI machines you can connect to with USB that still have “admin:password” to gain root access. That’s horrifying, sure, but that’s not an attack at scale. More frightening: we’re busily uploading all our medical records to the cloud. Take down that cloud, and no patients can be treated, because nobody will know what they have, what meds they are on. Software swallows your insulin pumps and your pacemakers. To kill people, all you need is to hack that database, or simply erase it or block access to it. After all, we don’t tend to realize that in an Internet of Things, humans are just Things too. As this software monster has encroached on stuff like election systems, the common reaction has been to go back to paper. So let’s consider a less obvious example. We should be going back to paper for our libraries too! We’ve outsourced so much of our knowledge to digital that the amount of knowledge available in analog has dropped notably. There are less librarians in the fewer libraries with smaller collections than there used to be. If the net goes down, how much reference material is simply not accessible that was thirty years ago? Google Search is “critical cultural infrastructure.” How much redundancy do we actually have? Could a disconnected town actually educate its children? How critical is Google as a whole? If Google went down for a month, I am pretty sure we would see worldwide economic collapse. How much of the world economy passes through Google hosting? How much of it is in GMail? How much is dependent on Google Search, Google Images, Google Docs? The answer is a LOT. And because financial systems are now also JIT, ten thousand corporate blips where real estate agencies and local car washes and a huge pile of software companies and a gaggle of universities and so on are suddenly 100% unable to function digitally (no payroll! no insurance verification!) would absolutely have ripple effects into their suppliers and their customers, and thence to the worldwide economic market. Because interconnection without redundancy increases odds of cascades.
  • But just as critically, governments and state actors seem to be the source of so many of the problems precisely because the Internet is now too many forms of critical infrastructure, and therefore too juicy a target. If software eats everything, then the ability to kill software is the ability to kill anything. Net connectivity becomes the single point of failure for every system connected to it. Even if the Net itself is designed to route around damage, that doesn’t help if it is the single vector of attack that can take down any given target. It’s too juicy a target for the military, too juicy a target for terror, too juicy a target for criminal ransom. The old adage goes “when they came for this, I said nothing. When they came for that…” — we all know it. Consider that the more we hand gleefully over to the cloud because we want convenience, big data, personalization, and on, we’re creating a single thing that can be taken from us in an instant. We’ve decided to subscribe to everything, instead of owning it. When they came for your MP3s, your DVDs, fine,. not “critical infrastructure.” When they came for your resumes, OK, getting closer.
  • As we rush towards putting more and more things “in the cloud,” as we rush towards an Internet of Things with no governance beyond profit motive and anarchy, what we’re effectively doing is creating a massive single point of failure for every system we put in it.
Leslie Harris

Money, Race and Success: How Your School District Compares - The New York Times - 0 views

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    Interesting infographics demonstrating that sixth graders in the richest school districts are four grade levels ahead of children in the poorest districts.
Todd Suomela

the mass defunding of higher education that's yet to come - the ANOVA - 0 views

  • I am increasingly convinced that a mass defunding of public higher education is coming to an unprecedented degree and at an unprecedented scale. People enjoy telling me that this has already occurred, as if I am not sufficiently informed about higher education to know that state support of our public universities has declined precipitously. But things can always get worse, much worse. And given the endless controversies on college campuses of conservative speakers getting shut out and conservative students feeling silenced, and given how little the average academic seems to care about appealing to the conservative half of this country, the PR work is being done for the enemies of public education by those within the institutions themselves. And the GOP has already shown a great knack for using claims of bias against academia, particularly given the American yen for austerity.
  • But his critics can’t see something that, for all of his myopia, he always has: that our political divide is increasingly bound up in a set of class associations and signals that have little to do with conspicuous consumption and everything to do with a style of self-performance that few people ever talk about but everyone understands. It is the ability to give such a performance convincingly that, in part, people buy with their tuition dollars. That this condition makes egalitarian politics a part of elite class formation has gone little discussed in my political home, the radical left. I have been excited to see a recent groundswell of young left-aligned people, and many of them are bright and committed. But almost none of them seem aware of the fact that their ironic Twitter accounts and cultural references and received opinions on all manner of political issues are as sure a sign of their class identity as a pair of wingtips and a blazer once was. And until and unless they understand how powerfully alienated the great mass of this country is from their social culture, we cannot hope to build a mass left-wing movement and with it do good things like defend public education. I agree: it’s the economy, stupid, and we must appeal to them by making the case that things like universal free college are good. But if recent political history tells us anything it’s that no economic policy, no matter how sensible, can win if its proponents refuse to grapple with the politics of resentment. The left, broadly, has not done a good job of that. The professoriate? My god.
Todd Suomela

Young Men Are Playing Video Games Instead of Getting Jobs. That's OK. (For Now.) - Reas... - 0 views

  • Video games, like work, are basically a series of quests comprised of mundane and repetitive tasks: Receive an assignment, travel to a location, overcome some obstacles, perform some sort of search, pick up an item, and then deliver it in exchange for a reward—and, usually, another quest, which starts the cycle all over again. You are not playing the game so much as following its orders. The game is your boss; to succeed, you have to do what it says.
  • Instead of working, they are playing video games. About three quarters of the increase in leisure time among men since 2000 has gone to gaming. Total time spent on computers, including game consoles, has nearly doubled. You might think that this would be demoralizing. A life spent unemployed, living at home, without romantic prospects, playing digital time wasters does not sound particularly appealing on its face. Yet this group reports far higher levels of overall happiness than low-skilled young men from the turn of the 21st century. In contrast, self-reported happiness for older workers without college degrees fell during the same period. For low-skilled young women and men with college degrees, it stayed basically the same. A significant part of the difference comes down to what Hurst has called "innovations in leisure computer activities for young men." The problems come later. A young life spent playing video games can lead to a middle age without marketable skills or connections. "There is some evidence," Hurst pointed out, "that these young, lower-skilled men who are happy in their 20s become much less happy in their 30s or 40s." So are these guys just wasting their lives, frittering away their time on anti-social activities? Hurst describes his figures as "staggering" and "shocking"—a seismic shift in the relationship of young men to work. "Men in their 20s historically are a group with a strong attachment to the labor force," he writes. "The decline in employment rates for low-skilled men in their 20s was larger than it was for all other sex, age, and skill groups during this same time period." But there's another way to think about the change: as a shift in their relationship to unemployment. Research has consistently found that long-term unemployment is one of the most dispiriting things that can happen to a person. Happiness levels tank and never recover. One 2010 study by a group of German researchers suggests that it's worse, over time, for life satisfaction than even the death of a spouse. What video games appear to do is ease the psychic pain of joblessness—and to do it in a way that is, if not permanent, at least long-lasting. For low-skilled young men, what is the alternative to playing games? We might like to imagine that they would all become sociable and highly productive members of society, but that is not necessarily the case.
  • A military shooter might offer a simulation of being a crack special forces soldier. A racing game might simulate learning to handle a performance sports car. A sci-fi role-playing game might simulate becoming an effective leader of a massive space colonization effort. But what you're really doing is training yourself to effectively identify on-screen visual cues and twitch your thumb at the right moment. You're learning to handle a controller, not a gun or a race car. You're learning to manage a game's hidden stats system, not a space station. A game provides the sensation of mastery without the actual ability. "It's a simulation of being an expert," Wolpaw says. "It's a way to fulfill a fantasy." That fantasy, ultimately, is one of work, purpose, and social and professional success.
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