Those who know me well know that I have an affinity for bats. In fact, when I was in college, one of my favorite professors gave me a poems related to some of the things that she knew I loved (mainly bats and hawks — although when I graduated, she also gave me a wonderful silk scarf with dragonflies on it that I treasure to this day). We discussed the bats after I professed my love of them, mentioning their tiny faces, and she said that most people were uneasy about them for one reason or another. The next time I saw her, she had a poem ready for me that included this line:
I’ve been following the plight of bats around the world (from being killed to dying of terrifying diseases) for years now, and I never fail to feel that these creatures are simply amazing. I honestly don’t think I’ve seen a bat that scared me or made me feel a bit uneasy, even if it does have a human face.
Some people don’t like them, but I hope this video will make you think twice about thinking they aren’t (or, at the very least, can’t be) adorable
Her story is a sad one, but she seems like an inquisitive little bat after she starts responding. And she’s pregnant! Here’s more about her first day after being rescued. (She was released about three weeks later and was still pregnant upon release!)
On a related note, there is a bat sanctuary in the United States, so if you’re interested in helping bats that have been mistreated or injured, check out Bat World to see what they’re up to. They even have bat cams in some of their permanent guests’ rooms, if you’re interested! Mr. Kitty has the best rescue story ever. It involves a cat that helps the charity’s mission, so how could that not be a good story?
What the ever-loving what?! This is ridiculous. What if she gouges her eye out with the corner of a book? Who comes up with these things? If I hadn’t been able to read on the bus when I was a kid, I probably would have just jumped in front of it. Yeah, her ride is only about 10 minutes, but what about kids who have over an hour on the bus? It’s not more likely to happen if a kid is on the bus less time, you know. This treating kids as if they are immensely fragile, overly breakable creatures is outright ludicrous. And tell other kids to stay seated. It worked when I was a kid. No one ever stood up to find out what I was reading in all of the many years I rode the bus for hours a day, especially not when the bus was in motion. Wow. Just…stupid.
Not sure if having children is for you? Baby Dilemma is an interesting site, because it mostly seems balanced on the issue. Most sites I’ve seen on this issue push one agenda or another, so it’s a bit refreshing to see one that presents this choice as what it truly is: a life-changing decision. Deciding to have children should always get an enthusiastic yes, to borrow that term, instead of an “Well, whatever…” that some people have going in. It’s really not the default in this day and age, thank goodness! You have a choice! The site even has a Decision Aid with questions and things to think about yourself and your personality before making the decision. It’s usefulness, of course, will depend on the person using it and how you’ll view the questions it asks. You may already be sure one way or the other, and that’s fine, too. Luckily with this question, there isn’t one right or wrong answer.
This is similar to what my cataloging professor does. She wrote her own text and partnered with HP to make it free online to DL and/or read online or via PDF. You can order a print copy for just $8, shipped. I ended up just printing it myself, because it worked out cheaper even than that for me.
Doug and Hey, Arnold!might be coming back? Yes! (Too bad we don’t have cable, I suppose.)
Aha! This makes a lot of things make so much sense now. You know those people that you’ve worked with who just don’t seem to get it? And everyone around the water cooler doesn’t understand how those people don’t seem to realize that no one really believes that they know what they’re doing? Yeah. Now I get it. Self awareness: catch it if you can!
Now that I’m working on my master’s degree full time, I need to find something to help me procrastinate a bit more when I have a major project due in just a few days, right? Blogging it is!
I’m going to start a quick feature for Sundays that will just be five things I’ve run into recently (usually in the past week) that I think you might be interested in hearing about. Actually, I don’t know if you’ll be interested in them, unless I know you personally, so I’ll just admit that they are things I’ve found interesting and not promise anything more.
This has kind of sprung up from the overly full bookmarks folder that I currently have on my bookmarks bar, into which I’ve stuffed “to be blogged about” items for a few years now. These are generally things that I’ve been meaning to eventually blog about in a longer format (perhaps an entire post for each item), but I haven’t, so you’re going to get the abbreviated format. Some might appreciate the brevity, which isn’t something I’m normally the best at. (Hey, I like to talk. Sue me.)
Without further ado (which would be about more nothing, unsurprisingly), here are this week’s five interesting (to me) things:
Interested in how Americans view the etiquette associated with mobile browsing in social situations? Who isn’t? (Really, who hasn’t been aggravated by someone’s differing manners in whether they should be texting fifty other people while they are having dinner with you?) Pew Research Center has some interesting statistics for you on that front. On a related note, PRC also has information on how smart phones change how teens communicate with one another. To be honest, I love seeing how non-smart-phoned teens communicate, so this was an entertaining read.
Males who have lower skills in-game are more likely to spout insults (negative comments) at female gamers (“female-voiced”) than males who are better players. Losing males actually tended to increase positive or negative comments to male gamers. Winning males generally give positive comments or encouragement to female gamers. Interesting…
Have you been following the Carter/S.H.I.E.L.D. Dubsmash wars? Of course you have! Well, now you can actually vote to determine the winner in the upcoming three-round Dubsmash Wars for Charity 2015. TO THE DEATH!!!
I was lucky enough to watch a panel on fantastical realism (yum) while at AWP in April with Neal, and it included both the amazing Laura Ruby (and her delicious Bone Gap) and the spectacular Nikki Loftin. I was able to talk to Nikki a bit after the panel and was taken enough to immediately read the three books she has out. Read a little bit of her personal background around her latest book, Wish Girl, which makes everyone long for a valley and an Annie of their own. (You can weep as much as you like over this book, and no one will blame you. Then think about this moment when Loftin said that a little boy once came up to her and said, “I’m just like Peter in my family.” Loftin responded, “I hope you find your Annie.” He sadly wished it as well.) Then go read her other two books immediately after you finish reading Wish Girl.
Many of you already know about my passion for bridging the so-called digital divide that separates communities of people from access. The areas that I am personally most interested in are low income and rural areas of the United States, which are often the most under-served communities in term of broadband access. A lot of you have heard the stories about how my parents only had access to dial-up until the past few years, but you might be surprised to learn that they still don’t have access to true broadband services. In January 15, the FCC increased the benchmark for what could truly be considered broadband service from 4Mbps/1Mbps (i.e., 4 download/1 upload) to a speed of 25Mbps/3Mbps. “The 4 Mbps/1 Mbps standard set in 2010 is dated and inadequate for evaluating whether advanced broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a timely way, the FCC found.”
The 4 Mbps/1 Mbps standard set in 2010 is dated and inadequate for evaluating whether advanced broadband is being deployed to all Americans in a timely way, the FCC found.
Using this updated service benchmark, the 2015 report finds that 55 million Americans – 17 percent of the population – lack access to advanced broadband. Moreover, a significant digital divide remains between urban and rural America: Over half of all rural Americans lack access to 25 Mbps/3 Mbps service.
The divide is still greater on Tribal lands and in U.S. territories, where nearly 2/3 of residents lack access to today’s speeds. And 35 percent of schools across the nation still lack access to fiber networks capable of delivering the advanced broadband required to support today’s digital-learning tools. (source; also attached at bottom of this post)
That’s a huge difference for rural folks, those living in territories or Tribal lands, and schools, people. Yet broadband providers are arguing that the old rules were fast enough, even as internet access needs get faster and faster. (Have you tried to access anything on the internet from dial-up lately? Believe me, it’s worse than you remember it being in the late 90s…)
FCC’s Fixed Broadband Deployment Map, showing deployment of the updated standard as of January 2015.
Pick an area you know well and zoom in on that map above. (If you click it, it will go directly to the FCC’s original image, where you can zoom in more.) I chose Illinois, of course.
When you know an area well, you can usually determine why the broadband follows the routes it takes. I can see Quincy, Illinois, on there. (That orange-ish belly button.) Here, I’ll help you a little bit:
Illinois broadband service (zoomed in)Illinois roads (via Google Maps)
Clearly the areas with access are the more settled areas: Chicago, greater St. Louis, I-55 (travels from Chicago to St. Louis), Springfield (capital city), Champaign-Urbana metro area (home of the University of Illinois), and so on. While this made more sense 10 years ago, we’re long past the time that broadband services have gone from being a nice way to browse the internet without lag to being an educational necessity.
The FCC provides a yearly broadband report on their findings based on speed tests and other information. Here’s the 2015 Broadband Progress Report site, where you can also find a link to past reports. (I download these every year to keep track of where we are.)
If you want to see the state of broadband service in your area, check out the National Broadband Map. Don’t see your provider? Let the FCC know, and they will take it into account for the next cycle.
If you’re interested in helping the government learn about speeds offered by different providers and how that stacks up against actual speeds consumers receive, you might want to sign up to participate in SamKnows.
The FCC measures both fixed and mobile broadband. Want to know more about their methodology? Check it out here.
I just posted this on my LIBR 203 Peer Mentor blog, but I thought it was important enough for all people (not just those in the information professions) to cross-post to my personal blog.
One of the most important things I was ever told about technology came when I was in eighth grade and my family was getting our first computer: “Don’t be afraid of it, ever.” Don’t be afraid of your computer or technology or what it can do. Never fear it.
I took this to heart, and even about 20 years later, I still rarely see new technology as something to be feared. Instead, I see it as fun, perhaps as a game to figure out. Maybe I’m lucky because I can easily pick up new things and figure them out quickly, but I still think it goes back to that very first real beginning of starting up that computer, seeing the DOS prompt, and going about my business of figuring out how to navigate my new tool.
Because that’s what technology is and should be: a tool for us to accomplish something. Whether that is fun and games, social interaction, or even actual work, it’s still a tool that we need to interact with to figure out how to make it work for us.
One of the first things I do when I start using a new program (or online tool or, really, anything on my computer) is to visit the preferences to figure out how to configure the tool to work best for my personal tastes. I just realized recently that this isn’t common sense or second nature to most people, so this realization was actually the catalyst for this post. How can we make something work best for us? The first step should always be to find out what it can do in order to figure out how to best set it up for our own benefit. Every well-laid-out program will have preferences to help us customize it in some way to our own tastes and requirements.
First things first! Immediately find the preferences section and set about trying to find out what the program can actually do before using it to see if you want to change any settings. If, as you go along, you decide you don’t like something, you will already know if there is a setting that will allow you to change it to something that is more helpful to you.
Another thing I often do is to find new tools just so I can learn more about them. This gives me a broader range of knowledge about certain types of products in general and has the added benefit of giving me more information about several specific programs within that category. For example, there are so many options available for web browsers, so I make sure to install and use several over time. At home, I currently have installed Internet Explorer (which I rarely use due to some severe deficits on its part), Opera Next, Google Chrome, Chrome Canary (beta version that can be installed side-by-side with Chrome), Firefox, and Waterfox (64-bit, open-source browser based on Firefox, but not an official product of Mozilla). At work I have all of the above except IE and Waterfox, but with the addition of Safari (because I use a Mac at work). All of them are used in fairly regular rotation (with the aforementioned exception of IE) — in part to keep my skills sharp, but mostly so I can be sure I’m regularly using the ones that are most helpful to me. Right now, I’m using Chrome (for school) and Firefox (for personal browsing and at work) most often, although I did just switch everything up from Canary or Opera Next for school, Chrome for work, and Waterfox for personal about a month ago.
This is just one example of doing something to widen my range of knowledge, but it shows a bit of what I’m talking about. Sometimes we need to experience something new just for the sake of finding out if it’s worth switching to or if it’s something that just isn’t right for us (right now — it never hurts to go back to it every so often to see if it has more features that you need at a later date). In addition — and perhaps more importantly — looking at a range of items in a particular category widens my own knowledge. Many items will work very similarly, and when I use more of a type of an item, I begin to see those similarities. I will be able to see what features I like in one that another doesn’t have, but I will also be able to compare and contrast more readily. I don’t like to become entrenched in one thing, be it a brand or a company or even a browser. To me that is part of what an information professional’s natural curiosity should be seeking: more information about a wide variety of productions to be able to help others make their own decisions and come to their own conclusions.
This skill is highly transferable to many types of work. In most of my jobs, I have worked with some type of database. No two jobs have had the same database, and some jobs came with needing to learn and use multiple databases regularly. To me, this isn’t a difficult task, because many things about databases are pretty similar and seem intuitive after I became familiar with my first one. I know this isn’t something that everyone picks up immediately, but I can say that the more you jump in and start to play with the new program at your fingertips, the more you will begin to understand it — and what it can do for you.
It all comes back to this: don’t fear your technology, whether it’s new to you or seemingly old and familiar. Always be willing to learn something new about it and never assume you know everything already. I am always updating my browsers, for example, with new extensions or add-ons to help me use them more efficiently. At work, I’m always excited about database updates on all of the ones I use, because I hope it will have new features to allow me to do my job more effectively. (I actually will be able to use a new learning management system very soon at work, and I couldn’t be more excited about that. After digging into both the student and the teacher side of Canvas here at SJSU’s iSchool as a peer mentor, I can’t wait to compare it to the new LMS I’ll be using at work.)
Dig in! Don’t be afraid! If you can’t figure something out, ask someone who might know or even Google it. As future information professionals, curiosity is our calling and finding out new and helpful information is our trademark.
Remember, curiosity didn’t really kill the cat. And even though what he was curious about just might have (it was probably a venomous snake or something), technology doesn’t have that power and won’t strike, so go ahead and seek more information and gather more data. Curiosity is knowledge-seeking, which isn’t such a bad trait in a librarian.
As you might expect of someone who is working toward becoming a “real” librarian (one with an MLIS, that is), I am very interested in information. Librarians are more than people who check out books to you and catalog those books when they first arrive at the library. We’re expected to be, quite literally, masters of information. (The MLIS stands for Masters of Library and Information Science.) My main focus, in fact, is the information science part, as I am largely interested in the digital archive and information architecture part of the job (i.e., more database, less paper). I not only am interested in how information is collected and disseminated, but I am also interested in information in general.
In one of my previous classes, I became particularly interested in the divide of information between groups of people. This could be a class divide (rich/poor) or a racial divide (people of color/Caucasian) or a country divide (United States/South Africa), but I am interested in the disparity between any and all of these divides. (The technical term for this is “digital divide.”) One of the big questions I quickly came up with myself was, “Even if we digitize what we consider everything, how much are we actually marginalizing the part of the world that relies on oral history or oral storytelling? [These still exist, by the way.] How much history and cultural richness are we actually losing by digitizing so much, but ignoring so much a the same time.” And perhaps the most concerning to me was one evening when I turned to my husband and said, “I just realized that when we speak of digitization of information, we are speaking from a mainly West-centric view, which means we are largely ignoring and losing how many cultures and worlds of stories and histories and mythology by our rushing ahead of a world that still has too many areas that are far, far behind our digital egocentrism. What are we losing that we don’t even know we’ve lost? Will future generations think we’re a more homogenized world than we truly are, because our digital focus is so centralized?” Yes, I mourn for the unmourned, I suppose. (I also am viscerally saddened each time I learn of a language dying with a single person who was the last native speaker of that language. We have then lost something we never quite understand and can never retrieve.)
I was greatly interested in this article (preserved via PDF below), then, that I ran into earlier this week: “5 Myths About the ‘Information Age’.” I was most happy to see numbers three and four listed, because they also readily tie into the digital divide. Anyone who has searched for any bit of information online without finding it can attest to the fact that not everything is online. And, as mentioned above, there are vast swaths of information not found online, because those cultures or communities are not engulfed in a race to digitize their beings. In a society where it seems everyone has a computer in his/her pocket, it might be hard to understand or remember that not every country has the riches of technology that we do.
And number four. Oh, number four! My first big paper in my MLIS program was on my new love: the digital divide. Again, it’s hard to understand that not even everyone in the United States has access to broadband services. And I don’t mean solely because they can’t afford it. Oh, no, not at all! I mean, quite literally, because broadband is not even available where they are. Before I moved up to Duluth, broadband wasn’t remotely possible in the area where I lived, which was the largest city in a three- or four-county area. It was still years after I left that town before anything other than dial-up (yep, “simply” DSL or cable even) was available. In fact, in the small village where I lived the longest while growing up, broadband service only recently became available. (Are you interested in the state of broadband in the United States? Well, so is the government. Here’s the latest report from August 2012, which includes a link to a map showing the latest data about areas with and without broadband. Yes, there really are a lot of areas without it. Surprising, eh?) This is a big reason that I signed us up a few years ago to participate in the FCC/SamKnows program that measures broadband service: existing broadband should be at the speeds stated and there needs to be an expansion of broadband available at higher speeds to rural areas in the United States. We are lagging behind the world in this area (and in high-speed public transportation, but that’s another gripe for another time), and it’s sad how little most people think about this problem, which is to the detriment of rural education and literacy.
While many of us think we’re living in the “information age,” we’re actually in a fairly small bubble of people who have access to vast amounts of (but not remotely all) information at our fingertips. We’re a privileged group, and I think more people need to recognize this fact and push for greater digital literacy and equality.
Edited to add:This is an interesting breakdown of the latest Pew survey of home broadband access from the Librarian in Black. The survey includes smartphone use, although if one reads through digital divide literacy, one notices that there also tends to be a divide of people who only have a smartphone. Most especially, this divide has shown that knowing how to appropriately search and find reliable information is more prevalent among people with devices such as a home computer or a laptop and less among people with only smartphones. And as the Swiss Army Librarian mentions and as I ran into regularly into my digital divide research, there is a small subset of users who choose to not have broadband access of any kind, and those users must also be accounted for.
