Time--Space--Continuum

Topics of Discussion

Dear Diary,

My mentee and I have the absolute Best-est conversations. We discuss everything from the perils of "pre-approved credit cards" and "ghostmen" and "time space continuums."
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The Present or `Now':

*Relativity's view of time as one part of a 4D continuum requires the notion of times passage to be an illusion:

The physical view of time is one where a 4D spacetime continuum exists as one entity. Thus, our everyday notion that time passes or is in flux is an illusion. While this is difficult to understand, or accept, there are numerous examples where our conscious perceptions differ from physical reality. For example, perception of color differs slightly from individual to individual, however, the physical interpretation of color is simply the wavelength of light emitted or reflected by an object.

*Our inability to perceive all of spacetime is signified by the boundary of time marked by the 'now':

Of course the key moment in our conscious perception of time is the present or now. The present marks the boundary being the past, which we have memory of, and the future which we have little or no knowledge. In a spacetime diagram, the present is indicated by a line horizontal to the spatial axis. As time passes or flows, we represent this by moving the present line upward at a rate of one sec per sec. For human minds, the present line is not perfectly thin. Our perception of time is fuzzy at about the 1/16 of a sec interval. For this reason, single images can be strung together at speeds greater than 1/16 sec to create the illusion of motion and time in videos.

*Memory allows us access to the past, but knowledge of the future is very limited:

Its not uncommon for our common sense view of the Universe to differ from the more exacting view presented by physics. The psychologically manifestation of physical events is what makes up our perception of the world around us. Take, for example, the old riddle of when a tree falls in a forest and noone is there to hear it, does it make a sound? A physics response to this riddle is that the falling tree does indeed make a wave of compression of air. But it takes a psychological view to explain that the compression of air on a human ear produces the perception of sound in the brain.
http://zebu.uoregon.edu/~js/21st_century_science/lectures/lec18.html

Ugh...Get Off Me!

Dear Diary,

My mentee and my adopted-mentee went to the Rec Center yesterday to blow off some steam. We had a pretty stressful day dealing with some unpleasantries.
I think it is vital that young ladies leaving home for the first time be completely aware of the dangers out in the big bad world and more importantly how to effectively deal with troubling situations.

So we went to workout to build muscles to enable them to defend themselves. We played B-Ball and they got to witness my skills, and my signature move when I get the rebound, I hug the ball and scream:

"Ugh...get off me!"

As a little girl growing up in "Da Hood" I watched a lot of street ball. That animated reaction to getting the ball always tickled me and basically was the only thing I remember about playing basketball.

The game with me and my mentees was funny...
I still don't see why the game itself is fun?

Naturally now I am sore. But I have not laughed that hard in a long time.
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Today I gathered the students after getting their NetIDs and passwords, so they could have one-on-one sessions on how to access Webmail.

Since most people are at ALA, I have been checking on the students to make sure they are alright. There were no concerns, other than one student used a librarian's bike to get around campus, but that bike was stolen. Doh! The worker feels so badly but it was not their fault.

More than a Notion

Dear Diary,

I am pretty much one of a very few librarians who are not at the Annual American Library Association Conference this week. As such, I have been making a concentrated effort to check in with our library student workers to make sure things are going smoothly and see if there are any concerns they have.

As a result I am pleased that I have because in informal passing conversations with a few of the young ladies I have noticed some disconcerting patterns related to their safety. Some travel to adjoining campuses on foot or on bikes and one was followed by a "creepy guy" trying to hit on her. And I am not sure what route she was on but at times the path can be a bit secluded (by trees) and since it is summer there are fewer people about, in general.

Other young ladies have been in uncomfortable situations or been forced into unpleasant but "seemingly innocuous" conversations with male employees in areas that don't have a lot of people nearby.

Since this is their first job, I have contacted the administrators of this program to see if we can have a formal "Safety Tips" discussion with the student workers. This is useful information for their future, especially since they will be going away from home for the first time and so we will see.

Also, I am pleased that I have contributed to the quelling of a potential student walkout. Due to extenuating circumstances, the students pay will be about a week late...so I was able to offer explanations and reassure the students that these things happen, but "bonus" they will have more money when they do get paid...in theory. Who knows how payroll handles these things. The important thing is to listen to any frustrations. Venting can be therapeutic.

I have learned how important it is to balance worker needs and management limitations. Also with the safety issues, I have had to walk a fine line between earning and maintaining worker confidence and trust while balancing the universities need to be aware of potentially problematic actions.

Also, I am thoroughly enjoying my mentoring. I couldn't ask for a better mentee. I am learning a lot from her, as well. We are so much alike. Not only are we both absolutely beautiful, incredibly intelligent and socially aware, but we have a similar outlook on life, overall. Yippee! Great experience.

First Come First Served

Dear Diary,

I worked at the Reference Desk for an hour today and reviewed some forms with my Coll. Dev. manager. We were discussing some exciting new books and she informed me that I can request that as soon as the book is processed to have it given to me to read. Yippee.

So this whole Collection Development thingy does have its advantages. Just like the commercial said, "Membership has its privileges" or something like that.
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Additionally, I am working with a co-worker who wants me to share my ahem "expertise" on blogs with her and some people she is on a community listserv with. She started the listserv and thinks that a blog may be the next natural progression. I naturally am more than willing to share what knowledge I have, however limited, on the wonderful world of Blogging.

I located these three as samples to show her listserv to give them a better idea of the possibilities:

http://mcno.org/

http://olyblog.net/blog/epersonae/eastside-neighborhood-association-meeting

http://peoplegetready.blogspot.com/2006/06/neighborhood-planning-rules-to-be.html
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*AND SPEAKING OF BLOGS....
HOMELESS PEOPLE BLOGGING????

By Jacob Ogles
Jun, 22, 2006

FILLMORE, California -- Happy Ivy doesn't have a bathroom or a kitchen in the bus he calls home. He does, however, have a video-editing station.

Living in a squalid, Woodstock-style bus parked in a Fillmore, California, orange grove, the 53-year-old homeless man charges a power generator from a utility shed and uses Wi-Fi from a nearby access point. From this humble camp, he's managed to run a 'round-the-clock internet television studio, organize grassroots political efforts, record a full-length album and write his autobiography, all while subsisting on oranges and avocados.

He claims he created one of the first handheld computer scanners and played a major part in the data transmission industry in the early 1990s. "I've always been trying to stay up on internet technology," Ivy said.

Ivy isn't the only homeless person who makes it a priority to keep gadgets handy even when a cooked meal is hard to come by.

Many of those now living without a permanent roof over their heads have cell phones in their pockets or laptop computers at their hips. While people living in shelters and alleys have found it difficult to cross social divides, the digital divide seems to disappear on the streets. Nearly all homeless people have e-mail addresses, according to Michael Stoops, director of the National Coalition for the Homeless. "More have e-mail than have post office boxes," Stoops said. "The internet has been a big boon to the homeless."

Helping the homeless get e-mail addresses has been a priority for years at shelters across the country. And in an age when most every public library in the nation offers internet access, the net has proven a perfect communication tool for those without a firm real-world address.
"Because of technology, people are able to keep in contact with their families," Stoops said. And perhaps most importantly, they are able to get some footing in society regardless of how removed from it they may feel.

Terri Hellerich's connection to the information superhighway is all that made life livable on the streets. "It kept me sane and provided my income," she said. Hellerich found herself homeless after a landlord in West Sacramento kicked her out and kept her belongings to make up for a debt. She didn't have a change of clothes, but she did have an old cell phone that she could use to stay online and check her inbox.

Hellerich slept on benches but she frequented a women's shelter with a cluster of internet-connected computers used mostly by the children who arrived at the safe house with their mothers. She started blogging and conducting a business. As an independent internet marketer, she was able to maintain bank accounts, nurse existing client connections and forge new business relationships. The business brought in only about $100 a month, but that was enough to help get her life back on track.

Hellerich now rents a room in Northern California, and she's bought an old computer and broadened her online presence with MySpace and Flickr pages. But she lives in fear that at any point, circumstances could throw her back into the urban wilderness.

And while many homeless people are quick to talk about the empowering elements of the internet, experts emphasize that technology won't erase the aspects of one's personal life that put them on the streets in the first place. "People believe that information is power, and it is sometimes, but it is still a complicated system," Stoops said. It is rare for technology alone to pull someone out of the cycle of habitual homelessness.

But if the internet can't provide the homeless with an out, it can at least provide them with an outlet. Stoops knows numerous cases where modern technology has afforded valuable opportunities to the homeless.

Las Vegas vagrant Kevin Barbieux runs a blog that's brought him a dose of digital stardom. He's been writing The Homeless Guy since 2002. "It's the only real success I've had in my life," he said.

His site isn't the only one on the web with entries about life on the street. WanderingScribe features the ramblings of a homeless woman in England. In Peoria, Willie York has a site devoted to giving advice on street life. And other online efforts have had mainstream attention in the past few years, from New York to California.

Barbieux's site garners 12,000 to 15,000 hits a month. He attributes that to the storytelling ethic of his posts, which detail not only his own travails, but those of colleagues in shelters and city parks. He also comments on the public's perceptions of the homeless, and the factors that force so many of his compatriots into a holding pattern of poverty. "The work I do on my blog is geared toward telling, not just my story, but the story of every homeless person," he said. "If it's just about me then its effect will be limited. I really want to change the world."

If it changes his own life a bit more that would be nice, too. But for now, Barbieux, sans residence, does his blogging in one-hour stints at a public library terminal. He had a Wi-Fi-equipped laptop donated to him through his site, but the machine was damaged and Barbieux has no resources to replace it.

Las Vegas is a great city for Wi-Fi, Barbieux said: You can connect from outside most any hotel or casino, and the homeless keep each other informed about the best hot spots. Technology has helped him collect donations through a PayPal button on his web page instead of having to panhandle.

When he first got online in 1997, he saw a world where one could interact with people without awkward looks and hold conversations without difficult social interactions.

"I have social anxiety issues, and being able to communicate with folks without having an attack was great, and I discovered that I actually had a personality that people liked when I chatted with them," he said. When friends at an internet discussion group suggested he start a blog in 2002, Yahoo tagged it one of the top 10 "new and notable" sites on the web. Suddenly he felt he had the world's attention. "I could be doing other things with my time," he said, "but I can't think of anything else that could be so vital."

Like Barbieux, Ivy hopes to change the world through the power of the web. Living with his wife in his $400 About Us Bus for the past three years, Ivy has driven much of California trying to raise awareness of the homeless, or as he prefers to call them, the home-free.

A head injury made it impossible for Ivy to hold a steady job, he said. But he has embarked on several tech efforts. He claims he helped establish the company which would become Omnifax, though he never saw a dime from the effort and lost touch with his business partners. Omnifax is now a division of Xerox, which did not return a call for a comment.

From his bus, he broadcast the 24-hour internet television show About Us Now in the early days of streaming video. Showcasing music concerts on the beach and offering a glimpse of his Bedouin lifestyle, Ivy believes his was the first successful internet television network. Though he doesn't maintain the show anymore, he still works on internet video -- for most of this year, he's following the United Souls of Awareness, a group of homeless artists embarking on a walk across the country.

Ivy insists he's homeless by choice: He was never comfortable living in apartments. "Walking out the door and seeing everybody had the same door, it would make me get violent, to tell you the truth," he said. But he hopes his efforts online will raise awareness of the plight of the involuntarily homeless community, whose numbers skyrocketed with the Reagan administration policies of the 1980s.

Having a presence online can be a problem. Hellerich deleted most blog posts from her homeless days when a prospective employer Googled her and found the page (it cost her the job). People have contacted Ivy, asking why he can't hold a job but can play the guitar every day. He responds that many days he can't play the guitar, but his vagabond lifestyle is his choice.
While homeless people lurk in the shadows of the physical world, Stoops sees many of them stepping into the virtual sunshine.

"I think people often try to hide the fact they are homeless because they are ashamed of it," Stoops said. "But more and more, others are sort of coming out of the closet. You see writers and poets. There is really a niche of homeless writers now, and I am amazed at that. This is the hook to get people to listen."
http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,71153-0.html?tw=wn_index_1

PALNI visit to ND for IDR information

Dear Diary,

Today we hosted members of PALNI (Private Academic Library Network of Indiana)
http://home.palni.edu/CivicSpace0813/

We demostrated our Institutional Digital Repository http://www.library.nd.edu/idr/

I am pretty impressed by our project to date.

Juneteenth

Do you know what Juneteenth is?

It is the name for a holiday celebrating June 19, 1865, the day when Union soldiers arrived in Texas and spread the word that President Lincoln had delivered his Emancipation Procalamation.

News traveled so slowly in those days that Texas did not hear of Lincoln's Proclamation, which he gave on January 1, 1863, until more than two years after it was issued!

The proclamation declared "that all persons held as slaves" within the rebellious states "are, and henceforward shall be free." Thus, the Emancipation Proclamation was limited in many ways. It applied only to states that had seceded from the Union, leaving slavery untouched in the loyal border states. It also expressly exempted parts of the Confederacy that had already come under Northern control. Most important, the freedom it promised depended upon Union military victory.

Although Juneteenth has been informally celebrated each year since 1865, it wasn't until June 3, 1979, that Texas became the first state to proclaim Emancipation Day (Juneteenth) an official state holiday. But it is much more than a holiday. Juneteenth has become a day for African Americans to celebrate their freedom, culture, and achievements. It is a day for all Americans to celebrate African American history and rejoice in their freedom.

Web & Weblog Class

Dear Diary,

We had a fun class. Even though we have the dreaded after lunch time slot, we managed to keep the energy level up and the laughs continual. We ran through the interactive tutorial I found and my co-resident walked the class through the process to create their very first Blogs...AAAAWWWW

Also the students are all very bright and energetic. They are adjusting to the 8-5 workday better than I expected. Our student worker is sharp and has already proven that she is dedicated and a hard worker. In fact, we had to strongly discourage her from working on our collection development assignments from home. I admire the desire but there are strict laws governing compensation for hourly workers.

The mentoring is going great. I immediately connected with my mentee. She is fab!

During the web class they were trying to come up with names for their blogs...and I was amazed that no one took me up on my ideas which included:

"I am too sexy for myself"
"I am too hot to work in a library"

or the method you are supposed to use as your Porn Name; which is the street name that you grew up on and the name of your first pet. Ha!

I am new to this, "structured" mentoring thing so hopefully I'll come up with more appropriate options in the future. Oh well...

One of the students already created his blog and it looks very promising:
http://iubboy2006.blogspot.com/2006/06/hello-fellow-mammals.html

I am especially amazed because for the past 3 days I have been unable to add images to my blog, but he did it.

MLK

MLK papers to find home at Morehouse College

June 30 auction, expected to bring up to $30M, is canceled

ATLANTA, Georgia (CNN) -- The children of the Rev. Martin Luther King Jr. will receive an undisclosed amount of money from an anonymous group of people for about 10,000 manuscripts and books belonging to the civil rights icon, Atlanta Mayor Shirley Franklin's office said Friday.

A planned June 30 auction will be canceled. Sotheby's auction house had expected to command between $15 million and $30 million for the documents.

The papers include drafts of King's "I Have a Dream" speech, his 1964 Nobel Peace Prize acceptance address and a printed version of the "Letter from Birmingham Jail."
King, who won the Nobel Prize at age 35, was fatally shot April 4, 1968.

Franklin's office said only that the group purchasing the papers represent the interests of Atlanta. King was an Atlanta native and both he and his wife Coretta Scott King, who died earlier this year, are buried in the city.

The papers will be housed at Atlanta's historically black Morehouse College, King's alma mater.
"This is a wonderful outcome for this collection" said Dexter King, one of King's sons and the chief executive officer of his estate.

"I know my mother would have been happy to see the collection housed permanently in Atlanta, which always meant so much to her and to our family."

The public exhibition of the King collection will continue at Sotheby's in New York until June 29th, at the request of Dexter King, according to Sotheby's.

"Sotheby's is thrilled that the papers of Dr. King, one of the greatest world leaders, are going to the city he called home" said the auction house's vice chairman, David Redden, in a Sotheby's news release.

"This historic archive is of extraordinary significance and the King Estate and Sotheby's had hoped - and worked hard to ensure -- that its disposition would permit access to the public and to scholars. This has now been achieved."

The collection also contains more than 7,000 documents written by King, including a college examination on the Bible from 1946, his earliest surviving theological writing, and papers he was working on just before his assassination in 1968. http://edition.cnn.com/2006/US/06/23/mlk.papers/

King Archives Will Be Sold at Auction

Dear Diary,

In our collection development training we learned about the controversy surrounding the sale of Betty Shabazz' letters after her death. So this seemed of great importance:

June 9, 2006
King Archives Will Be Sold at Auction
By SHAILA DEWAN

ATLANTA, June 8 — After years of trying to sell the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.'s archives to a library or university, the King family will instead put them up for auction on June 30, Sotheby's announced Thursday.

The sale, expected to bring $15 million to $30 million, will take place exactly five months after the death of Coretta Scott King, Dr. King's widow, who was keenly interested in finding an institutional home for the papers.

The buyer will determine the future accessibility of the papers. Many were housed for years in the archives of the nonprofit King Center in Atlanta, but the papers considered the most interesting by scholars, including a trove of handwritten sermons, were found in Mrs. King's basement and have not been widely studied.

"I'm really on tenterhooks about it," said Taylor Branch, the author of a three-volume biography of Dr. King. "Because it'll wind up in a library or it'll wind up dispersed."

David N. Redden, a vice chairman of Sotheby's, said the papers would be sold as a single lot to help ensure that they find a public home. "It really is a challenge to the institutions of America to muster up and buy it," he said.

Mrs. King had tried in vain to sell the papers, first to the Library of Congress for $20 million, then to a variety of other institutions, Mr. Redden said. The Library of Congress sale fell through when questions were raised by lawmakers about the price. The papers were appraised at $30 million by Sotheby's in the late 1990's.

They include 7,000 items in Dr. King's own hand, including a draft of his Nobel Prize acceptance speech, an annotated copy of "Letter From Birmingham Jail" and a program from the Ebenezer Baptist Church in Atlanta on which Dr. King scribbled notes for a speech about John F. Kennedy's assassination.

A blue spiral notebook contains a statement read to an Atlanta judge about why Dr. King chose to stay in jail after his arrest during a sit-in, and a note to the women arrested with him praising them for their faith in nonviolent methods, according to a news release from Sotheby's.

Also among the papers are letters and telegrams from presidents and civil rights leaders, an exam "blue book" from Morehouse College containing what is described as Dr. King's earliest surviving theological writing, and a collection of books with his handwritten scribbles and critiques.

The handwritten sermons and a collection of index cards reveal a less familiar side of Dr. King, that of clergyman and pastor to a flock, said Clayborne Carson, director of the Martin Luther King Jr. Research and Education Institute at Stanford University.

"What we can see from those kinds of materials is the way in which his religious identity shaped his identity as a civil rights leader," Dr. Carson said.

There is also a collection of ephemera, including flight coupons, receipts, and even, Mr. Redden said, the deposit slip for the check from the Nobel Foundation.

Mr. Redden said he had been through much of the collection with Mrs. King before her death, and that she had only to glance at a document to recall the circumstances of its creation.
Archivists and historians agreed that the collection was highly coveted. But some said the price was far out of reach.

"I would be stunned if they could command that sort of price, and I would be even more stunned if they command that from a library," said Brian Schottlaender, president of the Association of Research Libraries. But, he added: "How do you value the Martin Luther King papers? Good Lord, he was such a significant figure."

Kathleen E. Bethel, the African-American studies librarian at Northwestern University, agreed that Dr. King was a giant, even compared with other civil rights movement leaders. But she said that only the oldest and wealthiest institutions might hope to buy the papers, and that there was no obvious "angel" who might step forward to donate the money. "No one comes to mind," she said.

Mr. Redden countered that the papers were worth far more than $15 million, the low end of the expected range. For comparison, he said, some 450 pages of manuscripts by James Joyce were sold two years ago to an Irish library for more than $11 million.

The papers are owned by the King estate, not the King Center, a struggling nonprofit organization founded by Mrs. King that has received federal money over the years to catalog the papers and to make them available to scholars. The King Center houses the papers of the Southern Christian Leadership Conference, which Dr. King helped found.

Another group of about 83,000 documents — a third of Dr. King's personal letters and manuscripts — were donated to Boston University by Dr. King in 1964. Mrs. King tried unsuccessfully to get them back.

None of the four King children responded to requests for comment on the sale. Since the death of their mother, they have also explored the idea of selling the King Center to the National Park Service, which administers the historic district that includes the center, Ebenezer Baptist Church, and the birth home of Dr. King.

Interactive Tutorial

Dear Diary,

I attended a really fun lunch with our Director today. There are monthly informal lunches paid for by our Director wherein everyone introduces themselves and informs the group of the current events in each person's department. That is a great idea since people who do not work in other departments may miss out on valuable information. We also had a productive lunch. We discussed blogs as a tool for the library.

I gave them the link from our May Institute that shows a sample library catalog in the form of a blog. This is the software behind the catalog/blog combination: http://maisonbisson.com/blog/post/11133/

I have to discuss web page layout and design with our High School students. I found this really great interactive tutorial:http://library.albany.edu/imc/webdesign/#define

But as always you need a contingency plan so I created a handout based on the website. Ideally, I plan to demo the site as some portions are beter understood if viewed online.

Below is the text from my handout.

Layout & Design
online interactive tutorial http://library.albany.edu/imc/webdesign/

Identify the Purpose of the Site
A website may have several purposes. So determine the primary/ secondary purpose(s).
o This site is meant to be informative.

Identifying Who Will Visit the Site
If visitors may log in from home, design the pages for users with slow modem connections.
Ø Visitors using dialup access and modems.
Ø People between the ages of 18 and 24.
Ø Mom? (Keep it clean) :)

Proximity
Proximity refers to the distance between elements and how they relate to one another, including text, navigation, etc. Closer together have a stronger relationship than elements farther apart.

Alignment
Alignment can enhance or detract from the appearance of a web page. But in addition, it can significantly affect the readability of material on a page.

Repetition
All pages on a web site don’t have to be the same; there should be similarities for a consistent look and feel. This consistency is one of the things that help make a site easy to navigate.

Contrast
An example of contrast is the color of text against a background. It is easier to read text that contrasts highly with the background.

Navigation
In general, the styles are identified by position and orientation on a page. They include:
Top, Left Side, Right Side, Bottom, Horizontal or Vertical

Fonts
Text is displayed by browsers using the fonts available in the viewer's computer. Most PCs have Arial and Times New Roman. Macintosh computers usually have Helvetica and Times.

Images
Images are displayed by browsers differently, especially if animated. Should add to the site.

Page Size and Layout
Of the biggest challenges for designer is the variability of the screen sizes. Deciding on how wide a web page should be is based on several factors. Most computer monitors are set for a width of 800 pixels. Older monitors and ones smaller than 15", have a width of 640 pixels. Large monitors have widths of 1024 pixels or larger. One of the biggest decisions when creating a web page is choosing the most appropriate size for design.

Tables
Tables are used to control the width of material presented on a web page. Table width can be specified in either percent or pixels. Specifying table width in percent change the table size depending on what the viewer's screen size is.

Browser Question
There are several browsers one the Web. One is much more popular than the others.
* Images look funny on AOL.
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Top Tips to Annoy and Insult Your Web Site Visitors

"This site best viewed with ___"
Sites should be designed to work right on all.

"Under Construction"
Just annoying. You'd rather aggravate them than finish the site.
*Remember, people take detours around roads that are under construction.

Background music
Takes too long to download may not hear it, and it may sound bad.

Horizontal scrolling
Avoid it, people will click out rather than use arrows to scroll.

Animated GIFs
Take longer to download.

Scrolling text or marquees
Some browsers don't run the JavaScript that makes them work. Avoid the tag, it is proprietary and doesn't work with all browsers.
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Other Online Resources
*Webmonkey at http://www.webmonkey.com/
*Dynamic Drive at http://www.dynamicdrive.com/