The Distant Librarian

The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics

I just finished Amy Orben's excellent article, The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics, and recommend it.

I thought it was going to be simply an acknowledgement and catalogue of the fact that yes, we have seen this before, with radio, comics, TV, video games, etc., and while it does include that, it does an excellent job of explaining why we keep seeing what appear to be the exact same types of studies, and why politicians keep calling for inquiries into the latest thing that appears to be corrupting our youth.

A quote from the section describing the reinvention of the wheel, "In none of these cases does evidence ameliorate society's concerns; rather, the focus of concerns shifts to a new technology as society simply moves on." :-(

Orben does suggest a couple of solutions to breaking this cycle, but it really doesn't seem to me that either will come to pass, so hop on the train.

The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics

Orben, A. (2020). The Sisyphean Cycle of Technology Panics. Perspectives on Psychological Science, 15(5), 1143-1157. https://doi.org/10.1177/1745691620919372

With whom did Danielle Smith actually consult on her transgender rights policy?

In January 2024, Alberta Premier Danielle Smith announced "sweeping changes to Alberta's student gender identity, sports and surgery policies" aimed at the province's transgender community. According to news reports, "Alberta’s premier says she’s had many conversations with members of the trans community before and since drafting a suite of policy proposals dealing with transgender rights." I could find no mentions from members of the transgender community of such consultations, so I submitted a FOIP request to the government. My first request was, apparently, too narrow, so upon advice from several readers I resubmitted the following request, which yielded a result:

Several news sites, but specifically CTV at https://globalnews.ca/news/10281751/alberta-says-it-consulted-widely-in-drafting-controversial-transgender-rights-policy/ have reported that Premier Danielle Smith "consulted widely" before announcing policy changes affecting transgender and non-binary youth and adults on January 31, 2024.

I am seeking all documents, including correspondence, that describe or make reference to the planning of that consultation, including but not limited to references to parties, organizations and individuals with whom the Premier met on this issue, including dates, locations and how long each meeting lasted.

Timeframe: May 29, 2023 to Feb 16, 2024

Attached is the response, which shows a single, 30-minute meeting, with one person whose name has been redacted.

EC000-2024-G-12 Applicant Copy (PDF)

As mentioned in that CTV report, Premier Smith also said,

“It’s not a single voice and it’s not a single perspective.” Danielle Smith said during a Feb. 5 press conference in Ottawa. But it was one individual’s experience in particular, Smith says, that prompted the province to take action.

Yet my FOIP request suggests it was, in fact, a single voice that persuaded Danielle Smith to announce this ideological policy.

Can anyone shed light on that Organizer: MDS Final line? Is that an Outlook thing, or is it possibly related to the meeting? It looks like the former, but Google doesn't seem to think so...

#TRAHR

Seeking Alberta FOIP advice

I recently put in a FOIP request to the Alberta Executive Council and got a pretty quick response that no records exist (EC000-2024-G-10 closure letter).

I asked for clarification, and received,

"Based on your very specific request for a list, a thorough search was undertaken to locate the records, and it was discovered that no such list (record) exists with Executive Council. FOIP is unable to interpret results of a search other than convey the results."

That wording makes me think something does exist, but I have to re-word, or ask a different department. Anyone have any advice?

My original request was,

Several news sites, but specifically CTV at https://globalnews.ca/news/10281751/alberta-says-it-consulted-widely-in-drafting-controversial-transgender-rights-policy/ have reported that Premier Danielle Smith "consulted widely" before announcing policy changes affecting transgender and non-binary youth and adults on January 31, 2024.

I am requesting a list of all parties, organizations and individuals with whom the Premier met on this issue, including dates, locations and how long each meeting lasted.

Timeframe: May 29, 2023 to Feb 16, 2024
Eliminations: duplicate records, draft records, email records which are duplicated in the final longest string, records subject to solicitor/client or litigation privilege, records containing third party business information, and records containing third party personal information.

Should I not have asked for a "list"?

Some personal 2023 statistics

Not quite as intimate as Brian's, but according to the sites with whom I share my info, I read 37 books with 13,262 pages last year, and I cycled and ran 5,689 kms (3,535 miles), not including my e-bike commutes. I plan for 2024 to be significantly bigger on the cycling front, so stay tuned. I know you don't care, but I still use this site as an auxiliary brain :-) You should be able to click to embiggen either of these infographics.

 

Vaccine Injury Support Program - Statistics - not working in Wayback?

I've been using Visualping.io to watch for changes on the Vaccine Injury Support Program - Statistics page since I became aware of it, and I thought I was sending changes to the Wayback Machine as well, but after today's update I realized that when I visit the snapshot on Wayback, the captured page claims "No statistics available" rather than showing the actual content of the page. Anyone know why that might be? That's the case for all the captures, which makes them not useful at all.

Fortunately, Visualping keeps some captures, so we can still see what changed for the most recent update.

The most interesting figure that jumped out at me is that the average award is up, from $55,585.54 to $65,006.95

I'll submit an ATIP request to see what interesting information can be dug out (how many of these claims are related to COVID vaccines being the one that springs to my mind. Anyone have other specific suggestions?)

New Artificial Intelligence LibGuide

I wish I'd put it together, but it was my colleague, Bronte Chiang, who just released this fantastic LibGuide on Artificial Intelligence. It's not a hard-science guide, but

"...has been created for students and instructors to explore how to responsibly and ethically use AI in their work. There is information about how to critically engage with AI tools, examples and further reading on how students and instructors can use AI tools in their work, and information about current AI news, such as Chat GPT."

Main content areas include, AI Literacy, considerations for Students, for Instructors, ChatGPT, AI Art Tools, and the good old list of local Books and Databases. It promises to grow, and is well-worth your time to poke around!

Intellectual and unreasonable - AI and male librarians

I've been poking a bit at the multitude of AI image-generation tools, and just ran across this tool that allows one to do a little exploring of the algorithmic bias that's pretty much baked-in, but otherwise not really visible. I learned about it via this article in Vice, and thanks to @ResearchBuzz. Here's what I found:

First, according to Stable Diffusion, all librarians must appear against a background of books. Second, unsurprisingly, the vast majority of librarians present as female. And third, there are only two adjectives in this tool that will return pictures with a majority of male-presenting librarians, "intellectual" and "unreasonable". On the left of each of the images below are the default returns for the profession of "librarian", and on the right are the returns including the above adjectives. Click through to embiggen.

Intellectual Librarians

 

Unreasonable Librarians

Climate change books for kids

I'm nearly done listening to an episode of What On Earth, from the CBC, which talks about a couple of books on climate change that have been written for kids. I know my teenage daughter is anxious about the future of our planet, and can only imagine it's even more acute for younger kids. You can hear the authors reading from the books, which should give you an idea if they're something you and your kids would like/understand. Unfortunately, I don't see a listing of the actual titles, so here they are:

• The Lorax (of course!)
• Coco's Fire: Changing Climate Anxiety into Climate Action
• The Tantrum That Saved The World

Mentioned in passing, 20 Canadian books for kids to read for Earth Day 2022.

Hey @cbcwhatonearth would you consider upping your game on show notes, please?

Wonder Tools - New ways to record conversations

Because of my role supporting qualitative data analysis at MPOW, I'm always on the lookout for new transcription tools (see my current list here). The latest issue of the Wonder Tools newsletter introduces several new-to-me automated tools to record conversations. As a bonus, Jeremy includes many links to StoryCorps resources on how to improve interviewing techniques.

I haven't actually used any of the apps mentioned in this issue yet (though I've played around with Otter.ai). The biggest concern on my campus is with the security and confidentiality of any given transcription service. What's the most secure or rigorous service you're aware of?

Under the Influence: Long Overdue: The Creative Boom of Library Marketing

One of the most well-written podcasts (oh, and I guess it's a radio show too) out there is Terry O'Reilly's Under The Influence. Terry tells stories of how marketing works (and sometimes doesn't), and it's always an entertaining and fascinating half-hour. His most recent episode, Season 11, episode 3, is Long Overdue: The Creative Boom of Library Marketing. If you want to listen online, the CBC site is probably best. If you want to subscribe to the podcast (and you should), that's now over here.

From the show notes,

This week, we look at the ways libraries market themselves. If you think libraries are quiet, you’ve got another thing coming. We’ll talk about a library video series that played like a TV cop show - and - we’ll look at library wars - when libraries battle each other on social media.

Very frustrating though that on none of the sites affiliated with this show do complete transcripts with links appear. :-( He mentions an epic twitter fight between the Toronto Public Library and the San Francisco Public Library that occurred when the Raptors were playing for the NBA championship against the Golden State Warriors, and he also details a bunch of innovative YouTube videos.

So I did some searching for you, and here are the relevant links:

• Twitter fight
• Kawhi's personalized library card
• Central Rappahannock Library's Libraries Will Survive video
• UMD "Gangnam Style" Parody 강남 스타일 (Official) video
• BYU Library Research Rescue videos
• NYPL Black Friday
• Johnson County Library Trucks
• Save Our Libraries campaign

Such good stuff!

 

 

5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Races Without Coding

One of my more popular posts from the past few years was Thoughts on building my first bar chart race with Flourish, so HT to @ResearchBuzz, who recently pointed to this post on Hongkiat: 5 Tools to Create Bar Chart Race Without Coding. They mention Flourish, but there are four more you might explore. They missed Tableau, though. Lots of fun choices!

Linked data types in Excel

Apparently parts of this have been around for a couple of years, but it just came on my radar last week with this blog post.

Did you know that Excel can do lookups from providers like Wolfram, Bing, and Power BI on a bunch of different data types? Only available with a Live365 (and/or institutional?) account though, but that covers MPOW. Here's the overview page at Microsoft.

A partial list (you provide the first part, Excel will return data on the second):

• Food: calories, carbohydrates, fats, vitamins, nutrients, etc.
• Exercise: exercise types and calories burned.
• Locations: zip codes, economic data, airports, schools, forests, etc.
• Universities: graduation rates, tuition, student body, etc.
• Chemistry: elements, compounds, and minerals.
• Space: planets, moons, satellites, supernovas, space missions, etc.
• Movies: actors, characters, directors, release dates, poster art, etc.
• And More: music, plants, animal breeds, famous people, languages, etc.

I was going to do a little screencast, but there are good ones already out there.

You can even define your own data types.

I'm not entirely sure what I'll do with this, but at least now that I know about it, I'll keep my thinking cap on!

Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta

Filed under stuff no citizen should have to do, today I went through pages archived by the Wayback Machine in order to provide a patron with historical R-Value data for COVID-19 for the Province of Alberta. This information is updated weekly (since mid-December, 2020) at https://www.alberta.ca/covid-19-alberta-data.aspx, but for some reason the Government has chosen not to make previously-reported numbers available. Anywhere.

Here are the Historical COVID-19 R-Values for Alberta in a Google Spreadsheet. I'll continue to manually update.

 

That cool picture from the cover of The Data Journalism Handbook

The Data Journalism Handbook has been updated from its original 2012 edition, and is available to purchase or for free download from the publisher. When I first tweeted about this a month ago, @Gersart wondered who was responsible for the artwork on the cover. Frustratingly, there was no information about it in the publication, and my email to the publisher went unanswered.

So I clipped the image and threw it into TinEye and was able to identify it as a photograph from a 2012 exhibition by Sarah Sze entitled Fixed Points Finding a Home.

See also, and this YouTube video.

Bounegru, L. and J. Gray (eds.), The Data Journalism Handbook: Towards a Critical Data Practice.
Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2021

A couple of quick updates - FOIP and Twitter Academic

Just a couple of quick updates.

First, in December, I posted about my initial experience with Alberta's new(?) FOIP process. And then I actually submitted that request on January 26. So the fact that I was never notified that my submission was incomplete is a strike, for sure. But on February 16 I did get my response, so they easily made the 30-day deadline. Download AE000-2021-G-9 Applicant Copy. As you can see, it's a PDF, not the CSV I requested. Not a big deal in this case, but had there been lots of information it might've been, so another strike. I actually emailed back and forth a couple of times, because I didn't realize that both of my requests were being satisfied on that single page. Ultimately this response clicked with me:

I can confirm that the record provided to you in response to your FOIP request identifies all contracts awarded by Advanced Education to McKinsey and Company under the heading “Contract Number”. The list of reports finished by McKinsey and Company is identified under the heading “Finished Reports”, which indicates “None to date”.

If you are not satisfied with the response to your request, you have a right under Part 5 of the Freedom of Information and Protection of Privacy Act to request the OIPC review the decision of the public body. Additional information regarding this process can be found here: Request a Review/File a Complaint.

I have to assume the 1054-20200609-MCKINSEY contract number is associated with the Alberta 2030 Building Skills for Jobs contract (CBC article), but they would not claim that in the email, so I guess I'd have to spend another $25 to verify that? :-(

I am no longer a FOIP virgin.

Second up, on January 7 I submitted an application to be accepted into Twitter's Academic Developer program and on February 2 I got an email that I was in. I've since attended a webinar on the program and understand that lots of people have been waiting far longer than that, so I may have slipped in by being quick. I haven't actually done anything other than log in, attend that webinar, and install the postman tool that was being demoed in the webinar, so I can't give you any more info on the ease of the back end (I'm truly not a developer), but when I get around to it, I'll report back on that, too!