Deaf Sentence

I just finished reading David Lodge's most recent novel Deaf Sentence. My enjoyment was enhanced by its relationship to cognitive science, as it touches upon linguistics and language comprehension by the deaf.

Desmond, the main character, suffers from high frequency deafness, and he writes about his increasing difficulty hearing with both accuracy (as he describes loss of hair cells inside the ear and various technology he uses to compensate) and frustration. It was fascinating and somewhat chilling to read about this character's struggle to understand conversation, starting with the loss of consonants. It's often humorous as well, as Desmond describes some language misinterpretations, as well as the continual "what did you say, darling" conversations between him and his wife.

I suspect that the personal description of high frequency deafness would be helpful to new or experienced audiologists, as the character is articulate about the limitations of his hearing in a personal, rather than clinical way. I highly recommend this novel.

Also of interest to some cognitive geeks is the linguistic aspect of the novel. Desmond is a retired linguist, and most of his encounters throughout the novel are tinged with his linguistic touch. He reviews concordances for words like deaf and love; thinks about homophenes (words that look the same when lipreading, such as park, mark, and bark); and, academically, the stylistic analysis of suicide notes.

For More Information

• Lodge, David. Deaf Sentence. New York, N.Y. : Viking, 2008.
  

Promoting & Poking Fun @ Your Libary

... if you're at the University of Texas at Arlington, that is.

My e-buddy Eric Frierson tweeted yesterday "librarian v. stereotype videos getting great feedback - next one will involve a gorilla suit." The current YouTube videos are a great combination of library promotion and poking fun at the profession; here's the video introducing Librarian and Stereotype:


and here are Librarian and Stereotype talking about scholarly communication:


Can't wait to see the gorilla suit!

Government Web Site Widgets

I just had two great librarians talk to my reference class, and I learned as much as the students did about government documents work and GIS / geography sources. Thanks to UConn's undergraduate and GIS librarian Michael Howser and Connecticut's federal documents librarian Nancy Peluso!

Nancy showed a fabulous feature of usa.gov, the US government's search engine. A search for the word widgets yields some amazing widgets, free for use on any web site.

The Centers for Disease Control (CDC) has many widgets, including an FDA peanut recall widget, a National Flu Activity map, and a Daily Health tip (today's is a warning not to give birds as gifts):


This is also available in Spanish:




Other cool widgets that come up include:

• San Francisco Bay Area Rapid Transit District "BART" News Widget
• AmeriCorps widgets
• Business.gov Gadgets; their widget includes a search box and links to information helpful to small businesses.
• FDA Drug Information links, including widgets for drug safety information, Medwatch, FDA podcasts, and Drugs @ FDA

... search for, oh, say, Wellbutrin & see what kind of information you get.

Take a peek at the search, too -- the results page offers a nifty preview option, displaying the widget right in the results page, and a "Remix" option on the left which lets you narrow results by topic, agency, or source.

There are some great free web resources here for libraries, health marketers, and others.

the Brain, lately

I've seen some neat stuff about the brain lately, and since I'm swamped with mid-semester craziness, plus mid-move tasks, I thought I'd just link to the stuff I've seen:

Today's New York Times reports on research showing ways memory may be erased. Yipes! The article raises lots of interesting physical and philosophical issues. See Brain Researchers Open Door to Editing Memory, by Benedict Cary. New York Times, April 6, 2009.

Last week, uber-librarian Stephen Abram blogged about 2 Wired stories reporting on efforts to map the human brain. (Note that the images are not for the squeamish, but if you want to see what the grey matter looks like, check out these images). Mapping the Human Brain, Stephen's Lighthouse, March 31, 2009.

edited to add: I just went the print issue of Wired and thoroughly enjoyed the article that goes along with the photos: Jonah Lerer's Scientists Map the Brain, Gene by Gene from the April 2009 issue of Wired. Highly recommended!

What is an Electronic Resource Librarian?

I've had a few friends ask what I do as an Electronic Resource Librarian, and I thought I'd share the answer more widely, in case others are curious.

If you are looking for a job as an Electronic Resource Librarian, I expect that most libraries (usually academic) would want:

1. Experience with licensing for all kinds of electronic resources (individual journals, journal packages, databases, e-books, etc.)
   
2. Experience using & troubleshooting access to same
   
3. Experience obtaining, compiling, and analyzing usage data
   

One big issue that many electronic resource librarians are wrestling with is how to manage the resources -- often, but not always using something called an ERM (electronic resource management system). Elements that need to be managed can include (but are not limited to!):

1. When the license was signed, by whom, and if by the university alone or in a consortium. When the license renews / expires;
   
2. What the license permits (for Interlibrary Loan -- sending by print, email, or secure transmission; for electronic reserves -- in print? an electronic course pack?);
   
3. The URL for patron access as well as the administrative interface;
   
4. If & how the resource provides access to usage statistics. If so, notes about how & where to access them.
   

ERM systems are usually based on the Electronic Resource Management Initiative (ERMI), which covers most possible permutations of data elements that electronic resource librarians need to track.

I have blogged about troubleshooting UConn's e-resources at http://elibraryuconn.blogspot.com/ which provides a real-life sense of the issues we deal with.

Definitions from the Online Dictionary for Library and Information Science

• Electronic resource management
• COUNTER (Counting Online Usage of Networked Electronic Resources); see also Project COUNTER.
  
• Usage of electronic resources

For More Information (all of these are available in Gale's OneFile database)

• Young, Jeanne. "Electronic records management on a shoestring: Three case studies." Information Management Journal 39.1 (Jan-Feb 2005): p58(3)
• Tull, Laura. "Electronic resources and Web sites: replacing a back-end database with innovative's Electronic Resource Management." Information Technology and Libraries 24.4 (Dec 2005): p163(7).
• Grogg, Jill. "Investing in digital: as electronic spending rises, ERAMS, ERM, and URM systems step in to help with acquisitions and reporting." Library Journal 132.9 (May 15, 2007): p30(4).
• "The ERMI and its offspring." Library Technology Reports 42.2 (March-April 2006): p14(8).

Working with Faculty on Instruction Assignments

Two of my former students have pointed me to an interesting blog piece called "Stepping on Toes: The Delicate Art of Talking to Faculty about Questionable Assignments" by Ellie Collier.

Collier talks about faculty aversion to "online" resources -- and instead of just complaining about difficult-to-teach library assignments, she provides examples of how to other librarians have worked with faculty to improve those assignments.

I recommend it especially to students interested in working in an academic library, but it's got some actual instruction interactions which would be interesting to librarians of most stripes.

For More Information

• Collier, Ellie. Stepping on Toes: The Delicate Art of Talking to Faculty about Questionable Assignments. In the Library with the Leadpipe, March 18, 2009.
  

Interesting CogSci Folks

Two quick notes:

• Ginger Campbell, of the Brain Science Podcast recently interviewed Patricia Churchland on Neurophilosophy and other topics.  Read Ginger's show summary & download the show if you want to hear the whole thing:

Churchland is the author of Brain-wise : studies in neurophilosophy [WorldCat.org] (c2002) and Neurophilosophy : toward a unified science of the mind-brain [WorldCat.org] (c1986). She is currently on the faculty of the University of California at San Diego and she was a featured speaker at the annual meeting of the Society for Neuroscience in 2008.

In this interview we talked about neurophilosophy, which is an approach to philosophy of mind that gives high priority to incorporating the empiric findings of neuroscience. We also talk about the evolving relationship between philosophy and neuroscience. Churchland shares her enthusiasm for how the discoveries of neuroscience are changing the way we see ourselves as human beings. We also talked a little about the issues of reductionism

• Longtime readers of this blog may remember I wrote about Pat & Paul Churchland 2 years ago, summarizing an extensive New Yorker article about both of them.
  

• If you'll be anywhere near Storrs, CT on Thursday, March 19, you might want to stop by the Dodd Center's Konover Auditorium to hear Marc Hauser (Professor of Psychology, Organismic and Evolutionary Biology, and Anthropology, Harvard University) speak at 4:00 p.m. His talk is entitled:  

 The Evolution of a Moral Grammar.  Marc Hauser is an expert on the evolution of animal communication, behavioral ecology, and the evolution of mind.  His work integrates animal behavior, cognitive neurosciences, anthropology, and philosophy.  He is the author of a number of influential books, including The Evolution of Communication [WorldCat.org] (c1996) and Moral Minds: How Nature Designed our Universal Sense of Right and Wrong [WorldCat.org] (c2006).  

• Hauser was interviewed on Australia's radio programme All in the Mind in late 2006, which I summarized on this blog.
  
  

Meet Paul Jones!

I heard a fascinating interview with Paul Jones, a clinical associate professor at UNC-Chapel Hill's School of Journalism and Mass Communications and a clinical associate professor in the School of Information and Library Science. Frank Stasio, interviewer for WUNC, also calls Jones a "public intellectual."
The interview is a like a whirlwind tour of the interwebs, as Jones talked about having worked with Tim Berners-Lee (the birth of the Internet), Larry Lessig (the birth of the Creative Commons), and Brewster Kahle (the birth of the online archive), as well as a bit about setting up ibiblio.org. Jones talked about Roger McGuinn and Youssou N'Dour (find out what they have in common!). He also read a lovely poem he wrote called Dividing Waters and talked about what poetry and coding have in common.

If you have 49 minutes and are interested in the interwebs, I highly recommend this interview.

For More Information

• Meet Paul Jones, The State of Things, North Carolina Public Radio WUNC, Feb. 16, 2008. Also on iTunes.
  
• IntraHealth OPEN and Youssou N’Dour promote Open Source for Health in Africa with music downloads. The Real Paul Jones, Jan. 24, 2009.
  

Future of Journalism? Newspapers?

I heard a neat interview on Radio Times today about the future of journalism & news.  It was surprisingly, and happily, upbeat (or maybe it was just my mood).  Listening to the conversation, I felt optimistic that while news gathering as we know it may change, but that reporting and writing will not change so much as to be unrecognizable.  I even felt optimistic that some kind of revenue stream could perhaps be worked out so that in-depth reporting (ie, what we think of now as print journalism) could continue.  Probably it won't look the same, but maybe it will continue to exist.  

One surprising bit of information that one of the guests mentioned (and I forget which; I was driving and didn't take notes) is that actual readership of content-formerly-known-as-print- journalism is UP, after a slide that started in the 1940s.

Here's what Radio Times says about the show:  "We talk about the challenges facing the profession of journalism and consumers of the news. How will we fund news-gathering operations, what will they look like how will we access the news and how we will ensure quality journalism? Our guests are ROBERT NILES of Online Journalism Review and TOM ROSENSTIEL of The Pew Research Centers Project for Excellence in Journalism."

For More Information

• Radio Times, Challenges Facing the Profession of Journalism.  February 12, 2009.  Audio will be available shortly online and through iTunes.

CogSci Humor: Consciousness

more animals