Hazards of the Age

I think I may spend too much time on computers.

I was looking through some cabinet drawers for a spare set of earbuds I think I have somewhere, now that I have an iPod loaded with music. I was shuffling through the various wretched oddments, turning over this and that with no success, and I wanted to use the search bar.

It wasn't even a "wouldn't it be nice if there was a search bar for the real world:" I was actually reaching, in my head, to pull up a search field and enter "earbuds." As if there were no question such a thing was doable and reasonable.

It was a momentary fancy, of course. I immediately remembered that, oh yes, I'm not on the computer, and I kept digging through the cabinet by hand. I do realize the difference between the computer and the physical world.

For now.


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It's Weird

This is September 11th. And I posted that last light-hearted thing and then thought, "wait, should I have posted that on September 11th? As if everything were normal?"

But of course, everything is normal. This is normal. Whatever it is, it's normal now.

I wasn't even thinking about it while I wrote, I was just entertained by my enthusiasm for PubMed, and off I cheerily went. I thought about it on and off during the day, but I'm fortunate enough not to have lost anyone, so I don't have the sharp, personal reminder that so many people do. And there's work to be done in the office, and you have to carry on as if it were a normal day, and generally it is.

I remember in the time right after, I couldn't go a single day without thinking about it. Then, time passes. The immediacy fades, no matter how much it seems like it never will. I guess we're lucky that we can't remember things too vividly for too long. How would we stand it?

So, I don't know, should I have posted light-hearted database musings on September 11th? I guess so. You remember, but you have to live with your normal.


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Elusive New PubMed Features

I think I saw the new resources on the results summary page that were announced on PubMed New and Noteworthy the other day!

Also Try and Recent Activity were visible on my results screen this afternoon (possibly More PubMed Articles as well, I'm not sure if they automatically come as a set and I wasn't paying close attention), and I absent-mindedly thought "huh, that's different," but since I was busy practicing a demo search, I didn't explore them in more detail. 

The excitement of being one of a "small percentage of users" who get to observe these additions first hand before a possible general rollout! [Blissful sigh.]

I should have taken a screenshot to remember them by. 

Maybe they'll be back tomorrow. Yes: another reason to go to work! I love this job.

From what I recall, the new features fit in nicely on the right side of the screen where there tends to be a lot of white space. I thought the 'recent activity' list was kind of interesting as a way to keep track of what you've been up to, and 'also try' was something I might have looked at if I'd really been seeking information and not just practicing to show other people how to seek information. 

As I say, I was distracted and didn't really pause to check anything out in detail. 

This has been your PubMed Geek Love report for the day.

Tech-Happiness

I finally got around to ordering that backup hard drive, so I can store my precious, precious data in duplicate in case anything else happens to my present drive. It arrived yesterday. 

Also yesterday I got a brand new MP3 player to fill with music, so you can see that it was a fabulous day in terms of technology wealth.

Sadly, I haven't had time to get to work on either of the fun and exciting projects that naturally await. Last night I had to go out and drink free whisky cocktails in celebration of the TV show Mad Men (tough work, but someone has to do it). 

And tonight I had to work late. 

Fewer cocktails were involved this time, which is causing me to rethink my judgement on this being the absolute best job in the world. Was I not promised cocktails? I should have held out for it.

Let Us Once More Consider Facebook

I don't even spend that much time on Facebook (I swear! six or seven hours a day, tops!), but I do seem to frequently find other people talking about it and want to chip in.

This time, librarian.net recommended a paper called "Facebook and the Social Dynamics of Privacy," and said paper proved very interesting. 

The author, James Grimmelmann, offers some good background information on social networking, and a solid discussion of the ways that interactions with other people and use of applications on Facebook can build up a fairly detailed picture of who you are.

Your name and location, who you know and their names and locations, any additional personal details you care to post, the kinds of relationships you have with the people you know (do you often 'poke' certain people, exchange 'gifts' with others, play games with others?), can all be seen through your profile and actions.

The kinds of things you think are interesting, and thus, in a sense, who you are, will also show up in the status messages you post, the kinds of games you choose to play, the gift-images and poke-messages you send, the 'Cause' pages you subscribe to and the institutions you declare yourself a fan of, and so on.

He talks about the fact that this picture of you is not entirely under your control as a Facebook user, since even if you keep your own privacy controls set to high, other people can leave their profiles open (or make them public at any time without consulting you), including any statements you've written on their 'wall,' pictures tagged as you on other peoples' pages, comments about you, etc.

I liked the discussion about peoples' motivations for giving away so much information on these sorts of sites. The article says that there's a natural interest in being able to control the way that other people see you: people want to look good to others, and being able to present yourself on a site with a personal profile of carefully chosen details and images is an appealingly straightforward way to do this.

It's plainly also true that social networking sites are good for, well, networking socially: keeping in touch with friends, making new connections, getting to know more about acquaintances. 

There's strong presentation of the idea that the value of social networking depends on people sharing information: you need buy-in, you need people to be on the site, using its tools and playing with its applications, or else there's no point. These sites are interesting and can be fun and useful, and that value depends on having a mass of users willing to put in the time and share the information.

But there are also real concerns about sharing too much information, making too much available about yourself or someone else. The article suggests that we tend to assume much more privacy than we really have: we think we're posting pictures and comments for our friends, and don't really keep in mind the fact that things posted on the internet can be rapidly disseminated much more widely. 

Similarly, we assume that something we send to another person will be received the way we meant it ("clearly, that comment about Betty was just between you and me!"), while in fact, without the clues of expression and tone that we get in face to face conversation, the person may take the message to be public, or neutral, and see nothing wrong with passing it on.

We've all heard stories about people who were refused jobs because their potential employers saw pictures of them mixing martinis for children or whatever, and a lot of the users of these sites are surely not much concerned with whether such-and-such personnel manager for a company they'll want to work for in ten years but haven't heard of yet is going to think their profiles are as amusing as they seem right now. 

This made me think about the idea that the web is 'small-town-izing' the world: that in a small town (and potentially in a highly web-enabled world) everyone knows everyone's embarrassing youthful (or otherwise) exploits, but you all just live with it and go about your business anyway. I mean, what else can you do? 

And, not to present questions without suggestions for answers, the article also presents some thoughts about policies and tools that probably won't help to protect privacy on social networking sites (anything that makes it harder to connect with other users, since that's what people are there to do), as well as some that might (education of users, as well as policies implemented by the sites).

There's a lot more in the article, but I've already rambled on long enough. In any case, I'm not really doing it justice, but do recommend it as an interesting look at an interesting piece of the web.

A Guy Walks into a Library

He has the complete citation for an article he needs.

Since the journal is one the library subscribes to in electronic format, and the issue needed falls within the temporal span of our subscription, I am able to quickly locate the article and print him out a copy.

Yeah, there really wasn't a story there. Sorry if I got your expectations up with that subject line.

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Oh Me, Oh My

A colleague just alerted me to Google's soon-to-be-released web browser, Chrome. This should be interesting.

Apparently it will be available this very evening, and it will no doubt inspire a frenzy of downloading the like of which is rarely seen.

Meantime, you can enjoy this comic with the announcement from Google.

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