William Hoffman on Library IT Transformation

William Hoffman, founding executive director of the Foundation for New Business and developer of University of Minnesota's MBBNet, led a SCOPA forum on the topic: "New Knowledge Frontiers in a Flat World: A Campus Perspective", with Tom Friedman's The World is Flat serving as conceptual backdrop.

Some highlights: Johannes Trithemius exhorted monks to continue tradition of copying manuscripts in his 1492 book In Praise of Scribes, but had the book printed to ensure wide distribution. See E. Eisentein's The Printing Press as Agent of Change.

Andrew Odlyzko, now at University of Minnesota, writes in his chapter of Open Access that 7% of university budgets are now going to IT department, with only 2% going to libraries. Cf. "Envisioning a transformed University" in Issues in Science and Technology, Fall 2005. In order to survive over long term, libraries need to convey to visitors: "You have just entered a technologically superior facility." This article, by Duderstadt et al., came out of the Forum on Information Technology and Research Universities, a project of the American Academies that was formerly disbanded in 2006.

Urban Renewal?

Came across this document by G. William Domhoff on the UCSC Sociology Department's web site: Who Rules America: Who Really Ruled in Dahl's New Haven? Dahl's book was published in 1961, and seems to have captured the optimism of "urban renewal" that turned New Haven into a so-called "All-American City". Domhoff wrote his piece in September 2005, and so knows how things actually turned out: "Yale and its faculty members are islands of increasing privilege and isolation in a sea of misery," he writes. He cites a 2002 eyewitness account from the Manchester Observer, describing a tent village that had been set up on the New Haven Green following the closure of a homeless shelter. New Haven had by 2002 become the nation's 4th poorest city, the paper reported, even though it included Yale with an endowment worth $11 billion, and was situated in Connecticut, the nation's wealthiest state. According to Domhoff, Dahl had argued that Yale and the city's business elite were relatively helpless bystanders as politicians carried out the ill-fated urban renewal program. Domhoff re-analyzed the data, however, and found that Yale had tremendous influence. This was due, in no small part, to Prescott Bush's having been at the same time a trustee of the university and a member of the Senate Urban Renewal committee. Domhoff describes various ways in which Yale, along with local business interests, determined the course (and eventual failure) of the city's attempt at self-renewal. Fortunately, there are a few bright spots on the horizon. Certain parts of downtown (i.e., Ninth Square, Broadway, Chapel St.) have indeed bounced back. Let's hope this latest burst of renewal reaches beyond Yale's backyard and brings with it lasting employment and prosperity.

Dapper: The Data Mapper

Dapper: The Data Mapper

Stephen Greenblatt at yale

Stephen Greenblatt to deliver lecture entitled: "I Never Saw That You Did Painting Need": The Longing for Shakespeare's Portrait. Greenblatt is Kogan University Professor of the Humanities at Harvard, and author of Will in the World: How Shakespeare Became Shakespeare .

Marc Andreessen on PHP

Listed to podcast of Netscape co-founder and Mosaic co-author Marc Andreessen from ZEND PHP 2005 Conference, cited in Phil Windley's Technometria and IT Conversations.

For past 50 years, importance of "wringing out every last ounce of performance" out of machine, and therefore coding in languages like "C" which were almost at level of assembly language. 1980's advent of LISP marked shift toward more programmer-friendly code, but caused too much slowness in CPUs of that time.

Then java introduced new programming model "Write Once Run Anywhere" (WORA) and "sandbox" feature where experimental script wouldn't infect other programs. Also: "virtual machine" and portability. Java began to displace C and C++, mid to late 1990s, server CPUs had grown so fast, so machine speed optimization could afford to defer to programming optimization. In addition to CPU breakthroughs, Web-platform provided opportunity for instant software deployment. Java applets in browser never quite made it, though. And Java was neglected on server side. In late 1990s Netscape's introduced javascript, as kind of bridge between java and html. Javascript now dominates Web sites (versus Java) on the order of something like 1,000 or 10,000 to 1.

PHP develolped over past 10 years in absence of javascript on server side. "PHP is to 2005 what java is to 1995" according to announcement by Sun that it would join ZEND board of directors. Java, like C and C++ before it had become too complicated.

Doraemon's toolkit

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