Modifying the build system

This section covers making changes to the GHC build system. We'll give some general advice on how to work with the build system, and then describe a few common scenarios, such as how to add a new source file.

Note that before making any non-trivial changes to the build system you should acquaint yourself with the overall architecture. Even if you're already familiar with GNU make, the GHC build system is probably quite different from most Makefile-based build systems you've seen before.

Incedentally, it's a good idea to have a copy of the GNU make documentation to hand when working with the build system.

Debugging techniques can also be a handy way to understand how the build system works. Want to test your hypothesis about what the variable rts_C_SRCS contains? Just add a $(warning $(rts_C_SRCS)) somewhere.

Here are the techniques that we use. Note, for many of these diagnosis techniques you may want to invoke make on directly using make -f, to bypass the phase ordering machinery of the top-level Makefile.

make --debug=b --debug=m
make -p
$(warning ... message ...)
make show VALUE=VAR
prints the value of variable VAR. Useful for quick diagnosis.


Critical Thinking: Sound Reasoning

Posted by Hallee on Dec 11, 2009 in Critical Thinking, homeschooling |

CriticalThinkingReasoning is a set of mental power tools in the toolbox of Critical Thinking.  The four primary forms of reasoning that we teach our children are:

  • Deductive reasoning
  • Inductive reasoning
  • Abductive reasoning
  • Retroductive Reasoning

The main division between forms of reasoning is between deductive reasoning and inductive reasoning. Formal logic has been described as ‘the science of deduction’ while inductive reasoning is generally carried out within the field of  informal logic.   Both are vital and important tools in the disciplined work of thinking.

Deductive Reasoning

Deductive Reasoning is deemed valid if the argument’s conclusion must be true when the premises (the reasons given to support that conclusion) are true. One classic example of deductive reasoning is that found in syllogisms like the following:

Premise 1: All humans are mortal.
Premise 2: Socrates is a human.
Conclusion: Socrates is mortal.

The reasoning in this argument is valid, because there is no way in which the premises, 1 and 2, could be true and the conclusion, 3, be false.

Validity is a property of the reasoning in the argument, not a property of the premises in the argument or the argument as a whole. In fact, the truth or falsity of the premises and the conclusion is irrelevant to the validity of the reasoning in the argument. The following argument, with a false premise and a false conclusion, is also deemed “valid” because of its form.

Premise 1: If green is a color, then the sky is falling.
Premise 2: Green is a color.
Conclusion: The sky is falling.

Again, if the premises in this argument were true, the reasoning is such that the conclusion would also have to be true.  The argument is valid.  This is how even when the argument is entirely valid, entirely preposterous conclusions can be reached.  Another example:

Premise 1: If the earth is billions of years old, then the Holy Bible is clearly wrong.
Premise 2: The earth is billions of years old.
Conclusion: The Holy Bible is clearly wrong.

Obviously, the scientific evidence no longer supports that the earth is billions of years old.  Furthermore, the Holy Bible is the verbally and verifiably inspired, inerrant, and authoritative word of God.  It doesn’t get more “right” than that.  Still, the form of the argument is “valid” which superficially lends cogency to the erroneous conclusion.

It also must be noted that in a deductive argument with valid reasoning, the conclusion contains no more information than is contained in the premises. Therefore, deductive reasoning does not increase one’s knowledge base. It is entirely non-ampliative.

Inductive Reasoning

Induction is a form of inference producing propositions about unobserved objects or types, either specifically or generally, based on previous observations or experiences, or to formulate general statements or axioms based on limited observations of recurring phenomenal patterns.

A classic example of inductive reasoning comes from the empiricist David Hume:

Premise: The sun has risen in the east every morning up until now.
Conclusion: The sun will also rise in the east tomorrow.

Inductive reasoning contrasts strongly with deductive reasoning in that, even in the best, or strongest, cases of inductive reasoning, the truth of the premises does not guarantee the truth of the conclusion. Instead, the conclusion of an inductive argument follows certain degrees of probability.

Inductive reasoning can rely upon a chain of premises that each rely upon the truth of those which precede them and lead to the induced conclusion.

Premise 1: Birds have flown south for the winter every year until now.
Premise 2: Birds are flying south for the winter this year.
Conclusion: Birds will fly south for the winter next year.

Inductive reasoning was favored by Saint Thomas and is notable in such works as Summa Theologica, a rigorous study on right argumentation and certainly a divinely inspired work.

The Argument from Design (The Teleological Argument):

Premise 1: All natural bodies in the world act towards ends.
Premise 2: These objects are in themselves unintelligent.
Premise 3: Acting toward an end is characteristic of intelligence.
Premise 4: Therefore, there exists an intelligent being that guides all natural bodies toward their ends.
Conclusion: This being is that whom we call God.

On a related note, the conclusion of an inductive argument contains more information than is already contained in the premises. Thus, this method of reasoning increases one’s knowledge base. It is ampliative.

Other power tools

brain toolsThese are the two primary schools of reasoning, but there are others that are also nice to keep in the tool box.  You may not need a soldering iron every day but it sure is handy to have when you do need it, isn’t it?  It also helps to know how to use a soldering iron when you need to break it out.

Abductive Reasoning

Abduction is a method of logical inference introduced by Charles Sanders Peirce which comes prior to induction and deduction.  The colloquial name for Abduction is “guessing” or even following a hunch.

Abductive reasoning starts when an inquirer considers of a set of seemingly unrelated facts, armed with the hunch that they are somehow connected or related.

The term abduction is commonly presumed to mean the same thing as hypothesis; however, an abduction is actually the process of inference that produces a hypothesis as its end result.  Abduction is first, then hypothesis, then experimentation and/or observation, then theory.

Retroductive Reasoning

Retroduction is similar to induction, but it is predicated on known or assumed relationary rules and observations that contain at least one of the predicates or predictors of the rules in question. Another predicate of the relationary rule is then generalized to the observation due to the coincidence of the other predicates in both the observation and the rule.

Let’s simplify.

Retroduction is commonly applied in medical diagnostics via the patient’s symptoms and established diagnostic decision trees.  Retroduction is commonly applied in police work to determine the initial suspects of a crime via means, motive, and opportunity.

Critical Thinking: Brain Tools with LegendReasoning is a critical skill.  In life, we have seen so many times when simple emotion or man’s sinful nature lead to unreasonable demands.  The ability to reason, and recognize the types of reasoning involved in dealing with issues, are powerful tools to pull out of the Critical Thinking tool box.

Scripture informs us that the thoughts of the righteous are right, but those of the unrighteous are deceitful (Proverbs 12:5).  Proper reasoning keeps us from deceiving and from being deceived.  Proper reasoning keeps our thoughts right, and our hearts full of wisdom.

I’m so grateful for your visit, today.

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vol.38 número1Nutrient limitation of phytoplankton in five impoundments on the Manyame River, ZimbabweThe role of statutory and local rules in allocating water between large- and small-scale irrigators in an African river catchment índice de autoresíndice de assuntospesquisa de artigos
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Water SA

versão On-line ISSN 1816-7950
versão impressa ISSN 0378-4738

FUNKE, Nikki  e  NIENABER, Shanna. Promoting uptake and use of conservation science in South Africa by government. Water SA [online]. 2012, vol.38, n.1, pp.105-114. ISSN 1816-7950.

This paper aims to analyse how to encourage science uptake, here defined as the uptake and use of scientific research products (including journal articles, scientific reports, tools, expert knowledge, etc.), in the South African context. While science uptake into implementation is a very case- and context-specific process, the authors propose that a general framework for analysis of the policy-making context in South Africa needs to be considered when analysing how to promote science uptake in specific cases. In this paper, the National Freshwater Ecosystem Priority Areas (NFEPA) project is used as an example to illustrate how to apply this framework and how science projects in South Africa can be better positioned for impact and use. The paper starts by introducing the framework for conceptualising the complex set of dynamic processes and actors that can be involved in science uptake by government in South Africa, i.e., the policy-making context. From this theoretical platform the authors analyse to what extent the NFEPA project will be able to support more effective implementation of existing environmental and water legislation. This is done by exploring the challenges that hinder the uptake of science in government departments and then offering recommendations on how to address these.

Palavras-chave : Science uptake; implementation; scientific research products; conservation science; South Africa.

        · texto em Inglês     · Inglês ( pdf )


Radical Enlightenment in Brief

After a long and interesting discussion on Twitter, I wanted to say a bit more about the Enlightenment than in my last post. This is for the Twitter discussion, but I couldn’t put in 140 characters. Basically, below is the philosophical and political Enlightenment that I discuss in the book, and generally what I mean by “the Enlightenment movement.” In discussions of the Enlightenment with me, I’m more interested in whether someone agrees or disagrees with the values espoused below than with the term “Enlightenment” itself, which has always been heavily contested. Thus, I mean by the Enlightenment the values below, but the important part for me is the cluster of values, not the term Enlightenment itself, and what might help to implement those values. Most people in the world disagree with the values below, but I suspect some librarians agree with me who maybe think they don’t because of some labels I use. Although I could be wrong on that, too.

From Libraries and the Enlightenment:

Rather than provide any in-depth analysis of his exhaustive works, I will provide Israel’s own summary of the Radical Enlightenment from his shorter and more accessible Revolution of the Mind: Radical Enlightenment and the Intellectual Origins of Modern Democracy:

Radical Enlightenment is a set of basic principles that can be summed up concisely as: democracy; racial and sexual equality; individual liberty of lifestyle; full freedom of thought, expression, and the press; eradication of religious authority from the legislative process and education; and full separation of church and state. It sees the purpose of the state as being the wholly secular one of promoting the worldly interests of the majority and preventing vested minority interests from capturing control of the legislative process. Its chief maxim is that all men have the same basic needs, rights, and status irrespective of what they believe or what religious, economic, or ethnic group they belong to, and that consequently all ought to be treated alike, on the basis of equity, whether black or white, male or female, religious or nonreligious, and that all deserve to have their personal interests and aspirations equally respected by law and government. Its universalism lies it its claim that all men have the same right to pursue happiness in their own way, and think and say whatever they see fit, and no one, including those who convince others they are divinely chosen to be their masters, rulers, or spiritual guides, is justified in denying or hindering others in the enjoyment of rights that pertain to all men and women equally. (vi-vii)

As should be clear, by Radical Enlightenment Israel means more or less those political beliefs developed during the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries that eventually triumphed over the more conservative beliefs in divine-right monarchies or established churches or “enlightened despots” as the foundation for liberal democracies in the West. As he describes it,

Radical Enlightenment is the system of ideas that, historically, has principally shaped the Western World’s most basic social and cultural values in the post-Christian age. This in itself lends the history of the movement great importance. But this type of thought—especially in many Asian and African countries, as well as in contemporary Russia—has also become the chief hope and inspiration of numerous besieged and harassed humanists, egalitarians, and defenders of human rights, who, often against great odd, heroically champion basic human freedom and dignity, including that of women, minorities, homosexuals, and religious apostates, in the face of the resurgent forms of bigotry, oppression, and prejudice that in much of the world today appear inexorably to be extending their grip. (xi)

We end with this vision of Enlightenment. Eighteenth-century Europe and America present us with complicated histories, even if we restrict ourselves merely to intellectual history. For every proponent of Enlightenment, there were hundreds of detractors; for every radical idea, thousands of reactionary ones.

If we consider the Enlightenment as a period of history, we must along with Darnton and many others continue to see it as more complex and more quotidian than if we consider the Enlightenment to be a living intellectual tradition, an Enlightenment project. Israel’s work reinforces this view of Enlightenment. He digs deeply into the intellectual history of the period and discloses raging debates over socinianism or materialism that now seem trivial or obscure, but that helped form the modern consciousness. However, he is certainly not writing Whig history, because it is clear that while a system of ideas emerged as the foundations of Enlightenment, Enlightenment has yet to fully triumph. (pp. 41-43).

Libraries, Neoliberalism, and Oppression

I just read Beerbrarian’s post on libraries and neoliberalism, partly responding to this post on locating the library in institutionalized oppression by nina de jesus. I wanted to enter the discussion, but then realized I’ve already pretty much said what I have to say on the subject. I’ve addressed neoliberalism and libraries some before, particularly in a post on Libraries and the Commodification of Culture. I wanted to make that a research project a couple of years ago, but frankly after a lot of reading I found the topic too overwhelming. Nevertheless, the gist of that and other writings provides some view of where I think libraries are located in “institutionalized oppression.”

At the end of Libraries and the Enlightenment, I suggest that libraries are places “where values other than the strictly commercial survive and inspire, places people can go, physically or virtually, and emerge better people, their lives improved and through them perhaps our society improved.” The key is “values other than the strictly commercial,” because I think public and academic libraries are examples of public spaces where commercial values don’t dominate. They are public goods founded upon the values of democratic freedom and critical reason and provide a possible location within society to promote and protect anti-neoliberal values. Librarians in general are committed to open access to information and education. As Barbara Fister just wrote, they are gatekeepers who want to keep the gates open.

de jesus says that she has “seen very few people take a critical and sincere approach to analysing how the library, as institution, is actually oppressive and designed to create and perpetuate inequity.” The reason for that could be that the library, as an institution, isn’t that oppressive or designed to create and perpetuate inequity. That’s a strong and counterintuitive claim, and the burden of proof rests on de jesus. However, there have been two  books arguing just that, both published in the 1970s and both still worth reading (although as you’ll see below I disagree with some of their conclusions). First is Michael Harris’ The Role of the Public Library in American Life, second is Rosemary DuMont’s Reform and Reaction: the Big City Public Library in American Life. Excerpted below are three pages from Libraries and the Enlightenment where I address Harris and Dumont and the possible counterargument to my claims that libraries are institutions philosophically founded upon Enlightenment values of freedom and reason, and are instead instruments of oppression.

From Libraries and the Enlightenment:

The taste elevation theory has also been criticized for its “elitism” and “authoritarianism.” In The Role of the Public Library in American Life,” for example, Michael Harris argues that the entire democratic argument behind the founding of the Boston Public Library is flawed because of its elitist authoritarianism. By the eighteen forties, Boston had developed into a major destination for new immigrants, who in the opinion of the Standing Committee of the Boston Public Library thought “little of moral and intellectual culture.” George Ticknor believed the massive influx of immigrants could be a problem because, in Ticknor’s words, they “at no time, consisted of persons who, in general, were fitted to understand our free institutions or to be intrusted with the political power given by universal suffrage,” and thus the city needed to “assimilate their masses” and accommodate them to democratic institutions, primarily through education. Harris criticizes “Ticknor’s belief in the library’s potential as one means of restraining the ‘dangerous classes’ and inhibiting the chances of unscrupulous politicians who would lead the ignorant astray,” and claims this belief “explains his insistence that the public library be as popular in appeal as possible” (6). The most significant motivation behind the founding of the Boston Public Library and other libraries in the nineteenth century, Harris argues, was a fear that the masses would destabilize society, especially the immigrant masses unused to republican regimes. Any attempt to “Americanize” immigrants was “elitist” and “authoritarian,” a critique developed further in Rosemary DuMont’s Harris-inspired Reform and Reaction. The desire to elevate the reading taste of the people is just a desire to control the lower orders and prevent radical social change.

I mention this revisionist history of the founding of public libraries because it calls into question my argument that such foundings were inspired by the Enlightenment goal to educate and improve the lot of everyone, rich and poor alike. For Harris and like-minded historians, such idealistic rhetoric always masks the ambitions of the powerful to control the powerless. However, one does not have to disagree with Harris’ account of George Ticknor—who did seem to be an authoritarian prig—to recognize that something as complex as the founding of a large public library could be motivated by multiple reasons, some of them perhaps contradictory. Though the 1852 “Report” goes out of its way to argue that while good books should be supplied, no one should be forced to read them, one could still argue that even thinking some books were better than others and that people should read those books is “elitist,” etc. One question is whether such elitism and alleged authoritarianism are anti-democratic, and potentially counter-Enlightenment. The revisionist critique seems to imply that to be democratic in relation to books and learning means to consider all books equally good and useful and to consider all political beliefs and values worth defending, even if they are hostile or foreign to the needs of a democratic republic.

These days we would say this is a question of the value, or perhaps even the meaning, of multiculturalism, and addressing this debate in depth is out of our scope here. Harris and others (rightly in my opinion) would argue that the culture of the immigrants should be respected, but the question is, to what degree and in what areas? Let us assume that Ticknor and other upper-class Bostonians had a very conservative idea of what democracy should be; nevertheless, that does not show that they did not believe in democratic institutions. If we believe in the value of democratic institutions, then we must support those institutions, and what is more we must insist that everyone supports those institutions publicly, regardless of their private beliefs. Groups in democracies might fervently believe in fascism, but a democratic society cannot allow them to act on those beliefs. We can have a reasonable pluralism in society, but only if everyone acknowledges the authority of the public democratic institutions. What democracies cannot allow is a mere “modus vivendi,” as the philosopher John Rawls argues, where groups abide by democratic institutions until they can be overthrown. Carrying this argument back to Ticknor, why would he not believe that immigrants from countries without democracies would need some sort of education regarding democratic institutions? How could anyone possibly believe otherwise? Is there any difference in motivation behind this belief and the practice we have in the United States of giving extensive tests on American democracy to naturalizing immigrants, tests which most natural born Americans themselves cannot pass? While some supposedly democratic criticisms of practical educational institutions are no doubt valid, we must resist the tendency to believe that all educational efforts not derived from the group being educated are inherently undemocratic. Undemocratic groups require an education in democracy.

Harris and DuMont are quite critical of the admittedly stuffy movement in nineteenth century libraries to Americanize immigrants through education, arguing that Ticknor and others merely wanted to suppress dissent and the rising ideologies of socialism and communism. Even if Ticknor and other conservatives were motivated by a fear of, say, communist demagogues convincing the undemocratic masses to revolt, or whatever the fear was, this does not undercut the fact that they did indeed seek to educate people and to provide them with the means to educate themselves throughout their lives. That the founders of the Boston Public Library were not trying to educate revolutionaries does not take away from their accomplishment. We could just as easily interpret their actions as an early stage of progressivism. For example, Jane Addams and the settlement workers in the early twentieth century wanted to “’Americanize’ immigrants into the norms of their new society,” but they definitely improved the lives of urban immigrants (Flanagan 37). Indeed, by the standards of the anti-immigrant movements that gained control of the American government in the nineteen twenties, George Ticknor looks like a raging liberal. Citizens of a democracy must be acculturated into democratic institutions, and criticizing this necessity because the action first arose from the conservative fear of uneducated immigrants ignores this. Even Harris is forced to admit the value public libraries had for everyone, including immigrants. “That the library’s services to the immigrant had definite positive values for those able to take advantage of them cannot be denied,” though he still claimed that librarians had little to do with benefit, arguing that “these positive values were the result of the immigrant’s persistence and not the librarian’s conscious attitude” (14). In his zeal to deny the beneficial accomplishments of anyone remotely conservative, Harris acts as if the libraries which benefitted the immigrants sprung into existence without influential citizens to found them and working librarians to run them. Regardless of whether or not an enlightened and democratic ideal was not realized in practice, it is undeniable that the Trustees of the Boston Public Library wanted to found an educational institution to allow people access to useful knowledge and give them the opportunity to educate themselves for life and citizenship, and that the Boston Public Library became such an institution whatever its flaws. It is also clear from the founding of the Boston Public Library to the founding of libraries throughout the century, that the most important motivating reason was the link between the public library and public education. (pp. 110-14)

Engaging in the Public Sphere

A few months ago I met Rick Anderson at a conference. I introduced myself by saying, “I wanted to meet you in person since we argue so much online.” Someone with Rick asked, “so who wins the arguments?” I said that nobody ever wins arguments, and Rick followed with a pithy couplet saying the same thing. Pity I can’t remember it, because it was catchy and very appropriate. The question some people might have is, if no one ever wins arguments, why does anyone argue? And if we’re not arguing, what are we doing?

Answering the first question is easy. We argue because we want to win. People can rationalize it any way they want. They’re searching for the truth. They want to “set the record straight.” The want to put some schmucks in their place. But almost always, the underlying motive to arguing is to win, and following a fierce argument between worthy competitors will usually take you through a maze of arguments designed to shift the attention to something else whenever things go wrong. “Oh, you think you have me there? Well what about this tenuously related thing you probably don’t have a response to? Let’s talk about that!” Sometimes this is just tedious. Sometimes it can be fun, like a game. But it’s rarely persuasive.

Some people, maybe most people, don’t understand this. They write and speak as if they’re really going to win, as if their opponents will stop and say, “you know what? You’re right. I give up.” That never happens, but some people just don’t care. They’ll keep arguing vigorously long after anyone pays attention to them. They’re the sad trolls in the comments section of just about anything online. They’re the angry ranters. They seek victory at all costs, and the response they hate the most is laughter. If you want to drive angry ranters over the edge, just start laughing at them. As Brian Fantana says, 60% of the time, it works every time.

Then there’s another category of argument, if we can call it argument. I definitely present arguments in this blog, but they’re generally not the sort of arguments meant to persuade opponents directly. In my last post, I made an argument about a poorly written article, but I wasn’t arguing with the article, and I definitely wouldn’t bother to argue with its author. It’s not worth my time or effort. I’m doing something, just as Rick Anderson and numerous other library writers are doing something, but what?

Depending on the situation, we’re doing a number of things. Perhaps foremost, we’re telling stories or framing narratives, not in the hope of persuading the opposition, but with the goal of providing a compelling narrative that someone might accept, maybe especially someone who hasn’t made a decision on the matter under discussion. In rhetorical terms, we’re practicing the three rhetorical appeals: to logos, ethos, and pathos. We lay out reasons for our beliefs (logos). We present ourselves as certain kinds of people (ethos), hopefully the kind of people who are rational, intelligent, considerate, even-handed, the kind of people you want to agree with, that you might respect even if you don’t like them. And sometimes, if it’s appropriate, we bring in an emotional appeal (pathos).

I’ll provide an example from my own writing, the final paragraph of my book Libraries and the Enlightenment (which, hint hint, you can purchase here):

In the midst of this, libraries and the Enlightenment project both continue their struggle. With all of the ignorance, hatred, bigotry, violence, poverty, insecurity, and uncertainty in the country, both libraries and the Enlightenment can still provide hope for better days. Libraries are still places where people can find enlightenment, education, and enrichment. They are not warehouses for old books, as some people think, but active, thriving places where ideas clash and cultures engage, where values other than the strictly commercial survive and inspire, places people can go, physically or virtually, and emerge better people, their lives improved and through them perhaps our society improved. Extending or maintaining that possibility for all people equally, however achieved, remains a goal and a triumph for libraries and the Enlightenment.

This is the summation of the preceding arguments, and I provided reasons for linking the development of academic and public libraries to the Enlightenment goals of reason and freedom. I also present myself as a certain sort of person: calm, rational, maybe slightly detached and yet hopeful. Finally, there is an emotional appeal. Do you passionately dislike hatred and bigotry? Does personal and social improvement give you a good feeling? Then you should like libraries and the Enlightenment and you should agree with me. Within that, I’m using god and devil words. Education and enrichment, good; ignorance and hatred, bad! Unfortunately, appeals to ethos and pathos receive a lot of unjustified hostility as modes of argument, especially from philosophers. That’s probably why philosophers don’t do very well when trying to persuade the public, because most people are persuaded by ethos and pathos.

To use a non-library example, consider a person’s position on gay marriage. Whatever that position is, it’s almost certainly not motivated by rational thought alone. Most of the people I know are probably either in favor of, or indifferent to, gay marriage. The closest most of their positions, including mine, come to logic is probably something like this: People should be able to get married legally. Homosexuals are people. Therefore, homosexuals should be able to get married legally. Opponents of gay marriage might claim its about “natural law,” but it’s probably more motivated by the “yuck factor.” “Eww, gays are gross. They have sex with each other, even the men. Sex between men is gross. Why am I thinking about it all the time? Because it’s gross!” It’s the Santorum approach. Then every once in a while, something strange happens. Let’s say you’re a Republican senator and an opponent of gay marriage, because who cares what the gays want. But then your son comes out as gay, and you realize that the son you raised and love doesn’t fit as comfortably into the category of “those gays I don’t like” as complete strangers do. A transformation occurs. “The gays” as a category of the Other melts away. My son is a person. People are allowed to marry. So of course he should be allowed to marry.

People change their minds about contentious issues not because of logical arguments, but because of human sympathy and its capacity to erode familiar and comforting categories, categories that make us feel good by making us feel superior. “Wait, what? Homosexuals are just people? What about the blacks? Or the Muslims? Damn, even the Republicans? And the rednecks? And the homeless? Isn’t there anybody left I can hate indiscriminately just for fitting into a category of people I arbitrarily assigned them to? But I want to hate people. And then I want to rant angrily about why everyone else should hate them. Have I told you lately about vaginas and anuses?”

Angry ranters and belligerent interlocutors believe they’ll win by crushing, but that’s not what happens. They just put people off. Beliefs, rationales, ideologies, movements rarely succeed because they’ve crushed opponents with excellent arguments. They succeed because they compel enough people to accept them, usually people who weren’t directly engaged in the discussion or argument. If I’m writing about rhetoric or open access or information literacy, I’m not trying to browbeat people into submission. I’m trying to provide a compelling framework of beliefs and arguments that people can try out as they read through them. Part of that is logical, part ethical, and sometimes part emotional. If you agree with me, fine. If you don’t, fine. But on the stuff I write about, some day, somewhere, someone might want to find out more about the topic. They might Google it and they might run across some of my writing. And those people might say, “hey, that makes a lot of sense. Maybe I should think about this more.” Maybe other people are looking for ways to bolster their beliefs, or to strengthen their arguments against mine.

So that’s what I think a lot of us are doing when we engage with each other in the public sphere. We’re not necessarily arguing directly with each other. We’re creating rhetorical spaces for others to play around in for a while and telling stories others might find compelling enough to use as their own. And unlike the angry ranters, we don’t believe in victory. We just do what we do and hope for the best.

Anti-OA and the Rhetoric of Reaction

Some OA publishing is predatory publishing.
All predatory publishing is bad.
Therefore, all OA publishing is bad.

Nietzsche First Editions Digitized

The Princeton University Digital Library (PUDL) has just published a digital edition of the complete first editions of Friedrich Nietzsche: the Nietzsche Collection. I’m writing about it here because I initiated the project proposal and did part of the work to get it started.

As far as I know, the Princeton Library has the only complete set of the Nietzsche first editions outside of the Nietzsche Archive in Weimar. There’s another digitization project based on that collection, but it’s been going since 1998 and is still far from complete, and as far as I can tell no it’s made no progress in the year or so since my initial proposal and the publication here. This digital editions includes his early published articles in the journal Rheinisches Museum fur Philologie and includes the full issues of those journal volumes so that his work can be read in context.

If you want to know how it got to Princeton, here’s an excerpt from the original press release in 2001:

“Friedrich Nietzsche (1844-1900) is widely regarded as one of the most revolutionary philosophical thinkers. The Princeton University Library recently acquired one of the finest collections of Nietzsche’s works available in the world today, including first editions of all his books. This valuable addition is made possible, in part, by funds provided by the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation. The funds are a portion of the Distinguished Achievement in the Humanities Award given in 2001 to Professor Alexander Nehamas, the Edmund Carpenter II Class of 1943 Professor in the Humanities and professor of philosophy and comparative literature.”

And now that valuable collection is accessible to everyone.

The Law of Small Numbers

From an early Daniel Kahneman article referenced in Thinking Fast and Slow about how the poor instincts of researchers selecting samples can lead to undersampling:

“The law of large numbers guarantees that very large samples will indeed be highly representative of the population from which they are drawn. If, in addition, a self-corrective tendency is at work, then small samples should also be highly representative and similar to one another. People’s intuitions about random sampling appear to satisfy the law of small numbers, which asserts that the law of large numbers applies to small numbers as well.”*

Hint: it doesn’t apply. Based on the experience of reading numerous LIS studies and surveys, a lot of librarians implicitly believe in the law of small numbers. Of course, I might have just read an unrepresentative sample and they really don’t.

*Tversky, Amos, and Daniel Kahneman. “Belief in the Law of Small Numbers.” Psychological Bulletin 76, no. 2 (August 1971): 106.

Part 2 in P2P Review: an Elaboration

Today the Library Journal published the follow up to my previous column about information literacy as an unnatural state: Education is no Salvation. In that one I’m trying to explore the motivated reasoning and cognitive bias literature a little more with the goal of showing what we’re up against when educating people to be “information literate.” Definitely still a work in progress.

The question I’m now asking myself is why. What difference does it make if we’re more aware of cognitive bias, motivated reasoning, and all the tricks the mind plays? For the most part I’m content with Aristotle’s maxim that humans by nature desire to know, but librarians tend to be a practical breed, and the question I’ve often gotten when doing anything theoretical is what difference it will make in practice. Right now, I don’t know, but every practice is based on some theoretical construct, usually one we apply unawares.

In providing some context to the last column, I used the phrase “scholarly habitude” to describe what I think is one of the aims of higher education, at least in the traditional arts and sciences. It’s not a list of things we can do, but a state of being, a frame of mind, something along those lines. In some ways I’m going back to Aristotle and the notion of virtue ethics. Scholarly habitude captures better than “information literacy” the sense that being a scholar or academic researcher isn’t just about having a set of rules to follow. It’s also about being a certain kind of person: intellectually curious, skeptical, requiring evidence for at least some beliefs, etc. These traits aren’t necessarily abundant in people.

I’m thinking about this mostly in terms of teaching undergraduates how to research and write scholarly essays, which most of them are expected to do at some point. An example of one approach I mentioned in today’s column: the student who has something to say and wants some scholarly sources to support it. The exact opposite way that people should approach research, but the way that is the most natural and in accord with how the human mind seems to work. We make snap judgments and then try to justify them. As Daniel Kahneman puts it in Thinking Fast and Slow, our “System 1” comes to a conclusion very quickly, while our slower and more thorough “System 2” is usually happy just to accommodate System 1 without further prodding because it’s also lazy. As Michael Shermer puts it in Why People Believe Weird Things, “smart people believe weird things because they are skilled at defending beliefs they arrived at for non-smart reasons.”

The wrong way to approach research on an unfamiliar topic is to have an opinion and then look for sources to justify it. The right way is to look for evidence and follow the evidence where it leads. There’s an academic analogy for this, but I’m not sure how far I want to pursue it. It’s similar to the distinction between theology and religious studies. I don’t want to say theology isn’t scholarly, just that it’s not really in accord with current information literacy standards in some ways. Theology can be defined as faith seeking understanding, meaning the theologian believes something to be true and then seeks to understand and justify that belief. Although I’ll leave open the possibility that some people do, in general people don’t hold religious beliefs for rational reasons based on evidence that could withstand public scrutiny. That’s why most religious people tend to practice the religion they grew up with and few convert to a different religion. Children growing up in a religion didn’t rationally choose to follow that religion, although later on many of them seek to understand their faith in a rational way. Hence, theology.

Religious studies, on the other hand, takes a different approach. We can use the insider/outsider distinction. Theologians study a religion from the inside, while scholars of religion often come at religions from the outside, trying to understand those religions without necessarily practicing them. They approach the available evidence and try to make sense of practices that might seem bizarre to outsiders, and to outsiders all religions have their bizarre practices. Understanding a religion as an outsider partly means explaining why strange practices don’t just exist because they’re practiced by crazy people. “They eat the body and drink the blood of who again?” “What kind of loving god would forbid bacon!?” “Your religion says I can’t publish a picture of this guy? WTF?” I’ve noticed lots of people like to make fun of Scientology without considering what they’re own religion looks like to people who don’t practice it.

Or a slightly different analogy, a bit broader. The traditional foil of theology is philosophy, and during the European Middle Ages philosophy was considered the handmaiden of theology, at least by the Catholic Church, and they were the intellectual standard that mattered. During the 17th and 18th centuries, philosophy broadly conceived came into its own again, and philosophy became the queen of the sciences. Every study that wasn’t motivated by religion could be considered philosophy, and indeed what we now call natural science was called natural philosophy in the 18th century. That’s why we now have PhDs, doctorates of philosophy, for disciplines that we don’t consider to be philosophy by contemporary standards, because they’re all involved in the same Enlightenment driven enterprise: to discover and disseminate knowledge about the world. The way to do that is approach the world with as few preconceptions as possible and see what you find. That approach explains why we (or perhaps “we”) no longer believe that demons cause epilepsy or the earth is the center of the universe. Academics follow the evidence, unless they’re economists or philosophers, because those people just make stuff up.

If we use theology/ philosophy analogy, what we’re trying to do when we try to teach students about academic research is move them from a theological mindset to a philosophical one, where the preconceptions, uninformed beliefs, and cognitive biases don’t motivate all of their reasoning. Writing what they know isn’t a good idea, because they don’t know very much, their experience of the world is limited, and their experience of scholarship even more so. Those preconceptions and biases instead should become objects of investigation themselves. That boundary has to be crossed before they can begin to examine evidence in the way information literacy standards suggest. Part of a good liberal education is about breaking down your past self to prepare to develop a better self.

So where does this leave library instruction? If all these cognitive biases and preconceptions are completely natural, extremely difficult to overcome, and probably impossible ever to completely overcome, how does this affect us practically? For one thing, it should lower high expectations. If you were unaware of all the ways the mind obscures and distorts reality for our benefit and how difficult making the philosophical leap really is, and you were already frustrated how little you could get done in the hour you might spend with a class, this news should lower your expectations and perhaps explain your frustrations. If you thought a little library research instruction is going to have a remarkable effect, you should probably change your opinion.

Then there’s the question, what the heck do librarians do instead, or in addition? I don’t have any ideas on that yet, but I’m convinced so far that librarians play much more of a support role in this enterprise than some think we do.

Plagiarism and Library Research Guides


Coco Jones stars as...

What was the last song you listened to?

I listen to “Glee” songs a lot. I like their rendition of “Bust the Window Out Your Car.”

What is your favorite dish to cook?

 I like to cook shrimp alfredo. It’s also my favorite dish to eat!

What excites you?

Who is your favorite clothes designer?

I am so laid back that, honestly, I’m in jeans and sweats a lot of the time. I like Aeropostale and Hudson Jeans.

When you look in the mirror, what do you see?

My personal wish would be to have my own TV show, but if I could have anything, my wish for the world is that no one on the Earth would ever go hungry.

What is your earliest childhood memory?

My earliest memory is of the best Christmas gift ever, a toy train. I remember riding that thing all through our house.

If you were an animal, what animal would you be?

I would be a butterfly. A beautiful, purple butterfly.

When do you feel the most content?

When I’m with my entire family.

My dad always told me that I could be anything I wanted if I was willing to work hard enough to achieve it.

What key quality do you believe all successful people share?

How do you want to be remembered?

As a sweet Christian girl who was always loving and kind to everyone.


OLAP, Data Marts and Warehouses, Three-Tier Archit Essay

This essay has a total of 1873 words and 9 pages.

OLAP, Data Marts and Warehouses, Three-Tier Architecture and ASP

The term OLAP stands for ‘On-Line Analytical Processing'. OLAP is a technology used to
process data a high performance level for analysis and shared in a multidimensional cube
of information. The key thing that all OLAP products have in common is

An OLAP application is targeted to deliver most responses to users within about five
seconds, with the simplest analyses taking no more than one second and very few taking
more than 20 seconds. Impatient users often assume that a process has failed if results
are not received with 30 seconds, and they are apt to implement the ‘3 finger salute' or
‘Alt Ctrl Delete' unless the system warns them that the report will take longer. Even if
they have been warned that it will take significantly longer, users are likely to get
distracted and lose their chain of thought, so the quality of analysis suffers. This speed
is not easy to achieve with large amounts of data, particularly if on-the-fly and ad hoc
calculations are required. A wide variety of techniques are used to achieve this goal,
including specialized forms of data storage, extensive pre-calculations and specific
hardware requirements, but a lot of products are yet fully optimized, so we expect this to
be an area of developing technology. In particular, the SAP Business Warehouse is a full
pre-calculation approach that fails as the databases simply get too. Likewise, doing
everything on-the-fly is much too slow with large databases, even if the most expensive
server is used. Slow query response is consistently the most often-cited technical problem
with OLAP products.

OLAP is used for mainly for analysis. This means that the system copes with any business
logic and statistical analysis that is relevant for the application and the user, and keep
it easy enough for the target user. This analysis is done in the application's own engine
or in a linked external product such as a spreadsheet. All the required analysis
functionality can be provided in an intuitive manner for the target users. This could
include specific features like time series analysis, cost allocations, currency
translation, goal seeking, ad hoc multidimensional structural changes, non-procedural
modeling, exception alerting, data mining and other application dependent features.

The OLAP system implements all the security requirements for confidentiality. Not all
applications need users to write data back, but for the growing number that does, an OLAP
system handles multiple updates in a secure manner.

Multidimensional data is a key requirement. If one had to pick a one-word definition of
OLAP, this is it. The OLAP system provides a multidimensional conceptual view of the data,
including full support for hierarchies and multiple hierarchies, certainly the most
logical way to analyze your business or organization.

Information is gathered based on business needs, wherever it is and however much is
relevant for the application. The sure capacity of various applications in terms of how
much inputted data, differs greatly — the largest OLAP applications can hold at least a
thousand times as much data as the smallest. Many considerations are made here, including
data duplication, memory requirements, disk space utilization, performance, integration
with data warehouses and the like.

Most data in OLAP applications originates in other systems. However, in some applications
(such as planning and budgeting), the data might be captured directly by the OLAP
application. When the data comes from other applications, it is usually necessary for the
active data to be stored in a separate, duplicated, form for the OLAP application. This
may be referred to as a data warehouse or, more commonly today, as a data mart.

The most common uses for a data warehouse include performance, multi-data stores, data
cleansing, data adjusting, timing, and historical analysis.

Data warehouses are often large, but are nevertheless used for unpredictable interactive
analysis. This requires that the data be accessed very rapidly, which usually dictates
that it be kept in a separate, optimized structure which can be accessed without damaging
the response from the operational systems.
Continues for 5 more pages >>


fMRI research suggests classic mathematic models of memory, familiarity correct

June 6, 2014

(Medical Xpress)—When it comes to familiarity, a slew of memories including seemingly unrelated ones can come flooding into the brain, according to mathematical theories called global similarity models.

After conducting an fMRI study on memory and categorization, researchers including a Texas Tech University psychologist have shown for the first time that these mathematical models seem to correctly explain processing in the , a region of the brain associated with long-term memory that is disrupted by memory disorders like Alzheimer's disease.

The findings were published in The Journal of Neuroscience.

Tyler Davis, assistant director of Texas Tech's Neuroimaging Institute and an assistant professor of psychology, specializes in neurobiological approaches to learning and memory. He was part of a team that delved into global similarity models.

"Since at least the 1980s, scientists researching memory have believed that when a person finds someone's face or a new experience familiar, that person is not simply retrieving a memory of only this previous experience, but memories of many other related and unrelated experiences as well," Davis said. "Formal mathematical theories of memory called global similarity models suggest that when we judge familiarity, we match an experience, such as a face or a trip to a restaurant, to all of the memories that we have stored in our brains. Our recent work using fMRI suggests these models are correct."

People may believe when they see someone's familiar face or take a trip to a familiar restaurant, they only activate the most similar or recent memories for comparison. However, Davis said this is not the case. According to global similarity models, the feeling of familiarity for the taste of brisket at a particular restaurant draws on a spectrum of memories that a person has stored in his or her brain.

Eating the brisket can activate memories not only of a previous trip to that restaurant, but also of the décor, eating brisket at a similar restaurant, what that person's home-cooked brisket tastes like and even seemingly tangential memories such as a recent trip to another city.

"In terms of global similarity theories and our new findings, the important thing is when you are judging familiarity, your brain doesn't just retrieve the most relevant memories but many other memories as well," Davis said. " This seems counter-intuitive to how memory feels. We often feel like we are just retrieving that previous trip to that one particular restaurant when we are asked whether we'd been there before, but there is a lot of behavioral evidence that we activate many other memories as well when we judge familiarity."

This does not mean that every memory we have stored contributes to familiarity in the same way. The more similar a previous memory is to the current experience, the more it will contribute to judgments of familiarity.

In terms of the brisket example, Davis said, previous trips to the restaurant are going to impact the familiarity more than dissimilar memories, such as the recent trip out of town. However, similarity from these other less-related experiences can have a measurable effect in judgments of familiarity.

In his recent research, Davis and others used fMRI to examine how memory similarity related to behavioral measures of , in terms of activation patterns in the medial temporal lobes.

"We found that peoples' memory for the items in our experiments was related to their activation patterns in the medial temporal lobes in a manner that was anticipated by mathematical global similarity models," Davis said. "The more similar the activation pattern for an item was to all of the other activation patterns, the more strongly people remembered it. This is consistent with global similarity models, which suggest that the items that are most similar to all other items stored in memory will be most familiar."

The findings suggest that global similarity models may have a neurobiological basis, he said. This is evidence that similarity, in terms of neural processing, may impact . People may find things familiar not just because they are identical to things we've previously experienced, but because they are similar to a number of things we've previously experienced.

Explore further: Hippocampus plays bigger memory role than previously thought

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Merging Genres

Merging Genres

The Bands that Break Barriers

Genre divides in music have become increasingly irrelevant. As time goes by the boundaries continue to blur, but why now, what’s changing?

There are few bands in the world madder as a concept than Josephine and the Artizans. For starters, there are 10 of them. They’re led by opera singer Josphine Permaul, and she heads up a line-up of three rappers, a guitarist, a drummer, a bass player and a three-piece string section. Josephine and the Artizans are what happens when the boundaries between genres crumble completely, letting performers from different worlds perform together.

Permaul was never going to stick to just one genre. She trained in classical voice, piano and violin when she was younger, but she was reluctant to stick to just one style of music. “I thought that instead of going down the classical route, I’d go somewhere to study commercial pop music,” she says. “I went to the University of Westminster, and while I was there I found that my voice didn’t fit into any particular genre of pop. So I thought I’d use my voice to combine classical with more rock and pop-oriented stuff.”

It was that combination of rock and pop and classical and opera that resulted in her 10-piece outfit. It’s the most literal expression of how musical genres change, of how fluid they are and how the conventions which define them have started to erode. Managing such an unwieldy group, corralling all these different styles, takes every ounce of chutzpah Permaul has. They’re gearing up to release a new EP, Dies Irae (Day of Wrath) and the fact that they haven’t imploded at this point from sheer stress alone is worth applause.

“You have to work together as a team,” Permaul says. “The rappers, for example, are constantly emailing back and forth, checking lyrics with me, seeing how they work with the song. My string players have a completely different approach from my rhythm section, but when I recruited them, I had quite intense auditions to make sure they were interested in the music.”

Breaking down the expectations of each genre isn’t easy, she says. “It’s very hard to find classical string players who can improvise and write complementary parts to the rest of the song, rather than something very complicated and melodic. And classical musicians can be, at times, quite timid, and sometimes they are rather uncomfortable with improvisation.”

Blending discrete genres isn’t an entirely new phenomenon. Hip-hop came about from a heady mix of blues, jazz, reggae and soul. Rock and jazz techniques mixed to become prog rock. However, in the past 10 years, this kind of melding of genres has exploded. A whole slew of musicians have been rewriting the rules, appropriating whatever they see fit to create their music. Vampire Weekend mix afrobeat and indie rock. The Easy Star All-Stars often combine dub reggae with rock, resulting in interpretations of Pink Floyd and Radiohead. Tune-Yards and Gang Gang Dance seem to draw from a dozen genres all at once. Collectively, artists like these have sold hundreds of thousands of records and songs, possibly millions. Genre-blending is something music fans are clearly comfortable with. However, the question is still: why? Why, in the past decade, have the walls come tumbling down?

Jared Gudstadt thinks that technology has something to do with it. He’s the CEO and co-founder of Jingle Punks, an American company that specialises in production music. For Gudstadt, it was when music software and equipment became a lot cheaper – a process that began a little over a decade ago. “It’s tinker theory,” Gudstadt says. “When you’re sitting at home and you have a laptop, and an infinite number of creative possibilities, you’re gonna get bored really quickly with doing things that have been done before. There’s an explosion of new genres based on things merging together.”

Jingle Punks are a fascinating example of this. Alongside their roster of composers, they have an in-house string ensemble, The Hipster Orchestra. The group originally came about when Gudstadt was looking for a way to promote his music company in a crowded marketplace. “I started arranging classical interpretations of my favourite bands,” he says. “The Black Keys, The White Stripes, MGMT, Kanye West, Jay-Z. After two or three years of videos, we found it was a great way for people to understand our company, and it was also a great way to give other people access to these songs, by doing tribute records. The bass is the cello, the lead is the Chair A violin and the piano comes from over there. I was happy to change to this set-up. Some of the early adaptations we did, like Matt and Kim or Nirvana, they still maintain a rock feel, but were delivered in a style that was closer to classical music. Furthermore, I needed to understand the genre better, and I wanted to give people a way to appreciate classical styles better.”

However, The Hipster Orchestra mushroomed. It stopped being a promotional unit within a company, and became its own thing. Today, it’s arguably more well known than the corporate entity that gave birth to it (although there’s no evidence that the two have anything but a harmonious relationship). “The Hipster Orchestra started as a way for me to market Jingle Punks, and it became its own thing,” says Gudstadt. “We [started] getting offers to play stadiums, major festivals, and I’m struggling to figure out how to balance that with being CEO of a company with 70 people in it.”

For starters, the orchestra itself has begun to blend genres. They’re shortly to travel to South Africa, where they’ll back up hip-hop artist Nas. (Gudstadt: “I was drunk last year in Cannes, and I went up to Nas and told him that we had this orchestra and wanted to do Illmatic, and he said, ‘cool, you should meet my manager’…”). They’ve also become known for an interpretation of Nirvana’s In Utero, which they did for the album’s 20th anniversary.

It’s this latter project which shows just how much some genres have in common – a surprising fact, given how different punk rock and classical would appear to be. Gudstadt says that a lot of Nirvana’s music is “extremely European” in terms of its chords. He calls it a lot more complex than the music of other punk rockers like the Ramones, Pearl Jam or The Clash, and says that some of the stuff Nirvana lead singer Kurt Cobain wrote was highly complex. The songs, once The Hipster Orchestra got hold of them, were extraordinary. “Some of the stuff sounded like Wagner,” says Gudstadt. “We basically had two weeks to come up with the arrangements and get in studio. We recorded it in one day and shot all the music videos at the same time. It was awesome. I was playing ukulele and mandolin, and it was fun to play aggressive ukulele over Smells Like Teen Spirit and Lithium.”

Genre-bending is clearly working, and it’s obviously being accepted by a huge section of the listening public. It’s tempting to view this as a breakaway from the corporate side of the music industry – the folks in suits who demand that music be labelled and pigeonholed, put in little boxes so it can sell to the right demographic. But that’s a misunderstanding of where genre names come from. They are, by and large, invented by the artists themselves.

Tommy Dorsey, according to a 2011 Guardian newspaper article, first applied the term “gospel” to music. The name “hip-hop” meanwhile originally comes from a rhyme by DJ LoveBug Starski. This isn’t universal – you can thank big record labels for the proliferation of such weird labels as “EDM” and “big beat.”

But the point is this: artists have always redefined and tweaked their chosen genres, and simply because it’s become more noticeable in recent years doesn’t mean this crossing of stylistic boundaries shouldn’t be welcomed.

What it does require from artists is a willingness to experiment – and a refusal to give up when the going gets tough. “In our track Carpe Diem,” says Permaul, “I picked the string phrase from Vivaldi’s summer season, and some people thought it wouldn’t work, that it wouldn’t go anywhere. We had to try really hard to make a success of the idea, and I kept saying, ‘let’s give it one more go’. But we haven’t tried a piece we’ve given up on yet. I’ve been very stubborn!”
For further information, visit and

Rob Boffard


Marion Bartoli

Bouchard, Halep reach Wimbledon semis

Bouchard, Halep reach Wimbledon semis

LONDON - Rising stars Simona Halep and Eugenie Bouchard will meet in the semifinals at Wimbledon after winning quarterfinal matches in straight sets Wednesday.

The third-seeded French Open runner-up Halep won the last 11 games to beat last year's Wimbledon runner-up Sabine Lisicki, the 19th seed, 6-4, 6-0 in 57 minutes on the famed Centre Court.


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Orphaned polar bear cub ventures out to play in the snow at his new home days after his mother was shot dead in the wild
Knowing the 'whole' (ie CORRECT story) does change my opinion of the situation, but I still feel sorry for the cub. There are sanctuaries the world over for transitioning and releasing of animals back into the wild. Is there nothing like this for polar bears? I understand the practicalities would be different and difficult, but is there nothing like this for polar bears?
Vicki, South Australia, Australia , 3 years ago

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Your guide to the 2016 Allentown Fair
The Morning Call

The sprinting savages: '28 Days Weeks'

For the longest time, we had one advantage over the undead: They were really, really slow. As long as you could race walk, you could probably outpace the things that want to snack on your cerebellum. Then came '28 Days Later' and '28 Weeks Later.' These zombies can move. OK, fine, they're not undead, and therefore not really zombies -- but they're still scary as hell.
Copyright © 2016, The Morning Call


imgDubai (June 5, 2014)—Middle East Broadcasting Center (MBC) Group, headquartered in Dubai, is using Lawo consoles to broadcast to Dubai and beyond, including to Saudi-Arabia and Iraq.

The Dubai radio production complex—which has been on air since summer 2013—comprises three studios for producing MBC FM, Panorama and Iraq radio programming. These studios have four 20-fader sapphire consoles complete with overbridges for radio on-air production, and a Nova17 MKII router to network all of the consoles and act as an audio router. A fourth Lawo-equipped studio operates as production studio but can also serve as an on-air studio, while Studios 5 and 6 serve as backup studios.


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Mrs. Agnes L. O'Leary, former Luray postmaster, died at a Salina home, where she had been under care for several years. Mrs. O'Leary was the former Agnes Franzmathes. a 1920 graduate of Nazareth academ...

Agnes Leary (1907 - d.)

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Agnes Gertrude Colestock (Leary) (1873 - 1944)

Agnes C. O'Leary (1839 - d.)

Agnes O'Leary (Shortill) (1903 - 1980)

Agnes Bridget Brosnan (O'Leary) (c.1896 - 1969)

Ireland, Civil Registration Marriages Index, 1845-1958 about Agnes O'Leary Name: Agnes O'Leary Date of Registration: Jan-Feb-Mar 1923 Registration District: Tralee Volume: 5 Page Number: 365 FHL F...

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aidan o leary (deceased)

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Modeling Practice and Requirements

Models are useful in different settings in different ways. Models can test facts, ideas and understanding, simulate operation, and aid coordination between systems and people. In this column, Becky Winant lists six model patterns she has seen in practice in software development organizations, talking about where each is appropriate, and the strengths and weaknesses of each.

Last week, Joe (a client) expressed frustration about modeling practice disputes. "You hear people argue over requirements models, analysis models, executable models, architecture models, design models, and 'we don't need' models. Why can't they agree?" he asked. My years of working with people to build models made Joe's complaint familiar. Some build models to analyze a problem and some to plan software design. People choose different quantities of detail and quality criteria. Some projects might require models as documentation, while others don't.

Here are patterns of modeling practice I've seen and the conditions under which they're used

1. Artisan
Tool and core component developers usually are artisans. My friend, Doug, managed a group that built internal and external interfaces for all corporate products. Innovation and pride of craft drove the group. For one high-visibility project they eclipsed all expectations. Doug gleefully recalls how the executives came by the room peeking in to glimpse the magic of this group.

Artisan practice is model-less. An artisan needs only a mental concept. Products are directly crafted using personal skill and discussions with customers. The artisan might say, "the code is the requirement."

The hallmark of this pattern is personal craftsmanship. This is a strength and a weakness. When products remain small, with complexity and risks low, the individual craftsman shines. As products grow requiring expansion and maintenance to meet market demands, the artisan approach breaks down. Having no legacy or broad design for the product also means expensive and challenging revisions.

2. Improv
Irv, an IT manager for a banking group, hired me to create diagrams. "But, please," he urged me, "don't teach anyone to build models." The project involved three departments of a bank developing an integrated system to support international commercial accounts. Irv wanted to use design diagrams to bridge communication among the divisions and also to keep departmental boundaries clear. When I finished the diagrams and definitions, Irv said, "That's what I need! The operational detail we already know."

Improv modeling practice consists of diagrammatic sketches, not formal or technical models. System knowledge is ingrained in the culture and its systems. Diagrams align design concepts. Detail is expanded and explored with code. The whole motivation for this practice is communication; large systems take coordination to be successful. Improv modeling facilitates mutual agreement of purpose and success criteria but contains little elaboration of functional or technical detail.

Improv's forte is team synergy and communication. It succeeds because people know their market and systems well. This practice disintegrates when radical change forces rethinking requirements. At that point, modeling practice would need to extend beyond a tool for agreement into one that would expose what participants don't know-the gaps and anomalies in interpreting requirements.

3. Contract
My colleague, Linda, knew a contract practice where model walkthroughs only began after models were declared "done." Senior management approved the models, and while the full-color, oversized, plotted diagrams were displayed, no one suggested changes. Later the models were posted in the hallway outside the senior systems manager's office and covered in glass.

Contract modeling practice dictates detailed formal models. Automated tools shape model practice using fill-in templates and syntax checking. While they are detailed, contract models aren't required to pass tests for well-formed structure, only readability. Requirements often are literally a contract signed by all parties.

Contract practice thoroughness is good and bad. It increases good modeling sense and skill. In time, people build better and more useful models. The danger is wasting time producing useless models, if people only go through the motions. The practice fails when the cost of rebuilding unwieldy, poorly crafted models becomes intolerable.

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Scientific Method —

Mercury (the planet) shrinks as it cools

MESSENGER images show shrinking left scars on the planet’s surface.

The curving ridge near the day/night divide in the center of this image is one example of the features created by Mercury's contraction.

Take, for example, the “contracting Earth” hypothesis championed in the 1800s by James Dwight Dana and also proposed by Élie de Beaumont. They sought to make sense of mountain ranges, faults, and bending folds of rock with an appeal to Earth’s thermal history. The Earth had likely cooled from an initial molten state, they reasoned, and should therefore also have contracted in size. The outer crust of the Earth, exposed as it is, would have cooled first. As the hotter interior continued cooling and shrinking, the already-solid crust would have to crinkle, crack, and buckle in response—hence the faults and mountain ranges.

While this turned out to be the wrong explanation for the geology on Earth, it was rescued from the bin of discarded hypotheses by other bodies in the Solar System.

The planet Mercury, which is much smaller than the Earth, doesn’t have tectonic plates (plural)—it has one tectonic plate. Despite this geological unity, there are linear features on its surface caused by the squeezing of the rock. Without colliding tectonic plates to provide that squeezing, you need another mechanism. For Mercury, contraction fits the bill. Because it’s much smaller than the Earth, it cooled much more quickly, leading to a very different style of tectonics.

So how much has it shrunk? Planetary geologists have been trying to figure that out for a while. Models of the cooling process predict that the planet’s radius should have decreased by 5 to 10 kilometers, a reduction of about 0.2 to 0.4 percent. Using imagery from NASA’s Mariner 10 mission in 1974, however, researchers only saw evidence of surface wrinkles to corroborate 0.8 to 3 kilometers of radial shrinkage.

Of course, the Mariner 10 data wasn’t perfect—an entire hemisphere of Mercury wasn’t imaged—and this estimate was never taken as the final word. The spectacular data from the recent MESSENGER mission provided an opportunity to revisit the question, and Paul Byrne of the Universities Space Research Association headed a team that took full advantage of it.

Using MESSENGER’s planet-wide coverage and topographic data, the researchers mapped almost 6,000 tectonic ridges. These can run anywhere from 9 and 900 kilometers across Mercury’s surface, rising several hundred meters or more into its very thin atmosphere. The surface rocks aren’t actually broken by faults. Rather, they’re continuous layers draped over faults beneath the surface.

Picture a short stack of printer paper sitting on top of two wooden blocks. If you push one block upward (as one side of a faulted rock can move), the paper will bend in response, creating a muted version of the sharp ledge between the blocks. Mercury’s ridges are akin to this sort of upheaval.

The ridges aren’t evenly distributed around the planet. A region of volcanic plains in the northern hemisphere that encompasses about 6 percent of Mercury’s surface contains about 28 percent of its tectonic ridges. There are also some bands of closely spaced ridges that may represent networks of related faults common in mountainous areas on Earth.

By analyzing all these ridges, the researchers were able to calculate a new estimate for the contraction that created them—a reduction of Mercury’s radius by about 5 to 7 kilometers. That’s much higher than the older estimates, and it’s in line with the predictions of the mathematical models.

The interest in this area goes beyond getting the number right. That bit of information helps us sort out more details about the planet closest the Sun—it puts limits on the amount of radioactive isotopes that could have been present in early Mercury to generate heat, for example. It’s helpful for working out whether there’s any convection in Mercury’s mantle today and how its magnetic-field-producing metallic core cooled over time. We can also use it to make other inferences about Mercury’s surface. There’s still a lot we don’t know about the planet that shrank.

Nature Geoscience, 2014. DOI: 10.1038/NGEO2097  (About DOIs).

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Government monopolies: the Supreme Court should overrule the Southern Motor Carriers case

(Part 2 of a series. Here are Part 1, Part 3, and Part 4)

In the N.C. Dental Examiners case, the Supreme Court will decide whether to extend Parker antitrust immunity to state regulatory agencies that are run entirely by private parties who have a private interest in excluding their own competitors from the marketplace. We filed this brief, joined by our friends at the Cato Institute, arguing that Parker immunity should not apply. In this post, I explain why the Southern Motor Carriers case, which allows states to extend such imunity liberally, should be overruled.

The Supreme Court first invented Parker antitrust immunity because government is inherently monopolistic in some ways, and ought to be—when it prohibits certain types of dangerous activities, those prohibitions obviously limit competition in some sense. Moreover, the Court was wary about intruding into state sovereignty, especially since the Sherman Antitrust Act didn’t specifically say it was meant to interfere with state governments. “We find nothing in the language of the Sherman Act or in its history which suggests that its purpose was to restrain a state or its officers or agents from activities directed by its legislature,” the Parker decision said. “In a dual system of government in which, under the Constitution, the states are sovereign, save only as Congress may constitutionally subtract from their authority, an unexpressed purpose to nullify a state’s control over its officers and agents is not lightly to be attributed to Congress.”

But did this mean that states could immunize citizens from federal antitrust laws simply by declaring people exempt? The Court said no: “a state does not give immunity to those who violate the Sherman Act by authorizing them to violate it, or by declaring that their action is lawful.” So what was the limit? When could state law allow individuals to act in ways that would otherwise violate the federal antitrust laws? Parker itself didn’t say, but the Court noted that in that case, the state had “command[ed]” the activity in question. “The state itself exercises its legislative authority in making the regulation and in prescribing the conditions of its application.”

Later cases understood this to mean that private parties would be exempt from the Sherman Act only where state law specifically compelled the otherwise illegal conduct. Mere “state authorization, approval, encouragement, or participation,” the Court said, “confers no antitrust immunity.” In Goldfarb v. Virginia State Bar, it held that antitrust liability would apply to a private organization that adopted an illegal price-fixing arrangement in the form of dues, because “the threshold inquiry” in determining whether Parker immunity should apply “is whether the activity is required by the State acting as sovereign.” Since no statute or regulation imposed a restraint on trade, the state bar was not immune.

But in Southern Motor Carriers Rate Conference, Inc. v. United States, the Court dramatically liberalized its granting of Parker immunity. In that case, the Court declared that a state command displacing competition was not a requirement for immunity.  Instead, the state could shield people from the antitrust laws if the state law “expressly permits, [even if it does] not compel, anticompetitive conduct.” This meant that states could allow private parties to engage in price fixing and other illegal activities so long as the state “intends to adopt a permissive policy”—that is, so long as the state left its deputies (often private entities) free to decide for themselves whether to engage in otherwise illegal conduct.

That decision gave states vastly broader power to immunize private parties from the antitrust laws. It meant that states could do just what Parker declared off-limits: states could “give immunity to those who violate the Sherman Act by authorizing them to violate it, or by declaring that their action is lawful.”

Souther Motor Carriers muddied the waters considerably, allowing state officials to empower private parties to legally block competition, in violation of federal law, and to do so by providing those parties with only vague instructions, which shield the officials from political accountability. It encourages states to couch their economic policies in nebulous terms which give regulatory agencies the broadest possible power to determine “the public interest,” or merely suggesting to these agencies what they “may consider.” Under this rule, the state can tell the Widget Regulatory Board, made up of licensed widget makers, that they can decide for themselves whether to illegalize their own competition.

This rule fails to ensure that either the regulators (or would-be widget makers) know when the Board may or may not restrict competition contrary to federal antitrust policy. Vaguely phrased state “permissive policies” thus leave the Board free to set state policy, and to violate federal law, without real oversight by the legislature or accountability to voters. As Prof. John F. Hart writes, “The displacement-of-competition standard, in supporting immunity for a substantial class of restraints instituted by state agencies or local government that cannot plausibly be said to implement state policy, defeats the Court’s objective of confining immunity to those restraints that implement state policy.”

And when a state only vaguely gestures in the direction of anticompetitive conduct, its agencies—or private parties claiming to act in the state’s name—can exercise unguided discretion to choose when to allow and when to prohibit competition.  In such a case, “it is illusory to view the state legislature as the ‘politically accountable’ source of a state policy that in fact has been adopted by the agency itself.”

Finally, “permissive policies”—as opposed to specific, clear instructions—allow elected officials to take credit for the successes regulatory agencies achieve, or to distance themselves from their failures, whenever convenient. Politicians can allow the Board to determine its own jurisdiction, and then claim later that they themselves never intended to create a widget cartel. This reduces transparency and accountability, and creates an incentive for government to delegate its power to private entities—rarely a good idea.

The Southern Motor Carriers Court sought to deflect this problem by requiring “evidence [that] conclusively shows that a State intends to adopt a permissive policy,” thus apparently preserving a clear-articulation requirement. But this does little to diminish the broad power that the case gave to states to nullify federal antitrust law. Vague “permissive policies” are not made less vague by the fact that the law “conclusively shows” that the state intends to adopt a vague policy! Telling a private party “engage in whatever anticompetitive conduct you choose” would “conclusively” delegate broad power to that private party, but would not define the contours of the policy itself. It would only “conclusively show” that the state intends to cast its “gauzy cloak” over the anticompetitive conduct of private parties. And that is just what the law is not supposed to allow.

Worse, the “permissive policy” rule is irreconcilable with the strong presumption against antitrust immunity that the Court has time and again pledged itself to. The Court has emphasized that “state-action immunity is disfavored, much as are repeals by implication.” But Southern Motor Carriers encourages courts to “use [their] imagination liberally in determining whether particular anticompetitive conduct was a foreseeable or logical result of the regulatory delegation,” and to grant immunity when they conclude in the affirmative. Allowing private parties to assert immunity from the antitrust laws on the grounds that the state intends to permit violation of those laws is just the sort of immunity-by-implication that the Court has rejected.

Southern Motor Carriers also premised its liberal grant of antitrust immunity on the idea that limiting immunity to cases where state laws actually compel the anticompetitive conduct would “reduce[] the range of regulatory alternatives available to the State.” But many federal laws reduce the range of regulatory alternatives open to states. If the antitrust laws “reflect a basic national policy favoring free markets over regulated markets,” as the Court has claimed, then there’s no reason to let states deviate downward from this baseline too easily. And the Supreme Court noted in FTC v. Ticor Title Insurance that adhering to a consistent presumption against antitrust immunity actually helps states to craft economic policies: “By adhering in most cases to fundamental and accepted assumptions about the benefits of competition within the framework of the antitrust laws, we increase the States’ regulatory flexibility.”

In any event, states would still have plenty of flexibility under a rule that merely requires them to clearly declare their intent to restrict competition, rather than letting them issue antitrust exemptions by vague declarations that they will “permit” private parties to create cartels backed by state law. Limiting antitrust immunity to cases where state law actually requires anticompetitive conduct—as Parker originally required—would encourage transparency and accountability to voters: states would only be able to grant immunity to private parties when the state adopts an anticompetitive policy in the clearest terms. If states “choose to displace the free market,” antitrust law should at least ensure that it is “clear that the State is responsible for the price fixing it has sanctioned and undertaken to control.”

The lenient rule of Southern Motor Carriers warrants one critic’s conclusion in that “the ideology of federalism has displaced a national model of competition for one favoring state-based resolutions.” Whatever one’s opinion of antitrust law in general, there is no justification for allowing states broad latitude to disregard federal law and erect private cartels with only vague instructions and loose oversight. Parker immunity should be extended to private parties acting under color of state law only where state law requires the restraint of trade in question. Southern Motor Carriers should be overruled, and courts should grant Parker immunity to private parties only where the anti-competitive conduct at issue is actually compelled by state law.


Complete works of william shakespeare is copyright 1990-1993 by world inc. Was it skulking along behind the blow. Interests at the general scene.
Country than to fight to the frighted fields. We floated there with a false turn. Can whip up some saliva. As pillow for us to make her helpless.


This afternoon the Committee hosted a high-level hearing with representatives of various European civil society organisations on the next multi-annual financial framework for the European Union. Among the guest speakers were Janusz Lewandowski, the Commissioner for Financial Programming and the Budget, and Ms Eniko Gyori, the Hungarian Minister of State for European Affairs (representing the Hungarian Presidency). The hearing was organised in the context of an opinion being prepared by Henri Malosse (France, President of the Employers’ Group) and his co-rapporteur Gerard Dantin (France, Employees’ Group). Lewandowski expressed hope for an early agreement, pointing out that absence of agreement would lead to far from optimal accelerated budgets later. In the same context he pointed out that, within the existing seven-year framework, it was normal that budgets should grow, as programmes reached maturity. However, he acknowledged that a middle way now had to be found between ‘the mood of the time and what is necessary’. Eniko Gyori opined that letters from the net contributors had become a familiar rite of passage but that what was needed in the first instance was a policy-driven debate. A broad consensus emerged in the ensuing exchanges. As Malosse put it, the EU’s budget is not a matter of figures. Behind the figures lies a project and Europe’s ambitions, and these should be defended. That project includes common values and an inclusive, collegial approach. Last but not least, a far more pro-active case should be made for the benefits and efficiency of money spent at EU level; despite caricatures to the contrary, EU expenditure represents economies, synergies and efficiencies rather than additional costs.


OnTrack Reading Phonics Workbook Order Now From

Notation for the 43 Sounds

Whenever a phonics curriculum is devised, a decision has to be made as to how to break down all English words into component phonics sounds, or phonemes. The OnTrack Reading Phonics Program teaches spellings for 43 specific English phonemes, consisting of 24 consonant sounds and 19 vowel sounds.

It’s necessary to establish some notation so that we can discuss sounds in here without having to say them aloud. When I use the notation /s/, I mean the sound /s/, as in sit. Then choices have to be made. To take one example, I chose to define "oo" as the vowel sound we hear in the word soon. So, wherever you see the notation /oo/, it will therefore mean the vowel sound in soon. As you will see when you read the list below, most of the symbols chosen for sounds are obvious. About five of them might be difficult to recall or might need a bit of explanation, particularly /oul/, /err/, /the/, /hw/ and /zh/.

Below is a list of the 24 consonant sounds and the 19 vowel sounds in the OnTrack Reading curriculum, or 43 sounds in all. Note that no consonant /y/ sound, as in yard, is listed. In this curriculum the first sound in yard is denoted as an /ee/ sound with the emphasis on saying it quickly. Thus, the notation for yard is /ee/ar/d/.

Notation for Consonant Sounds

Consonant Sounds

  1. /b/ as in bet
  2. /c/ as in cot
  3. /d/ as in dip
  4. /f/ as in fan
  5. /g/ as in got
  6. /h/ as in hot
  7. /j/ as in jar
  8. /l/ as in land
  9. /m/ as in mat
10. /n/ as in nap
11. /p/ as in pet
12. /r/ as in red
13. /s/ as in sip
14. /t/ as in tip
15. /v/ as in van
16. /w/ as in wet
17. /z/ as in zip
18. /sh/ as in ship
19. /ch/ as in chip
20. /th/ as in thin
21. /the/ as in this (Symbol for sound doesn’t match spelling)
22. /ng/ as in rung
23. /hw/ as in when (Symbol for sound doesn’t match spelling)
24. /zh/ as in vision (Symbol for sound doesn’t match spelling)

Vowel Sounds

  1. /a/ as in cat
  2. /e/ as in bet
  3. /i/ as in kid
  4. /o/ as in hot
  5. /u/ as in nut
  6. /ae/ as in favor (Symbol for sound doesn’t match spelling)
  7. /ee/ as in see
  8. /ie/ as in tie
  9. /oe/ as in toe
10. /ue/ as in cue
11. /oo/ as in zoo
12. /oul/ as in would
13. /ow/ as in cow
14. /oy/ as in boy
15. /aw/ as in saw
16. /er/ as in her
17. /ar/ as in car
18. /or/ as in for
19. /err/ as in merry

For now, note that these particular choices were made:

   1. /hw/ differs from /w/ and /h/. I describe it as the “blow out a candle” sound.

   2. /ar/ is always treated as one sound, rather than as two sounds /o/+/r/

   3. /or/ is treated as one sound when it is spelled as or and as orr, rather than as two sounds /oe/+/r/

   4. /err/ is treated as one sound when it is spelled as err, arr, er, ar, and ere, rather than as two sounds /ae/+/r/

   5. No consonant sound for the letter “y” as in yard is listed.

Several of the specific symbol choices should also perhaps be explained:

   1. /the/ was chosen for the sound heard in words like that and those because the spelling th was already used for the sound in words like think and thin.

   2. /ae/ was chosen to mirror the ee, ie, oe, and ue symbols for their respective sounds. Think Mae West for an example, but generally ae is an infrequent spelling of this sound.

   3. /oul/ was chosen because the more common oo spelling in wood was already used for /oo/ as in zoo and the u spelling in push was already used for /u/ as in nut

   4. /hw/ was chosen rather than wh because the way the sound is taught in the OnTrack Reading Phonics Program is more accurately reflected as hw. That is, /hw/ more closely reflects “blowing out a candle.”

   5. /zh/ was chosen to reflect the infrequent sound encountered in vision and beige because the common spellings of /zh/ are not intuitive representations of the sound.

Now that we have some understanding on how sounds will be discussed in print, we move on to a discussion of four Phonics Assessment Tests that you can use to determine your child’s particular strengths and weaknesses as he attempts to make sense of the phonics structure of English words, beginning with Testing Blending Skill


120 days. [Introduced 1989 by SESE.] Family heirloom from SW Virginia since 1910. Grown by Frank Carwile for over 75 years since he was given this peanut by a traveler when he was 8 years old. He later tried other varieties but found none with a better flavor. 2-4 seeds per pod. Plants have average disease resistance but excellent production and drought resistance. (¼ lb = 4 oz = 114 g)

Cannot ship to CA or Canada.

Please refer to Peanut Cultural Notes for growing information.