Thing 30: RSS Feeds and De.li.ci.ous

I subscribe to RSS feeds through LiveJournal for BBC News, Librarian's Internet Index, The Straight Dope, Margaret Cho's blog, and a travelogue written by my friend from Israel. Some people use LiveJournal or their other blogs strictly as RSS readers. I should figure out how to set up RSS feeds through Blogger. I get RSS feeds from the NYTimes through Twitter as well.

I created a de.li.ci.ous account last year to organize my bookmarks for LGBT and culinary websites. I still have a long way to go on that project, as I continue to find excellent websites...they are bookmarked on my home and work computers, and I catch up with entering them in de.li.ci.ous as I have time. I don't keep up with de.li.ci.ous that much because I do not experience as much social networking as I would like. I expected that fellow de.li.ci.ous users would use the site to share websites with others, chat about them, and talk about their research, but this was not my experience. This leads me to believe that most de.li.ci.ous users are using the service simply to organize their bookmarks, in spite of the extra features of the site. I did read the article about The Several Habits of Wildly Successful de.li.ci.ous Users, however, and will give it another shot.

Is An Anti-Racism Conference Racist?

US May Boycott Anti-Racism Conference

The United States, Canada, and Israel might boycott an anti-racism conference because they feel that it unfairly targets Israel as a racist state, and Zionism as a racist policy.

For the record--the UN has gone back and forth on its position on Zionism. I do not normally cite from Wikipedia, but you can find a condensed history of the UN's changing point of view of Zionism here.

If Israel is to be called a racist state, then what about France, whose school history textbooks tell all French schoolchildren (including those descended from Arabs, Africans, Vietnamese, and Tahitians) that their ancestors were the Gauls, and that the French brought civilization and light to the world? If Israel is to be called a racist state, then what about Saudi Arabia and other Arab nations who publish school history textbooks that teach children not to trust Jews, Christians, or other "non-believers"? If Israel is to be called a racist state, then what about Japan, where the government severely restricts immigration from other nations and does not allow immigrants without Japanese ancestry to become full citizens?

Let's be fair, folks, no matter what our political opinions are on the Occupation.

Thing 29: Google Tools

This week I taught my students about online search strategies for Google. Over the weekend they will be using Google Scholar to find articles for their research topic. For my students, I am going to post the link to

Google Alerts On Your Research Question Or Topic

so that they can get updates on the latest news or scholarly articles on their topic.

I personally have used Google Alerts for many research topics, and have found it incredibly convenient as I check my email more frequently than any other website.

Alerts.com is a new service for me. I checked out the Craigslist Alerts through this site, as I am interested in buying a car but don't always have time to check Craigslist every day. Now I will get Alerts sent straight to my email every day for potential cars.

Critical Thinking Gone Out the Window

Growing hate groups blame Obama and Latino immigrants for the failing US economy.

This is a terrific article, referencing the Southern Poverty Law Center's "Year of Hate" report as well as FBI statistics and observations from a professor of psychiatry at Harvard Medical School. If you don't believe that this increase in hate crimes is taking place, look up those reports and statistics!

In any case, these hate groups are violating some major guidelines of critical thinking:

Guideline 1: Ask questions; be willing to wonder. Why are the people in hate groups so willing to believe what they are taught? How is it solving their problems?

Guideline 2: Define the problem. If the people who join hate groups followed Guideline 1, they would soon have to follow Guideline 2. The problem may not be immigrants, but immigration policy itself. The problem may not be immigrants "taking" jobs, but Americans "rejecting" them, or Americans simply not qualified to do those jobs. If they could define the problem with more clarity, these people would busily be engaged in overthrowing the government, not attacking minorities!

Guideline 3: Examine the evidence. The US economy was failing before Obama got into office. In fact, the US economy has been failing since the 1980s!

4: Analyze assumptions and biases. The hate groups are making a big assumption that Latino immigrants are "taking" American jobs and not paying taxes. The hate groups do not like Latinos to begin with, and as a result they are allowing their bias to dictate their beliefs.

5: Avoid emotional reasoning. It would be interesting to do a study on the members of hate groups to determine how many of them have been cited for violence due to anger. Also, are these people in hate groups spewing hatred simply because it makes them feel good?

6. Don't use either/or thinking or overgeneralize. Do white supremacist groups believe that all "white" "Aryan" people are naturally good, while all "non-white" people are naturally bad?

7. Consider other interpretations. What type of information about the economy, immigration, and up-to-date government legislation does the average person receive? Adults make choices as to what they will believe as true or not.

No More Happy Hour?

The latest Yahoo! News headline to catch my eye: "More evidence links alcohol, cancer in women." According to the article, 1.3 million British women at breast cancer screening clinics were surveyed about their drinking habits over the course of seven years. Researchers compared women who regularly consumed two or fewer drinks a week with women who drank more. According to the study, each additional drink increased the risk of breast, rectal, and liver cancer. If smokers drank, according to the study, only then were they at higher risk for esophageal and oral cancers.

What I did not like about this article was that it did not indicate who did the study. Because this is news, the research study is probably too new to appear as a research article indexed in a database. It would have been helpful to at least find out if the study had been published in a journal or not.

I am curious to read about the research design of this study, as well as why alcoholic beverages put the body at higher risk for cancer.

Thing 28: Customized Home Pages

I set up an iGoogle customized home page for myself, but a few days later was no longer allowed to access it because I do not have a gmail account. Why would I need to have a gmail account? For customer support from Google in case something goes wrong? Would I get better customer service from them if I did have a gmail account? It seems a bit silly to have to maintain a 3rd email address just for the customized home page. Most of the features on the customized home page I already have on my desktop, and it seems to be very repetitive.

These days I am suffering from technological overload. Every day I check and/or use the following: work email, personal email, online course management system, library catalog and databases, Microsoft Office software, search engines, LiveJournal, Blogger, Facebook, Pandora, and now Twitter. That is at least twelve pieces of technology every day.

I am grateful to have the opportunity to learn about new Web 2.0 tools. To be fair though, they should not force me to set up more email accounts than what I already need, and they should not already replicate what I can do through tools provided through my browser or my desktop.

Thing 27: Twitter

Twitter is described as a "social networking and micro-blogging service". Micro-blogging is right--I set up my Twitter account today, and discovered that "tweets" are limited to 140 characters! In fact, you can watch the number 140 in the upper right hand corner of your "tweet" quickly decrease as you chirp along. Otherwise, Twitter is similar to Facebook.

One of my friends has a Twitter connection to his cell phone, so that he can tweet frequently about what is happening in his life without having to use his computer and without having to actually talk to people. This particular friend is living in Israel right now, doing military service, and of course we are all concerned about him and want to make sure that he is alive. To read his tweets is a comfort. I receive his tweets as an RSS feed on my personal LiveJournal account.

Another one of my friends uses Twitter to take notes for longer pieces of writing (more detailed blog posts or presentations). He used Twitter to follow the presidential campaign and elections, and he also uses it to tweet about court cases in the news.

I can see myself using Twitter more for quick journalistic purposes, and less for social purposes...I have Facebook for that...in any case, I will be tweeting on Twitter tonight while I watch the Oscars. (My Twitter name, BTW, is voxpopulare in case you would like to follow my tweets.)

Thing 26: Ning!

A "ning" is an online platform where people can create their own social networks. I suppose it is a hybrid term to mean "networking ring", although "ning" also means "Peace" in Chinese. The Palo Alto company probably cashed in on this fact to woo liberal, New Agey Gen Xers to their site.

If it were not for 23 More Things on a Stick, I would have never achieved the state of "ning". The structure and features of the site are similar to Facebook; I like the ning's features better because they are larger and easier to read. So far I have uploaded a gadget to my ning page, commented on someone else's ning, added two fellow librarians to my ning, and joined one of the forums. I will not use the ning for blogging at this point...I currently have my Blogger account, as well as a LiveJournal account for personal blogging, and I don't have much time to keep a third blog. Ning, like Facebook, will most likely be used for short correspondence. Unlike Facebook, however, I might use Ning for professional networking rather than personal.

Outside of 23 More Things on a Stick, I can see myself creating a specialized ning network for my film festival work, in order to communicate with people on my film review committee as well as potential filmmakers and other festival organizers.

Does Talcum Powder Cause Cancer?

Talcum Powder and Cancer

A friend had emailed me this article, and it made me quite paranoid because we both powder ourselves liberally. I decided to check whether or not the author of this article had cited from any real research studies, and if what she had cited was correct.

The first study of a potential link between talcum powder and cancer was originally published in The Journal of the National Cancer Institute. It did show that a significant percentage of women who used talcum powder were at higher risk for developing ovarian cancer than others. Researchers involved in this study, however, did not want to make the claim that talcum powder caused cancer because they did not feel that the study asked enough questions of the patients in regard to the age when they started talcum powder usage, what brands of talcum powder were used, and whether the women were menopausal or pre-menopausal.

This second study published by Epidemiology, according to the abstract, also shows that use of talc increases the risk of ovarian cancer. I wish I had access to the article, because the researchers had looked at other factors such as smoking, endometriosis, tubal ligation, etc.

The third study that I found showed no correlation between talc use and ovarian cancer! According to the abstract of this study, hospital based studies showed no increased risk of ovarian cancer and talc use, while population studies did. The researchers believed that, in population based studies, the researchers already had a bias as to a particular type of women to target for the study.

I could go on, but...I am just going to take a powder.

Thing 25: Blogger's Toolkit

I am having fun with the Apture tool on my blog. Unfortunately, it will only make those splendid pop-up windows if you link to Wikipedia, YouTube, or other sites which may or may not be sound for research purposes. I also am setting up Shoutmix on my blog for chat, and I am also going to try out CloudShout as well as one of the text-audio converters.

Although I do like gadgets, my blog posts tend to be lengthy, and so I will not post every single type of gadget to my blog. I will only post ones that would be of value to my students and outside readers who may want to get to know me better.

Censorship

Do people follow the guidelines of critical thinking when they censor or ban books?

Heinrich Heine, a famous German Jewish writer, had once said "Where they burn books, they will ultimately also burn people."

The American Library Association has developed an Intellectual Freedom Manual to teach librarians how to address the freedom to think through collection development and reference services. Public and school librarians are often faced with requests to remove books from the collection, for various reasons. Sometimes the patrons win. Here are two recent examples:

Court Declares Vamos a Cuba OK to Be Removed from School Library Shelves
(Reason? The book is a positive depiction of life in Cuba, from a child's perspective.)

Teacher Wants to Expel Huck Finn
(His reason? "We have a black president now, a really articulate guy, yet all of the books we have students read in class show blacks as uneducated and unarticulate.")

How Medical Conclusions Are Made

Autism ruling fails to convince many vaccine-link believers.

According to a CNN report, "special court", composed of "special masters", decided that there is no link between autism and infant vaccines that contain "thimerosal", a mercury-based preservative.

I was a bit disturbed by this article, for the following reasons:

1. I would like to know who these "special masters" are who made this determination. The federal government's US Department of Health and Human Services appeared all too ready to accept this determination, based on "three or four" studies.

2. No information is given about studies conducted to determine whether or not a correlation between autism and thimerosal exists. How do we know that the results of those studies are even sound, or that the research samples were large enough to make a determination?

3. The studies to determine a correlation between thimerasol and autism were only conducted when parents of affected children sued the US Department of Health and Human Services. According to the article, the parents were unable to sue to the manufacturers of these vaccines directly. Regardless of this, is it not the responsibility of the manufacturers and the federal government to test all substances that enter the human body prior to putting them out on the market as safe, trusted, FDA approved substances?

4. The last part of the article:

This week's ruling brought a different outcome from the Hannah Poling case. In November 2007, the Division of Vaccine Injury Compensation concluded that the Georgia girl's illness that had predisposed her to symptoms of autism was "significantly aggravated" by the vaccinations she received as a toddler and that her family should therefore be compensated.

But Thursday, Special Master George L. Hastings Jr. wrote in his ruling in the Cedillos case, "The evidence advanced by the petitioners has fallen far short of demonstrating such a link" between autism and vaccinations.

What was the difference between the Poling case and the Cedillos case? Nothing in the article revealed any difference in the information provided. Why, then, did those decisions contradict each other?

To begin with, autism is such a complex disorder that medical professionals cannot even decide on a definition for the disorder or its symptoms, as they fall into a wide spectrum of variation. Second, no one knows for sure what exactly causes autism. Third, because not all autistic children display all of the the same symptoms of autism with the same level of severity, nor do those symptoms appear within the same age range for each child, the number of official diagnoses vary from year to year. Some children are only diagnosed with autism when they are already in primary school, while others are diagnosed as early as six months old.

So before any more guidelines to critical thinking are violated in the study of autism, here are my humble suggestions:

1. Scientists, psychologists, and pediatricians must go back to the drawing board. First, they must ask more questions about autism in order to determine what autism actually is. It may not be one disorder, but a group of related spectrum disorders, such as Asperger's Syndrome (which has already been isolated as distinct from autism, although it has many similarities to autism). Second, they have to do more studies on what could cause autism so that future parents could receive this education, even if they do not have a history of autism within their families.

2. Pharmaceutical companies must take all human factors into account when creating vaccines and medications, and they should review the history of medicine! Since the nineteenth century, it has been well-documented that the ingestion of mercury has caused various types of damage to the human nervous system (hence the expression "mad as a Hatter", as people who worked in hat factories had used mercury to treat the fabrics to make the hats, and they had been permanently brain damaged from overexposure to mercury). Old fashioned thermometers used to contain mercury to measure temperature, but no longer do because a person could get brain damage or even die from the amount of mercury in a thermometer should it crack in their mouths. Thermometers used to measure internal temperatures of foods also do not include mercury for this reason. Why oh why, then, did a pharmaceutical company decide to use a mercury based preservative in a vaccine for infants and toddlers, whose nervous systems are still developing and often at risk for damage from high fevers or other phemonena? The federal government has told people what type of fish they can and cannot eat, and in what amounts, based on the amount of mercury found in recent catches of those fish. Why oh why, then, is the federal government saying that it is still OK to produce a vaccine for infants and children that contains a mercury based preservative?

23 More Things on a Stick

For those of you familiar with the Minnesota State Fair, there are many many things you can eat on a stick.

For librarians, there is an online program in Minnesota called "23 More Things on a Stick" to help us learn more about Web 2.0 technologies. Over the next 17 weeks, I will be learning how to use different Web 2.0 tools. Some will be "old hat", and some will be brand new, and I will be posting entries about these Web 2.0 tools as I learn about them.

Barriers to Critical Thinking

On Wednesday evening, there will be a panel discussion on campus on a topic whose name alone stirs up a great deal of controversy. Some people will call it the Israeli Occupation, some people will call it the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, some people will call it a massacre, some people will call it revenge, some people will call it just desserts. It is very easy for people who live thousands of miles away from the Middle East to sit back in their armchairs and name things.

In any case, a passage from the original notice posted to a faculty listserv regarding this panel discussion caused a great deal of controversy in its tone:

Since the Palestinians elected the Islamic Movement Hamas in 2006, Israel has sealed off Gaza from the outside world, and has been starving it ever since. Just before the inauguration of Barak Obama, while the world was celebrating Christmas, Israel assaulted Gaza from air, sea and land spreading death and destruction on a largely disarmed, starved and scared population for 23 days. In the US media, this war crime went largely unreported, although US taxpayer funds it and US politicians provide cover for it. This panel aims to educate the public, mourn the dead, and express solidarity with those who survived.

A faculty member, concerned about the tone of the email, asked the following question:

Will the panel provide the other sides of the story?

The response he received offlist:

"You have the whole world demonizing the Palestinians for you, and am sure you do a great job yourself. You don't need me to do that for you."

This caused someone else to post the following:

The poster attached to the scsu-announce is obnoxious, insensitive and vulgar....all words used when swastikas were found on campus last year. The juxtaposition of the recent violence in Gaza with actual historical photos of the Nazi Holocaust in Europe is completely inappropriate. If the HURL professors want to speak on behalf of Palestinians and Gaza and Hamas...so be it, but their suggestion that Israel, Jews, are equal to Nazis....is completely out of line and does not belong in a university which is supposedly on guard for such vulgar manipulation of discourse.

The announce list should not be a means of such mean-spirited views.

I have stood with two of these professors in solidarity....I will not be silent. Their opposition to Israeli policies is obvious, the use of Nazi photos goes far beyond that opposition.

Which finally led to the poster of the original announcement to respond:

This is not the space to respond to Dr. Edelheit's attack on the forum Gaza 2009. The accusation of the connection of this panel with the swastikas found on campus last year is unfounded,and inappropriate. There are no Nazi photos in the flyer. There are photos of two ghettos that were both sealed off, starved, and disarmed.

Peace comes only with proper historical understanding of injustice, and no other place is more equipped to do that than a university. If we are interested in pursuing peace, we should try to understand the situation from the perspective of the most helpless victims. Closing discussion only prolongs the injustice. We welcome all views and questions in this forum.

With the exception of one poster, who asked a simple one sentence question, all other posters involved accused each other of terrible things, made assumptions about each other's political beliefs, and ended up closing dialogue before it could even begin. If participants in the panel discussion perpetuate such behavior, are they truly engaged in educating students about what is happening in Gaza right now, or are they going to mis-educate students into prejudice and one-sided information?

For the record, I am not against the creation of a Palestinian state. I am, however, against faculty setting a bad example of ad hominem for students.

The Film Hunter

I volunteer for a local film festival. My job is to locate films for the festival as well as to review them. Although it sounds like great fun (which it is), finding the films, filmmakers, and production companies takes perseverance, as well as some dirty tricks.

First, I locate the contact information for production companies that make or distribute films containing the subject matter that would be appropriate for the festival. After visiting their websites, I contact those companies to ask them for "screener copies" of films that we would like to review. This is the easiest part. Unfortunately, public performance rights to show these films is not cheap, and so I must also rely on other venues for potential films.

My next stop to find new films and potential filmmakers are video websites. Video Menu and Reelseo provide many links to video sharing websites aside from YouTube. The research fun starts here, as I must use different keywords to search for potential films and filmmakers that cover the topics that our film festival celebrates. Quite often I find shorts this way, or promo trailers from independent or student filmmakers. I locate their websites, as well as their email addresses, and ask them for screener copies of their work to review. They are very happy to share what they have. If the reviewing committee wants to show these films, quite often they are free or at little cost to us.

Third, I subscribe to email lists, Facebook sites, MySpace sites, and LiveJournal sites for film festivals that show similar films. I find out what these film festivals are showing, look up those film makers or distribution companies, and request screeners. This is my dirty little film research trick, but I am sure that all other film hunters must do this as well.

Finally, I talk to a lot of people about my "job" as a film hunter. You would be surprised how many people say "You know, I have a friend who just made a film..." or "I have a friend in film school..." I leave no stone unturned; I get the friend's contact information and get a screener. This is a research strategy as well!

Subject Headings Gone Wrong

During her presentation on subject headings, Professor Gross brought up the fact that many subject headings to describe ethnic groups or the LGBT community are often dated, inaccurate, and offensive. Librarians such as Sanford Berman have worked hard to create and revise subject headings that describe the LGBT community as well as modern phenomenon ("krumping", for example). Their work is thankless and rarely recognized by anyone except librarians, but without it, people would have a difficult time using the library catalog to find books that address new trends in culture, technology, and other areas. Poor subject headings in the library catalog restrict people's access to books on the shelves.

There is one subject heading that has always bothered me. This is the subject heading "Cookery". While inoffensive compared to "sexual minorities" or "drug addicts", people are less likely to do a subject search using the term "cookery" than they would for "homosexual" or "queer". At the same time, more people use public libraries to borrow cookbooks than LGBT materials. Why has "cookery" remained an ignored, archaic subject heading, not changed to "cooking" by the Library of Congress?

Some people have justified the use of "cookery" as a subject heading because they are under the impression that "cuisine" only refers to French cooking, or fine dining. "Gastronomy", a more encompassing term, refers to the art and science of cooking but would not necessarily be appropriate for a book that only contained recipes and no culinary lore or food science. It is also another one of those "frou frou" terms which many Americans think is solely associated with fine dining.

For the past eight years, I worked as a librarian at a culinary school. I assisted chefs and culinary students with their research, and showed them how to use our library catalog quite often. Not one of them ever used the term "cookery" in a keyword search, and not one of them would use the term in their everyday or academic discourse about working with food. As the cataloger for our collection, I made the merciful decision to modify the LC subject headings to say "cooking" instead of "cookery". It became a lot easier for people to find the books they needed, and more people used the catalog to search on their own. One day, I will take up this fight with the Library of Congress.

The United States of Africa

Colonel Muammar Gaddafi of Libya, elected president of the African Union, calls for the 53 African nations to form the United States of Africa.

If Gaddafi is serious about this, he is going to have his work cut out for him. Although it is possible that forming an African coalition like the European Union may improve the economy of African nations in the long run, will it make peace between rival nations and rival tribes?