Caveat Lector

Humphrey (so named because he bogarts the feeder, and no, I am under no illusion that his name is an original conceit) and Humriette made it through Tropical Depression Ernesto okay. The poor birds came to perch on our balcony railing a few times, because it was about the only perch they could find that wasn’t thrashing about like a carnival ride. I was afraid the wind would bash them up against a wall or something, but they seem to have managed.

I’m guessing somebody else in the area has put up a feeder, because I don’t see Humphrey a-bogarting as often as I did, and I see Humriette rather more often at our feeder. That’s fine with me; sugar-water’s cheap.

Open-access publishing is sometimes thought to change or threaten peer review. Now, as Peter Suber will gladly mention, open access and peer review are basically orthogonal. Open-access journals can be peer-reviewed, and toll-access journals can be unrefereed. Institutional and disciplinary repositories typically accept both refereed and unrefereed work.

Still, an oft-heard argument goes something like this: an open-access article can be commented on by anyone, and the aggregate of those comments can serve as well as or better than the existing pre-publication peer-review workflow to point up the article’s worth (or lack of worth) to its field.

All very good—if gatekeeping for purposes of quality control is peer review’s only or primary role in the process. Certainly that is the assumption I most often see, in books like this for example.

But consider this thorough examination of one peer-reviewer’s process. “I read each paper quickly to get the overall feel for its contents, and make some preliminary notes,” says Holley. “If I feel that the article is not suitable for publication, I stop there and return it with my reasons to the editor. This has happened only about three times in all my years of peer reviewing.” (Emphasis mine.)

This doesn’t suggest to me a reviewer wielding his pen like a vorpal sword to cut down the unworthy. Nor do I believe that Holley is a cupcake reviewer. No, I think Holley is pointing out another central function of peer review.

“The peer reviewer can be the author’s best friend in creating a much stronger article than the initial submission,” says Holley. “At its best, the peer review process finds errors, methodological problems, and inconsistencies while authors can still correct them—a much better alternative than learning about them in a letter to the editor.” (Added emphasis mine.)

I’ve not had anything peer-reviewed yet; getting conference proposals approved is as close as I’ve come. David’s book was peer-reviewed, however, and the process I saw was much less gatekeeping than critical feedback on making the book better. I do believe it served that purpose admirably.

If we admit that improving papers before they see the harsh light of day is one (though not the only) function of peer review, then post-publication measures come up short, don’t they? By design, they hit a paper once it’s been enshrined in the scholarly record as final.

I still think it quite possible to come up with peer-review systems that take advantage of the breadth of reviewing talent available via the Internet to improve the quality of the scholarly record while avoiding some of the cronyism, bias, and outright error that plague the existing system. Unless we acknowledge all the functions of peer review, though, whatever systems we come up with will not serve even as well as the present one.

My hands are dapple-gray like a horse at the moment, but that’s okay—it means five or six years, maybe more, before I have to go shoe-shopping again.

If shoes weren’t necessary, I’d go without them. Honestly, I’d do less damage to my feet that way. Whether it’s the sheer dearth of choice in a women’s size ten and a half to eleven, or something odd about the shape and movement patterns of my feet, most shoes I’ve ever tried—including some I’ve actually bought in desperation—just plain shred my feet to pieces.

For the last three or four years, I’ve been wearing an ugly pair of Munro clodhoppers just about everywhere, because by gosh they didn’t shred my feet, and by gosh they actually lasted that long. (Six months is pretty good for a pair of workhorse shoes on me; I walk a lot compared to most people. Six times six months is outright astonishing.) Unfortunately, they’re coming to the end of their lifecycle—the soles are getting thin, the uppers shabby, and I recently had to do a quick-fix to the buckle elastic that isn’t going to hold for very long.

A while back one of my favorite seconds/overstock catalogs suddenly featured my shoes. Closeout, they said. Uh-oh, I said, and cruised to the website to see what they had in my size.

Ten and a half wide, yay! Denim blue. Um. Not my preferred workhorse shoe color. I bought two pair anyway. If I have to look stupid for the next five to eight years, it’s worth it if my feet don’t hurt.

Unwilling to look like a complete dork unnecessarily, however, I cruised the web for shoe dye. Another ten bucks procured me a bottle of basic black, and now my next two pairs of workhorse Munro clodhoppers are drying on the balcony. They’ll need another coat, but they’ll do.

My hands are stained, but my feet are happy.

I’m listening to the CD recording of our concert from last May, and dancing about in glee at the amazing amounts of non-suckage I am hearing. Ladies and gents, we sounded good, even accounting for the cleanup I know perfectly well was done on the raw sound.

Rehearsal tonight was fun, even given the inevitable incipient trainwreck. I’ll talk more about the next concert soon.

My thanks to the LazyWeb for helping me with my JPEG to PDF conversion problems.

I got several suggestions. The easiest fix turned out to be telling ImageMagick to turn the JPEGs into a PostScript file (convert *.jpg newfile.ps) and then using ps2pdf (part of the Ghostscript suite of PDF tools) to turn the PostScript into PDF (ps2pdf newfile.ps). Worked like a charm; no outsize bounding boxes.

I still have no idea why ImageMagick messed this up in the first place, since (my understanding is) it works through Ghostscript anyway. But as long as I can fix the problem without huge angst and discontent, it’s all good.

I’m working on a review of Open Access: Key Strategic, Technical and Economic Aspects. This is not that review; this is just a sidenote that working on the review touched off.

Where was the essay in this book on what open access will do to and for libraries? The book mentions libraries with some frequency. Several of its essayists are librarians. Yet “libraries” is not even an index term (though “library budgets” is). “Publishing” is an index term. “Researchers” is an index term (and so is “research”). Not libraries. Nor librarians.

I hope I’m not the only person to find that disturbing. We’re not a key strategic, technical, or economic aspect of open access?

Much is made of how librarians impede open access. I’ll surprise you: I agree with that assessment. I don’t agree with the usual complaints, however. It’s got nothing to do with metadata (though I agree that we over-obsess about it sometimes, and the evidence shows it isn’t where we need to put the bulk of our effort). It’s got nothing to do with preservation, which is an absolutely valid and necessary concern. It’s got nothing to do with peer-reviewed research versus everything else we can and do archive.

It’s ignorance. Just as with researchers, the biggest problem I see in libraries is that outside of some enlightened leaders and a scattering of peasants like me, librarians know next to nothing about open access. Worse, my sense (admittedly based on anecdotal evidence only) is that the ingrained librarian distrust of free-as-in-beer is actively hindering library use and promotion of open-access materials.

Serials Solutions offers an open-access module in its popular e-journal management software. Dozens of OA journals and other sources, added to library collections in a few keystrokes. It’s a very enlightened approach. I wonder how many libraries that subscribe to Serials Solutions turn up their noses at it?

I wonder how many repository-rats have to struggle to build a coalition around a repository inside their own library. Insofar as I have managed it, it’s been by force of personality rather than my colleagues’ intellectual investment in the concept. Several of my colleagues still stumble over their own tongues when they introduce me to faculty (which they are exceedingly good about) and try to describe what I do.

I wonder how many hear “But why would they just give that all away?” in tones of abject disbelief. (True story. I heard this with my own ears, from an honest-to-goodness librarian.) I wonder how many librarians at smaller, non-research-intensive institutions don’t think open access concerns them. I wonder how many are turned off by virulent anti-librarian sentiment in the open-access community—I’ve gotten fighting mad about that myself once or twice.

Much as I dislike survey research, I see a use for it here. We need to know how bad the ignorance problem is. We need to know if librarians are suppressing open-access materials, and if so, why. We need to know if they’re buying into publisher fear, uncertainty, and doubt.

Part of the problem appears to be a certain reticence on the part of repository-rats (as opposed to leaders and policy-makers) to be open and direct with their colleagues. “I’m surprised you aren’t in more demand,” one of the folks engaging my speaking services said to me. “You’re almost the only one talking about what it’s like on the ground.”

This sounded odd to me, until I thought about it. I do see a few articles from folks on the ground. They’re highly guarded in tone, and they’re guarded because running a repository is really rather a bleak job at present. Repository rats aren’t losing faith, exactly—but I think it fair to say it’s easy for us to lose confidence.

I have my own agitprop plans locally; they’re actually looking rather promising at present. The dreaded book chapter I wrote this summer also addresses one thing that I myself think open access is going to do to libraries. If we’ve got a systemic perception problem, though—and I very much think we do—local agitprop will be of limited use, and what good is one little book chapter? We’ll need to get professional library associations further into the game than they are.

Anyway, all of this will probably boil down to a sentence or two in the actual review. I just didn’t want to forget it.

I walked up to get my name tag just as a new chorus member was arranging for receipt of his music and rehearsal CD.

“What part do you sing?” the chorus manager asked him.

“Soprano,” he said sepulchrally. Everybody nearby broke up laughing.

(Hey, it could have been true. Nobody would figure me for a weak little countertenorish warble…)

Seats get reassigned every year, so I had high hopes of getting off the front row. No such luck. I figure they figure if I’m singing the right stuff, everybody else must be too. Keep the pros close—and the pathetic amateurs closer…

But when Noah lined up the animals for a group photo before embarking, the elephants were in back. I’m just sayin’.

Rochelle in LaCrosse haiku’d her library’s mission statement and invites us all to create haikus for personal mission statements.

Could. Not. Resist. So here’s mine:

Electronic text.
Durable and attractive,
free to all users.

Baby tigers quickly master the commonest skill of felines everywhere: getting underfoot. Mama tiger was very good about not stepping on them, though she didn’t bother worrying about them when they knocked each other around or landed smack on the ground after gunning for her.

I couldn’t manage to tell the three of them apart; they’re the same size from where I was standing, and I’ve not got the visual intelligence to make sense of stripe patterns. I’m pretty sure it was the same one every time who would start squawking when it lost track of where mama-tiger was, but I’ve no notion which one that was.

They’re imitative little cusses; they ignored a chunk of log on the second tier of their yard until mama-tiger sharpened her claws on it, whereupon they busily did likewise—which was silly cute, because they had to climb bodily up on the chunk to get their claws into it. Mama-tiger didn’t have to teach them to jump, though. They were almost entirely dependent on the stairs between tiers when David and I got there, but at the end of their outside-time they’d learned to scramble up some of the rocks and weren’t afraid of skipping a few steps with a jump down.

If you can get to the zoo between 8 and 10 in the morning, I do recommend it. How often does one see baby tigers in a lifetime?

In Amazonia, we got to watch the big fish getting fed, which jazzed David because he really likes the big fish. Up top, quite a few flowers were in bloom (mostly yellow ones, for some reason), and the sunbitterns! were! nesting! One of them gathered leaves and creepers and whatnot to take up to a wide branch by the window, while the other hung out nearby and displayed gorgeous dark-gold, rust-red, and black sunspots. I’ve never seen a sunbittern do that before—it’s spectacular, and David had a hard time dragging me out!

(In passing, I hope Amazonia won every zoo design award there is. It’s an amazing building design. I can’t imagine improving on it.)

We ate lunch on the tamarin trail, though those small souls did not make an appearance, before trudging up to the aviary. They’ve been moving birds around; the argus pheasants aren’t in the open enclosure with the ducks any more, perhaps because Mr. Pheasant had gotten too used to hopping out of it. A little burrowing owl watched me closely—my hat, maybe?—its head jerking from side to side to train its eyes on me no matter where I went. The learning center was open, so we poked through an awesome pile of cast-off feathers (including argus-pheasant feathers).

In the indoor open-fly zone, we were treated to the most astonishing duet I’ve ever heard: sunbittern and crowned pigeon. The latter has a deep, hollow, echoey sort of voice that’s reminiscent of a lion’s “oom” heard from a long way off. I honestly thought the noise was from outside the aviary somewhere until David got me watching the bird, which ducks its head and inflates its chest to speak.

In the outdoor open zone, we found the tragopans and the bamboo-partridges, the hammerkops (Dutch name, I presume?) and the laughingthrush. And the cormorant, whose throat rattled as it digested its fingerling fish. (The waterfowl are moulting, so they’re not as pretty or as active as in spring.) We saw the bustards getting fed, and defending their food from the ubiquitous Nycticorax, who isn’t quite as numerous in September as in spring, but scrounges from the zoo birds nonetheless. We also saw a young flamingo; you wouldn’t think grey-brown plumage would be conspicuous, but it is when all your neighbors are salmon-pink!

We popped up to see young Tai-shan in his building; he was contentedly napping guarded by his mom. Better so, probably, given the number of disgustingly rude yahoos who think nothing of popping a camera flash in a wild animal’s face. What is it with people? Do they not realize they are being pointlessly cruel? Poor Tian Tian was showing his teeth, for all the good it did him. They thought he was “posing.”

Some days I hope these yobbos try this with a bear in Yosemite or Yellowstone and get themselves savaged; it’s no more than they deserve. The only problem is that the poor bear would be killed. Buy a fricking postcard, people. Or at least learn to take non-flash pictures.

Meandering back down, we peeked in at the invertebrates (what’d they do with the nice cuttlefish? they aren’t there any more!) and the small mammals. There is, it turns out, something cuter than a baby tiger—and it’s a baby meerkat.

We headed over to Meskerem in Adams Morgan for the best in finger food. Hit the spot after a crowded day. I got home tired, but—the real reason for this post’s title—I was wearing one of my new pairs of Munro clodhoppers by way of trial by fire, and nary a blister to be found. That’s a good pair of shoes.

After a snafu with the ISBN, the bookstore finally managed to lay its hands on copies of the textbook for my remedial Java class, so I have been catching up on reading.

Yeah, yeah, I said I hated Java. Well, I don’t any more.

I LOATHE THIS LANGUAGE WITH A PASSION THAT BLAZES UNCONTROLLABLY.

Oh my $DEITY, how many more things could they have designed into this language that make it easy for me to screw things up? Interfaces, decorator classes on every little freakin’ thing (the gyrations necessary to get a string out of a file have to be seen to be believed), wrappers all over hell’s half-acre ($DEITY forbid I just not give a damn what kind of number I’m seeing at any given time…), special rules for primitives (… or whether it’s an object or not…), Stupid Exception Tricks…

Look. I am not a very good programmer. Let’s just take that as read, okay? I screw things up enough all by myself. I want a language that lets me get stuff done in spite of my well-known tendency to screw things up, and gets out of my way otherwise.

Java is not that language. Java is absolutely wonderful at finding new and annoying ways to get in my way. So much for OOP being the silver bullet. If Java is the poster child for OOP, gimme a procedural language, thanks all the same, and preferably one whose VM doesn’t eat new-model computers as a light snack.

Java is Teh Evil. The more I understand about it, the more I wish I could kill it. Preferably with a Beeblebroxian very large axe.