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Digital Document Quarterly Perspectives on Trustworthy Information |
Volume 6, Number 2, 2Q2007 |
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HMG Consulting |
© 2007, H.M. Gladney
ISSN: 1547-8610 |
Artists, poets, and philosophers have just two functions: to bring the inner significance of the period and of the world to ideal vision and to transmit this as an imperishable record to posterity. Burkhardt 1901[1]
Archiving and Digital Preservation
Interesting recent symposia and publications include:
An International Workshop on Database Preservation in March 2007 and anticipatory DDQ comments.[2]
Reagan Moore and Mackenzie Smith, Assessment of RLG Trusted Digital Repository Requirements, JCDL Symposium on Digital Curation & Trusted Repositories: Seeking Success, June 2006. This is the first “Trusted Digital Repositories” community paper that I have seen making the DDQ-recommended shift from the subjective attribute ‘trusted’ to the objectively measurable attribute ‘trustworthy’.
Ross Harvey, Preserving Digital Materials: An Australian Case Study, 2005. Since no copy is available in nearby libraries, I have not seen this book; nor could I review it, because it is too close to my own book. However, a 2006 review is available in American Archivist 69(2).
The
OCLC RLG Programs and National Archives and Records Administration, Trustworthy Repositories Audit & Certification: Criteria and Checklist, Feb. 2007. According to the report, its international task force produced a set of certification criteria applicable to a range of digital repositories and archives, from academic institutional preservation repositories to large data archives and from national libraries to third-party digital archiving services.
EWeek Magazine has provided good recommendations for The Now-What of Losing Customer Data.
Cornwell Consulting has been granted EEC funding for a Version 2 of its Model Requirements for the Management of Electronic Records.
An IFLA working group invites comments on its April 2007 draft of Functional Requirements for Authority Data: A Conceptual Model.
The Enterprise Search Sourcebook informs managers planning to implement search of organizational assets. It examines the strategies and skills needed to make content findable, with articles about return on investment, buying decisions, and solving the complex problems that challenge search engines.
Such work is the beginning of an orderly engineering background for digital archiving in the cultural sector.
One might think that after 10 years activities, the term ‘digital preservation’ would have an objective consensus meaning. A 2007 midwinter inquiry suggests otherwise. A useful definition would minimize the overlap with ‘digital archiving’ and would focus on what is needed for preservation because uncurated artifacts (digital as well as physical) have limited lifetimes.
Given a practical definition of ‘authentic’, DDQ suggests that a practical definition for ‘digital preservation’ would be a condensed version of the following excerpt from §1.2 of Preserving Digital Information:
To please consumers and other clients, we need methods for
• ensuring that a copy of every preserved document survives as long as it might
interest potential readers;
• ensuring that authorized consumers can find and use any preserved document as
its producers intended, without difficulty from errors introduced by third
parties that include archivists, editors, and programmers;
• ensuring that any consumer has evidence to decide whether information
received is sufficiently trustworthy for his applications;
• enabling scaling for the information collection sizes and user traffic
expected, including empowering editors to package information so as to avoid
overloading professional catalogers; and
• allowing each institutional and individual participant as much autonomy as
possible for handling preserved information, balancing this objective with that
of information sharing.
A Flawed Critique of “Durable Encoding”
The otherwise helpful Arts and Humanities Data Service (AHDS) report, Digital Moving Images and Sound Archiving Study, evaluates use of a universal virtual computer (UVC) as “the software development burden, as well as issues around the complexity of developing decoders, mitigates [sic] against the use of this approach”.[3] This pronouncement seems inappropriately strong and confident, in view of the limited evidence on which it is based and its tacit assumptions about economic circumstances.
The report’s comments on emulation with UVC contains several errors and misleading statements, suggesting that its writers have not read or understood the most careful and recent description of the methodology:[4]
1)
It asserts that “a shortcoming often encountered in advocates [sic] of
emulation or the UVC approach: an inability to recognize that migration is not
a single technique.”
This assertion is problematic on at least two counts:
i. The phrase “a single technique” is ambiguous almost to the extent of being meaningless. (This is illustrated by the following trivial example: does a single computer program with internal branches implement one technique or as many techniques as there are branches?)[5]
ii. Nowhere in the UVC technical description is there a claim of “a single technique”. In fact, several alternatives have been described, depending on the kind of data to be preserved.
2) Critical comments about UVC implementation costs should not be ad hoc, but should instead respond to the estimate of skills needed and numbers of instances in §4.1 (“Efficiency and Skills Needed”) in the cited 2005 ACM TOIS article.
3) In retrospect, the Koninklijke Bibliotheek (KB) choice of PDF format to test UVC was unfortunate, because word processing applications are among the most complex software in widespread use[6] and because PDF processors are likely to be readily available and inexpensive for the foreseeable future. In addition, Adobe Acrobat™ is proprietary. Source code is not publicly available, and emulation of Acrobat would risk a copyright lawsuit (production of a derivative work).[7]
DDQ and UVC publications have repeatedly encouraged criticism of UVC methodology. However, such criticism should have been based on the most recent and complete published work, not on incorrect conjectures from an outdated and simplified summary.
Arguably, the organizations to which the AHDS authors belong do not have the economic structure or, perhaps, the skills to apply UVC methodology. However the quoted conclusion is not justified by such shortfalls. Neither the economic assumptions implicit in their report nor the issues raised in the current short analysis have been thoroughly considered.
In passing, it seems appropriate to mention that the AHDS report pays insufficient attention to digital compression for noisy signals.[8]
Seeking Software Preservation Volunteers
Are you a software hobbyist or an enthusiast for modern history? The Software Preservation Group (SPG) of the Computer History Museum (CHM) is seeking volunteers to contribute to collecting, preserving, and presenting information with which historians will eventually describe and assess the growth of digital technology creating the information revolution.[9]
Such volunteers can be anywhere in the world, and can choose
to offer their expertise and enthusiasm for content that especially interests
them, or for any part of the collecting, organizing, annotating, and presenting
to museum visitors. We have set up and are refining infrastructure for
managing digital content collections from anybody’s favorite working location—services for remote librarians.
Volunteering can provide opportunities for collaborating with like-minded
enthusiasts in
Epistemology
New DDQ readers might wonder why it discusses epistemology so prominently. This is because epistemology seems essential reading in Information Science (abbreviated to “IS” in this DDQ number).[10]
20th–century Rift: Analytic and Continental Philosophies
Colleagues and I began to study epistemology after retiring from IBM Research, starting with Wittgenstein’s Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (TLP). The motivation was play; we had heard that TLP was difficult, and relished the challenge. Earlier, research careers and young families had precluded more than dipping into the history of philosophy.[11] Our study of mostly analytical philosophy included over 200 evening meetings in five years.
My epistemological emphasis is unlikely to surprise any DDQ reader. It is natural, given the TLP start, our scientific and engineering professions, and our mostly English-speaking universities.
We focused narrowly partly because there is so much to read that we have not yet completed even epistemology to the depth we want. To read original texts more broadly would have made depth impossible. However, we did spend several months with Heidegger’s Being and Time and smatterings of other Heidegger work.
We only slowly became aware of the rift between analytic philosophy and Continental philosophy,[12] a development with large social and political consequences. A critique by the late Richard Rorty includes:[13]
The moral of my lecture will be that both the failure of analytic philosophy and the history of its autocritique give additional reasons to abandon, once and for all, the very idea that philosophy can be made into any sort of science. Both help us replace the assumption that philosophy should add bricks to the edifice of knowledge with the thought that philosophy is, as Hegel said, its time held in thought.
There is often said to be a "crisis" in the humanities departments of American universities. … American philosophy departments had their last crisis back in the 1940's and 1950's—the period during which analytic philosophy accomplished its takeover. …
Analytic philosophy may crudely be defined as an attempt to combine the switch from discussing experience to discussing language—what Gustav Bergmann called "the linguistic turn"—with one more attempt to professionalize the discipline by making it more scientific. The linguistic turn is common to all twentieth-century philosophy—as evident in Heidegger, Gadamer, Habermas and Derrida as in Carnap, Ayer, Austin and Wittgenstein. What distinguishes analytic philosophy … is the idea that this turn, together with the use of symbolic logic, makes it possible, or at least easier, to turn philosophy into a scientific discipline. …
Prior to the linguistic turn, Edmund Husserl had made a
similar attempt. His exhortations to scientificity
and teamwork sound much like those of Carnap and Reichenbach a few decades later. But in Being and
Time Heidegger managed to package Kierkegaardian
and Nietzschean thoughts in a jargon that made them
sound like respectable philosophical doctrines, rather than mere literary
conceits. By imposing a quasi-Kantian,
professional-sounding form on Kierkegaardian
and Nietzschean content, Heidegger helped make
it possible for philosophers to be much more interesting to literary
intellectuals than either Carnap or Husserl thought
they had any business to be. He thereby founded the tradition that
analytic philosophers refer to as "Continental philosophy"―a
tradition which, in the
I found the language of Being and Time particularly difficult. Perhaps others who have been mystified by Heidegger’s works or found their language difficult will be comforted to know that some professional philosophers have similar difficulties.
Such technical difficulties and misunderstandings contributed significantly to the analytic/Continental schism. From Friedman,[15] it seems to me that Carnap and Heidegger were addressing different questions: Carnap, what could confidently be known (the essential epistemological question, and the core of science), and Heidegger, what it meant to be a human being (an ethical and metaphysical question). To the extent that this impression is accurate, the schism is an unfortunate historical accident.
In the period 1925-1940, the issues were not exclusively
those of dispassionate scholars, but were exacerbated by the social and
political agendas of the participants.[16]
That key analytical philosophers were Jews who escaped to
That word definitions are used not only to make communication as precise as possible, but also as social and political weapons, is illustrated by how key players used ‘scientific’ and even ‘philosophy’ to claim moral and organizational territory. For instance, Heidegger insisted on the necessity that “philosophy as a discipline recognize as its true task nothing more nor less than ‘the self-freeing of the freedom in human beings’"[18] and some of the analytical philosophers insisted that proper philosophy was limited to what could confidently known (as opposed to believed). And the Communist Party, a principal agent of some of the most repressive governments of the last century, likes to refer to itself as “the people’s party”. Similarly, “gay marriage” was coined to legitimize a perversion of the legal and religious concept of marriage as a procreation-oriented lifetime partnership.
Information and Knowledge Deliberately Confounded
The choice of words to convey meaning and intent is a tricky topic, as hinted at in the prior section and evidenced in many careful philosophical texts. Uncontrollable social behavior leads to definition changes over time and between different contexts, often making understanding critical texts difficult even for expert readers and impossible for less versed readers. Regrettably, some speakers and authors add to such difficulties with changes whose objectives are rhetorical and political, often deliberately to confuse an unaware public or as part of staking out moral or bureaucratic territory.
The proposal in Chaim Zins’ Redefining Information Science: from Information Science to Knowledge Science and other indications from the IS community seems to me such an attempt.[19] Shortly before the appearance of this article, Zins requested my comments. I objected that the proposal and a related suggestion of a comprehensive ontology were ill-advised for reasons substantially summarized below. Zins later agreed with some of these comments, and argued with others; his arguments are summarized in dark green below the affected comments, followed by DDQ reactions to these arguments.
(1) Deliberately renaming objects, values, and concepts from common meaning and usage of the time violates “a kind of moral obligation”, as most eloquently suggested by Martin Gardner. Contrary behavior should have strong justification that I have not seen in proposals to insert ‘knowledge’ for what we used to refer to with ‘information.’
Justification is needed because people have often sought
grander names as part of a political agenda, even in campus politics. In 1960,
at the
Zins responded that the name change was to stress the idea that the field explores the mediating perspectives of human knowledge in the universal domain (how it appears in documents and records). Notice that his domain is limited to the subset of knowledge that can be communicated.
(2) A Zins Web page contains "we fail to capture the whole picture and see the logical relations among the various constituents of human knowledge." This is certainly true. However any attempt to capture and express "the whole picture" in a finite number of symbols must fail. Part of scholarly work is noticing and commenting on relationships that no previous author has discussed. There is no reason to expect an end to that activity.[20]
Building subject classifications and their more elaborate cousin, ontologies, has become an occupation for hundreds of librarians, archivists, information scientists, and other scholars. This circumstance demands persuasive supporting arguments from those who propose special status for any particular ontology—special compared to alternatives that readers might invent or consult.
The presentation of Zins’ knowledge map included, "The map is a powerful tool for understanding the structure of contemporary knowledge." It would have been better to write, "Maps are powerful tools for understanding and communicating structures of contemporary and ancient knowledge, and for proposing new ideas." Whether any specific ontology is of interest to a researcher will depend on what question(s) he is trying to answer. I will use a particular knowledge map only if doing so will help me in my task of the moment.
Zins responded that his Knowledge Map of Information Science and Knowledge Map of Human Knowledge are definitely not the only maps, but that he could theoretically and empirically justify them. DDQ responds that the last is true for any thoughtfully constructed ontology.
(3) Whatever we take 'knowledge' and 'information' to mean, I believe that any helpful map of the world of knowledge contains a map of information as a proper subgraph. An example is that how to ride a bicycle requires more knowledge than I could ever provide you about what constitutes my ability to ride.
(4) These issues are muddied by ‘Informatik’ being the German word for computer science. Peter Lucas commented that the first Professor of Informatik at the Technical University of Vienna argued at great length that Informatik is not necessarily connected to computers.[21] For instance, the study of the information flow within any bureaucracy would be of interest whether or not there is an intention to automate.
Zins reacted that his JASIST paper identifies 6 different [IS domains], among which one can be called "knowledge Science", another "Informatik". What is extremely important that we systematically agree to use a distinct name for each field. DDQ agrees with this criterion, but suggests that preempting the word ‘knowledge’ for a subdomain in fact violates the spirit, since the word conventionally denotes a super-domain of IS.
(5) The first 80% of the article is a well-written summary of epistemological history--well-written, that is, relative to what can be accomplished within its length. However, this history fails to mention two critical concepts: information and concept structuring as relation sets[22] and the dependency of phrase meanings on context.[23]
(6) The article gives little attention to the most interesting relationships between knowledge and information, viz., how knowledge is converted into information (e.g., in teaching) and how information is converted into knowledge (e.g., in learning). It could analyze the knowledge involved in riding a bicycle, paying attention to those essential parts that are never communicated when a father teaches his child how to ride, i.e., the distinction between information conveyed by the father and knowledge "magically" generated by the child and then never forgotten.[24]
We are agreed that re-naming is of small importance relative to the difficulties of IS to identify its role and position in academia.[25] I believe that, without more substantive changes than I have seen proposed, university IS Departments will vanish within two decades. Later in 2007, DDQ will identify the trends and weaknesses underlying this opinion, which might displease current professional information scientists.
News
The
Open Document Format Plug-in for Microsoft Office
OpenOffice™ (free) poses a growing challenge to Microsoft Office™ (about $120 in the Home version). To intensify the competion, Sun Microsystems has released its Open Document Format (ODF) plug-in for Microsoft Office. This gives users of Microsoft Word, Excel, and Powerpoint the ability to read, edit, and save to the ISO-standard Open Document Format. It is available as a free download.[26]
EU Book Digitization and the European Digital Library
A beginning of European response to Google's Digital Library effort is now available. The Europeana prototype digital library service was developed by the Bibliothèque Nationale de France (BnF) for the European Digital Library project. It currently offers about 12,000 copyright-free documents from the BnF, the Széchényi National Library of Hungary, and the National Library of Portugal and features an assortment of tools and services for research about or within a book, for reading, for printing and downloading documents, and for creating one's own personal library.
IBM Provides Free Access to its IP for Standards
IBM is making it easier to utilize patented intellectual property (its own and others’) to implement about 200 standards in Web services and security. The company pledges universal and perpetual free access to its intellectual property in standards implementations making software interoperable. IBM hopes to spur development of software that leverages the standards it identified.
Among the technologies included on IBM's list are standards pertaining to SOAP, SAML, XML Schema, and Service Component Architecture. IBM was not the sole developer of many of these standards, which are often under the jurisdiction of organizations like the WWW and OASIS. But the company did contribute to their development.
IBM’s offer is armed with teeth that affect other patent owners. IBM will void the offer to any party that itself asserts IP claims to any of the listed standards and specifications. For instance, if you assert a patent claim against any user of the Security Assertion Markup Language (SAML), IBM might assert its patent claims against you for all of the listed technologies!
Reading Recommendations
Alistair McGrath’s Story of the King James Bible
In the beginning: the story of the King James Bible and how it changed a nation, a language, and a culture is a fascinating tale, with many facts that you might have long suspected without paying as much conscious attention as they merit. An idea entirely new to me is the immense influence this translation had on the evolution and quality of everyday spoken English. The following excerpts might induce you to seek out McGrath’s book.
[Wycliffe’s] translation of the Bible into English would be a social leveler on a hitherto unknown scale. All would be able to read Christendom's sacred text, and judge both the lifestyle and teachings of the medieval Church on its basis. The very idea sent shock waves throughout the complacent Church establishment of the day. Henry Knighton—an English chronicler interested in maintaining his rather comfortable status quo—had no doubts of the dangers posed by what Wycliffe proposed. “Christ put the clergy in charge of the church; what right had lay people to get involved in its affairs?” …
… the concern he had was real, and was shared by many within the religious establishment of the era. Translating the Bible into English would break the clerical monopoly on this text, and allow it to be placed into the hands of the laity—or, even worse in Knighton's view, women. What Knighton feared was, of course, precisely what Wycliffe hoped for. …
[People often] forget that they were reading what was
originally written in a foreign language. Demands for revision of the
translation [have been] met with: "If the King James Bible was good enough
for
[Such thinking] reached its climax in the middle of the nineteenth century. The prominent American writer Alexander Wilson McClure (1808-65) published a work entitled The Translators Revised, in which he lavished praise on their achievements, and set out his belief that:
The first half of the seventeenth century, when the
translation was completed, was the Golden Age of biblical and oriental learning
in
We find here an insight concerning the early seventeenth century that was apparently denied to those fortunate enough to live then—that it was a Golden Age of biblical learning and translation. An increasing historical distance, not to mention a certain lack of knowledge of the early history of the translation, allowed this heady nostalgia to settle over the reputation of the King James Bible.
[That] this … work was actually a translation [was]
completely lost to most in the nineteenth century—even the clergy.
Richard Whately (1787-1863), archbishop of
Ernst Cassirer's Problem of Knowledge (Volume IV)
The philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874-1945) is renowned as an historian partly because of his monumental The Problem of Knowledge (Das Erkenntnisproblem in der Philosophie und Wissenschaft). I strongly recommend its 4th volume, even for readers not versed in philosophy. In it, I found very little that, almost 80 years since Cassirer conceived it, modern physicists and mathematicians would disagree with. Understandably, the part about biology cannot be regarded as beyond dispute.
Part I, "Exact Science", is the best critical summary I recall for the century ending in 1932. However, "exact science" seems to me overly broad, since the treatment is limited to mathematics and theoretical physics.
The book mentions neither Ludwig Wittgenstein nor any of the
authors of the
Chapter VII conveys a fact that few people know—that Wolfgang Goethe was an active researcher into biology (esp. epistemology as applied to biology) and made contributions that affected all subsequent work on biological morphology and evolution.
I disagree with the view of "purposiveness" in the chapter on Darwinism—at least as the word ‘purpose’ is often construed. This issue is important both historically and today, being close to religious distress with much of modern science. I take ‘purpose’ as alluding to objectives of some sentient being: God, human being, or animal. The problem is expressed on page 166 as:
Not only the answer that Darwinism yields but even its formulation of the problem is indissolubly bound up with the purposive idea. The concepts of "fitness," "selection," "struggle for existence," "survival of the fittest"—these all have plainly a purposive character.
No purpose of any outside individual is needed to account for natural selection. (That sentient individuals often have a will to survive is a red herring that someone might introduce into the debate.) Intelligent design religionists would, of course, object.[27]
Language such as ‘survival of the fittest’ is problematical because many people will respond to "fittest for what?" with "fittest for survival"! The phrase is more productively read as shorthand for observables, e.g., that some minnows are less likely than others to be eaten before they reproduce because they swim faster than their cousins. Similar objective observations about avoiding predation, exploiting food sources, and so on can be made for other species and other situations. However, the language appropriate for dandelions is so different from language for minnows that ‘survival of the fittest’ is needed to convey the generalization.
Parts of the section on biology recount heated debates about whether or not biology can be reduced to physics and chemistry and the now-obsolete notion of "vital forces". This discussion has omissions that can be excused in a book conceived in the 1930's, but must be considered in modern analysis. A mistake was confounding two questions: whether or not physical sciences were in principle the core of biology, and whether or not a program of explaining biological observations on the basis of physical sciences would be practical.
At least three factors make physico-chemical reduction impractical (impossible?) for the explanation and prediction of biological observations:
· the immense complexity and number of layers that such reduction would require, and the immense scale range from behavior of an animal to the chemical reactions that play roles in that behavior;
· the immense variability of circumstances that impinge upon any organism, differing from time to time and between different individuals (e.g., local fluctuations of salinity, temperature, lighting, nearby organisms, …, that surely affect each individual); and
· that tiny differences of initial conditions of many-particle systems often lead to very different later histories.
That physics and chemistry are the core of biology is difficult to prove, but this issue is only distantly relevant to specific predictions of biological behavior.
Friedman argues persuasively that Cassirer “plays a fundamental mediating role between C.P. Snow's famous two cultures”.[28]
Michael Polanyi’s Personal Knowledge
Polanyi is another philosopher whose writing style is accessible to readers not versed in philosophy. Read Personal Knowledge: Towards a Post Critical Philosophy, whose back cover includes:
In this work the distinguished physical chemist and philosopher, Michael Polanyi, demonstrates that the scientist's personal participation in his knowledge, in both its discovery and its validation, is an indispensable part of science itself. Even in the exact sciences, "knowing" is an art, of which the skill of the knower, guided by his personal commitment and his passionate sense of increasing contact with reality, is a logically necessary part. In the biological and social sciences this becomes even more evident.
The tendency to make knowledge impersonal in our culture has split fact from value, science from humanity. Polanyi wishes to substitute for the objective, impersonal ideal of scientific detachment an alternative ideal which gives attention to the personal involvement of the knower in all acts of understanding. His book should help to restore science to its rightful place in an integrated culture, as part of the whole person's continuing endeavor to make sense of the totality of his experience.
Niall
1848 liberal revolutions in Paris (February), Vienna (March), Berlin (March), Piedmont (May), Prague (June), Frankfurt (September), and elsewhere at the time seemed failures. However, they led to profound changes because rulers quickly changed their social policies to avoid renewed revolution. The ensuing political changes began rapid social and scientific evolution that continues today. Significant insight into prior European politics and economics available from The House of Rothschild: Money’s Prophets, 1798-1848 as suggested by:
According to [the poet Heinrich] Heine, … it was the development of mobile property in the form of [rentes] and other government bonds which severed the link between wealth and land, …
I see in Rothschild one of the greatest revolutionaries
who have founded modern democracy. Richelieu, Robespierre and Rothschild
are for me three terroristic names, and they signify
the gradual annihilation of the old aristocracy. Richelieu, Robespierre and
Rothschild are
Heine returned again and again during the 1840s to the subject of Rothschild power. … [He] was singularly perceptive in identifying the Rothschilds as agents as much of social revolution as of reaction, even if their revolutionary role was less conscious than he suggested. pp.214-5
New Methods for Image Discovery
UCSD engineers report a suite of indexing methods for images.[29] These can annotate and search images by analyzing their content. The report claims that the new tools can process more images at a lower computational cost than previous methods. Without testing, DDQ cannot endorse the claims beyond recommending that any manager of image collections should look into these tools.
Practical Matters
Touring with Your Data and Applications
An InformationWeek article, USB Drives Mobilized, recommends the Portable Apps Suite and says that this free download contains neither spyware nor advertisements. There is no additional hardware or software to buy. You don't even have to give out your email address.
KeePass is a free, open-source, light-weight and easy-to-use password manager. Kruptos provides file encryption for sensitive information.
Inexpensive Software Resources
PC World identifies a number of free or inexpensive programs which might interest readers. Great Multimedia Utilities lists 5 downloads for media-playing and disk burning, 5 video management utilities, and 4 audio management tools. Great Free Security Programs describes 9 downloads for detecting and eliminating malware and 6 downloads for protecting sensitive information. I have long used the ZoneAlarm firewall and plan to use Kruptos file encryption for sensitive information that I carry while traveling.
The magazine also identifies Websites helpful for managing your broadband (DSL and cable) Internet connections: reviews of ISPs, broadband bargains, channel bandwidth measurements, and other tips.
Price Watch and PC Evolution
DDQ reminds readers that Price Watch is intended to chronicle one of the most noteworthy trends of the information revolution—the steady decrease of prices. It does this with a selection of near-commodity PC offerings, and reports only offerings that are less expensive than have been mentioned in prior issues of DDQ. For storage and memory devices, the price criterion is normalized to device capacities.
Before purchasing any large ticket item, I compare Fry’s and Amazon offers. Sometimes the latter’s prices are lower because Amazon shipping is free (for orders over $25). For instance, because the PC on which I was building a Computer History Museum digital library pilot was a 7-year-old machine that failed frequently and was slow and small (disk storage space), I replaced it. Compared to Fry's $850 price (tax included), Amazon provided the chosen machine for about $760, delivering it to my doorstop 2 days after it was ordered.
A comment from a
Even Higher Performance Coming
A June article in the San Jose Mercury News (SJMN) neatly summarizes competition among PC chip manufacturers—activities that might yield 2009 offerings. It projects that Intel, AMD, and Nvidia will invade each others‘ current areas of market dominance in their efforts to exploit parallel computing threads. Although the manufacturers’ announcements are guarded, SJMN conjectures that all are targeting scientific computing initially because it is technically easiest. Intel is working on increasing its lead in multi-core general purpose chips; AMD is working on combining general purpose and graphics processors on a single chip; and Nvidia is adding scientific computing circuits to its graphic chip technology.
PC memory and storage prices have become low enough that everyone who can afford a computer should acquire as much semi-conductor memory as needed to optimize performance and enough persistent storage (magnetic and optical disks) to save “everything” with its backup duplicates.
After little change for several years, 2007 main memory prices have halved, to about $40 to $50 per gigabyte, with an occasional loss-leader offered for $32 per gigabyte. Since a MS/Win PC with less than 1Gb memory is likely to be significantly slowed by page swapping, I recommend adding a 1Gb module to any machine with less memory. Check the manufacturer’s machine specifications for the type of storage required.
The steady decrease of HDD prices has continued, so that you surely can afford enough on-line storage for all needs except perhaps for large collections of video recordings. Desktop internal HDD space is now available for as little as $0.22/Gb ($110 for a 500Gb drive).
External HDDs cost about 20% more. I find it convenient to carry an 80Gb drive when I travel, instead of a heavier and more expensive laptop, since borrowed access to a PC is available almost everywhere. Directory synchronization and backup software is often packaged with external drives.
HDDs for laptop computers cost 3 to 4 times as much as their desktop counterparts.
For protecting valuable files from fire and theft, I store copies in a bank vault. Since almost every new PC is delivered with a R/W optical drive, the incremental cost is merely that of DVD disks—currently about $0.20 per platter. Since double density and more modern optical drives and platters are not yet standard, and therefore significantly more expensive, and since my key data is easily accommodated by 9.4Gb (two DVD platters), I have not yet upgraded. The price of such technology is likely to drop significantly in 2-3 years.
[1] Ernst Cassirer, The Problem of Knowledge: Philosophy, Science, and History Since Hegel, 1950, p.278.
[2] Giorgos Flouris and Carlo Meghini, Steps Towards a Theory of Information Preservation, PresDB-07, March 2007 substantially repeats ideas published in DDQ and more completely and formally in Preserving Digital Information.
[3] See §6.1.2 of the AHDS report. This DDQ objection substantially repeats a private communication responding to the report’s authors request for comments on their 2005 draft. These authors neither responded nor changed the errors in their manuscript.
[4] The AHDS report is based on a 6-year-old news release (RLG DigiNews 5(3)) rather than on the best source, H.M. Gladney and R.A. Lorie, Trustworthy 100-year digital objects: durable encoding for when it's too late to ask, ACM Trans. Info. Sys. 23(3), 299-324, July 2005.
[5] “Single” might be meaningful for an object in the world, but is ill-defined for subjective concepts.
[6] In fact, before the KB project was undertaken, Raymond Lorie discussed emulation of Acrobat with Jim King of Adobe Corp. King recommended caution on account of the great complexity of Adobe Acrobat.
[7] IBM, a corporate co-author of the KB prototype, avoids (as a matter of policy) willful copyright violation.
[8] For instance, see P. Roos, M.A. Viergever, M.C.A. Van Dijke, and J.H. Peters, Reversible Intraframe Compression of Medical Images, IEEE Trans. Med. Image 7,328-336 (1988).
[9] Here ‘software’ includes all digital artifacts that are not electronic hardware—programs, documentation, course material, and so on.
[10] DDQ, especially this number, provides many links to assist readers seeking more information than DDQ can itself provide.
[11] I started with The Mentor
Philosophers series: The Age of Adventure, The
Age of Reason, The Age of Enlightenment, The Age of Ideology, and The
Age of Analysis, and also Alfred North Whitehead’s Science and the
Modern World. In 1960, the most expensive of these cost 60¢! I
still refer to them whenever I want a quick introduction to one of the 50
philosophers from which they excerpt. A favorable
review in the 1958 Journal of Philosophy suggests why.
Another anthology that I found a useful starting point was William
Barrett and Henry D. Aiken, Philosophy in the Twentieth Century, 1962.
[12] Neil Levy, Analytic and Continental Philosophy: Explaining the Differences, Metaphilosophy 34(3), 284–304, 2003.
[13] Richard Rorty, Analytic Philosophy and Transformative Philosophy, a 1999 lecture.
[14] As in Haskell B. Curry, Foundations of Mathematical Logic, 1963.
[15] Michael Friedman, A Parting of the Ways: Carnap,
Cassirer, and Heidegger,
[16] See, for instance, Friedman loc. cit., pp.156-9.
[17] Nicolas Rescher, Minding Matter and Other Essays in Philosophical Inquiry, 2001, Chapter 4, Who has Who Has Won the Big Battles of Twentieth-Century Philosophy? Friedman loc. cit. includes, “both Carnap and Heidegger viewed their own philosophical efforts as intimately connected with their wider social and political views and projects, and as closely intertwined, in particular, with precisely those social and political struggles of the Weimar period that eventuated in the triumph of National Socialism.” p.158.
[18] Friedman loc. cit., pp.150-1.
[19] John Sowa, who monitored the exchange, recommended attention to Ted Byfield’s A Brief History of Information.
[20] Cassirer argues that this is true even for the limited area of the physical sciences. See Felix Kaufmann, Cassirer's Theory of Scientific Knowledge, pp.188-213 of Paul Arthur Schilpp, The Philosophy of Ernst Cassirer, 1949.
[21] Peter Lucas communicated this.
[22] This idea pervades seminal philosophy texts of the early 20th century, and is a core idea of Rudolf Carnap’s Logical Structure of the World.
[23] For instance, see Wittgenstein's Philosophical Investigations.
[24] See Chapter 2, Knowing How and Knowing That, in Gilbert Ryle, The Concept of Mind, 1949.
[25] John Sowa reminded us that “changing a name isn't going to solve the underlying problems.”
[26] I have not used this plug-in myself because I do not need it, having found that the current version of OpenOffice Writer has integrated import and export of Microsoft Word documents in a way that I find extremely convenient and fast when I use it in my Linux Ubuntu system. Presumably this is accomplished with the same code base as is used in the plug-in.
[27] A pertinent book has just appeared: Gordon Slack, The Battle Over the Meaning of Everything: Evolution, Intelligent Design, and a School Board , Jossey-Bass, 2007.
[28] Friedman, loc. cit., Chapter 9. See also Friedman’s biography of Cassirer.
[29] From Pixels to Semantic Spaces: Advances in Content-Based Image Retrieval, IEEE Computer 40(7), 20-26, 2007.