My Fitbit recommended that I lower my daily step count goal by 2000 steps. My Fitbit is managing my expectations.
Category: Uncategorized
What librarians do
“Approaching a question with an open mind, being willing to let evidence (not raw opinion, emotion, or group affinity) influence what you think, being committed to a method for truth-seeking that minimizes bias and harm, and doing this for the public good, not out of self-interest.”
Source: Library Babel Fish
Aletheia has started dreaming. Last night, she had a dream that a baby skeleton was eating her toes. Gods, that’s terrifying.
Happiness is buying eggnog on a whim and then discovering a misplaced bottle of rum in the cabinet.
Aletheia is giving me grief for not putting up xmas lights on the house. So this is how it begins.
Reliability of a source is not binary
A few of us at mpow have been talking about ways to put more “science” into library science, mostly in the context of using more robust research methods to study user behavior and assess library services. With that in mind, Lane Wilkinson’s recent post on using Bayesian inference to understand how users contextualize the credibility of an information source strikes me as a particularly useful thought experiment (if not an actual research agenda… which you should totally do, Lane!). There is one insight in particular that caught my attention:
“Values like credibility, reliability, or trustworthiness are not binary; they exist on a continuum between 0 and 100%. We need to stop asking ‘is this source reliable?’ and start asking ‘how reliable is this source given what it is reporting?'”
If there is one thing I could help our students to understand right now, this would be it. Perhaps simply framing the question of credibility in this way is enough to inspire them to be more critical of what they read via their everyday information consumption. One can hope.
To keep us going the next four years
Fuck. Fuck. Fuck.
I’m still with her.
We’re all in this together
I love that it looks like the continents are holding hands. From Mental Floss, A More Accurate World Map Wins Prestigious Japanese Design Award:
“AuthaGraph faithfully represents all oceans [and] continents, including the neglected Antarctica,” according to the Good Design Awards, and provides “an advanced precise perspective of our planet.” No longer does Africa look the same size as North America, or Antarctica look like one of the biggest continents (it’s smaller than everything but Europe and Australia).
Standing Rock syllabus
The NYC for Standing Rock committee has created a resource for understanding the controversies and protest surrounding the Dakota Access Pipeline.
“This syllabus brings together the work of Indigenous and allied activists and scholars: anthropologists, historians, environmental scientists, and legal scholars, all of whom contribute important insights into the conflicts between Indigenous sovereignty and resource extraction.”
The syllabus contains key search terms, maps, a timeline of U.S. settler colonialism, and suggested reading arrange by theme and topic.