Last night (and today) was the 12-hour ASUC-sponsored Dance Marathon at Cal (http://dancemarathon.berkeley.edu). The event raised money for the Elizabeth Glaser Pediatric AIDS Foundation. Students registered and solicited donations. They were given a number of raffle tickets based on their level of donations, and there were prize drawings throughout the 8pm Friday to 8am Saturday event. I’m not sure of the final amount of money the event raised, but I know it was well over double what they earned last year.

The Scholar’s Workstation was one of the sponsors of the event and my fellow Apple Campus Reps and I put on a photo shoot in order to support their efforts. We set up a white backdrop and lights, took photos of students in front of them, and then edited the photos there on Macs with Adobe Creative Suite 3 in order to create silhouette photo souveniers. All of them included a custom background image that picked up the “World Tour” theme of the Dance Marathon and included a link to our website.

Everyone seemed to like the photos and we were able to talk with quite a few people as they watched us creating them on the Macs. It was a great way to show off a neat thing that Apple computers can do as well as how well the new Creative Suite runs on them.

I took some pictures at the event and I’ve posted them in my photos section. Here’s a link to my Dance Marathon Photos. All of the silouhettes we created are posted online as well.

I think my favorite is the one of Oski:

According to The Guardian and The New York Times, the United States Department of Homeland Security wants to require British citizens of Pakistani descent to have additional travel documents (potentially a visa) in order to enter the United States. On its face this seems like it would be very difficult to enforce, or, at the very least, it would require the British Home Office to do a lot of the screening for the United States. Additionally, it raises the issue of whether the United States and Great Britain would have to enter into a treaty that would specify racial or ethnic classification — there would have to be some sort of legal standard that would determine when a person was “enough British” to not require a visa.

The United States Government is having to confront the cultural and social legacy of the British Empire. Britain, especially since the Second World War but also even earlier, has a long history of trying to figure out the legal status of citizens of the Empire and Commonwealth. Historically, there were bureaucratic squabbles between the Colonial Office, the Foreign Office, and the Home Office when one department would want to give permission for people to enter Britain while another department disagreed.

The contemporary situation and the pending demand from the United States Government has caused the British to become united in defense of the rights of their citizens. It is interesting to me how the United States is adopting the sort of attitude that might have been expected of the British years ago.

The American government wants to impose travel restrictions on British citizens of Pakistani origin because of concerns about terrorism, according to a report today.

In talks with the British government, the US homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, called for British Pakistanis to apply for a visa before travelling to the US, according to the New York Times.

The newspaper claimed that US officials were concerned about the number of terrorist plots in Britain involving citizens with ties to Pakistan.

But today the Foreign Office made it clear would resist the idea. It said it would oppose any attempt to exclude particular ethnic groups from the US visa waiver scheme that allows citizens from 27 countries, including the UK, to travel to the US without a visa for up to 90 days.

A spokesman said: “We are in close touch with the US about entry clearance, and they are aware of our view that changes to the visa waiver programme could cause economic damage to both our countries without materially enhancing the security controls over immigration.”

He added: “The Muslim community in the UK, including those of Pakistani origin, are an important part of our society and we would oppose strongly any proposal to single them out in response to the actions of terrorists. Furthermore, we will oppose any measure based on broad categories of religious, ethnic or other criteria, and will continue to emphasise the importance of the current risk-based approach.”

The complete article from The Guardian article: “US ‘wants British Pakistanis to have entry visas’”

Also of note is the different way that the issue was covered in The New York Times. While The Guardian emphasized the requirement itself and what changing it would mean for individuals, only giving a passing nod to “terrorism,” The New York Times begins with the fact of terrorism and the “danger” of British Muslims.

Omar Khyam, the ringleader of the thwarted London bomb plot who was sentenced to life imprisonment on Monday, showed the potential for disaffected young men to be lured as terrorists, a threat that British officials said they would have to contend with for a generation.

But the 25-year-old Mr. Khyam, a Briton of Pakistani descent, also personifies a larger and more immediate concern: as a British citizen, he could have entered the United States without a visa, like many of an estimated 800,000 other Britons of Pakistani origin.
American officials, citing the number of terror plots in Britain involving Britons with ties to Pakistan, expressed concern over the visa loophole. In recent months, the homeland security secretary, Michael Chertoff, has opened talks with the government here on how to curb the access of British citizens of Pakistani origin to the United States.

At the moment, the British are resistant, fearing that restrictions on the group of Britons would incur a backlash from a population that has always sided with the Labor Party. The Americans say they are hesitant to push too hard and embarrass their staunch ally in the Iraq war, Prime Minister Tony Blair, as he prepares to step down from office.

Among the options that have been put on the table, according to British officials, was the most onerous option to Britain, that of canceling the entire visa waiver program that allows all Britons entry to the United States without a visa. Another option, politically fraught as it is, would be to single out Britons of Pakistani origin, requiring them to make visa applications for the United States.

The complete article from The New York Times article: “U.S. Seeks Closing of Visa Loophole for Britons”

Robert Townsend lists on the American Historical Association Blog several problems with Google Books and its program of scanning books to make them accessible on the internet. His critique is mostly focused on the accuracy of Google’s scanning, or rather the inaccuracy of its OCR, which he believes has led to a variety of problems.

The problem of quality control only exacerbates my most basic worry about the larger rush to digitize every scrap of information—that we are adding to the pile much faster than the technology can advance to extract the information in a useful or meaningful way. When I have asked people who know a lot more about the technology than me about this problem, they tend to wave their hand and mumble about “brilliant scientists” and “technological progress.” Forgive me if I remain unconvinced. Even for someone fairly proficient in Boolean search terms I find a lot of the results from Google Books (and Google more generally) just page after page of useless and irrelevant information. I find it increasingly hard to believe that Google can add tens of thousands of additional books each month to the information pile—many containing basic mistakes in content and metadata—and the information results will actually grow better over time.

The problem with Townsend’s quick dismissal of the opinions of “people who know a lot more about technology than [him]” is that there is stunningly brilliant work being done in field of search technology not to mention OCR software.

I remember a consumer flatbed scanner ten years ago that would take 5 minutes or so to scan a flat page of text, and the OCR recognition was pitiful. By contast, I am now able to use my digital camera and tripod to photograph documents for my own research at about 5 to 10 pages a minute (depending on page size, condition, binding, etc.) and my personal OCR software is upwards of 90% successful at recognizing type (I still wouldn’t dare try anything handwritten). For my own research, the OCR capability is something I’m experimenting with, not relying upon. Digitizing the documents I’m finding in archives is immensely useful, however, because I can enlarge the images on a large monitor and zoom in to read them much more effectively than I could with a magnifying glass. Five or ten years from now, when OCR is even more advanced, there’s nothing stopping me from running it on my TIFF images.

My own experience with research thus far is beside the point of Google Books. I offered the experience as some form of vindication for the technology underlying Google’s book scanning process. If a lowly graduate student like myself can do what I described fairly easily and inexpensively, what tools must Google have at its disposal?

Townsend in his piece continues to be a nay-sayer, and concludes that the Google’s immense financial resources are reason to be mistrustful of the motives behind its efforts.

So I have to ask, what’s the rush? In Google’s case the answer seems clear enough. Like any large corporation with a lot of excess cash the company seems bent on scooping up as much market share as possible, driving competition off the board and increasing the number of people seeing (and clicking on) its highly lucrative ads. But I am not sure why the rest of us should share the company’s sense of haste. Surely the libraries providing the content, and anyone else who cares about a rich digital environment, needs to worry about the potential costs of creating a “universal library” that is filled with mistakes and an impenetrable smog of information. Shouldn’t we ponder the costs to history if the real libraries take error-filled digital versions of particular books and bury the originals in a dark archive (or the dumpster)? And what is the cost to historical thinking if the only substantive information one can glean out of Google is precisely the kind of narrow facts and dates that make history classes such a bore? The future will be here soon enough. Shouldn’t we make sure we will be happy when we get there?

Of course, the problem with the argument that the Google “library” is “error-filled” is that it is constantly being updated and revised. The “errors” that do exist, as the result of faulty OCR or scanning, are going to be fixed as part of the Google’s process. The fear that actual libraries will relegate their scanned books to a “dark archive” or “dumpster” seems unfounded at this point. It is hard to imagine any historian or scholar tolerating that sort of destruction no matter how accurate and complete the digital archive becomes. Rather, the digital should complement, supplement, and augment the original physical archive.

A fellow Berkeley student, Jo Guldi, has used Google Books much more than I have for her research and dissertation work. On her blog she writes about how many new places Google Books search results have taken her by introducing her to a wealth of obscure 19th century texts. Google Books and Google search results were one of many starting points for her work, and opened up new avenues of inquiry for her.

I expect that Google Books, combined with many of their other search technologies, will help scholars in a wide variety of ways. Instead of criticizing their efforts, graduate students as well as established scholars should be lending the expertise we have with the content to Google and other organizations that have the technical and financial resources to help us with our research and writing.

Townsend’s critique on the AHA Blog: American Historical Association Blog: Google Books: What’s Not to Like?

The CNN and Associated Press report that NASA is rethinking its plans and procedures for dealing with the medical problems and/or death of an astronaut in space. Unfortunately for my own research into the history of the bureaucratization of government concern for the dead, NASA has not decided on a policy — merely that it should have one.

But on other topics — such as steps for disposing of the dead and cutting off an astronaut’s medical care if he or she cannot survive — the document merely says these are issues for which NASA needs a policy.

The full article on CNN’s website: “NASA rethinking death in mission to Mars”