Don't think that the actions of one person do not make a difference

I use a Firefox add-on called WOT for Web of Trust. They rate web sites on four criteria: trustworthyness, vendor reliability, privacy, and child safety. Green means the web site is good to go; yellow means caution; and red means stop, danger here. Most of the time, the sites I visit are green. Yesterday, I was surprised to encounter two sites that had lower ratings.

• Tegrity was marked as an unsafe web site by Web of Trust (WOT) (yellow for trustworthy, red for vendor reliability and respecting of privacy, with no rating for child-safety).
• The WOT rating for Echo360 is trustworthy, but also has a red rating for vendor reliability and respecting of privacy.

These ratings are disturbing, but I like their products. I went to the WOT web site to ask them about the ratings.

I wrote to WOT about the Tegrity and Echo360 ratings and received the following reply from Sami, a representative at WOT:

"It seems that tegrity.com has a poor rating, because one of our information sources believes their products have been spam-advertised in the past. However, we have no other evidence of this, so it's plausible that this is a false positive. I have removed the false positive from our database and the site's rating should improve shortly.

"It looks like apreso.com has been reported of spamming last spring by a couple of our sources. The company is now called Echo360, Inc. and some of links direct to the echo360.tv domain instead. Again, this might be caused by a one-time mailing instead of a larger campaign.

"As you can see, email marketing is a very touchy subject for many Internet users these days, and sending out unsolicited messages is an excellent way to quickly hurt one's reputation. That's probably because the spam problem is getting worse each year. Even though companies like Google do a great job filtering out most of the junk, over 90% of all email traffic this year has been spam:
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13505_1-9831556-16.html

"If you have any further questions, please let us know."

So, one person's action (mine) resulted in the change of rating for both companies. Tegrity's ratings were all changed to green. Since Echo360 had been reported by a couple of sources, their ratings on reliability and privacy were changed from red to yellow.

I plan to write WOT again because it seems to me that they are linking vendor reliability and privacy policy to spamming. Vendor reliability should have more to do with their delivery of their products and the quality of their products. I think that since spamming is so critical, there should be a separate rating that would reflect advertising methods.

While I was at it, I also mentioned that many of the links in the ALA (American Library Association)'s newsletter indicate a yellow rating for the first three categories with no rating for child safety. Here is Sami's reply:

All the links in the newsletter you sent us point to a server called link.ixs1.net . The domains ixs1.net and ixs2.net are owned by a company called eWayDirect, which sells email marketing and tracking services to many companies. Unfortunately, they also do business with spammers. You can read some of the abuse reports here:

http://groups.google.com/groups/search?q=group%3Anews.admin.net-abuse.*+ewaydirect

I like WOT's service. I like how responsive they are. I want to help them improve their service.

What did the professor say?

The New York Times had a most intriguing article today, What did the professor say? Check your iPod, by Anne Eisenberg. A number of universities (University of Central Florida; Santa Clara University, CA; Purdue University; El Centro College, Dallas; Kansas State University) are using or planning to use software for recording a professor's lectures and making it available to students on their iPods.

The software for recording that "captures the words of classroom lectures and syncs them with the digital images used during the talk--usually PowerPoint slides and animations" is offered by at least two companies: Tegrity and Echo360. Each web site lists colleges/universities that are their clients (Tegrity claims over 400 educational institutions world wide; Echo360's customer list).

In the New York Times article, they spoke with people at Purdue who were using Echo360. Their web site lists MIT, Princeton, Brandeis, St. John's University, and Stanford among their customers.

On the Tegrity web site, Blackboard is listed as one of their partners with this comment:

Blackboard is allied with Technology Partner Tegrity to enhance the online education experience for institutions, administrators, instructors, and students. Tegrity products complement and enhance the Blackboard suite of products, and Tegrity-generated class recordings and e-learning content is seamlessly integrated into Blackboard courses.

In a news article, the following is said:

Blackboard provides the e-Learning platform used by colleges and universities across the country and abroad. For more than a decade, Tegrity's technology has enabled educational institutions to automatically record every class on campus and deliver them online for students to access. Together Blackboard and Tegrity will enable greater access to educational resources and content providing significant convenience and flexibility to the members of academic institutions around the world.

How Tegrity's Blackboard Building Block Works - Podcasts Automatically Created from Class

Tegrity Podcast setup starts at the beginning of the semester as the Tegrity Campus Blackboard Building Block adds a podcast subscription button in every Blackboard course and sends a personalized email to students with a one-click link for subscribing to their podcasts using iTunes.

During class, instructors press one button to start and stop recording and the software automatically creates visual podcasts broken down by chapter, that are automatically uploaded after class to the right place on the Tegrity Server. The Tegrity Campus Blackboard Building Block component uses information already available in the Blackboard Learning System to automatically catalogue the recordings by course. While listening to their podcasts, students can easily navigate to specific parts (chapters) of their class and get right to the information they need.

Blackboard administrators and other stakeholders in the institution can use the Tegrity Campus governance component to track usage, observing how students effortlessly take advantage of more instruction hours without burdening institution staff.

More to come . . .

Confirmation that my photo is to be published

I received notification three hours ago that my photo taken inside the American Museum of Natural History has been selected for publication in the Schmap's Guide to New York City. I wrote about the possibility of my photo being selected previously. As mentioned previously, the selected photos rotate through a mini slide show above the description of the AMNH. You have to look quickly, but my photo is in the show and they do give me credit.

Google (maps) goes green!

Esther Dyson shows a screen shot of the new Google map screen (may not yet be available where you are) for New York City with a "Take Public Transit" option. Esther is reaching this screen from within the Google headquarters. Commenters indicate that they are not able to access the same screen as Esther shows.

Her screen shows a route from La Guardia Airport to the Meetup Headquarters where she has office space. She credits Tom Sly of Google for the new green and indicates that real-time transit information is coming soon to a computer near you.

Richard Wolf, NYPL librarian @ Health & Information Center

On November 26, 2007, I took a class called Health Information on the Internet at the Mid-Manhattan Library. The class is regularly scheduled.

More to come . . .

Jack Kerouac Explored in In-Depth

Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road on view at The New York Public Library from November 9, 2007 - February 24, 2008; March 1 - 16, 2008. The occasion is the 50th anniversary of the publication of his novel, On the Road.

The poster is from another event, Remembering Jack, held at Columbia University, November 3, 2006. I took photos of the panel discussion and participated in the reading of Howl at the West End.

Jennifer John, Librarian

I have been thinking about Jennifer John today. I spoke of her in a previous entry.

So I went to whitepages.com and typed in her father's name. Three entries came up. The first one looked like a possibility even though the address was not that of the family's previous home. Within minutes, I was reconnecting with Mr. John!

It took a few more days for Jennifer and me to connect by phone. That wonderful business that did research for people also shifted to providing an organizing and cataloging service of a business' documents. The main clients were oil and gas and engineering firms. When the recession hit, then the business slowed. Jennifer has done a variety of things since then including working in the Austin Public Library. She presently does training of library personnel through Central Texas Library Systems. Jennifer is now Jennifer Patterson. She also participates in their blog.

My photo may appear in Schmap's Guide to New York City

I got an email saying one of my photos has been selected to appear in Schmap's Guide to New York City! The edition that might have my photo will appear in early December. They will notify me if my photo is published.

If you look at their site, you will see a map on the left with pointers to places. When you mouse over a pointer, information shows up on the far right describing the location. My photo is of the American Museum of Natural History. The photo would show up above the description. The photos in that location are dynamic and are rotated with other photos.

Discover History: Thanksgiving

There is one last web site that should be included in a review of the history of Thanksgiving. This is a post by Jeremy Bangs, Ph.D., Leiden University and a fellow of the Pilgrim Society. It is called, Thanksgiving on the net: Roast bull with cranberry sauce. It considers whether setting people straight about Thanksgiving myths is as much a part of Thanksgiving as "turkey, cranberry, and pumpkin pie."

Since I have been a vegetarian since about 1994, my turkey might be soy turkey and the pumpkin pie is without egg. Sometimes we have gone to a Turkish restaurant, Beyoglu's, on Thanksgiving where they did have a traditional turkey and cranberry meal for meat eaters and I could have a middle eastern vegetarian meal. My meal several years ago is pictured above. I don't have a photo for this year because Beyoglu's was closed for Thanksgiving this year.




So instead, we ended up at P. J. Clark's in Lincoln Center. The lighting was not so good for photos and I was so hungry that I ate the food forgetting to take the photo first. P. J. Clark's has really good food! The photo is the bar inside P. J. Clark's.

More about the origins of Thanksgiving

After some looking around at what the Internet offers on Thanksgiving and its origins, I have a more complete sense of the historical issues and also of what various people wish to emphasize. It is always important to consider a writer's/historian's personal bias as you read. As usual, there is the issue of how much religion is in the holiday.

Religion is one issue for Dennis Rupert in his explanation of The True Thanksgiving Story. He does give his references (by footnote, bibliography, and links). It appears that the Pilgrim's feast was in an American native tradition of thanksgiving festivals held at various times of the year, making Thanksgiving truly American and certainly allowing for alternate times, such as the Canadian Thanksgiving. Rupert's tracing of early Christian Thanksgivings begins in Texas on May 23, 1541 with the European Spanish explorer, Francisco Vasquez de Coronado.

Walter McCabe (1942-2005), a person who had learning disabilities despite intelligence in the superior range, made quite a few web pages on Thanksgiving, as well as other holidays. Walter does not list any sources and writes in non-standard English telling about "Tisquantum," whom the English called Squanto. In his story, Squanto, from the Wampanoag confederation, was captured by Captain George Weymouth and taken to England to live with Sir Ferdinando Gorges, one of the merchant ship owners, who taught him some English. Apparently, Squanto was being taught the language so he could and did return to Americas to assist as interpreter to those exploring the coast of America.

In 1614, Squanto returned to America with Captain John Smith on a mapping expedition. Smith left the project to his replacement Captain Thomas Hunt who captured 27 natives, sailed with them to Spain where he sold them as slaves. Squanto was lucky enough to be purchased by Friars who nursed him back to health and taught him about Jesus. It is not clear if they also taught him any Spanish. He lived with the Friars until 1618 when he took a ship to Newfoundland, where he was recognized by Captain Thomas Dermer, who wrote a letter to Sir Ferdinando Gorges. Gorges organized an expedition with Dermer taking Squanto as interpreter to re-establish trade with the native Americans. In 1918, Squanto was returned to Patuxet, his home, where he found the entire population was wiped out by a European disease. Squanto lived with a neighboring tribe until the pilgrims settled in the same location as Patuxet. Squanto also negotiated the release of Dermer who had been captured at Cape Cod by Nausets.

The Christian Broadcasting Network (CBN) has an interview with Eric Metaxas, who wrote Squanto and the Miracle of Thanksgiving while working as the editorial director and head writer for Rabbit Ears (specialized in children's picture books with an audio read by celebrities; bought by Listening Library, the children's division of Random House Audio). Metaxas emphasizes in the interview that his work is based on research using the original documents from the 1620s and 1630s. He confirms "that around 1612, a trader, a Captain Hunter, came to the coast of Massachusetts and was trading with the Indians." Captain Hunter sailed to Malaga, Spain where the Spanish monks bought Squanto from a slave market. Metaxas says that in 1615 Squanto went from Spain to England in hopes of getting a ship back to America. He worked for a family named Slaney as a stable boy for about five [sic] years until 1618. A ship is eventually provided and Squanto signs on as interpreter. Metaxas says the time from his capture until his return to Patuxet around 1620 was about ten years [sic], so even researchers have some trouble with time periods. Metaxas tells of the devestation Squanto must have felt in finding out that all of his people have been wiped out by disease. Metaxas also tells of Squanto going to live with a neighboring tribe until the Europeans settled in the same location as his former home, where he joined them.

Education World has a number of resources listed for teaching Thanksgiving in schools. Education World is a free resource for educators funded by corporate sponsors and advertisers.
Chuck Larsen, himself a descendant of native Americans, writes a foot-noted introduction with bibliography to Teaching about Thanksgiving where Larsen writes, "Squanto, the Indian hero of the Thanksgiving story, had a very real love for a British explorer named John Weymouth, who had become a second father to him several years before the Pilgrims arrived at Plymouth. Clearly, Squanto saw these Pilgrims as Weymouth's people." He also states that the Wampanoag natives were not friendly, due to Hunter's capturing their youth, and were invited to the Thanksgiving as a step in the process of "negotiating a treaty that would secure the lands of the Plymouth Plantation for the Pilgrims."

Education World also lists web sites that refute many of Larsen's statements. One such web site is that of Caleb Johnson of Mayflower History.com, who is himself a Mayflower descendant, and is a member of the General Society of Mayflower Descendants through his nine Mayflower ancestors. He has spent more than ten years researching the Mayflower and has published numerous books for sale at his web site. His web page refuting Larsen is indeed most factual, not only listing the names of sources, but also giving sizable, direct quotes. Johnson refutes the Captain John Weymouth story by indicating that his name was really Captain George Weymouth, which agrees with the name on Walter McCabe's web page. Johnson also includes Sir Ferdinando Gorges in Squanto's life, but only the second incident after Dermer's letter. He also gives a page of full-text, downloadable sources in pdf. Johnson's story of Tisquantum starts with his capture by Hunter and continues until his death. The same page also describes several other native personalities who were important at the time.

Back to Rupert's web site, we learn that Thanksgiving was not celebrated in Plymouth every year after that first feast held sometime between September 21 and November 11, 1621. Plymouth brought the celebration back in July 1624 after a drought led to prayer and reconciling with others, followed by days of a light, gentle rainfall. December 18, 1777 was the first time Thanksgiving was celebrated by all thirteen colonies to commemorate the "patriotic victory over the British at Saratoga."

"President George Washington proclaimed a National Day of Thanksgiving for November 26, 1789 to honor the formation of the United States government. His proclamation called for a day of prayer and giving thanks to God. It was to be celebrated by all religious denominations, but discord among the colonies prevented it from being practiced by all the states" (Rupert).

Perhaps Thanksgiving should really be the celebration of the United States processes of lawmaking. Thanksgiving remained a function of Presidential Proclamation until it became a law that took effect in 1942. Rupert states,

"Only Presidents Washington, Adams, and Madison declared national days of thanks in their terms. Thomas Jefferson and John Quincy Adams considered the practice to infringe upon the separation of church and state. During the War of 1812, President Madison proclaimed three days of fasting and prayer in response to Congressional requests (August 20, 1812, September 9, 1813, and January 12, 1815). He was the last president to call for a national thanksgiving until Abraham Lincoln in 1863."

Lincoln's proclamation was the result of 40 years of efforts by Sarah Josepha Hale, a woman's magazine editor living in Boston. Her efforts led to State Governors proclaiming a Thanksgiving Day beginning with New York in 1830. The Territory of Minnesota made their first proclamation to celebrate Thanksgiving on December 26, 1850. By 1852, 27 states proclaimed the last Thursday in November as Thanksgiving Day. Then Hale's letter to Lincoln resulted in his proclamation, which was also the last Thursday of November.

In 1939, President Roosevelt was persuaded by the National Retail Dry Goods Association to proclaim the next to last Thursday of November as Thanksgiving Day in a year when there were 5 Thursdays and in order to "create a longer Christmas shopping season." Twenty-three states celebrated the "Republican" Thanksgiving on November 23, with 23 other states celebrating the "Democratic" Thanksgiving on November 30. "Texas and Colorado declared both Thursdays to be holidays." The confusion that ensued over the next two years led to Congress' legislation declaring Thanksgiving to be on the fourth Thursday of the month. This is a great story to tell in November 2007 when November has five Thursdays.

Happy Thanksgiving to all!!

Thanksgiving

"What is life? It is the flash of a firefly in the night. It is the breath of a buffalo in the wintertime. It is the little shadow which runs across the grass and loses itself in the sunset." These are the dying words of Ispwo Mukika Crowfoot, a Blackfoot Indian who was twenty years old in 1803, the same year that Lewis and Clark launched their famous expedition. It is reported in a Thanksgiving article telling about Squanto, who helped the Pilgrams in planting food before the winter. The article also says:

"What you didn't know is that long before the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock, this same Squanto had been captured by two English sea captains, George Weymouth and John Hunt, and abused as a slave for fourteen years. Squanto had been free less than five years when Capt. John Bradford's Pilgrims arrived on the good ship Mayflower."

Unfortunately, history is full of things we do not know. This only points to the necessity to learn history. The American natives were and are amazing people.

PodCamp Boston: Famous Dinosaur delivers some laughter

PodCamp Boston 2 was October 26-28, 2007. A person named Ewan Spence, Vice President (Stuff) at The Podcast Network, had a Sunday presentation from 1 pm to 2 pm called The Circle of Podcasting. I watched his video explaining that he had some idea about testing what would happen if he showed a PowerPoint presentation during his talk that had nothing to do with what he was talking about.

Late Saturday night before the presentation, he and his friends were discussing what content should be shown. They came up with the idea of LOLsaurs, which means that they combed Flickr for photos of dinosaurs with CC licensing. Then they added funny captions to the photos using Flickr toys. I guess those made it into the PowerPoint presentation for Ewan's talk, which was October 28. On October 27, they also created a quick, free WordPress blog as a showplace the LOLsaurs. They got all excited because by Sunday noon, their LOLsaur blog was number one on Digg. However, the tide turned against them and they got a lot of negative comments after that. Chris Brogan kept the perspective on the project with his entry, "Why LOLsaur really is cool!" If you do a search on Digg for LOLsaur, you get Chris's blog entry.

There is a very famous dinosaur nicknamed Dave by Mark Norell of the American Museum of Natural History. Dave was Mark's introduction to dinosaurs with feathers in China. [Norell nicknamed the specimen "Dave," a reference to the communication difficulties with the Chinese while Norell was jet-lagged as being analogous to "an old Cheech and Chong routine--one where Cheech Marin attempts very unsuccessfully to communicate with his friend Tommy Chong about the whereabouts of a character named Dave" (from Unearthing the Dragon, p.173).] You can read more about it under Dave's photo. Incredibly, I was able to see Dave with other New Yorkers and I took his photo. Mark's book is also most interesting, not only for the information about the dinosaurs, but also because Mark told about the mash-up between the cultures of the United States and China. I am showing Dave's photo here first before the altered photo of Dave as an LOLsaur.

Dave is very special to me. I don't mind the LOLsaurs (some are quite funny or cute), but Dave and what he represents is much more important. Dave made it into the LOLsaurs blog on November 9th so he missed being part of number 1 on Digg. However, since interest in LOLsaurs has died down, only one other LOLsaur has been posted since Dave, making him the second entry on the home page. That is not a bad place to be.

He was created as an LOLsaur by Wendell Oskay, one of Ewan's friends. Wendell has a blog called, Evil Mad Scientist Laboratories: Making the world a better place one mad scientist at a time. Dave also made it to this Mad Scientist blog on November 9th. Wendell's blog is rather interesting and promises to present a new project every Wednesday. In any case, I can't complain as there is always a link back to Dave on my Flickr site (a requirement of my CC license). It is great for Dave to get any and all publicity. He deserves it!

So that is how Dave got his start as a comedian. However, his real contribution is to Mark Norell's understanding of feathers on dinosaurs and through Mark the rest of the Western world gained that understanding.

Questions

It is the questions we ask that determine the quality of our lives.

More to come . . .

About Social Networking

My first adventures in social networking were with Flickr. When I joined Flickr in August 2004, they had a chat room feature, Flickr Live. It was really wonderful and I met many people there. Flickr was still small then. Sometime later, someone broke into the code of the chat room and it was immediately taken down and never seen since. Note: As you can see from my links, I also save photos at Smug Mug, where generally I put whole sets of photos rather than better photos as is my present goal on Flickr.

In those early Flickr days, I looked at the photos of all the Flickr staff. So I noticed immediately when Esther Dyson joined Flickr and became one of her contacts. I have always watched Esther because her father is also a physicist. She sort of out did me though - with her stories of thinking Einstein was Santa Claus. My dad talked about Einstein, but I have no reason to believe he ever met Einstein. My dad was educated at Rice Institute (today, Rice University). He drove us through the campus every Sunday after church to show us all the buildings, especially the one where they split atoms.

I joined MySpace a couple of years ago because I discovered I could keep up with my nieces and nephews there (2 nephews are in Iraq with a second cousin leaving for Iraq soon). Almost all of my young relatives post photos which I download and share with my Mom. Sometimes I post their photos on Flickr so more of the family can see them. The photos are restricted to my family.

In July, I started Graduate School in Library and Information Science at Queens College (the campus is seen in the photo to the right with Manhattan in the background taken on a rainy day). In one of my classes we were urged to network. This led to my eventual joining of Facebook. I also joined several listservs.

Google mail is perfect for listservs. I can set a filter to have all the email from each listserv go into its own folder that I can then check when I have time. The emails do not get mixed up with my regular mail. I have learned through the years of trying lists using both individual emails and digest versions that there are advantages and disadvantages to each form. Individual emails are easier to reply to. Digests don't flood your email or get mixed up in the listing with your other email. Digests are also VERY long and it is hard to find something you read later. But with Google mail, I do not get the individual emails in with my regular email, so I no longer have to use a digest version. I can also mark the individual emails that I want to refer back to using Google's yellow star.

As for Facebook, I joined it one day and then ran off to other things. It sat there for a while until someone I knew from Flickr asked for me to make him a friend. I then looked for library groups and groups for other subjects I am interested in. Facebook saves users time by listing related groups on every group page.

I used their feature for importing my gmail addresses. A number of my friends were already on Facebook. So slowly, my set of Facebook friends has grown. David Pogue is even my friend. At the time he made me his friend, I was his 11th friend. I think he may have just joined Facebook on that Sunday right after I imported my gmail address book the day before. I may have been responsible for his joining.

However, it turns out that there is more librarian and student librarian action on MySpace. I added Queens College to my list of schools on MySpace. I joined MySpace's QC LISSA group (Queens College Library and Information Science Student Association) and asked the QC LISSA members to be my friends. QC LISSA has forty-some-odd members on MySpace and only about 10 on Facebook. I think I prefer the communication formats on Facebook, though.

An October 25th New York Times article says that Facebook claims 50 million active members with 200,000 new ones added each day. The article continues to say that MySpace has more than twice as many members but is growing more slowly. Facebook's growth spurt started in May when it invited developers to create tools for the site and to share in its revenues. I found the following quotation in the article especially interesting (although note that MySpace is not mentioned).

“Once a social operating system takes over a country, it’s like it becomes the native language of that country,” said Lee Lorenzen, a venture capitalist who has invested in companies making Facebook applications. Mr. Lorenzen noted that Google’s Orkut dominates Brazil, Friendster dominates the Philippines and Facebook is becoming the dominant forum in the United States, Canada and Western Europe.

Now that I have gotten into some of this librarian networking, I do remember that the librarian at the middle school where I spent 11 years working was always getting emails from other librarians. I helped her set up a free email account so she could subscribe to the various lists.

Some Library Resources

There are so many people cataloging and collecting information. Here are some links to a few recommended by my sister's friend who is a librarian.

"Multimedia Librarian is aimed at librarians and information professionals who work with multimedia formats. It is a forum for collecting resources relevant to the library and information science profession as it pertains to audio-visual materials. These include, but are not limited to, digital media (Web-delivered formats, DVDs, CDs, etc.) and instructional technologies comprised of more than solely print content. Multimedia Librarian aims to recognize audio-visual resources as invaluable to the profession of librarianship and the propagation of information literacy." [Description taken from the site.]

"DoIS (Documents in Information Science) is a service for finding and downloading the latest research results in Information Science. DoIS is a database of articles and conference proceedings published in electronic format in the area of Library and Information Science. DoIS is a volunteer effort to create a free bibliographic resource of scientific texts specialized in Information Science." [Description taken from the site.]

Google Librarian Central: Your Official Source for Google News, Tips, and Updates. While it is run by an associate marketing director, she attended the ALA conference and is collecting information for librarians.

On the eve of Halloween, a brief story about reincarnation

My father always told me that as he left the hospital after I was born, the newspaper headlines were that Franklin Roosevelt had died. He said his greatest fear was that I might be the reincarnation of Roosevelt.

So I spent much of my young life thinking that I was born on the day that Roosevelt died. I did even consider that Roosevelt might have died in the night while I was born the next morning.

At any rate, it is probably remarkable that my father, not just a scientist, but a physicist, spoke to me this way about reincarnation. It gave me a basis for considering reincarnation seriously, which I did at various times in my life, which is a topic for another day.

At some point, perhaps as a teen or in my early 20's, I decided to look up the death of Franklin Roosevelt. You can imagine my surprise to find that he did not die the day before or on my birthday. He died the day after I was born! Apparently, my father was in the hospital so long that the time merged into one day.

The Bible in our culture

In school I learned that when the American pioneers left the east coast in their covered wagons, they took two books with them: The Bible and a copy of the complete works of Shakespeare.

I grew up in Houston, Texas, in the Bible Belt of America. As a child, I did not really know what this Bible was, or Shakespeare either for that matter. Today, I have multiple copies of both the Bible and Shakespeare. No, the copies are not identical. It is amazing how many different versions there are of the Bible. Even Shakespeare is getting his due with the historical work looking into his true identity.

Seeking the meanings of a spiritual text is certainly a lifelong task. I spent eleven years studying with a teacher who translated the text from the Greek and Hebrew. I learned that the Greek Bible we study was written using the Greek of Alexander the Great. My teacher taught that Alexander's Greek is one of the most precise languages ever. I have studied with many other teachers since only to realize that whom one selects as a teacher is a very important decision. I have learned much from each of my teachers.

As a child, I questioned why there were so many different types of religions and subtypes within each religion. I have studied with teachers from many subtypes of Christianity as well as with several Rabbis, and looked into Eastern beliefs. My best answer to my childhood question is that we humans have to have a teacher. The universal being (you would be surprised at how many names there are for this) has to send us someone to teach us, which is done in every generation and there can be multiple teachers in a generation. If one goes back to the teachings of the initial teacher of any movement that becomes a religion or subreligion, one will find an amazing consistency in the teachings.

Each teacher uses different examples to illustrate his or her teaching. The students at the time the teacher is alive can be kept safe from misunderstandings because they can check with their teacher. However, after the teacher has passed on, as they must do, then over time the teachings get distorted by our human tendency to place more importance on the physical than on what we cannot see (spiritual). The rituals that were meant to help us understand a spiritual teaching get overemphasized. Before long, people are fighting over the rituals.

Look yourself to see what it is that people in different religions disagree over. However, if we would all ask what the original teachings were with less emphasis on what the illustrations were, we might find that there is much we could agree on and perhaps not get involved in so many conflicts. Most of all, we need to define what we want in a spiritual teacher. They say the teacher shows up when you are ready.

I always return to the story of the blind men and the elephant. You know, one said an elephant is like a rope, one said the elephant is like a tree trunk, another said it is like a wall, yet another said it is like a hose. The poor elephant is misunderstood by them all.

The path of a new way of thinking making it into people's general knowledge

This will be about Einstein.

More to come . . .

An example of how a child uses a library for problem solving

My parents often spoke of Franklin Roosevelt as the worst thing that happened to this country. As a child, I wondered who he was and what was so bad about him. Sometime about the fifth grade (1955), I looked for a biography on Roosevelt so I could answer my questions. My school library had a whole series of biographies that had orange bindings. Sure enough there was one on Franklin. The book did tell me about who Franklin was and about his life. It did not really tell me, nor was I probably ready to comprehend, what my parents thought was so bad about him.

The point here is that libraries provide a child with a place to find some answers to his or her questions. Many times a child's questions are not ones that have been fully articulated. Bruno Bettelheim has certainly shown this in his work with fairy tales in the book, The Uses of Enchantment: The Meaning and Importance of Fairy Tales.

Bettelheim relates in the book how different children use the same fairy tale to resolve problems at different ages. In the case of Hansel and Gretel, one might think that the story is most useful for children dealing with fears about their parents diserting them, but Bettelheim tells how a young girl used the story to work out her own autonomy separate from her brother. Battelheim relates how Gretel had to take action to save her brother, who was in a cage, from being cooked and eaten by the witch. The girl did not really know what was bothering her, but apparently, she had been dependent on her own brother and it was time for her to assert herself. The Hansel and Gretel story gave her a model of Gretel acting independently so the girl was able to use this model in her own life.

Reading Bettelheim gave me a new insight into children and helps me to listen to them differently. The difference is being open to what a child may not be able to articulate, but what is a question for him or her. It is important to step back from our own thinking to allow the child to explore in a seemingly disordered way that may lead to his or her hitting on just the issue that is not at the level of awareness that would allow articulation.

Review of an Adesso CyberPad for Note Taking

After starting graduate school in the summer, I was captivated by the idea that I could take notes that OCR software would turn into a text file. I began a study of various pens and tablets for note taking. Most of the pens require special paper, so I rejected that idea. A few of the pens I looked into seemed to be vaporware.

Finally, I was in J&R Computers where I saw an Adesso CyberPad. I spoke at length with the J&R representative. He had no experience with the CyberPad and he did not know anyone who had tried it. He assured me that they sell the pads and that people did not seem to be returning them. I was hesitant to try it after my study of note-taking systems on the Internet, but because of their return policy, I purchased it.

Specifically, reviews of the CyberPad said that it really did give good results, meaning a jpg file of the handwriting. Most reviewers of this product (late August and early September) did not seem to have tried and certainly did not comment on converting the handwriting to text. One reviewer specifically said he had not tried converting the handwriting to text. He did try the email program to email the notes and said it worked very well.

One nice feature of the CyberPad is that I could use a regular notebook clipped onto the pad to take my notes in regular ink. The mechanism for recording the digital image was picked up from the relative position of the pen on the pad and a quarter-inch to 3/8ths inch of paper stacked on top of the CyberPad clipboard did not matter. In fact, the unit comes with an inexpensive letter-sized legal pad (see in photo; clicking photo reveals a larger image). The pen itself looked cheap with some sort of plastic gripper glued onto the barrel of the pen, but it worked and was not too thick or heavy to hold. It seemed to be balanced fairly well for writing comfortably. The ball point pen made nice, smooth lines on the paper.

Also, it is important for my uses (note taking in college classes) that the CyberPad does not have to be connected to the computer while you are taking notes. It comes with rechargeable batteries and its own battery charger (see third photo). It also has an SD slot to add extra capacity for storing pages to the 32 MB that the pad comes with. It has ample storage space with 26 directories (one for each letter of the alphabet) that can hold 99 files, one file for each page of text that you write adding up to a capacity of 2,574 pages.

I found that the CyberPad did indeed make good jpg files of my handwritten notes. It would be easy to send a copy of such notes to classmates when they missed class. On the other hand, I could easily just scan my regular pencil and pen notes.

The OCR software is where I found deficiency. My package included MyInk software for the conversion. The software did not have a clear manual and the directions for use were obscure. You can see the various manuals from the photo (click on the photo for a larger image that you can read) for six different software titles: MyInk, riteMail, EverNote 1.0, Free Notes, Office Ink, PowerPresenter RE, and Pensoft Pro. [Note: I have revisited reviews of this product in December and found that less software is bundled with the product. J&R is now bundling Adobe Photoshop Elements 5.0 with the product.]

Other reviewers say that the conversion to text is made by riteMail. riteMail is the program that one uses to view the pages of notes on the computer. I saw nothing about it having OCR capacity, and I tried all the options that were available. But please notice in other reviews that they just say that this is very powerful software that recognizes four languages without giving any specifics as to how it works. Also, notice that the same pictures are in most every review of CyperPad. I think that if word was out that this software worked in translating handwriting to text, it would be big news! Apparently, riteMail is a product of EverNote as they have other "rite technology." [However, riteMail is not listed one their web site in December.]

The review that I am the most surprised about is at About.com. I believe that Catherine Roseberry actually used a CyperPad to write and look at the files on her computer, but I do not believe that it translated the jpg files to text. She gives no detail about the translation from handwriting to text. That is the key question in any review and experience with converting handwriting to text. All the reviews just fade away from specifics and barely mention that they got text files from the jpg. If it worked, it would be exceptional given the present state of handwriting recognition. Why would I get hooked into thinking it could be done? Because I use the Palm operating system with my Kyocera phone and daily it converts my handwriting into text.

There was an implication in some of the reviews that I read in late August and early September that this product would work very well with Vista's ink program. The program supplied in the package, MyInk, did some weird things on my computer. After spending more time than I would have liked, I never got one character translated to text. I did see a screen that supposedly worked at the letter-by-letter level. Since removing the software from my computer, I have been getting a message that one of the programs related to my mouse is not loading. I am politely asked if I want to send Microsoft a report about the problem. Restarting the computer fixes it and ignoring the error seems to work as well. [Note: there is no mention of MyInk software in reviews of this product in December.]

Adesso includes EverNote software, which is really a database for managing information. Here one can store and retrieve the jpg images that are created for each page. The addition of key words allows you to find the jpg image with the data. EverNote can store files other than jpg files. I remember hearing about EverNote years ago when it first came out. I was surprised to encounter it again, especially in version 1.0. One would think that it would have made some advances in the couple of years it has been around. In fact, the EverNote web site has version 2.2 which does say it has the capacity to translate handwriting into text. How is it that Adesso can produce an over-priced item and not include the latest versions of the software?

Honestly, I only looked at the Adesso reviews, not the EverNote reviews. I do not understand why a company would not bundle the best software possible with their product. I must admit, that after reading the EverNote reviews, I probably should have upgraded the software and I would have been happy with the Adesso product. With the pressure of working within a short time to try out the product before the opportunity to return it passed, I packed it up and returned it rather than risking spending a lot of money on something that did not work. You can tell by looking at the photo of the documentation, that the manuals were not the original manuals of the various software products. When the customer sees the cheap way they put the pen together plus the cheap production of the manuals, it does not lead to confidence that the product will work. They should take a lesson from Steve Jobs on the importance of design, construction, and packaging of a product. One can download the manual from EverNote and find that it is of better quality. In hindsight, I wish I had checked reviews of EverNote. I did not think that EverNote or riteMail was the software for converting the handwriting to text. I understand now that EverNote 2.2 might be a really good product.

The bottom line: I returned the CyberPad. [Note: This entry was reviewed and edited in December.]