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Sassanid Empire
The Sassanid Empire or Sasanian Dynasty[1] is the name used for the Persian dynasty which lasted from 224 to 651 AD.[2][3]
The Sassanid Empire, which succeeded the Parthian Empire, was recognized as one of the two great powers in Western Asia, alongside the Roman Empire and later the Byzantine Empire, for more than 400 years.
King of kings[change | change source]
The Sassanid dynasty was founded by Ardashir I when he had defeated the last Parthian (Arsacid) king, Artabanus IV, and ended when the last Sassanid Shahanshah (King of Kings), Yazdegerd III (632–651), lost a 14-year struggle to drive out the early Arab Caliphate, the first of the Islamic empires.
The Sassanid Empire's traditional territory included all of today's Iran, Iraq, Armenia, Afghanistan, Egypt, eastern parts of Turkey, and parts of Syria, Pakistan, Caucasia, Central Asia and Arabia.
The Sassanid era is considered to be one of the most important and influential historical periods in Iran. In many ways the Sassanid period saw the highest achievement of Persian civilization, and constituted the last great Iranian Empire before the Muslim conquest and adoption of Islam.
Persia influenced Roman civilization considerably during the Sassanids' times,[4]p109 and the Romans reserved for the Sassanid Persians alone the status of equals. The Roman Emperor wrote letters to the Persian Shahanshah, which were addressed to "my brother". Their cultural influence extended far beyond the empire's territorial borders, reaching as far as Western Europe,[5] Africa,[6] China and India, and played a prominent role in the formation of both European and Asiatic medieval art.[7]
This influence carried forward to the early Islamic world. The dynasty's unique, aristocratic culture transformed the Islamic conquest of Iran into a Persian renaissance.[5] Much of what later became known as Islamic culture, architecture, writing and other skills were borrowed mainly from the Sassanid Persians and propagated throughout the broader Muslim world.
Decline[change | change source]
In the spring of 632, a grandson of Khosrau I, Yazdegerd III who had lived in hiding, ascended the throne. In that same year, the first raiders from the Arab tribes made their raids into Persian territory. They were united by Islam. Years of warfare had exhausted both the Byzantines and the Persians. The Sassanids were further weakened by economic decline, heavy taxation, religious unrest, rigid social stratification, the increasing power of the provincial landholders, and a rapid turnover of rulers. These factors made the Islamic conquest of Persia easier than it would have been in earlier times.
The Sassanids never mounted a truly effective resistance to the pressure applied by the Muslim conquests.
Sassanid Empire chronology[change | change source]
226–241: Reign of Ardashir I:
- 224–226: Overthrow of Parthian Empire.
- 229–232: War with Rome.
- Zoroastrianism is revived as official religion.
- The collection of texts known as the Zend Avesta is assembled.
241–271: Reign of Shapur I:
- 241–244: War with Rome.
- 252–261: War with Rome. Capture of Roman emperor Valerian.
- 215–271: Mani, founder of Manichaeism.
271–301: A period of dynastic struggles.
283: War with Rome. Romans sack Ctesiphon.
296-8: War with Rome. Persia cedes five provinces east of the Tigris to Rome.
309–379: Reign of Shapur II "the Great":
- 337–350: First war with Rome with relatively little success.
- 359–363: Second war with Rome. Rome returns trans-Tigris provinces and cedes Nisibis and Singara to Persia.
387: Armenia partitioned into Roman and Persian zones.
399–420: Reign of Yazdegerd I "the Sinner":
- 409: Christians are permitted to publicly worship and to build churches.
- 416–420: Persecution of Christians as Yazdegerd revokes his earlier order.
420–438: Reign of Bahram V:
- 420–422: War with Rome.
- 424: Council of Dad-Ishu declares the Eastern Church independent of Constantinople.
- 428: Persian zone of Armenia annexed to Sassanid Empire.
438–457: Reign of Yazdegerd II:
- 441: War with Rome.
- 449-451: Armenian revolt.
482-3: Armenian and Iberian revolt.
483: Edict of Toleration granted to Christians.
484: Peroz I defeated and killed by Hephthalites.
491: Armenian revolt. Armenian Church repudiates the Council of Chalcedon:
- Nestorian Christianity becomes dominant Christian sect in Sassanid Empire.
502-506: War with Constantinople.
526-532: War with Constantinople.
531–579: Reign of Khosrau I, "with the immortal soul" (Anushirvan)
540–562: War with Constantinople.
572-591: War with Constantinople. Persia cedes much of Armenia and Iberia to Constantinople.
590–628: Reign of Khosrau II
603–628: War with Byzantium. Persia occupies Byzantine Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine, Egypt and the Transcaucasus, before being driven to withdraw to pre-war frontiers by Byzantine counter-offensive.
610: Arabs defeat a Sassanid army at Dhu-Qar.
626: Unsuccessful siege of Constantinople by Avars and Persians.
627: Byzantine Emperor Heraclius invades Assyria and Mesopotamia. Decisive defeat of Persian forces at the battle of Nineveh.
628–632: Chaotic period of multiple rulers.
632–642: Reign of Yazdegerd III.
636: Decisive Sassanid defeat at the Battle of al-Qadisiyyah during the Islamic conquest of Persia.
642: Final victory of Arabs when Persian army destroyed at Nahavand (Nehavand).
651: Last Sassanid ruler Yazdegerd III murdered at Merv, present-day Turkmenistan, ending the dynasty. His son Firuz and many others went into exile in China.
Notes[change | change source]
- ↑ Persian: ساسانیان [sɒsɒnijɒn]
- ↑ Wiesehofer, Joseph 1996. Ancient Persia. New York: I.B. Taurus
- ↑ "A brief history". Culture of Iran. Archived from the original on October 11, 2007. Retrieved 11 September 2009.
- ↑ Bury J.B. 1923. History of the later Roman Empire. Macmillan, London.
- ↑ 5.0 5.1 Durant, Will The story of civilization, 4: The Age of faith. New York: Simon and Schuster. ISBN 978-0671219888
- ↑ Transoxiana 04: Sasanians in Africa
- ↑ Iransaga: The art of Sassanians
References[change | change source]
- Iranologie History of Iran Chapter V: Sasanians Archived 2009-07-15 at the Wayback Machine
- Iran Chamber Society (History of Iran) Archived 2006-11-10 at the Wayback Machine
- Livius articles on ancient Persia Archived 2011-05-13 at the Wayback Machine
- Richard Frye "The History of Ancient Iran"
- Iransaga: Persian arts through the centuries
- Christianity in Ancient Iran: Aba & The Church in Persia
- Sasanika: the History and Culture of Sasanians Archived 2012-05-29 at Archive.today
Other websites[change | change source]
- Sasanian rock reliefs, Photos from Iran, Livius Archived 2016-11-10 at the Wayback Machine.
- Sasanian Dynasty entry in the Encyclopædia Iranica
- ECAI.org The Near East in Late Antiquity: The Sasanian Empire Archived 2006-12-14 at the Wayback Machine
- The Art of Sassanians
- Sassanid crowns Archived 2006-11-08 at the Wayback Machine
- Sassanid coins Archived 2006-11-07 at the Wayback Machine
- Sassanid textile Archived 2006-10-22 at the Wayback Machine
- Islamic Metalwork[permanent dead link] The continuation of Sassanid Art
- A Review of Sassanid Images and Inscriptions
- Sasanians in Africa in Transoxiana 4.
- Ctesiphon; The capital of the Parthian and the Sassanid empires, By: Jona Lendering
- Islamic Conquest of Persia
- Pirooz in China, By Frank Wong
- The Sassanian Empire Archived 2009-01-01 at the Wayback Machine BBC – Radio 4 In Our Time programme (available as .ram file)
- The Sassanian Empire: Further Reading


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Last updated: 01/03/04
Copyright ©1999-2009 Herp Vet Connection. All Rights Reserved.
All gathered data/text, images/graphics and code, unless stated otherwise are property of Herp Vet Connection and cannot be used without written permission from the HVC Team.
Herp Vet Connection is developed and owned by Susan Julian, Joan Appell, & Desiree Wong.

subset: commoncrawl


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The mother of injured Humboldt Broncos player Ryan Straschnitzki has shed a lot of tears over the past year and that didn't change as the family finally returned to its newly renovated home Saturday.
Michelle Straschnitzki was handed a box of tissues by her husband, Tom, as the entire clan walked into the family home in Airdrie, just north of Calgary.
But this time it was tears of joy.
"It is. It's been a heck of a year and a bit, but we're going to celebrate this moment and keep in mind why we're here now and everybody's still in our hearts. We're grateful to be home," she said wiping away tears.
Ryan Straschnitzki was paralyzed from the chest down in the April 6, 2018, crash between a bus carrying the Humboldt Broncos and a semi-trailer. Sixteen people died and 13 others, including Straschnitzki, were injured.
The family has been living in hotels since July while the home was renovated. It now includes an elevator down to Straschnitzki's new man cave in the basement and a separate heating unit for his bedroom because he's unable to sense when his body is too hot or too cold.
It also includes hockey memorabilia including a framed jersey from his favourite player, Jonathan Toews of the Chicago Blackhawks, his number 10 Broncos jersey and a big-screen TV and sound system.
"Awesome. This is too good to be true. It's amazing. Wow," Straschnitzki beamed.
"I'm like speechless. Everything has just been amazing and you saw my mom with the tears going on. Just her reaction shows what this house is like and it's like a whole new house and I'm really excited."
Straschnitzki intends to have his friends over to watch the rest of the NHL playoffs and he's thrilled to have his life return to a bit of normalcy.
"It gives me more independence with the laundry room and the open bedroom. Even having all the controls here — I can do it on my own and don't have to depend on other people."
Her son's smile prompted more tears from Michelle Straschnitzki.
"It's been a long time and that was a genuine smile. Also, knowing Ryan can do what he wants now. He can live his life the way he needs to and he can come and go as he pleases, more or less," she said.
Tom Straschnitzki said his son's smile has only been this bright once before since the accident.
"The last time he lit up like that was last July when he first got back on the ice," he said, referring to his son's new sport of sledge hockey.
A lone hockey stick was propped up at the front door.
Neighbours turned out to welcome the family, and many sat in lawn chairs across the street before the beginning of what appeared to be a huge block party.
"It's not going to end. I think it's going to go until next Saturday probably," said Michelle Straschnitzki.
Bill Graveland, The Canadian Press


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Racism against Somalis cited in Minn. school brawl
Somali-Americans blamed racial tensions for a Minneapolis high school cafeteria melee that began as a food fight and ended with police using chemical spray to break up a brawl involving more than 200 students.
Three students and one staff member at South High School were taken to a hospital for treatment of minor injuries. No weapons were used, police said.
Students threw food, plates and soda bottles at staff and police -- "anything they could get their hands on," police spokesman Sgt. William Palmer told the St. Paul Pioneer Press.
The fight began about 12:45 p.m. CT and lasted 15 minutes. It was captured on video.
No arrests were made, but police were reviewing surveillance footage, and rioting and disorderly conduct charges could be filed, the Minneapolis Star-Tribunereported.
Classes resumed Friday, but the school, which has about 2,200 students, remained on lockdown.
On Tuesday, the student newspaper carried an article in which Somali-American students said racial and ethnic tensions had grown this year.
"This school is not safe for Somali students," Adnan Farah, a junior, told the Star-Tribune. "Throughout this year, there have been a lot of fights."
A school district spokesman would not comment but said racism complaints are taken seriously.


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Graphic Collections >
The Graphic Materials Collections fall into four major categories: prints (engravings and lithographs); photographs; architectural collections; and ephemera (trade cards and other advertisements, broadsides, sheet music, and other paper items). For further assistance see the specific material descriptions or contact a librarian. Patrons are required make appointments to view materials from the Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architecture. Collection level records are available for the majority of these collections through the library's online catalog. Electronic guides or finding aids are available for many of the collections of the Department of Prints, Photographs, and Architecture.
To make an appointment, please contact us at email@example.com
E-Mail: Email Reference Form
Phone: (212) 485-9227


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Asian Artistry
Inspired by "Penguin Patrol" from designer Lorrie Franz of Bean Counter Quilts
- 1/4 yard blue print (blocks)
- 3/4 yard purple floral (blocks, sashing squares)
- 1-1/2 yards wavy stripe print (blocks, outer border)
- 1/4 yard red-and-blue floral (blocks)
- 1/4 yard red floral (blocks)
- 3/8 yard Asian-style character print (blocks)
- 5/8 yard blue floral (sashing rectangles)
- 3-1/4 yards backing fabric
- 56" square batting
Finished quilt: 49-1/2" square
Finished block: 11" square
Quantities are for 44/45"-wide, 100% cotton fabrics. Measurements include 1/4" seam allowances. Sew with right sides together unless otherwise stated.
Cut Fabrics
Cut pieces in the following order. Cut outer border strips lengthwise (parallel to the selvages).
From blue print, cut:
- 5--7-1/2" squares
From purple floral, cut:
- 6--2-1/2x42" binding strips
- 5--4-1/2x7-1/2" rectangles
- 4--2-1/2" sashing squares
From wavy stripe print, cut:
- 2--5-1/2x49-1/2" outer border strips
- 2--5-1/2x39-1/2" outer border strips
- 5--4-1/2x11-1/2" rectangles
From red-and-blue floral, cut:
- 4--7-1/2" squares
From red floral, cut:
- 4--4-1/2x7-1/2" rectangles
From Asian-style character print, cut:
- 4--4-1/2x11-1/2" rectangles
From blue floral, cut:
- 12--2-1/2x11-1/2" sashing rectangles
- 2--1-1/2x39-1/2" inner border strips
- 2--1-1/2x37-1/2" inner border strips
Assemble Blocks
1. Referring to Diagram 1, lay out one blue print 7-1/2" square, one purple floral 4-1/2x7-1/2" rectangle, and one wavy stripe 4-1/2x11-1/2" rectangle for one A block.
2. Sew blue print square to long edge of purple floral rectangle to make a unit. Press seam toward purple floral rectangle. Join unit to one long edge of wavy stripe print rectangle to make an A block. Press seam toward rectangle. The block should be 11-1/2" square including seam allowances.
3. Repeat steps 1 and 2 to make five A blocks total.
4. Referring to Diagram 2, lay out one red-and-blue floral 7-1/2" square, one red floral 4-1/2x7-1/2" rectangle, and one Asian-style character print 4-1/2x11-1/2" rectangle for one B block.
5. Join pieces as in Step 2. The block should be 11-1/2" square including seam allowances.
6. Repeat steps 4 and 5 to make four B blocks total.
Assemble Quilt Center
1. Referring to the Quilt Assembly Diagram, lay out blocks, blue floral sashing rectangles, and purple floral sashing squares in five rows.
2. Sew together pieces in each row. Press seams toward sashing rectangles. Join rows to make quilt center. Press seams toward sashing rows. The quilt center should be 37-1/2" square including seam allowances.
Add Borders
1. Sew short blue floral inner border strips to opposite edges of the pieced quilt center. Add long blue floral inner border strips to remaining edges. Press seams toward inner border.
2. Join short wavy stripe outer border strips to opposite edges of quilt center. Add long wavy stripe outer border strips to remaining edges. Press seams toward inner border.
Finish Quilt
1. Layer quilt top, batting, and backing; baste. Quilt as desired.
2. Bind with purple floral binding strips.


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South Milwaukee Auto Glass Repair and Auto Glass Replacement
Fix that crack before it spreads! Not only is a crack in your windshield annoying, it is dangerous as well. While impeding your vision, cracks and chips left unchecked can spread and compromise the strength of the glass. Don't go another day without talking to the South Milwaukee area vehicle glass experts!
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Residential Window Repair and Window Replacement for South Milwaukee
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Several months ago Andrew Feinberg, founder of the Capitol Valley.net blog, laid down a challenge to me and other tech bloggers: why don't we ever come to Washington D.C. to get the politicians' view of the tech industry?
After all, politicians have huge control over our industry.
They can decide things concerning network neutrality, taxation, whether universities get funded so that our industry will have a constant stream of new potential new employees, immigration (one tech-industry CEO recently told me his company is losing its best R&D talent which we educated here, but then are forced to go back home due to immigration laws), wireless bandwidth allocation, and much much more.
These are issues that the "shiny new thing chasers" like me don't often talk about cause, well, they require doing homework and building partnerships and, well, going to Washington DC. Most of the geeks I hang out with don't like hanging out with politicians. They would rather watch an hour-long-PowerPoint presentation on some boring enterprise-focused technology than hang out with politicians.
But I saw value in Andrew's plea. He was right that we need a new conversation about technology and politics, particularly because there will be a regime change in Washington DC in January (even McCain would bring a different approach to the tech industry than Bush had).
So, next week me and the crew from FastCompany.tv is headed to New York for a day to attend the Personal Democracy Forum. Andrew will do some interviews there with me and I'll be on a panel discussion.
Then on Tuesday we're headed to Washington DC. Right now we're tentatively speaking to four congressmen/women including Nancy Pelosi, speaker of the house.
My agenda for the week?
1. Learn about pending or upcoming legislation that will affect the technology industry.
2. Start a dialog between tech journalists and politician's staffs, so we will have better understanding of what they are thinking and will have a chance to get our audiences feedback on potential legislation.
3. Hear how the regime change (er, Presidential election) will affect what they are thinking and what executives at technology companies should be aware of going into 2009.
4. Listen and bring you into conversations. I hope to do some Qik videos while there, and have some discussions on Twitter and FriendFeed.
Andrew also has us scheduled to interview a few key members of the FCC and we're still working on our schedules to fit in some other fun stuff.
Plus, on Wednesday night we're hosting a party which is open to all — wow, 122 are already signed up on the Facebook page for the party. We're hosting Gary Vaynerchuk, the web superstar behind Wine Library TV and owner of one of the biggest wine stores in the world, along with a few other surprises.
Anyway, I really want to thank Andrew Feinberg. He did all the heavy lifting on this week and it should be an amazing week. He has my deepest respect and can't wait to see what conversations start.
We'll publish our calendars as we get them firmed up. Unfortunately in the world of politics even the best planned out calendar can instantly change due to world events, so we probably won't know for sure we'll get interviews with specific people until it happens.
Anyway, anything you'd like us to look into while we're there? Leave suggestions on the comments here.


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Abduction Aesthetic: Computationality and the New Aesthetic
In a previous article on this blog I discussed abduction, thinking and patterns (Berry 2012a), and consequently I have been struck by a provocative article written by Bruce Sterling about what he called the New Aesthetic (Sterling 2012). The links between this 'New Aesthetic' and questions over pattern recognition and the way in which computational models are imposed on the 'real' are very timely.
The 'New Aesthetic' is an aesthetic that revels in seeing the grain of computation (Jones 2011), or perhaps better, seeing the limitations or digital artefacts of a kind of digital glitch, what we might call an 'aesthetic of failure'. Indeed,
the debate on the aesthetic of digital code has been predominantly focused, on the non-representational and non-functional performativity of coding and its infinite possible infractions (errors, glitches and noise), emphasising that it is precisely these infractions that give code its real aesthetic value... [or] the sensorial alterations or affects produced by technology on the human body-subject (Parisi and Portanova 2012).
More so this aesthetic is concerned with the act of representing the digital within the more commonly analogue life-world that we inhabit in everyday life. The 'New Aesthetic' was initially introduced at South By South West (SXSW) on March 12th 2012, at a panel organised by James Bridle.[1] It was called 'The New Aesthetic: Seeing Like Digital Devices' and was primarily concerned with 'giv[ing] examples of these effects, products and artworks, and discuss the ways in which ways of [computer/robot] seeing are increasingly transforming ways of making and doing' (SXSW 2012). A number of post panel write-ups have been made by the participants, including Bridle (2012b), Cope (2012), Davies (2012), McNeil (2012) and Terrett (2012). Bruce Sterling attended the presentation at SXSW, and subsequently discussed how struck he was by the New Aesthetic and how it went beyond a mere concern with computer/robot vision (Sterling 2012).
Certainly enabling robot/computer algorithms to 'see' by imposing computational 'pixels' on reality is part of this New Aesthetic (see Catt 2012). However, there is also an element of 'down-sampled' representation of a kind of digital past, or perhaps digital passing, in that the kinds of digital glitches, modes, and forms that are chosen, are very much located historically – especially considering that we are moving into a high-definition world of retina displays and high-pixel density experience (for an example, see Huff 2012). Sterling explains that the new aesthetics:
concerns itself with "an eruption of the digital into the physical." That eruption was inevitable. It's been going on for a generation. It should be much better acculturated than it is. There are ways to make that stark, lava-covered ground artistically fertile and productive (Sterling 2012).Using a flâneur-like approach, James Bridle collects objects, artworks, buildings, places and images in a growing blog-based accumulation of things that he presents as exemplars of this new aesthetic (a collection itself an interesting computational form) (Bridle 2011a, Bridle 2011b). He explains:
I started noticing things like this in the world. This is a cushion on sale in a furniture store that's pixelated. This is a strange thing. This is a look, a style, a pattern that didn't previously exist in the real world. It's something that's come out of digital. It's come out of a digital way of seeing, that represents things in this form. The real world doesn't, or at least didn't, have a grain that looks like this. But you start to see it everywhere when you start looking for it. It's very pervasive. It seems like a style, a thing, and we have to look at where that style came from, and what it means, possibly. Previously things that would have been gingham or lacy patterns and this kind of thing is suddenly pixelated. Where does that come from? What's that all about? (Bridle 2011a).
|CV Dazzle, Camouflage from Computer Vision (Harvey 2012)
The "New Aesthetic" is a native product of modern network culture. It's from London, but it was born digital, on the Internet. The New Aesthetic is a "theory object" and a "shareable concept."... The New Aesthetic is "collectively intelligent." It's diffuse, crowdsourcey, and made of many small pieces loosely joined. It is rhizomatic, as the people at Rhizome would likely tell you. It's open-sourced, and triumph-of-amateurs. It's like its logo, a bright cluster of balloons tied to some huge, dark and lethal weight (Sterling 2012).Sterling rightly argues that this is a symptomology that Bridle (2011a, 2012a) is observing but something must be bring these forces together. Sterling again,
It was grand work to find and assemble this New Aesthetic wunderkammer, but a heap of eye-catching curiosities don't constitute a compelling worldview. Look at all of them: Information visualization. Satellite views. Parametric architecture. Surveillance cameras. Digital image processing. Data-mashed video frames. Glitches and corruption artifacts. Voxelated 3D pixels in real-world geometries. Dazzle camou. Augments. Render ghosts. And, last and least, nostalgic retro 8bit graphics from the 1980s (Sterling 2012).The question that arises both for Bridle and for Sterling is: what is going on here? What does this aesthetic signify and what is its critical location? Sterling correctly, in my mind, rejects the notion of an aesthetic of the machines, or of computer vision etc, what has been called sensor-venacular elsewhere, equally rejecting a kind of hauntology of the 1980s (Jones 2011), or sensor-aesthetic (Sloan 2011, see also Ellis 2011, Gyford 2011). I also think that although the notion of 'computational value', introduced by Bernhard Rieder, is interesting in terms of political economy, it doesn't help us understand this aesthetic eruption (see Bridle 2011b). Nor does an explicit link between this new aesthetic and an object-oriented ontology necessarily help us understand this pattern aesthetic (Borenstein 2012, Kaganskiy 2012) although I agree with Battles (2012) and Reynolds (2012) that the new aesthetic poses a challenge for us to think about.
|Untitled (2011) David Hockney
a three-part rule, which expresses a relation between a certain context, a problem, and a solution. As an element in the world, each pattern is a relationship between a certain context, a certain system of forces which occurs repeatedly in that context, and a certain spatial configuration which allows these forces to resolve themselves. As an element of language, a pattern is an instruction, which shows how this spatial configuration can be used, over and over again, to resolve the given system of forces, wherever the context makes it relevant. The pattern is, in short, at the same time a thing, which happens in the world, and the rule which tells us how to create that thing, and when we must create it. It is both a process and a thing; both a description of a thing which is alive, and a description of the process which will generate that thing (Alexander 1979: 247).Patterns are also deeply concerned with computer pattern recognition, repeated elements, codes, and structural elements that enable something to be recognised as a type of thing (see Harvey 2011 for a visualisation of facial pattern recognition, below). This is not just visual, of course, and patterns may be recognised in data sets, textual archives, data points, distributions, non-visual sensors, physical movement or gestures, haptic forces, etc. Indeed, this points to the importance of information visualisation as part of the abduction aesthetic in order to 'visualise' the patterns that are hidden in sets of data. This is also a link between new aesthetic and the digital humanities (see Berry 2012b, Gold 2012).
OpenCV Face Detection: Visualized from Harvey (2011).
Computation, understood within the context of computationality, pervades our everyday life, it therefore becomes the limit of our possibilities for reason, experience and desire within this historical paradigm of knowledge, or episteme (see Berry 2012c). One can think of abductive aesthetic as a bounded aesthetic linked extricably with the computational and the foundation for developing a cognitive map (Jameson 2006: 516). The fact that abduction aesthetics are networked, sharable, modular, 'digital', and located both in the digital and analogue worlds is appropriate as they follow the colonisation of the lifeworld by the technics of computationality. We could look at David Hockney's Fresh Flowers (Grant 2010) and the fact that he links the artwork he produces to the medial affordances of the computational device, in this case an iPad, stating 'when using his iPhone or iPad to draw, the features of the devices tend to shape his choice of subject...The fact that it's illuminated makes you choose luminous subjects' (Freeman 2012). Parisi and Portanova further argue for an algorithmic aesthetic with their notion of 'soft thought':
the aesthetic of soft thought precisely implies that digital algorithms are autonomous, conceptual modes of thinking, a thinking that is always already a mode of feeling ordered in binary codes, and is not to be confused with sensing or perceiving. Numerical processing is always a feeling, a simultaneously physical and conceptual mode of feeling data, physical in the actual operations of the hardware-software machine, conceptual in the grasp of numbers as virtualities or potentials (Parisi and Portanova 2012).The point I want to make is that the collections that Bridle (2012a) is making, are indeed symptomatic of an emerging aesthetic, and is somewhat haphazard and uncurated in as much as the objects collected are placed within a Tumblr blog that presents them to us as a stream of data – again significant in my reading of computationality (see Berry 2011a). It is also significant that the means of collecting these digital and pseudo-digital objects is through a computational frame, the collection made possible through new forms of computational curation tools, such as Tumblr and Pinterest (2012).
|Splinter Camouflage Scheme for Fighter Jet
As computation, and by definition its carriers, code and software, increasingly withdraw into the background of our experience, it is probable that we will increasingly see the foregrounding of a representation of, and for, the digital/computational.[3] In some ways, 8-bit images are reassuring and still comprehensible as different from and standing in opposition to the everyday world people inhabit. In other ways, however, the glitches, retro 8-bit esque look that we see in pixelated works are actually distant from the capabilities of contemporary machines and their 8-bit blocky ontologies provide only limited guidance on the way in which software now organises and formats the our shared, and sharable, world (Berry 2011a). So ironically, just as digital technologies and software mediate our experience and engagement with the world, often invisibly, so the 'digital' and 'software' is itself mediated and made visible through the representational forms of pixelation and glitch.
|Skeuomorphic calender in Mac OS X
Further, following Charles Sanders Peirce notion of abduction (Berry 2012a), we might introduce the concept of musement to describe the mode of thinking relevant to the aesthetic enjoyment of the abductive. Peirce defined musement as 'pure play' which is strikingly receptive and leisurely (Salas 2009: 468).
It is "a lively exercise of one's powers" and yet "has no rules, except this very law of liberty" (6.458). Though musement is leisurely in that it allows the muser to assume different standpoints, it also involves deliberate observation and meditation. "It begins passively enough with drinking in the impression of some nook in one of the three universes [a primary universe of sensations or raw experience; a secondary universe of reactions to sensory data; and a tertiary universe of representations or signs used to relate the primary and secondary universes]. But impression soon passes into attentive observation, observation into musing, musing into a lively give-and-take between self and self" (6.459). While in a sense passive and receptive, musement is also that in which "logical analysis can be put to it full efficiency" (6.461). We might say that, while "musing" one is both "active" and "contemplative"... (Salas 2009: 468).It is striking the similarity between Peirce's notion of musement and the Greek concept of theôria or contemplation, which according to Aristotle was the highest activity of leisure. Indeed, Peirce distinguishes musement from 'reverie' or 'vacancy and dreaminess (Salas 2009: 290). This element of playfulness is extremely relevant to a discussion of the aesthetics of computationality, and indeed forms a large part of the new aesthetic that Bridle (2011) and Sterling (2012) describe. It is interesting to note that a properly distanced musement indeed seems possible towards the abduction aesthetic when mediated through the real-time streams made available through Tumblr, Pinterest, Twitter, and other digital asset/object streaming technologies.
[1] The original panel description read: 'Slowly, but increasingly definitively, our technologies and our devices are learning to see, to hear, to place themselves in the world. Phones know their location by GPS. Financial algorithms read the news and feed that knowledge back into the market. Everything has a camera in it. We are becoming acquainted with new ways of seeing: the Gods-eye view of satellites, the Kinect's inside-out sense of the living room, the elevated car-sight of Google Street View, the facial obsessions of CCTV....As a result, these new styles and senses recur in our art, our designs, and our products. The pixelation of low-resolution images, the rough yet distinct edges of 3D printing, the shifting layers of digital maps. In this session, the participants will give examples of these effects, products and artworks, and discuss the ways in which ways of seeing are increasingly transforming ways of making and doing' (SXSW 2012).
[2] Where computationality is understood as a specific historical time period defined by a certain set of computational knowledges, practices, methods and categories. Computationality might then be understood as an ontotheology, which Heidegger argues creates a new ontological 'epoch' as a new historical constellation of intelligibility.With the notion of ontotheology, Heidegger is following Kant's argument that intelligibility is a process of filtering and organising a complex overwhelming world by the use of 'categories', Kant's 'discursivity thesis'. Heidegger historicises Kant's cognitive categories arguing that there is 'succession of changing historical ontotheologies that make up the "core" of the metaphysical tradition. These ontotheologies establish "the truth concerning entities as such and as a whole", in other words, they tell us both what and how entities are – establishing both their essence and their existence' (Thomson 2009: 149–50). Metaphysics, grasped ontotheologically, 'temporarily secures the intelligible order' by understanding it 'ontologically', from the inside out, and 'theologically' from the outside in, which allows the formation of an epoch, a 'historical constellation of intelligibility which is unified around its ontotheological understanding of the being of entities' (Thomson 2009: 150).
[3] Here I would like to draw attention to two interesting areas of study that focus on code and software, namely Critical Code Studies and Software Studies: (1) Critical Code Studies: critical approaches to the study of computer source code. Marino argues: 'that we no longer speak of the code as a text in metaphorical terms, but that we begin to analyze and explicate code as a text, as a sign system with its own rhetoric, as verbal communication that possesses significance in excess of its functional utility... In effect, [Marino proposes] that we can read and explicate code the way we might explicate a work of literature in a new field of inquiry' (Marino 2006); and (2) Software Studies: critical approaches to the study of software (as compiled source code), particularly large-scale systems such as operating systems, applications, and games. Alternatively this also includes the use of software to study other things, like culture (see Manovich 2008), which Manovich calls Cultural Analytics (Williford 2011). It might also entail the study of the use of software historically (see Ensmenger 2010). One important aspect of this is to focus on computer/technical systems within society and culture - for example the Internet, the email system, mobile data, the HTTP protocol, etc.
[4] Pareidolia involves seeing importance in vague and random phenomenon, for example a face in a random collection of dots on paper. By 'digital pareidolia' I am gesturing towards seeing digital causes for things that happen in everyday life. Indeed, under a regime of computationality in the future it might be considered stranger to believe that things might have non-digital causes. Thus apophenia would be the norm in a highly digital computational society, perhaps even a significant benefit to one's life chances and well-being if finding patterns becomes increasingly lucrative. Here we might consider the growth of computational high-frequency trading and financial systems that are trained and programmed to identify patterns very quickly.
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Ensmenger, N. L. (2010) Computer Boys Take Over, Cambridge: MIT Press.
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Harvey, A. (2011) OpenCV Face Detection: Visualized, accessed 08/04/2012, http://vimeo.com/12774628
Harvey, A. (2012) CV Dazzle, Camouflage from Computer Vision, accessed 05/04/2012, http://cvdazzle.com/
Huff, J. (2012) Beyond the Surface: 15 Years of Desktop Aesthetics, Rhizome, accessed 05/04/2012, http://rhizome.org/editorial/2012/mar/14/beyond-surface-15-years-desktop-aesthetics/
Jameson, F. (2006) Postmodernism or the Cultural Logic of Late Capitalism, in Kellner, D. Durham, M. G. (eds.) Media and Cultural Studies Keyworks, London: Blackwell.
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MAME (2012) Multiple Arcade Machine Emulator, http://mamedev.org/
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Marino, M. C. (2006) Critical Code Studies, Electronic Book Review, accessed 16 Sept 2011, http://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/electropoetics/codology
Parisi, L. and Portanova, J. (2012) Soft thought (in architecture and choreography), Computational Culture, accessed 08/04/2012, http://computationalculture.net/article/soft-thought
Pinterest (2012) Pinterest, accessed 05/04/2012, http://pinterest.com/
Reynolds, S. (2012) Bruce Sterling with a super-thought-provoking essay on what some are starting to call the New Aesthetic - "an eruption of the digital into the physical", accessed 08/04/2012, http://retromaniabysimonreynolds.blogspot.co.uk/2012/04/bruce-sterling-with-essay-on-what-some.html
Salas, E. (2009) Abduction and the Origin of "Musement": Peirce's "Neglected Argument" for the Reality of God, International Philosophical Quarterly, Vol. 49, Number 4, Issue 196.
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Danger and the Promise of Heidegger, an American Perspective, In Jan-Kyrre Berg Olsen, Evan Selinger, and Søren Riis (eds), New Waves in the Philosophy of Technology. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 146–66.
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IIS Manager missing in IIS 7 on Windows Server 2008
I recently installed an evaluation version of Windows Server 2008 (web edition) for some research thingy. So in order to use IIS, I added web server role using server manager wizard. Normally I would expect to see IIS Manager, so I can configure IIS for further use but I don't see them or able to find it on this server. Seems my Windows Server 2008 is missing "Internet Information Services (IIS) Manager". I tried to find it using search from start menu, no luck Next option was to open up IIS manager from run so I hit Windows + R > inetmgr, no luck again Okey so lets find it from server manager, try to expand Web Server role from server manager and no luck there too I comes to my knowledge why I was lost. Windows Server 2008 ships with IIS 7 and when you enable Web Server » Read more


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SYTYC Week 4: Pea Coat8:00 AM
This week the challenge is "For You".
I chose to finally get the guts to make myself a classic, black, pea coat using wool I've been saving for years.
I have orangutan arms. I've mentioned this before.
Remember this sad photo of me in my tween years where my arms literally are pretty much down to my knees?
Well some proportions improved and evened out, but unfortunately my arms are too long and sleeves are always too short. Not just a tad, embarrassingly Frankenstein too short. Having orangutan arms really motivates me to sew for myself.
Fall 2010: yellow coat, red hooded jacket, Equestrian blazer
Fall 2011: corduroy blazer, Larkrise blazer, Moscow coat
But at least it finally got sewn and will be waiting for me next winter!
My husband hates taking posed pictures of me wearing my projects almost as much as I hate modeling for them, so what you see is what you get!
15 comments
Great Job! The coat is gorgeous!ReplyDelete
love the coat - and the photos - you are photogenic - you'd pull any funny face off!!!!ReplyDelete
great job - I love the collar the most, it's perfect!ReplyDelete
wow! that's incredible!ReplyDelete
That coat is fantastic! I love the collar!ReplyDelete
Great coat, hilarious photos - I'm off to vote for you :)ReplyDelete
I love the way you did the collar! So much more feminine than the other way. It looks great, and I love the blue on the inside too! :)ReplyDelete
Very cute. I have orangutan arms myself, and I love so many things about your tween photo.ReplyDelete
I love that someone else has super long arms too. I totally commiserate with you. In Jr. High it was the school rule that your shorts had to be to your fingertips, which I thought was a little crazy, because on some people that barely covered anything and on me that meant my shorts were nearly down to my knees. For the record, I didn't want to wear short shorts--it just didn't make sense!ReplyDelete
Oh, and you know how you are supposed to be the same height as your wingspan? I'm about 4 inches longer on my arms. :) I need to start making my own coats!
Fab fab fabUlous! Love the coats-- love the tights-- you rock!ReplyDelete
Looks awesome Jess!ReplyDelete
dude. you made a whole coat. i'm going to drive over and break some fingers so the rest of us can have a fighting chance. it's amazing. (and i LOVED the pictures!lolReplyDelete
Oh my goodness you are adorable! I love the coat! Beautiful job as always.ReplyDelete
Just found your blog. Your sewing is sooooo amazing!! You have such an awesome talent. =0)ReplyDelete
So pretty- especially the rounded collar!ReplyDelete


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Chalk one up for Samsung in the great patent rumble of 2011; the company has had Apple's sales ban on the
overturned in Australia.
Federal Court Justice Lindsay Foster has reversed the sales ban, as was predicted late last week, although it's still in place until Friday this week.
Apple could (and, most likely, will) go to the High Court to have the sales ban extended beyond Friday, although Samsung is gearing up to have the 10.1-inch tablet in Australia's shops on Saturday.
In a Galaxy far far away
It's excellent timing for Samsung, which will be able to take advantage of the Christmas shopping season Down Under, rather than missing out on the country's cash. Cue the soft focus and cries of "It's a Christmas miracle!" from the crowds.
"We believe the ruling clearly affirms that Apple's legal claims lack merit," crowed a Samsung spokesperson, handily overlooking the pile of other defeats it has suffered at Apple's hands in court.
The two companies are locked in a long, tedious, court-based battle over patents, with each accusing the other of infringing on copyrighted tech. There are cases going on in the UK, US, South Korea, Japan, Germany and a number of other European countries.
Via Financial Times


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President Barack Obama was just asked to respond to Republican charges that he has engaged in a foreign policy of appeasement.
Obama responded: "Ask Osama bin Laden, and the 22 out of 30 top al Qaeda leaders who have been taken off the field whether I engage in appeasement — or whoever is left out there, ask them about that."
There you have it.
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What Libraries Can Learn from Facebook
February 19, 2009 at 7:43 pm Peter Bromberg 13 comments
A colleague and I were discussing the recent Facebook TOS kerfuffle and she said she was fascinated by how much privacy people are willing to give away in exchange for a desired experience. I agreed that I am equally fascinated, and that it is vitally important for librarians to be on the vanguard of monitoring these trends, and educating our customers as to the possible risks of sharing too much information.
But I also think that librarians, at times, can be too knee-jerk about privacy issues, and I wonder if while looking at one end of the Facebook dustup (big corporation trampling on privacy rights) we might be missing some important lessons on the other end (big corporation letting customers control their own information in exchange for a highly engaging experience. And Facebook DOES give customers a tremendous, leading edge, amount of control. See: "10 Privacy Settings Every Facebook User Should Know.)
We all know that people (myself, and probably you included) will share personal information in exchange for a quality experience. We share personal renting and buying habits in exchange for Netflix and Amazon recommendations. We share personal reading habits on GoodReads and LibraryThing to connect with others who share our interests and tastes. We share our credit card numbers with many online vendors in exchange for the convenience of "one-click" ordering.
We know all this, and we personally experience the benefits, but librarians still seem generally loathe to let our customers share their personal information in exchange for anything. We don't just protect customer privacy, we paternalistically protect it from the customers themselves, rendering them childlike. Our privacy philosophy often reduces down to, "We know better", or "You can't be trusted with that–you'll hurt yourself."
Our choice to disallow customer control of their own information means that their needs for connection and social networking go unmet, which in turn creates opportunities for entrepreneurial companies like Library Elf, GoodReads, and LibraryThing (created by frustrated library lovers, I wonder?) to come in and fill those needs. Which is great, but why aren't libraries creating and offering these experiences?
I worry every day about whether libraries will be relevant, three, five, or ten years from now. Unless we start allowing our customers to make decisions about their own personal data, AND start building systems that offer them a social networked experience based on their ability to selectively share their heretofore private info, I fear that libraries will grow increasingly irrelevant to our customers.
Entry filed under: Facebook, Privacy. Tags: Facebook, linkedin, Peter.
13 Comments
I worry about relevance too. This whole social network / privacy overprotection thing is only one reason why… libraries have a lot of things to address to stay relevant. It's always a toss-up between falling into these new models vs "tradition."
Tradition sounds great, till you start to realize that, eventually, those who remembered and valued those traditions will all be gone.
When personal information is treated as a legal liability, there is going to be an overprotective attitude to it. As a service provided by the county or state, the public library inherits the same privacy paradigm that the government utilizes. With access to the most sensitive personal identification information, the government will attempt to publicly disclose the least, generally that which is only required by statute or regulation, and release additional items only to properly authorized individuals. What you perceive as paternalism on behalf of the patron is really the library protecting itself from any potential security risks involving patron information. It is the tried and true "better safe than sorry" mantra that makes libraries hold patron information so close that they cannot use it within the system.
With that said, I don't see the future of libraries as building social networks or creating ways to facilitate the sharing of patron information. I am more in favor of utilizing what currently exists. There are current third party entities (such as the ones you specifically mentioned in your post) that are able to take on the privacy liabilities and security concerns better than libraries can currently handle. The creation of bridge products that will allow libraries and these sites to interact with each other is the most viable and practical path at present. I think this is as an inevitable development as the web brings everyone and everything closer. I think with the proper outreach we can position ourselves as a facilitator and supporter to these outside sites and create mutually beneficial relations.
Personally, I think there are bigger issues about privacy within the library community that really control the conversation. There is much graduate school classroom time dedicated to the value of freedom of inquiry and the various contemporary historical specters that have threatened this over the years (e.g. censorship, McCarthyism, the Patriot Act). This sets the tone and maintains the so-called status quo around patron privacy.
Peter, two thoughts:
I often wonder about libraries trying to "keep up" with commercial enterprises. Are we really competing with booksellers, cafes, and video stores? I don't think we are. I think we complementarily occupy neighboring spaces.
Which is background that makes it easier for me to say that libraries are different. There are businesses that connect folks with books, with information, with entertainment. But we do it for free. We do it to ensure that the opportunity to access learning, knowledge, media, exists for everyone.
So, if you want to play with your own borrowing data, you have at least two choices:
1. Buy your books online from a bookseller who will keep and track that data and won't protect it when you accidentally land on a no-fly list
2. Use the library and a third party add-on to play with your data. Add your books into GoodReads and LibraryThing. Nobody is stopping you. Hell, the library will even provide all the data you need to add that title into Library Thing. It's your information, use it however you want. And whatever you do with it, it's your choice.
Are we really wrong for committing over the decades to protecting user borrowing habits from anyone's eyes? I see it as bedrock, just like freely available access to information in the technology de jour. Just like not being in it for a profit.
Kathy, thanks for your comment. I think we're basically in agreement however, I wouldn't say that it's a "toss-up" between tradition and new models; I'd say it's about discovering new ways to express our traditional values. Certainly one of those core values is the protection of patron privacy–I just question whether it is useful expression of that value to protect patron data from patrons themselves…
Andy, I think we have a few fundamental disagreements. I don't see library privacy policies as being inherited from the privacy paradigm of government. In fact, government records are, for the most part, open. And library records are, for the most part, much more protected. If you told a private investigator to work up a report on me they'd probably be able to give you every piece of information about me EXCEPT my library borrowing habits (and my library let's me opt in to preserve my reading history on the ILS system — and it's still secure!)
I also disagree that libraries adopt strict privacy policies to protect themselves. Protect themselves from what? Can you point me to any data, articles, etc. backing this up? I've never heard this suggested before…
I would be very happy if libraries would open up their patron data and give patrons the option of sharing that data with 3rd party systems, but I don't see that happening too much outside of Library Elf–which doesn't provide a social networking experience, merely a convenient reminder service–something libraries really should be offering themselves IMHO.
Deepening: Are we really competing with booksellers, cafes, videos, etc.? I don't know. I agree that we occupy a complimentary space (well put.) But I also think it's helpful to approach planning and assessment our services with a good old SWOT (Stregths, weaknesses, opportunities, threats) analysis, and I would be surprised if bookstores, netflix and Starbucks didn't show up on most library's SWOTs! Futurist Faith Popcorn says "time is the new money" and to the extent that people have less and less time, we are in fact competing for their time and attention.
Deepening, you also say that "libraries are different", and I agree. But nothing about the ways in which we are different suggests that we can't also allow patrons to control their data and allow them to interact with each other. To suggest that doing so somehow conflicts with our mission to promote learning and knowledge is 180 degrees from how I see it. Learning and knowledge is not only, or even primarily about reading data in a book. It's about connecting with others in conversation, and debate. I learn more about great books to read from Good Reads than I do from my local library's ILS system for instance. GoodReads not only gives me great title recommendations, it also connects me with friends and acquaintances with similar interests and allows me to form relationships. Just think how useful it would be for researchers if the library allowed them to share share and annotate their reading habits, share that information, and connect with others doing similar research.
You say nobody's stopping me from using my patron data and that the library will even provide all the data I need. But they don't! I can't easily access, manipulate, mix and mashup my library data. I'm pretty much forced to use GoodReads, Shelfari, or Library Thing. Most libraries don't even give patrons the option of saving their reading history, and those that do don't (to my knowledge) provide an API to get that data out.
To suggest that if I don't like it I have the choice to go to a bookseller instead sounds to me too much like, "this is OUR library and if you don't like the way we do things you're free to leave." Libraries could maybe get away with that when we were the only game in town, but those days are over. My concern is that if we tell people it's our way or the highway, they'll choose the highway in a heartbeat.
So to answer your final question: Are we wrong to protect borrowing habits from anyone's eyes? Absolutely, yes we are. We should be protecting borrowing habits from everyone *except* the patron themselves AND whomever else they want to share that information with. I see that is the proper expression of our commitment to privacy.
(First off, bravo for actually making me do my homework on this rather than skimming and guessing as to why the library is so privacy crazy. However, with that said, it does make my initial suppositions more accurate than I thought for reasons that you will see below.)
For me, it is not much of a logical leap for the library to inherit the attributes of the government when the state/county is acting in the role of a guardian. While it is true that there are many government records that are open to the public (as well there should be in the capacity of an open democratic government), these records are products of the business of government. They are not the product of the personal intellectual choices of the ordinary citizen. For me (and the ALA), library patron polices reflect a safeguarding of the First and Fourth Amendments and the freedom of expression that the entailing Supreme Court cases have defined within. Thus, the state or county as a maintainer (guardian) of library records is liable for keeping them within the legal definitions of "privacy".
This goes into addressing the second issue you raise. Libraries develop subsequent privacy policies to protect themselves from the spectrum of legal ramifications as mentioned above and in addition to (at best) patron information theft for use for junkmail and/or spam or revealing potentially embarrassing reading subject matter to (at worst) identity theft. (I am absolutely loathe to cite a Wikipedia article, but in this case it does give a good overview of the tort of invasion of privacy. The previously mentioned ALA article does cover the issue as well in regards to state governments.) Given the litigious nature of our society, this makes it a risk worth avoiding.
Now, for all its huffing and puffing, this is somewhat dodging the point of your blog post; what you are asking for is the ability to manipulate your own patron information how you see fit. I see the library's hands legally tied in this matter. However, I don't see it as the end of the road. I see room for development of third party programs that give patrons the interface that you are talking about. These programs would also need to improve upon the current bevy of sites that are available now. The alternative is a complex legal dance for people to waive their federal and state protections to share their library information directly; I cannot imagine any libraries eager to engage in this.
I'll second pretty much everything Andy W. has said. There's a huge difference between "open government" which allows me to view public documents and the idea that public access to records should extend to the personal information of patrons. I'm guessing by Peter's comments that he's not well acquainted with library privacy laws across the country. I know in my state that these laws put strict controls on how personal information, including what I check out from library, is handled and who has access to it. These policies and laws exist to protect patrons from the unauthorized access to their personal use of the libraries and the inherent threat to privacy that comes from allowing unfettered access to that information. If I was a system administrator of an ILS, I would have serious reservations about sharing patron data with 3rd parties. Who is "Library Elf" and what are they doing with that data? In my state, I don't even think the Library Privacy laws would allow that data to be shared with a third party service provider. I understand how that frustrates a user like Peter but in an area like this, I would err on the side of caution.
Hi anonymous, and thanks for your comment. I don't think you read my post very closely as you seem to be responding to a straw man of your own creation and not to what I wrote. I'll try to clarify:
I did not suggest that library patron records should be open and accessible as some other government records are. I was responding to Andy W's assertion that library privacy policies are "inherited" from the strict privacy policies of our governmental bodies (and therefore our "hands are tied"). I was pointing out that in fact library privacy policies are much stricter–and I'm not anywhere saying they shouldn't be… But clearly there is nothing about my county government's approach to privacy that prevents my county library from giving me control of my OWN DATA.
And that's the point that you and Andy and "Deepening" seem to be missing so I'll stress it again. When I talk about opening up the data, I'm suggesting that libraries give CUSTOMERS control of their OWN DATA.
When I hook up with Library Elf for the benefit of text message reminders, my library has not given away access to my data. The have simply configured the ILS system to ALLOW ME to share my OWN DATA with Library Elf, in exchange for a service.
See, I (as an adult) get to decide if Library Elf is trustworthy.
I (as owner of my account) get to decide if Library Elf can access it.
To sum up: I am only advocating that libraries give customers more flexible control of their own data so they can choose to share it with whomever they choose.
It is also my wish that libraries would build some of these social networking features into our own systems so customers choose to play on our turf.
Allow me to offer a correction and a clarification to my previous post.
Peter, NJ libraries do take their cue about library record privacy from the state government. In fact, in New Jersey, library records are controlled by state statutue. To quote it here:
"18A:73-43.2. Confidentiality; exceptions
Library records which contain the names or other personally identifying details regarding the users of libraries are confidential and shall not be disclosed except in the following circumstances:
a. The records are necessary for the proper operation of the library;
b. Disclosure is requested by the user; or
c. Disclosure is required pursuant to a subpena issued by a court or court order.
L. 1985, c. 172, s. 2, eff. May 31, 1985."
(Emphasis mine.)
So, please accept a mea culpa about "having our hands tied". It certainly helps to look at the actual law that controls in the state in which we both work in. Library patrons are within their rights to ask for disclosure of their information. However, inherent control of the record is vested with the library; it is up the patron to request disclosure.
Now, this still leaves open an exciting conversation as to the nature of the disclosure.
The social libertarian in me would say that disclosure should be anything and everything the patron wants, but the pragmatic side tells me that this is not going to be as easy. In the same statute (18A:73-43.1), a library record is defined as
"[…] means any document or record, however maintained, the primary purpose of which is to provide for control of the circulation or other public use of library materials."
In this language, I see a couple of problems.
In a response to the first version Patriot Act, some library systems scaled back the amount of information that a library automation system retains. In some of the cases listed in the articles linked, the library cut record keeping down to the bare bones to protect patron privacy from government intrusion. Even with the revisions in the Patriot Act, I have not found any articles in which libraries have returned to previous record keeping policies. (I would be interested to hear about any who have.)
The second problem is that, as a result of these draconic record keeping policies, there would be no borrowing history to disclose. You specifically mention in your original post how we trade shopping or borrowing history for enhanced services; what if there is nothing to share? The patron borrowing record would have to begin from the moment the patron exercised their library record rights; it is not for the library to maintain a borrowing record "just in case" a patron decided to keep one. In following your own example, it would take an action by the patron to ask that their record retain their borrowing history. So, there is the distinct possibility that whatever information is retained in a library record is not going to be much in terms of actual disclosure.
The third problem is, with the exception of Library Thing, I don't see an automation or interface that allows for ease of disclosure with one of these third party sites. I would not put the onus on the library to meet the different demands of the various sites and services in order to comply with disclosure requests. This may be a case of waiting for the market to catch up and create an interface that would allow for a greater connection between library record and third party site or service. If the demand is great enough, it would certainly be in the best interest of the library to be the one attempting to bridge this gap. (Any links to articles or studies to support such a demand would be wonderful.)
Bottom line: This now feels less like an issue of library policy and more about educating patrons on their rights. Beyond that, it is a matter of implimentation.
Yowza! Facebook just posted a draft of their "guiding principles" and they are asking members to comment on them–and then they're going to ask members to vote on them. Now that's transparency!
Sink your teeth into the first two principles (I'd like to see them adopted whole cloth into a Library User's Bill of rights…):
1. Freedom to Share and Connect
People should have the freedom to share whatever information they want, in any medium and any format, and have the right to connect online with anyone – any person, organization or service – as long as they both consent to the connection.
2. Ownership and Control of Information
People should own their information. They should have the freedom to share it with anyone they want and take it with them anywhere they want, including removing it from the Facebook Service. People should have the freedom to decide with whom they will share their information, and to set privacy controls to protect those choices. Those controls, however, are not capable of limiting how those who have received information may use it, particularly outside the Facebook Service.
You can read the rest here:
Perhaps I wasn't as clear as I should have been in my comments. But Andy W. correctly identifies that the laws that govern library come from state law and that those state laws err on the side of privacy and protection when it comes to patron information as compared to open access. Again, I can sympathize with your feelings that you "own" that information. But you don't. It's a government record about you and ultimately, it's the government, not the user, who is liable for the release of that information. This probably sounds overly legalese in response but it is the law and that's how it will be interpreted by the lawyers. Whatever Facebook does, they are not governed by the same laws of privacy nor I suspect, the same expectations of privacy.
To respond to one specific example, Library Elf, you again confuse information about you that is stored on the library's servers, with your information. Your information is what you have actual control over. You don't have control over the records that the library keeps except as permitted by law. You also make the assumption that it should be easy to allow Library Elf access to your data. But how? There's no easy way to ensure that the data belongs to you and if I was a systems administrator, why would I want to turn over to a third party the ability to access data from my system, especially when I have no knowledge of who that third party is or how they will use that data?
[…] Dave! And thanks for saying so eloquently what I've tried to say in the past–in a much clumsier way, I fear. Our profession's general approach to privacy […]
Ever been interviewed by the FBI? (Because a colleague wants to join the Peace Corps.) Entirely chilling.//When one patron complained to local police (not to us) about what another patron was looking at on the 'Net it was a great big fat relief to be able to tell the police when they came calling "No, sorry … no 'Net logs, no security cameras trained on people at the computers. No nothing." I don't think we're overprotective of patron privacy…of use and of inquiry. I do think we have an important role in educating them about the parameters of privacy in cyberspace–and find they very much want to know.
Thanks for sharing your perspective Sarah. However, I feel like I'm talking about the benefit of apples, and you're pointing out the downside of oranges…
You know I'm not talking about whether or not to delete Internet searching logs to maintain privacy. (And raising the specter of a chilling FBI visit because a co-worker wants to join the peace corps is just silly–and certainly not relevant to the conversation. Boogedy Boogedy, the FBI–they're scary! and sometimes they substitute their value of crime-control for our shared constitutional value of due process. I get it.)
But I'm talking about giving customers the option of keeping, deleting, sharing, manipulating and remixing, their own data as they choose. The choice many libraries make to delete customer's check-out data and not give them control over sharing that data (whether explicitly through policy, or implicitly by using limited ILS systems, or not taking advantage of built-in options) has significant downsides as I noted above and won't rehash here.
Yes, educate customers about privacy, help create an informed, even cautious citizenry. But balance that with treating them like adults and letting customers control their own information. Their. Own. Information.
Let them decide whether they want to maintain a record of their reading (as I have opted to do with my library account–not that I can share it easily.) You know, like Librarything lets them. And GoodReads. And Shelfari. And Visual BookShelf and… Oops, maybe we're too late.
PS, I just flipped open LJ to a SirsiDynix ad that reads, "It's your data. How will you use it?" Now that's what I'm talking about!


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Researchers at Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis are evaluating whether vitamin D can slow the development of cardiovascular problems in African Americans with diabetes. They are more likely to die from cardiovascular disease than Caucasians with diabetes.
The researchers are seeking to enroll about 90 African Americans who are 45 to 80 years old and have type 2 diabetes. Study volunteers must not have heart disease or have suffered a stroke.
"Cardiovascular disease is a major health problem and cause of mortality in African Americans," said Carlos Bernal-Mizrachi, MD, the study's principal investigator. "Compared to Caucasians, African Americans suffer disproportionately from type 2 diabetes and heart disease."
Nationally, African Americans with diabetes are 36 percent more likely than Caucasians with diabetes to die of cardiovascular disease. In past studies, Bernal-Mizrachi has found that low levels of vitamin D can double the risk of cardiovascular disease in patients with type 2 diabetes. His research also shows that blood vessels near the heart are less likely to clog in people who get adequate levels of the key vitamin.
Study volunteers will be screened at the School of Medicine to determine their vitamin D status. Those with low vitamin D levels will be asked to return for a second assessment, during which investigators will evaluate participants' risk for coronary heart disease by measuring electrolyte levels, kidney function, blood cell counts, average blood sugar levels and cholesterol levels.
"In general, vitamin D deficiency is more common among African Americans, and that may help explain why they are so much more likely than Caucasians to have severe cardiovascular complications related to diabetes," said Bernal-Mizrachi, associate professor of medicine and of cell biology and physiology.
Volunteers who meet the study's criteria will be randomly assigned to one of two groups. Those in the first group will take 600 international units of vitamin D daily to try to raise their levels of the vitamin to the standard recommended for good health. Participants in the second study group will take 4,000 international units of the vitamin daily.
Subjects will be evaluated about every two months to measure blood sugar levels, hypertension, heart function and various markers of inflammation — all risk factors for heart disease.
"Compared to other potential interventions, vitamin D is very inexpensive and doesn't have many known side effects," said Bernal-Mizrachi. "We believe vitamin D could have a very big impact if the study shows that it can prevent or delay heart problems in African Americans with diabetes."
For more information or to volunteer, call study coordinator Robin Bruchas at 314-362-0934 or email email@example.com.
Washington University School of Medicine's 2,100 employed and volunteer faculty physicians also are the medical staff of Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals. The School of Medicine is one of the leading medical research, teaching and patient-care institutions in the nation, currently ranked sixth in the nation by U.S. News & World Report. Through its affiliations with Barnes-Jewish and St. Louis Children's hospitals, the School of Medicine is linked to BJC HealthCare.


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New health care office celebrated
PANAMA CITY — Local health and governmental agencies celebrated the grand opening of a health care facility for non-emergencies Thursday.
The Village Health Center at A.D. Harris Learning Village, 819 E. 11th St., is an emergency room diversion acute care clinic. The purpose of the clinic is to attract people who have non-emergencies — such as, sore throats, colds and infections — in order to divert them from using local emergency rooms as primary care facilities.
The center is open 1 to 9 p.m. until Oct. 14 when hours will expand to 9 a.m. to 9 p.m.
"About 60 percent of the people that show up at the E.R. is not truly an E.R. visit, it may be an earache, pinkeyes, sore throat or flu," said Douglas Kent, administrator at Florida Department of Health in Bay County. For non-emergencies at the E.R., "you may be turned down. So, this is a way that we can say 'we can take care of you now and get you into the place that will take care of you in the future.' "
The Florida Department of Health in Bay County collaborated with Bay Medical Center Sacred Heart Health Systems, Gulf Coast Medical Center, the Bay Health Foundation and Panama City Community Redevelopment Agency to establish the center at the A.D. Harris Village.
The facility has been open at A.D. Harris for about two months. A non-emergency medical office at the health department will close on Oct. 14. The service was developed through a $1.1 million state grant and offers patients care based on income.
A regular E.R. visit could cost between $500 and $1,400. At the village, the average cost is $65, officials said.
"It goes from $15 to $130, but several of our clients go from $15 to $50," said Karen Cooley, family support specialist. "So, it saves substantial amounts of money for people."
Cooley said the sliding fee scale — which determines how much a person pays — allows for a range of incomes. She said the maximum payment — $130 — may be more than what a person who is at the highest end of the income scale would have to pay at a primary care doctor, however, in cases where a primary care doctor is unavailable, the facility could be useful.
"To go to a Level 3 tertiary hospital when you have a cold or a nose bleed — that's not a good use of funds," said Mayor Greg Brudnicki, who cut the ribbon at the ceremony and proclaimed Thursday as Health Village Day. "This situation, you get in quicker and they can figure out what's going on with you right away.
"It's a perfect scenario," he added.
The clinic takes appointments and walk-ins. Officials said mornings until 4 p.m. are typically reserved for appointments and walk-ins are taken after 4 p.m. Potential clients should bring: driver's license, Social Security card, insurance or Medicaid card and proof of income. If proof of income is not provided, potential clients could be assessed the highest fee, $130.
The 1,517 square foot facility has 16 health care professionals to assist patients. Prescription assistance and health education services are available.
"It's impressive. It's going to be nice," Anette Lippincott said after touring the facility for the first time. "I live in Callaway and it'll be quicker to come here for shots than to go to the health department."
Lippincott added she'll refer people who need financial assistance for health services to the clinic.
For more information, contact the health department at 872-4455 or go to www.baycountyhealth.org.


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RELEASE (issued by US embassy in Samoa)
Samoa Victim Support Group is
Shrinking Heads!
Yes we do mean that literally, but don't worry, they are only
Styrofoam heads.
Children of SVSG were onboard the U.S. research vessel Thomas G. Thompson this week
participating in a science experiment with oceanographers from the University
of Washington in Seattle.
You may recall UW's first mission here last year where they
laid the groundwork for research on the strong ocean currents 4-5 kilometers
below the surface that run through the Samoan Passage---largest and deepest
slot in a series of ridges separating the deep basins of the North and South
Pacific that is roughly 400 km north of Upolu.
The team is back this year to collect data from their
instruments that they set in the Samoa Passage last year. While they are at it, they will take the
Styrofoam heads decorated by SVSG and send them 5 kilometers below the ocean
surface where the water pressure will shrink the heads to a fraction of their
original size, with the decorations/drawings become very detailed. This change in size of the heads gives a very
real sense of the immense pressures that both deep-sea life and the scientific
instruments have to deal with.
According to the ship's scientists the Samoan Passage acts
as a nozzle that funnels deep ocean currents in the Pacific. About six million tons of water flow through the
passage every second, or 30 times the average flow of the Amazon. Over the coming months, a team led by Mathew
Alford, a Principal Oceanographer and Associate Professor at the School of
Oceanography at the University of Washington, will study and measure the water flows,
analyze tidal changes, and assess ocean turbulence. According to Alford, the more turbulent the
flow the more it exchanges heat with the warmer water above. "This is important
because the deep circulation of the Pacific is the key to understanding sea
level rise and the way the planet will respond to climate change." This
includes measuring underwater waves that can reach over 1000 feet.
One Samoan scientist from the Ministry of Natural Resources
and Environment is scheduled to join the ship and participate in the research
over the coming months. The ship, along
with the shrunken heads will return in mid-February.
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Hi all! This entry will cover off the following topics:
1. Adding previously referred shops to your affiliate account
2. Shopify Banners
3. Using your Affiliate Token
If there are any other burning issues you'd like addressed, please let me know and I'll do my best to answer them in a future entry.
1. Adding previously referred shops to your affiliate account
By now you all should have received your email confirming you as part of the affiliate program. Many of you have also requested to have shops you've previously brought to Shopify added to your account. If there are any more of these requests, I'll be happy to accommodate them, just drop me a line, telling me the URL of the shop you'd like added.
If you ask to have a specific store affiliated with your account, I will confirm that the shop is not owned by you or your company (as this is a violation of the terms of service). Most of the time this is easy for me to check through our admin interface. However, if you are signed up as the store owner, I'll be double checking with you to confirm ownership. Often, the designer will create the store and do the design work under their own name, and at launch time transfer ownership to the client. You simply need to ensure that down the line the client is associated with this account, or eventually the system will choke on paying you out affiliate transactions.
2. Shopify Banners
If you're interested in putting a Shopify banner on your site, we have several available here. If there are any specific banners or badges that you think would be valuable, drop me a line and let me know.
3. Using your Affiliate Token
Your affiliate token is the link that you need to sign your clients up under to have the store automatically associated with your account. When you log in to the affiliate portal, you can view your token by clicking on the "affiliate token" button. You'll see the following text (replacing "shannon" with your handle):
The first link is the one you'd use if you're simply creating a link from your website to ours, or if you want a client to check out the Shopify website. The second one is the one where you or the client would directly sign up for an account.
Once the link is clicked, your affiliate token is valid for 7 days. So if someone clicks on the link to access Shopify through your token, then return to shopify.info and sign up within 7 days, you'll automatically get the affiliate relationship with that client. However, tokens can be overwritten – as in, if a client clicks on your token, then clicks on someone else's and signs up, the last token to refer will get the affiliation. If you suspect something parasitical's happening, as in someone is intercepting your clicks and replacing them with their own token, please let me know immediately. We will do our utmost to quash those kinds of shenanigans immediately.
Please let me know if you have any questions on the affiliate system. Til then, happy shopifying!


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LOS ANGELES, California -- Miss California USA Carrie Prejean "breached her contract" by keeping semi-nude photos a secret and could be stripped of her beauty queen title, according to a state pageant spokesman.
Miss California USA Carrie Prejean may lose her crown because of some semi-nude photos she appeared in.
Prejean said the photos -- taken when she was 17 and aspiring to be a Victoria's Secret model -- were being used in a "vicious and mean-spirited" effort to silence her for "defending traditional marriage."
The 21-year-old Miss USA contestant has been the center of controversy since she declared her opposition to same-sex marriage in a response to a question on the pageant stage last month.
"That answer, and my commitment to stand by my beliefs, has since resulted in attacks on me and my integrity as a woman," Prejean said in a news release dated Tuesday.
Her fate was being discussed in "closed-door meetings" Tuesday among California pageant officials, lawyers and representatives of Donald Trump, who owns the international competition, said Miss California USA spokesman Roger Neal.
"They are going over the legalities and clearly she breached her contract," Neal said. "When you compete for Miss California, you're supposed to disclose whether you posed for nude or semi-nude photos because it's grounds for disqualification.
The spokesman for Miss California USA provided CNN with a copy of the pageant contract Prejean signed last year agreeing that the discovery of semi-nude photos could mean disqualification.
"You'll see in the agreement that she signed that she clearly violated the terms of her reign as Miss California USA, but we don't expect a decision to be made today," Neal said.
One photo published Monday on a Web site -- The Dirty -- showed barely more skin than the bikini Prejean wore in the pageant's swimsuit competition. While she appears topless, she was turned away from the camera with her arm covering most of her breast.
The Web site said it had "exclusive images," suggesting there were more to be published.
"The reports say that there are more photos to come," Neal said. "We'll see what happens with those and we want to know who's releasing them."
Shanna Moakler, the co-executive director of the Miss California USA organization, will meet with Tami Farrel, the runner-up for the title, "to discuss the possible next steps."
In the news release Prejean -- who finished as runner-up in the Miss USA pageant -- defended the photos, which she said were taken when she was a teenager.
"I am a Christian, and I am a model," she said. "Models pose for pictures, including lingerie and swimwear photos."
She said the photos "have been released surreptitiously to a tabloid Web site that openly mocks me for my Christian faith."
"I am not perfect, and I will never claim to be," she said. "But these attacks on me and others who speak in defense of traditional marriage are intolerant and offensive. While we may not agree on every issue, we should show respect for others' opinions and not try to silence them through vicious and mean-spirited attacks."
Her publicist, Melany Ethridge, confirmed a comment she gave to celebrity Web site TMZ in which she said Prejean was just 17 when she posed for the photos, hoping they would land her a job model for the Victoria's Secret lingerie line.
"In her naivete, an agent convinced her to pose for this photo to submit to a lingerie company, claiming they could make her the next Victoria's Secret model," Ethridge told TMZ. "She has since learned what a lie that was, and what a mistake it was to have the photo taken."
Prejean announced last week that she would star in a new $1.5 million ad campaign supporting what she called "opposite marriage" (marriage between a man and a woman) funded by the National Organization for Marriage.
"Marriage is good," Prejean said at a news conference announcing the ad campaign. "There is something special about unions of husband and wife. Unless we bring men and women together, children will not have mothers and fathers."
CNN's Aileen Martinez contributed to this report.


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KA009 - Serrate Top of Slide 30 LPI
KA011 - Front Cocking Serrations on Slide (Doesn't include refinishing on blackened stainless steel slides)
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Vanity (34.75″w x 23.00″d x 32.75″h)
Optional Mirror(s) (22″w x 39.25″h)
Optional Tops:
- 2cm natural stone tops come with an ogee edge and pre-attached white porcelain oval sink(s).
- 4cm natural stone tops come with an laminate edge and pre-attached white porcelain oval sink(s).
- 3cm eased edge tops come with white porcelain rectangular sink(s) that ship separately and include mounting brackets for easy installation
Finish: Urban Gray
Faucets: Not Included – Pre-Drilled for an 8″ spread
Wood: Birch Solids
- One door cabinet with shelf space and three drawers (Lower double-height drawer and top row tip out drawer)
- Premium soft-close hinges on doors. Under-mount soft-close slides on drawers.
- Drawer bottoms are lined with our signature brushed aluminum laminate.
- Tops are sold separately.
- Wood species: Birch solids with Birch veneers.
- Cabinets are finished inside and out, with a premium undercoat finish for superior moisture and UV resistance.
- Satin Nickel finish hardware
The Brittany 36″ vanity by James Martin features classic details with bridge both Traditional and Transitional styles. This beautiful piece of furniture includes one hide-away tip out, top row drawer plus two full-depth side drawers, one of which is double-height for storage of taller items. This cabinet also has one door, which conceals an interior shelf, for ample storage. Hand crafted in Birch solids and Birch veneers with Satin Nickel hardware.


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You call it afternoon tea, but in Britain it's just called tea. Because you don't just have tea in the afternoon. You have tea all the time.
It's the first thing we have when we wake up. It's the first thing you're offered if you walk into someone's house—whether it's blinding sunshine or rain, sleet, and snow—because it's assumed that everyone loves tea.
If someone is upset, you'd say, "Come on, let's sit down and have a nice cuppa tea." That's cuppa, c-u-p-p-a. That's a standard thing. If you have bad news in the family, you'd honestly say, "Let's sit down and have a nice cuppa tea" before anything else.
Tea solves everything.
Tea for Tipping
Having or making a cup of tea is a bit of an icebreaker. When people come to your house, whether they're fixing a broken boiler or building a new conservatory in the garden, you provide them a never-ending stream of tea—in a proper mug, only ever in a proper mug, don't give it to me in a plastic cup—and it's our way of saying thanks. We'd never give them a tip; we only give them tea.
Yes, we tip hard labor with tea.
Afternoon Tea
Afternoon tea has become really popular in England, but it's not for the tea because we drink tea like water. It fuels us. At afternoon tea in the UK, we drink champagne. It's more of a celebration, an excuse to get together. It's more about the scones, pastries, and cakes, and there's always champagne.
Between lunch and supper, tea is a good excuse to have cup and a piece of cake to tide you over 'til dinnertime. But you always eat so much you feel sick. You start with a scone. You have some finger sandwiches. You can't leave the cakes out. So you just end up coming out a good size bigger than you went in, and that was just tea. You've still got dinner to go!
How Do You Take Your Tea?
People like it prepared differently. My parents will only drink tea if it's been brewed in a teapot. My nan, my aunt, they all like it from a teapot—it's generational. Me, I'm happy with it brewed in the cup. People are really particular about mugs as well. My parents only like a thin china mug; I like a thick chunky mug. I honestly think it tastes better that way.
Also, we only drink it with milk, not cream, and none of that skimmed rubbish either. You've gotta have a little fat in there. It's meant to taste good.
I would categorically like to say that black tea is not English tea.
Don't even give me Lipton. You know you're in a foreign country when you are served the yellow Lipton teabag. Where's my PG Tips?
Tea in the U.S.
My mum sends me packages of PG Tips, which you can buy in stores now (Ralph's and Cost Plus). You also can buy Tetley's and Yorkshire tea; those are both northern teas, so they're stronger. PG Tips is for us southern fairies. It's not as strong, but I love it. You can get it here, but it's expensive, so Mum supplies me. She once sent me a clear Ziploc bag full of teabags. It looked like drugs, but she labeled it "PG Tips Decaf."
I guarantee you The Queen is fueled by tea. She probably drinks Earl Grey, though. None of that for this queen.
All this talking about tea has made me thirsty; I'm going to make myself a brew.
For O.C.'s Best Afternoon Teas as named in our May 2014 issue, click here.


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Mind-Over-Matter In Medicine
[Recently] I came upon a Jan 24 op-ed, "A Fighting Spirit Won't Change Your Life" by Richard Sloan, Ph.D., of Columbia University's psychiatry department. Somehow I'd missed this worthwhile piece on the sometimes-trendy notion of mind-over-matter in healing and medicine.
Sloan opens with aftermath of the Tucson shootings:
…Representative Giffords's husband describes her as a "fighter," and no doubt she is one. Whether her recovery has anything to do with a fighting spirit, however, is another matter entirely.
He jumps quickly through a history of the mind cure movement in America: From Phineas Quimby's concept of illness as a product of mistaken beliefs — to William James and "New Thought" ideas — to Norman Vincent Peale's 1952 "Power of Positive Thinking" — to more current takes on the matter. These ideas, while popular, are not reality-based.
In his words:
But there's no evidence to back up the idea that an upbeat attitude can prevent any illness or help someone recover from one more readily. On the contrary, a recently completed study* of nearly 60,000 people in Finland and Sweden who were followed for almost 30 years found no significant association between personality traits and the likelihood of developing or surviving cancer. Cancer doesn't care if we're good or bad, virtuous or vicious, compassionate or inconsiderate. Neither does heart disease or AIDS or any other illness or injury.
*Am. J. Epidemiol. (2010) 172 (4): 377–385.
The New York Times printed several letters in response, most of which point to pseudo-evidence on the matter. All the more reason to bolster public education in the U.S. — people won't be persuaded by charismatic, wishful thinking about healthcare.
It happens I'm a fan of Joan Didion's. I was so taken by the "Year of Magical Thinking," in fact, that I read it twice. Irrational responses — and hope — are normal human responses to illness, disappointment, and personal loss. But they're not science. It's important to keep it straight.
*This blog post was originally published at Medical Lessons*