Musings & Meanderings

Dan writes on being a student again, a change which has granted him access to academic libraries, saying,

As an independent researcher, I simply could not keep on top of my subject properly.

We complain about the quality of education without thinking twice about the lack of resources available to anyone with a spark of interest or an iota of motivation. Any of us who choose to pursue an interest can easily summon the sense of attraction and challenge that emanates from a newly discovered and available body of knowledge. Most of us have looked for information in vain on many occasions.

Almost everyone I know who has any sort of specialized knowledge outside of technology and computers has commented to me on doors closing on the availability of learning resources over the internet for a number of years now. This continuing construction of barriers to learning is destructive to our society. It is rationalized on an economic basis, yet it shares characteristics with the economics of free enterprise. Lower taxes and the result will be economic growth. Open libraries and the result will be a higher level of public education and a greater demand for learning materials.

The more we limit access to literature of every sort the less knowledge we all have.

Some percentage of bloggers are also academicians. Those who are typically have access to far more online resources than the rest of us, but usually do not consciously recognize their participation in creating what is effectively a class distinction. The class divides are expanding. Schools increasingly ban access to online publications of the less educated while restricting access to tools of self education. Elite online publishers shun the masses, yet there are many weblogs written by informed and well-educated citizens who take greater care with facts than some professional journalists, with access to expensive resources, do.

My own subscriptions over the years, represented a huge outlay of dollars. Where those subscriptions were used to inform business activities they represented an investment. This thinking is sound as far as economics are concerned, but our lives and our society are about more than just economics. We don’t expect a direct financial return from teaching our children to read, nor from much of the reading and learning we do ourselves. My personal interests are wide ranging and cross disciplinary, so I have constant cause to compare the enormous gap in quality and depth of information available to the public on different topics. On this issue, I envy Dan his official student status. There is much online information that I would be willing to pay for access to which is not available at all, for love or money, to non-members, be they professionals or laypersons. Being limited physically, I don’t have regular access to various libraries, so am perhaps more aware than most of just how empty the electronic public library is.

The expectation that the internet could and would make more substantive information available to all of us has not been fulfilled. Whatever your views on the wisdom of crowds versus the madness of mobs, each is composed of a collection of individuals. Those individuals are either informed and educated, or not, and often those levels are determined by accessibility to learning resources. Formal education isn’t free, but access to educational materials and other publicly published information shouldn’t be limited only to those who can afford an expensive education. People who have a higher level of education read more. They read more for the rest of their lives, not just while they are in school. Not everyone who wants a higher education gets one. Sometimes life interferes.

If you’ve read this far, and are new to Open Access, try reading these
11 (mis)Leading Open Access Myths.
Peter Suber offers a page titled
What You Can Do To Promote the Open Access Movement.

Open Access does not make education, or books, free. Teachers and authors both require stuff such as food and heat in winter just like the rest of us do. The internet, though, offers us a different world with its own unique characteristics. In a bookstore or a public library, we can browse hundreds of publications on a topic we’re interested in. A majority of the billion people with internet connections, though, never even see the wealth of potential information and learning tools that already exist electronically. Much of it languishes, rarely read and ‘gathering dust’ in walled gardens while people of all ages, eager to learn something, wade through ad-laden Google search results.

One oft cited frustration by institutions which offer some open access is that we use the information without linking to the source or crediting the author. Perhaps some of us use information irresponsibly, and perhaps there are enough of us who have the opposite intention to make a difference. If you care, teach someone else about this.

From my install process, which had to be hacked, to my WordPress feeds, which are still acting up regularly, rather like brief blackouts, I was repeatedly told that there was something wrong with my code or file configuration. This caused me to spend all my usual blogging hours, and a few nights, digging through every single file. There are a couple of hundred of these, only a dozen of which I had initially worked with for the set up and theme.

All that time spent wasn’t necessarily a bad thing (although I’m suffering from withdrawal in missing many of my favorite reads) since it afforded me an even deeper appreciation of what has been created by the WordPress community.

Why didn’t my index files work? Nobody knew, so we just kept making new ones.

What were those way too long strings that doubled back in error messages? Must be a non-tech newbie code mistake I made somewhere.

What was that —>  thing that kept appearing before certain pages loaded? Tech people just shrugged.

That thing represents the hidden encoding characters preceding a UTF-8 file that has been saved with a BOM, or byte order mark, and I’ve also now read somewhere that PHP doesn’t care much for BOM.

Although I found many entries in help forums by webmasters waylaid by BOM, the only formal faq I’ve found on it is by Sun and Unicode. The Wikipedia entry refers to this being a problem with Unix and not Windows servers, and I’ve read that including the BOM in UTF-8 by default was one of those unilateral Microsoft decisions. Here also is a post by WordPress blogger Pierre, and a related issue post on translating character sets and collation in WordPress.

I first found evidence by downloading one of the suspected problem files and opening it in WebTide, which showed me unicode hard break characters before the file content. They didn’t appear on the page, but rather in the code schema window.

Getting rid of the BOM is fairly simple, although time consuming. You have to open a file that can be saved in plain text with no encoding and then paste the file contents into it. After saving it, you then copy the contents again, and paste them into a new file in an editor that will save with no BOM. Not all editors will do that, even the fanciest professional ones might require you to know how to script in that function. I’m using Notepad++, one of the top downloads on sourceforge.net, and really liking it so far.

There’s a possibility that db files can become corrupted as well. There is a WordPress plugin called UTF-8 DB converter which I think was developed for upgrading from versions earlier than 2.0 (which I think is when WordPress switched from Latin-1 encoding to UTF-8) but I don’t know whether it would help with this issue.

It’ll still be a while before I can get to setting up all my blogrolls and links here, and to joining in as many conversations as usual, but in the meantime, I hope that this post on the BOM issue might make it a bit easier for someone else to learn about than it was for me. I do wonder how much buggy behavior remains a mystery for the moment because of BOM.

I followed Matt’s post titled Should poetry be open source?

…to a post in which Dave Bonta thoughtfully discusses the issue of copyright versus open source in terms of his own writing

…and from within the comments on Dave’s post, I was led to and enraptured by the Poem Dancing category on Sharon Brogan’s poetry blog.

If there had been a current poem dance taking place I would have joined in, and very much hope to come across one in future.

I do believe that copyright protections still have a place, and will continue to, given the structure of the society we inhabit. I also believe in a future order in which our understanding of rights and responsibilities would be redefined in many ways. Open source is symbolic of a free internet, and a collaborative culture, where value is contributed, received and shared through means other than money. This ‘gift’ economy has grown to represent an entire sub culture, one in which free exchange greatly enhances value for all. Meanwhile, though, participants still require income in dollars to pay the rent, and most projects of any size require financial investment to achieve fruition. The frictions between open sharing and collaboration, private interests, and individual needs are many and, as we know, not easily resolved. I have come to understand that the demonstration of what can be accomplished with free is an important key to unlocking the rhythms and formulas of new orders and understandings.

A year ago I was wandering around here wondering, “Where is the public trust?”. Now my intent is to contribute to the evolution of new definitions of it.

Since today is my birthday, though, my pleasure is to release the following song fragment, which I wrote in response to the development zeitgeist, into the collaborative space…

i want fast
cars
purring like panthers
a nuclear power that sings in my veins

i want pure
lightning
unleashed by my fingertips
all destinations forever attained

the song
speeds
with a million hearts beating
unique synchronicity linking all planes

in our fast
cars

I’ve read that code is poetry. My own comprehension of code has advanced to the point where I can recognize some of it as elegant or beautiful, but the full understanding of it as poetry, well, so far I can only make this association through analogy. Becoming a parent or creating a successful business can be similar to both writing and experiencing poetry. Both are acts of creation and also, or therefore, more than a simple sum of our experiences, actions and selves.

Successful collaborative creation as greater than the sum of the individuals’ contributions… a defining element of the richest cultures?

Thoughts?
Poetry?

I’ve learned enough about the origins and early days of the internet, read enough about the principles of a free internet, to make me a firm believer in and supporter of open source. The difficulty, of course, is finding time to learn to use it.

As long as the internet remains free, it provides a means of communication, connection and enablement of free speech as well as free enterprise. As long as the majority of its users are free individuals, moreover, they will have the ability to use their freedom to protect it. In the early days of the net, and even fairly recently, this was understood and appreciated by most people who spent time online, but is that still the case?

Of the billion people online today, what percentage knows how to build and operate all the tools they’re using? 2%? 5%? That’s high, but the exact number isn’t important. What is important is that for the overwhelming majority, its ability to understand and become fully empowered by this medium is severely limited.

It is mostly the creations of profit driven corporations that have enabled the size of this population, and, as far as I can see, it is their agendas which continue to drive both adoption by users and most new development.

This is very much in the usual tradition of all development in modern history, industrial and technological, for it takes highly knowledgeable specialists to create new marvels of engineering or technology, and those specialists, by their nature, are employed by the highest bidders, who are invariably private and government interests. The resources of these large entities enable them to pay the largest salaries to brilliant programmers and developers. What is most likely to be developed, therefore, will not enable the individual or benefit society specifically, except through by-products, and, perhaps, or perhaps not, in terms of long term change.

Granted, there are as many new small communities, including not-for-profit, being built daily as there are social media apps, but the majority of these are created on specialized and limited platforms created by small entrepreneurial businesses for that purpose alone. Citizens for Clean Water in XXX City would exist whether they had an internet based community portal or not.

There is a fair sized contingent of socially responsible developers who contribute online tools for individuals and communities, and it has become the norm to offer a basic free version together with paid versions accompanied by more advanced features. These developers are running small business, which may or may not be profitable, but they are essentially a more sophisticated version of the website developer who built a portal for your small chain of local stores, and most are producing a limited community version of a narrow slice of enterprise software without a commerce component.

For any non-tech community or group of any size and complexity, however, the options to develop organically online are almost non-existent. This, I fear, is a factor which marginalizes the free internet to the extent that it may eventually exist only on the fringes, with the mainstream belonging to large powerful entities.

Perversely, it seems that the very developers who pay the most attention to their targeted consumers adhere to the principle that internet use should be mindless and painless, and as a result are directly contributing to disenfranchising the vast majority. We should be learning what we can do and invent ourselves here rather than waiting to be entertained and served, but even those of us actively desiring these opportunities find more obstacles than options to the pursuit of this desire.

eBay, in its early days and before it became a ‘big business’, was such an opportunity to a limited extent. Millions of ordinary, non-tech people joined in, bringing to the ongoing event a kaleidoscope of interests and knowledge, connecting as sellers and collectors, forming into natural communities, creating sole proprietor businesses, and much more. Many gained some technical knowledge, motivated by their new online activities. eBay was originally a platform, not a programming platform such as .net, but a human platform where not just the content but some of the activities were as much defined by individuals and groups as by the developers of the site, who followed as much as they led.

What online site is doing that today? Blogging platforms? Social media sites? The ‘platforms’ for people and their chosen activities are becoming so sophisticated as developers continually try to offer a better targeted product that few users will ever do more than use the basic tools initially provided. This reality is an argument for open source in itself, except that the complexity of building anything to meet and advance current uses and expectations is and will remain too big of a learning curve away from the vast majority of users.

There are any number of projects which could truly enable the majority of users more fully, but there aren’t any that I’m aware of which are a human platform (such as eBay was) as well as a programming platform, where the form and function is being developed in tandem with user activity. Releasing a social app, early and often, isn’t the same thing. The full human platform requires a range of human activity that includes wide varieties of both social and commercial enablement for individuals and groups. Personal and societal balance requires both. We all have to make a living as well as dream, play, and socialize, and we further become a rich and thriving society by contributing to the public trust as well as by taking responsibility for our economic roles.

Can such human platforms really be built? Only if tech and non-tech communities collaborate.

Can that happen? What say you?

—–
later…
Open Peer-to-Peer Design quoting Linus Torvalds:
“I think the real issue about adoption of open source is that nobody can really ever “design” a complex system. That’s simply not how things work: people aren’t that smart - nobody is. And what open source allows is to not actually “design” things, but let them evolve, through lots of different pressures in the market, and having the end result just continually improve.”