Libraries Outsourced: Librarians Under New Management

Nice that you are able-bodied. Do enjoy it.

As you wish (remembering both Lord Kelvin's and Einstein's fateful yet oh-so-wrong expectations / predictions as refered to earlier, and thinking out-loud: "well if Dragon Naturally Speaking is as buggy as you appear to suggest, why is it I and many many others find it so damn useful?" Your viewpoint might infer Dragon Naturally Speaking's present limitations more than it does its present usefulness / lack of usefulness.

Might I further suggest there are a number of merited reasons to engage in point / counterpoint outside of the arguably presumptive expectation of convincing the poster in question?

Now there's a post I can get behind.

Might make an interesting thread i.e. how does your physicality affect your life and what have you done to accommodate it?

Oddly enough I sometimes have the notion I might be more successful if I had a physical impediment of some sort, thus forcing me to rely more on my brains in a work / creative environ.

IOW, I am not always convinced that able-bodied-ness is a condition worthy of elevated aspiration, not that you were necessarily suggesting as much.

New found freedoms can come from presumably undesirable restrictions, again not that you were necessarily suggesting as much

If I had not gone ahead with certain notions this thread would have been likely rather blasé, as it was, it had a modicum of zip and the odd chuckle now and then.

That would only be because you do not understand that tinygiraffe's response to my post is as blatant a Straw Man as one could find as indicated by my subsequent in kind response to tinygiraffe's post.

I find it rather amusing that earlier tinygiraffe accused me of not reading certian posts iwhereas I have spent a goodly portion of my efforts in this thread reminding certain others as to what should be the obvious if they had indeed read / comprehended my posts in question.

I don't care about straws, I care about real life.

I could answer you about physicality and real life but prefer not to go there.


From me, enjoy your opinion.

Real life is rife with straws.

Chumley has painted himself into a corner by coming out hard against libraries and the reacting slightly (and then increasingly) aggressively to other posters who are pro-library.

It seems that Chumley has made the mistake of assuming that if he doesn't need a thing then no-one else should either.

I don't need childcare but I can see why others would.

//Disclaimer:

I am a librarian, heavily involved in IT, (and I can use hammer - how the heck did that rant start?), so you could argue my view is tainted.

//End

Libraries are way past thinking they are bricks and mortar only. I have online access to tens of thousands of peer reviewed journals in my study courtesy of university and public library consortia agreements. Subscriptions I could never afford on my own, and I'm pretty well off. I could go on (endlessly) about how libraries and librarians are still relevant in a digital information economy but given my disclaimer I'll stop.

I have no "e" and you're false in your assessment as to "coming out hard against libraries and the reacting slightly (and then increasingly) aggressively to other posters who are pro-library."

You amusingly go on say "It seems that Chumley has made the mistake of assuming that if he doesn't need a thing then no-one else should either." That entertainingly, is pure Straw Man logical fallacy.

I recommend you read the thread from the beginning and attempt to substantiate your specious post in point of fact, or perhaps better still, carry on as is and I can garner some cheap entertainment.

In part answer to your open question, far be it for me to draw additional parallels between the notions of the physical / mental and their place in this thread given my above recommendation.

Why are we arguing with this guy? Move along.

Chumley, sweet, I've had disabilities, but not gone for any kind of recompence. surely stupid on my part. I've also lived the construction life, yes, me, a woman.

I see a lot of your stuff as blowhardian.

Your sense of persona seems to be in the way of useful argument.

Chumly did you edit one of your posts? I'm sure you said 'for chrissakes' somewhere but I can't find it. Anyway, this if for you:

not to worry hh, i was the one that said that. i think you'll find it's still there.



i'll tell you what happened, osso. chumly made two ad hom attacks, one that we were closet luddites, (oh maybe he was referring to someone else) and one that we had less experience with hands-on work and the great outdoors. the ad hom attack of being luddites (of one form or another) has been made throughout the discussion.

these would be fallacial even if they were true, they have nothing to do with logical argument. when the possibility that they might not even be true- which the validity of our points doesn't even rest on- was presented, this presentation was attacked as a "straw man" fallacy, which implies that we are the ones who deliberately misunderstood the fallacial attack. *we* made the conversation an illogical one, you see. it must be our fault. that supports the idea that we're also wrong, as can be seen in the fallacial proof below:



the above proof is illogical, and thus can be ignored completely. it substantially weakens the conclusion that "some grass is green" just as our arguments have less merit because of our strawman attack on chumly's ad hom attack. all our arguments can (and probably should) be ignored, as all arguments of fallacial, closet luddite, indoor-dwellers like ourselves (and anyone disagreeing with the march of progress, which unlike our comments is firmly rooted in pure unadulturated logic.)

to recap, the premises being dealt with here are respectively, yours and mine that there is room for more than one "period" of technology and our opponent's, that (as far as i can see) presenting any case for "luddite" technology is due to less experience with the outdoors, or a fear of technology we embrace, yet do not replace the whole world with.

that is how we've been attacked from the beginning, without any *logic* being presented in favor of scrapping all the old for the new- only preference. it's all opinion here, and somehow, his opinion is more logical than ours, and thus of course more legitimate- but there's no need to prove it because we're the ones guilty of "strawman." the only point i wish to be accepted is that more than one group's preference for period technology should be expressed in reality. i think that's reasonable, but this is our fallacy i guess. GO FIGURE.

if the merits of our posts- and indeed our posts themselves, are going to be selectively ignored and ridiculed along these lines, i cannot blame you if you feel it's a wiser use of time to abandon our intellectually dishonest audience and let someone else weigh them. there must be a reasonable discussion elsewhere on the forum.

oh and watch out for the "don't tell me there's no proof for evolution" thread. there is, but that place is just as bad as this.

i am fairly certain the responses we've received were designed to turn what might have been an interesting conversation into a fallacial pissing match. i don't know what could be said that hasn't been said anyway, but good luck with it, either way- your company was a pleasure. oh and for the record, the fetishist post (which i thought was interesting at least,) could be ad hom- but i never claimed this was a logical debate, did i? it certainly isn't going to become one.

One last thing on Dragon (BTW, I'm dropping the argument mainly because I'm damned tired of it -- I am allowed to get tired on occasion, yes? ) and voice rec --

Dragon is a lovely product as far as it goes. Friends of mine worked on it. It's nice. For what it does.

But it's not an industrial application. It is for everyday usage. It's for letters and dictation for regular kinds of stuff. But it's not for medical, it's not for legal, it's not for police, it's not for government (and yes, ordinary folks need to dictate about such things, particularly if you start eliminating all books). How do I know this? Because I was working on the successor products that do work on such things. Successor products with considerably larger and more complex word lists. Products used by folks from all over the world with all sorts of accents -- not just people born in the US and Canada. And those products were used in many funky ways, such as dictation done in a convertible car with the roof down, or by someone whose first language was Tamil, or about complicated oncology cases or to prepare for a seminar on interventional radiology or to write up police reports about identity theft, where there are numerous names with multivariant spellings. Dictation while eating, dictation while the radio is on, dictation with the windows open, dictation with a police scanner going. Dictation of the slow- and fast-speaking among us, of the young and old, male and female, accented and not. And the people who get the best recognition are unaccented male voices from the middle of the continent, places like Michigan and, yes, Canada. It's no wonder that you and your peer group get good rec scores. But many, many other folks do not.

BTW Kurzweil, I'm sure, wrote a lot of glowing reports about the product he mainly developed. Wouldn't you?

Anyway, of course this is not all about voice rec but the point I am making is that technology holds plenty of promise but it's still very, very uneven. Depending on it fully is absurd right now. Not everyone gets it and not everyone can afford to get it (oh yeah, that $200 or $300 computer that the poor are supposed to be able to afford? Is that with a mouse? Printer? Warranty? Keyboard? Instructions on how to use it? Monitor? Tech support if it breaks down? Any sort of software? Internet access for more than a few months if at all? Does it come with Dragon, perhaps? No? Oh, well, then too bad, so sad, just go without a few meals in order to afford such things, since it's all about money management.). This society of tech only or tech mainly is coming, but it's going to take a while (a few of the little things in its way, in addition to poverty and technophobia, are tiny little annoyances like the dependence on a dwindling, polluting energy supply and the AIDS epidemic). Just because folks are impatient for it to start already does not mean it can come any faster.