Recently a new proposal has been made for Digital Preservation. Many of the proposed questions are interesting (including one of mine) – and I would strongly encourage anyone interested in the topic to check it out.

The topic has resparked a question I have had for a long time – why is important to archive data?

Not that I think it’s inherently bad to hold onto digital information for some period of time – but what is the impetus for storing it more-or-less forever?

In tech popculture we have services like Google’s gmail which starts users at a mind-boggling 7+ gigabytes of storage! For email! Who has 7GB of email that needs to be stored?! For a variety of reasons, I hold onto all of my work email for the duration of my employment with a given company – you never know when it might be useful (and it turns out it’s useful fairly frequently). But personal email? Really? Who needs either anywhere near that much, or to hold onto it for that long? And those few people who arguably DO need that much, or to keep it forever, can afford to store it somewhere safely.

I think there is a major failing in modern thinking that says we have to save everything we can just because we can. Is storage “cheap”? Absolutely. But the hoard / “archive” mentality that pervades modern culture needs to be combated heavily. We, as a people, need to learn how to forget – and how to remember properly. Our minds are, more and more, becoming “googlized“. We have decided it’s more important to know how to find what we want rather to know it. And for some things, this is good:

If you are a machinist, is it better to know how to reverse-thread the inside of a titanium pipe end-cap, or to go look up what kind of tooling and lathe settings you will need when you get around to making that part? I suppose that if all you ever do in life is mill reverse-threaded titanium pipe end-caps, you should probably commit that piece of information to memory.

But we need to remember to forget, too:

when you need to make two of these things. Ever. In your entire life. In the entire history of every company you ever work for. Well, then I would say it’s better to go look up that particular datum when you need it. And then promptly forget it.

The historical value, interest, and amazing work that is contained in the “Domesday Books” is amazing – and something that has been of immense value to historians, archivists, politicians, and the general public. Various and sundry public records (census data, property deeds, genealogies, etc) are fantastic pieces to hold onto – and to make as available and accessible as possible.

Making various other archives available publicly is great too (eg the NYO&WRHS) – and I applaud each and every one of those efforts; indeed, I contribute to them whenever I can.

I continuously wonder, though, how many of these records and artifacts truly need to be saved – certainly it is true of physical artifacts that preservation is important, but how many copies of the first printing of Moby Dick do we need (to pick an example)?

I don’t know what the best answer is to digital hoarding, but preservation is a topic which needs to be considered carefully.

I’ve seen pundits, or as I call them, “blowhards”, on both sides of the aisle claim that even suggesting we return to the gold standard is madness. Maybe it’s just because I’m not an economist, but I don’t understand that - we had like 3-4 thousand years of experience with the gold standard; we have less than a century with floating currencies. Why is it so crazy to say “we keep getting into trouble this way, maybe we should fall back until we’ve got this figured out better”?

The only issue I can see with returning to the gold standard (or the silver or any other), is that since gold is by nature a finite resource (whereas many others, while finite, are growable (eg crops, industry, etc)), there would be no reason to have an “exchange” between different counrties, and that it would make an effective universal currency – to some extent, undervaluing the currency systems of every country that chose to use the standard, and globalize (even more) our economies.

Plus, it makes issuing loans (and receiving them) substantially more difficult – and loans are NOT always a Bad Thing™.

For example, if, say, Canada and the US use the gold standard and decide that $1000 US is one ounce of gold, and $500 Canadian is one ounce of gold, the exchange “rate” is fixed – and it’s fixed to something that is increasable, but only at a fairly fixed rate (how fast you can acquire/generate gold). Whereas if you have floating currencies with no “real” backing, exchange rates can change based on the relative health of each country.

By setting a fixed exchange (which is what the gold standard would do … like what China has been doing for years to the US, but only on paper), is that it can cyclically under- and over-value individual countries currencies and economies, ultimately bringing more down at once when a few fail (or, of course the reverse – bring more up when some few major ones succeed).

During the early part of the last century, we were still mostly working with gold, and we had both the Great Depression, and some of the greatest economic growth ever seen.

The Great Depression, imho (though, admittedly, a biased, and fairly-underinformed opinion), was about 90% perception, and 10% reality – a fairly commonplace occurrence in economics, but one that was exacerbated by the [initially] fixed relations between the various national currencies

Also, imho, basing currency on a fixed standard (like gold) was truly only viable in an era of poor communication (I’d personally argue that shortly after the telegram became more than a technological marvel, this became more and more true until it was universal) - with poor communication, perceptions take a LONG time to be transferred – which correspondingly means that “news” was A) old, and B) taken with larger grains of salt than we *tend* to take it with now, since comunication is [effectively] instantaneous. {I have no research or citations to this point – yet: it is currently only my opinion.}

In my opinion, by floating currencies against each other and the relative strengths of each country involved, crashes are slowed (not eliminated, of course). Of course, again, the reverse is also true – booms are flattened-out. So, I’d view the floating-currency approach as one that will *tend* to flatten local (and global) booms and busts into substantially smaller ripples, rather than major mountains and troughs.

Not being an economist, I’m not sure I understand why that should be. What’s the evidence for that? How can we be certain that’s a good thing? Maybe the cycle of mountains and valleys is important, socially?

[not being an economist either,] I’d *think* that it would be better to keep the mountains and valleys more stable / less high|deep, so that slowdowns aren’t felt by a disproportionately small community/niche of the economy, and so that speed-ups can have a “good neighbor” effect to bringing some of the udnerperforming sectors ‘along for the ride’.

As to question 2 – I don’t *know* that it’s “a good thing” … but I also can’t say it’s a ‘bad thing’, either.

I’d be happy to hear arguments that either oppose mine, or are different

I think my strongest one would be that we used the gold standard for like 4000 years, and it seemed to work very well for us nearly globally during that time. As far as any possible good neighbor effect from flattening things out, it may be that social upheaval is an important component of progress: almost all major advances thus far in history have had some component of socio-economic shift; flattening those upheavals could very well have consequences that we can’t foresee (I realize this is a weak, speculative argument, but it’s worth considering).

There’s also part of me that feels like floating currencies are so much handwaving and voodoo. You talked about how they allow countries to create exchanges that are tied to their relative health, instead of some fixed point - but isn’t how much currency they’ve arbitrarily decided to create often used as one of the measures of health? If so, that’s somewhat circular logic: if floating currencies let us control how much inflation we’ve got, and inflation is one of the health metrics, then what prevents nations from trying to hide economic problems, just the way that nearly every EU member has done over the last 15 years?

Isn’t it exactly the fact that their currencies were floating relative to one another before hand that allowed them to hide so much of their debt before entering the euro zone? Or have i misunderstood that?

Prior to the “euro zone” cluster****, country finances were a LOT less open/transparent, too … kinda like a private vs public company (not that public companies are as transparent as would be helpful, but the comparison stands).

I feel like if they’d been the gold standard, the euro zone negotiations would have been more along the lines of:

“ok, so how much gold have you got?”
“oh, quite a bit!”
“ok, well, we’re going to need to count all of it, so that we can figure out how many euros to give you.”
“oh, well, we have quite a bit of gold!”
“yeah, still need to count it.”
“oh. um. crap. …fine”

It’s a lot harder to hide how much actual wealth you have, when your wealth can be reduced to a physical object, instead of just assertions on paper.

However, if you’re going to count the gold nuggets (or whatever), it’s also trivially-simple to elect to *NOT* show your whole hand … which would seem to me to be the same economic sleight-of-hand as can be done when asked “how many barrels of oil do you have?” and you reply “we’re recovering 5million bbl/day”

That’s not an answer – it’s interesting information … but not an answer.

In this particular case, there’s no benefit I can immediately think of to hiding your wealth – the whole point was to get your finances into a good enough shape to be able to qualify for the euro zone. The shenanigans were more about hiding debt than hiding wealth.

I think that hiding wealth *could* be beneficial to make yourself *appear* weaker than you are, so that when you “need|want” to be “strong”, you can be. It could also be from a detail-vs-gestalt approach.

So now I ask all of you – is this plausible/reasonable/right? Or am I smoking some serious space crack?

^{*_{He gave me permission to quote him as appropriate if desired}}

For example, I have seen people list multiple full-time jobs that they could not have had at the same time (eg, both at one employer and also at the company that acquired their old employer).

I’ve also seen people claim to have accomplished things or be in a role that is either flat-out wrong, or worded in a weaselly way that looks like they’ve accomplished a lot more than they really did (eg showing only their current title at their current employer, but listing the start date as their initial hire date, and only listing their current accomplishments/roles (or listing all of them, but implying they did something that other individuals were actually responsible for)).

I’ve also seen LinkedIn profiles that are spartanly-populated – which is cool, that kinda follows my personal philosophy of never putting anything on my resume I don’t want to be asked about. But the ones that are full of – at the very least – questionable entries on their work history seem very troubling to me.

CONFIDENTIALITY NOTICE: This email communication is intended only for the personal and confidential use of the recipient(s) designated above and may contain information which is subject to Federal and/or State privacy laws. In the event that you are not the intended recipient or the agent of the intended recipient, you are hereby notified that any review, disclosure, or use of the information contained herein is strictly prohibited. Do not copy or use the information contained within this communication, or allow it to be read, copied or utilized in any manner by any other person(s). If you have received this communication in error, please notify the sender immediately, either by response e-mail or by phone, and permanently delete the original e-mail, any attachment(s), and copies.

I’ve never understood this – if you were NOT the intended recipient, why would you keep the message, and not just think it was spam? Or, if you’re feeling charitable, why would you not reply to the sender and tell them they have the wrong person?

I think message like this are added by administrators who don’t grok how email works – it’s an electronic postcard: there is no special security, so if you misaddress it, then who ever gets it, gets it.

Email stops, and potentially is collected, at some many different places along its delivery path that such a “disclaimer” is completely pointless.

You know, the Two Things. For every subject, there are really only two things you really need to know. Everything else is the application of those two things, or just not important.

It’s got me wondering – if you had to give The Two Things about your job/field, what would they be?

And – if you had to describe your whole job in a tweet (<= 140 characters), could you do it?

Being terminated over charging a movie to your room? Seems harsh (getting the $9.95 back from the employee would seem to be easier) – but breaking the rule is breaking the rule.

Being terminated over buying gum? Ok, so I WOULD terminate somebody over that … but I hate the stuff

But it’s repulsive, revolting, and wrong
chewing and chewing all day long
The way that a cow does*

There are a host of ways listed in the article – that I find truly shocking – to cheat on expense reports: blank receipts? buying gifts and then selling them on eBay? double-billing? Wow. The sheer effort taken by some people to cheat is astonishing!

Where I work now has a corporate credit card issued to every traveling employee. The only time we submit non-AmEx charges is if a place doesn’t accept AmEx: it’s just way easier to use the corporate card than it is to try to give all the supporting documentation of a personal card. Plus, there’s the benefit that it’s not my personal limit that is being affected if a customer delays in paying a bill.

Everyone that works where I do now also follows the expense guidelines we have – don’t exceed the IRS per diem rate for your region (on average). If you want to eat someplace nice for dinner – that’s fine. Just eat someplace less expensive the next day. Sticking within the rules isn’t that hard … so why would you want to try to evade them and end up with employment history issues like termination on your record?

Ms Penland seems like a nice person – but her writing is not at all what I would expect for a blog associated with a newspaper – it is far more like a personal journal of a teenager than a professional blog of a reporter.

I’m all for personal voice showing-up in folks’ writing (it certainly does on all of the blogs I follow – and on the ones I write ) – but when you’re writing reviews for a newspaper, it would seem like you’d try to be a bit more … professional in your writing.

Besides the myriad grammar errors (I know – we all have them, but certainly some proofreading should be done to catch things like “was is“), it seems she has a routine dislike for “chains” – and yet visits many. She also refers to her boyfriend in many of her reviews: a perfectly fine thing to do in passing, but she ends up making some of them more about him than about the place they went.

As a “recent graduate”, I wouldn’t necessarily expect Brittany’s writing to be on par with, say, Malcolm Gladwell, but I would expect it to be at the level of, well, a college graduate. (I have seen some collegiate writing that appalled me when I was in school – writing submitted by 4th year English Majors that looked like it was pulled from a 6th grade student’s portfolio: but those folks don’t [typically] get hired by newspapers… do they?)

I hope Ms Penland’s writing improves dramatically through her “freelance” association with the Observer, but I also hope that the Observer doesn’t have too many folks like her writing in association with them: it reflects poorly on their editorial staff and hiring practices if they do.

There’s a problem with that, though: when those changes happen, sometimes access to other digital resources becomes…difficult. For example, I have an old (now unused) merchant credit account that I opened about 7 years ago. For reasons I cannot now recall, I linked that account’s digital updates to my school email address. Problem: I graduated school Dec of 06, and my account ceased to exist sometime after that.

Woops.

And the password reset goes to that email address.

Double woops.

So the question now becomes – how do you ensure that when you switch email addresses, you don’t lose anything “important”?

It’s a problem I have yet to solve – any thoughts?

Are they the 2011 incarnation of iWon?

They come in three sizes: single, double, and triple. The single is $1, the double $2, and the triple $3.

What do you get on the sandwich? A bun, patty, cheese, sauce, and bacon. What about on the double? A bun, 2 patties, two cheeses, sauce, and bacon. The triple adds another patty and cheese.

Nifty. So for the cost of two single burgers, you get less bread and sauce. If you’re trying to cut-down on carbs, or don’t like the sauce much, that’s cool. But if you’re looking to maximize your caloric intake for dollar output, buy three singles and not one triple.