T. Scott

No Place Is Very Far Away

We went to Chamonix so that we could stand on the slopes of Mont Blanc.    When we stepped off the cable car at Brevent, I was surprised that we were standing in snow.  Lynn gave me that pitying, affectionate look she displays when I'm being particularly obtuse.  "November?  The Alps?  And you weren't expecting snow?"  Yes, well, I'd been pretty focused on the Global Health Library meeting.

We'd been uncertain, from the forecasts, what the weather would be like, but it could not have been more beautiful.  Bright sunshine, crisp blue skies with just a few picturesque clouds kissing the mountain tops.  We spent an hour or so there, pushing our way through the snow toward 6500 feet, and then in the afternoon, another hour near the Mer de Glace, on the other side of the valley.

The concierge at our hotel had said that Saturday would be a good day to get out of town, because there were anti-WTO demonstrations planned.   When our bus was pulling back into the station in Geneva at the end of the day, our tour guide, Simon, said that there had been "an incident" that afternoon and we should "be careful" if we were going to be out walking through the central city that evening.  We found out later that the demonstrations had turned violent and there were smashed windows and cars lit afire a block from our hotel.  By the time we went out for lunch the next day, the cars had been cleared away and many, though not all, of the broken windows were boarded up. 

For several years now, I've kept a travel journal separate from the notebook that I write in every morning when I'm at home.  In the front of each I write the date range that it covers and list the cities that I've taken it to.  The one that I'm just finishing up starts August 7, 2009 and lists the following:  Washington DC, North Little Rock, Brisbane QLD, Lancaster MA, Birmingham, Breckenridge CO, Frankfurt, Memphis, Boston and Geneva.  Even for me, that's an extraordinary amount of travel for a four month stretch.

Without ubiquitous internet access and the trusty laptop it wouldn't be possible.   But I manage to get at the email everyday and I can get a lot of work done on those long airplane flights.  Some projects don't get done quite as soon as I would like, but I manage to get to it all eventually.  And I think that the work that I've done on these journeys is worthwhile and important.   Certainly it is endlessly interesting.

I'm glad to be home now for awhile, though.  At the moment, there's nothing on the calendar until early February, although there are one or two things in the offing that might call me out of town before then.  But for now I'm just looking forward to going to the library every day, and getting into something that feels like a routine. 

Tomorrow Marian and Josie will be coming over to help us trim the Christmas tree.  That's more exciting to me than standing on the side of a mountain.

Birthday Parties

When we got home from the champagne tasting, the message light was on.  I knew it was Josie.  I pressed the button, and there she was, singing "Happy Birthday" to me.

Squeaky little girl voice, but her pitch and rhythm are exactly right.

I'd been home fifteen minutes or so and then she called.

"Happy Birthday Nonai!"

"Thank you, Bug!"

"Did you hear my message?"

"I did!  You sang wonderfully.  Would you sing it for me again?"

She giggles.  "Yeah," she says, shyly.

"Did you have a good birthday?" she asks when she's done with the song.

"Yes," I say.  "I had a fine time."

"What party did you have?"

That is, did I have a Gymboree party, or a Pump It Up party, or did I have some of my friends over for a Pirate party, or what?

"Well, I haven't had a party yet."  This perplexes her, and she's a little concerned.  She's always had at least two or three birthday parties (and attends her friends' on a regular basis), so how can it be my birthday and I haven't even had one yet?

"We'll have a party when you and your Mom come over on Sunday...  Okay?"

"Okay," she says, apparently placated.  "Love you, bye..." 

Policy and Passion

I know that it startled some of my colleagues when I said, during some of the meetings in Boston last week, that as far as I could tell Open Access just wasn't very controversial among publishers any more.  When I was at the STM meeting in Frankfurt, I detected very little opposition to the concept -- indeed, all of the major publishers appear to be experimenting with some form of open access publishing, and the best of the open access publishers are treated with increasing respect for the strength and quality of their operations.  If you'd gone prowling through the halls of the Arabella, or spent time hanging out in the bar listening in on conversations, you'd have been hard pressed to find anybody expressing opposition to "open access."

"What is controversial," I said, during one of those Boston meetings, "is the NIH public access policy.  But opposition to the policy is not about opposition to open access.  It's opposition to what many publishers consider to be unwarranted government intrusion."

One of the things that SPARC has been tremendously successful at is controlling the terms of the debate and equating support for Open Access with support for the NIH policy and FRPAA.  If you're a supporter of Open Access, you are necessarily a supporter of the policy.  Express reservations about the legislation and you open yourself up to charges of being opposed to Open Access.  It's been a very effective advocacy strategy.

Unfortunately, this rhetorical sleight-of-hand effectively cuts off serious discussion of the implications and trade-offs inherent in any policy proposal.  Issues of stewardship, interoperability, commercial and non-commercial reuse, branding, context, differences in how the literature of different disciplines is handled, as well as the appropriate role of government all have a place in the discussion.  It is perfectly possible to be completely committed to the widest possible unfettered dissemination of peer-reviewed scientific literature and still have serious reservations about whether or not the legislative approach enshrined in FRPAA is the best way to get there.

"For America to obtain an optimal return on our investment in science, publicly funded research must be shared as broadly as possible," states the recent open letter from the 41 Nobel Prize winners to the U.S. Congress.  I don't know a single person in publishing who would disagree with that statement.  But I really do wish that we were having a serious, honest discussion among all of the stakeholders about the best way to get there.

Stewardship

"Trust is the only important thing!"   Slightly hyperbolic, but I knew what Geoff was getting at.  We were talking at the end of the CrossRef 10th anniversary dinner about the various projects under development at CrossRef in support of their mission:

CrossRef is a not-for-profit membership association whose mission is to enable easy identification and use of trustworthy electronic content by promoting the cooperative development and application of a sustainable infrastructure.

I'd be speaking the next day on issues surrounding the development of sound policies for handling plagiarism and duplication of publication.  The Baroness Onora O'Neill, Professor of Philosophy at Cambridge, would speak on "Trust, Communication and Academic Publication."  Heady stuff.  (The slides for the presentations are now all available on the CrossRef site).

While issues surrounding the protection of the integrity of the scientific record were front and center at the CrossRef meeting, the same themes permeated all of the various venues in which I found myself engaged with publishers throughout the summer and fall, be it with the Scholarly Communication Roundtable, the STM meeting in Frankfurt, the publishing panel we put together for the NLM/AAHSL Leadership Capstone, or the Chicago Collaborative meeting in Boston.  The fact is, serious publishers of all stripes, be they large or small, commercial or not-for-profit, spend a helluva lot of time worrying about ensuring not just the integrity of the single article before them, but the ongoing stewardship of that article. 

Stewardship involves not just shepherding a manuscript through the peer review process -- there are issues of image manipulation, unintentional errors or violation of publication norms through ignorance or cultural differences, the challenges of dealing with post-publication updating, errata, error, fraud,  retraction and preservation.  In our focus on access, librarians tend to ignore most of this.   Is it that we think these issues are unimportant or trivial?  Or do we just not think about them at all?

Of course access is important, but as Professor O'Neill pointed out in her talk (done without slides, so not, alas, reflected in the presentations that are available online), access is not sufficient -- what we're really after is communication.  And ensuring communication requires that we pay adequate attention to integrity and to stewardship. 

Librarians haven't put enough energy into those aspects of the discussion, and we need to.

Beauty's In The Eye...

Here in the South, beauty pageant culture is a very big deal, and there are many girls younger than Josie who've already learned the runway walk.   Marian cringes at the idea -- it's a subculture she doesn't want any part of.

On the other hand, given Josie's requited love for the camera, getting a bit of modeling work has some appeal.  It's not a practical pursuit right now, given everything else M. is trying to keep up with, but she was intrigued by the Gap's Casting Call contest, whose winners will be the featured photos at babyGap and GapKids stores early next year.  Maybe a foot in the door?

So Josie's been entered, and Marian is trying to get everyone she can to vote for her as a fan favorite.  You go to the Gap Casting Call website, and enter Josie's number (794876305) and can vote once a day from now through November 17.  You do need to register with DisneyFamily.com in order to vote (ah, there's the catch!), but it's fairly painless and you can opt out of getting email ads from them.

Being the dutiful Nonai that I am, I've registered and linked and I'll be putting in my votes.  Marian'll be grateful for any help she gets.

At The Zoo

"C'mon Bug.  We can't get out that way."

"But why?"

"Look -- they've got it blocked off.  We've got to go around this way."

"But Why!?"

"I dunno.  C'mon along this way."

She plants her feet and gives me her insistent look, eyes fierce, lower lip pushed out.  "Tell me WHY!"

"I don't know why.  D'you want me to make something up?"

Her face relaxes.  "Sure!"

"It's like this....  A wild alligator escaped and is wandering around over there.  A four year old little girl walked down that way, and the alligator caught her and gobbled her all up!  So they blocked that way off until they catch the wild alligator so that no other four year old little girls can go that way."

"Oh....!" She says thoughtfully, "I see....!"

Public Private

When I first went to work at the National Library of Medicine you couldn't get a password to search Medline until you'd been trained.  They'd gotten it down to a basic three days, plus a couple of days for the specialized databases -- a week altogether.   A decade or so earlier, it took three months.  No, I am not making this up.

You had options.  Although no private company would've built Medline, there were several that were eager to provide access.  BRS had been formed by some of the people who'd been involved in the original MEDLARS project.  When I was in library school, DIALOG was the big dog in the bibliographic database market, with a portfolio of more than a dozen databases.   But Medline was the first -- when it came up in 1972 1971, it was the first publicly available bibliographic database in the world.  But "publicly available" didn't mean you could just come in.  NLM licensed the database to independent companies, but with plenty of restrictions -- required training being one of them.

Searching Medline (MEDLARS On Line -- the original project had been MEDical Literature Analysis and Retrieval System) was cheapest if you went directly to NLM.  By law, they couldn't charge more than the actual cost of providing access.  You paid by the minute, so a librarian spent a good bit of

time before dialing up working out the search strategy so as to be as efficient as possible.  The companies had to make money, so they had to charge more, so they had to build fancier search engines, had to offer additional services to draw customers.  And they were very successful.  They hated the fact that they had to compete with "the government".  But if the government hadn't built the database in the first place, they wouldn't have existed.

This was all pre-internet.  (Remind me to tell you sometime about my experience with the first IBM XT personal computer purchased by NLM's Bibliographic Services Division).  So you dialed into a commercial telecommunications company (NLM had contracts with two), and linked into the database.  Lots of people made money off of that government investment. 

I was there when access was opened up to physicians.  Without training.   Highly controversial within the organization.  At the time, I was the assistant editor of the NLM Technical Bulletin, the newsletter that was sent monthly to everyone with an access code.  In the course of a year, the number that we sent out increased by a factor of ten.

One of my projects at the end of my Associate year was to investigate whether or not videodiscs (twelve inch platters encoded in an analog format) would be a good vehicle for distributing information in the event of toxic waste spills.  They weren't, but in the course of my investigations I became aware of the five inch "compact optical discs" that Phillips & Sony had recently developed and were trying to find a commercial use for.   I calculated the number of discs that would be required to hold the entire MEDLINE database and suggested, in the formal presentation that capped the year, that they could be used as a distribution medium.  It seemed pretty far-fetched, but I thought it was a fun idea.

The commercial outfits always complained about competition from NLM.  One of the ironies of capitalism is that while competition is the essential engine, every capitalist hates competitors.  And having the government as a competitor is worst of all.  But NLM never put anybody out of business, and the investments that were made in MEDLARS and MEDLINE were the foundation of the search industry. 

It was a government agency that developed the internet in the first place.  The Defense Department wanted a communications network that could survive a nuclear attack.  Tim Berners-Lee worked for a government funded organization when he invented the world wide web.

So it's hard for me to get too freaked out about government intrusions into the marketplace.  Public health insurance option putting private companies out of business?  I don't think so.  Public access to federally funded research destroying the STM industry?  Probably not.

My Imaginative Memory

When I was twelve or thirteen, one of my older sisters started collecting the Diaries of Anais Nin, and I started reading one (eventually read them all).  I was fascinated and started keeping a journal of my own.  Through my teens, I wrote fairly regularly, although there were stretches of weeks or even months, when I wrote nothing.

At some point in my early twenties, I suppose when I was moving from one place to another and boxing up journals, I was leafing through them and was stunned to find not only descriptions of things that I had completely forgotten, but descriptions of things that I thought I remembered, but for which my memory was very clearly false.  It was tremendously unsettling because up to that point I'd assumed, as most people do, that my memory was generally reliable.

By then, my journal writing had settled into a pretty steady pattern.  For decades now, there are not more than a dozen days in any given year that I don't write something (although in the years when I was courting Lynn, most of that writing went into letters to her).  And I keep a rough daily log of where I've been, who I've had meetings with at work, what restaurants I've eaten in.  When Lynn asks, as we're getting ready to return to a city we visited years ago, "And what was that restaurant we ate in our first night?" I can find out.  And I'm always amused, and sometimes astonished, to see the ways in which my memory has diverged from the evidence of the written record.

Elizabeth Loftus has done the most accessible work on the fallibility of memory.  Her research shows repeatedly how unreliable memory is, and how much of what we think we remember is internally constructed.  The fact is, we have no internal way of distinguishing between true and false memories.  They feel exactly the same.  Eventually one learns to assume that all of what we think we remember is inaccurate in some degree.

Most people believe that their memories get worse as they get older.  That's not as true as they think it is.  Over time we just accumulate increasing evidence of how poor and unreliable our memories have always been.

Unfortunately, most people don't know this.  The most negative impact, of course, is the reliance on eyewitness testimony in criminal trials, even though it has been shown again and again that for any given event, the testimony of eyewitnesses will invariably diverge, often very significantly.  But on a very personal level it affects our very sense of who we are, if we believe that our sense of self is an accumulation of our memories.

The Ethics of Healthcare

"The design of a healthcare system is a moral issue."

So said T.R. Reid near the end of his keynote address at the MCMLA meeting in Breckenridge last week.

And, "Without the moral commitment, you end up with America's healthcare system."

Reid's presentation style is very relaxed.  He brings a light touch, and a finely tuned sense of humor, even when dealing with very weighty issues.  Still, when he contemplated the fundamental unfairness of the American system, his righteous indignation and frustration showed through.

He said that he undertook the writing of his new book to answer one question:  "How is it that every industrialized country provides better healthcare for all of its citizens and spends half as much as we do?"  He says he thinks he nailed that one.

But as he did his research, he realized the more important question was why do they?  And he thinks he figured that one out as well.  But then it leads to the most pressing question of them all -- why doesn't the United States?  Why is it that the richest country in the world fails so miserably to provide what every other nation considers to be one of the fundamental responsibilities of a civilized society?  He said he's still trying to puzzle that one out.

And he's not particularly hopeful that we'll achieve any significant improvement in the current round.  He believes that Congress lacks the political will.  We'll continue stumbling along through the paradox of having the capacity to provide the best healthcare in the world, while failing on every measure to actually do so.  What does it say about us as a nation that we are willing to tolerate an infant mortality rate that puts us just behind Cuba and only slightly ahead of Croatia?

It might be easier to deal with if we were at least having a debate about the real issues.  But we're not.  What passes for debate in this country (particularly on this issue) is sloganeering designed to make political points.  Actual facts aren't that hard to find.  Reid had a very good op-ed in the Washington Post a month ago in which he dismissed the major myths that are fueling that most emotional of the anti-healthcare reform screeds.  But in an era when most people get their news from cable tv or talk radio, serious attention to actual facts takes too much time and is too boring.  It doesn't provide the cathartic release of frustration and anger that people seem to want.

Reid emphasized several times that if we, as a nation, choose to provide universal healthcare and contain costs, we certainly can do it, without falling prey to the horrors of socialized medicine or rationed healthcare that are used to scare people away.  The fundamental question is whether or not we believe that we have a collective responsibility to take care of each other.  The answer is clear -- we, in this "Christian" nation, believe that we do not.  This is the paradox that puzzles T.R. Reid.

Anniversaries

When Idie asked how many years we'd been married, I teased, "How old is your restaurant?"

"Um, fourteen, we think?"

"Our marriage is just six weeks older than your restaurant."

The Hot and Hot Fish Club would be one of our favorite restaurants even if we didn't almost share an anniversary date, but the coincidence of its opening just weeks after I moved here has always made us feel particularly affectionate toward it and Chris & Idie.  It's always near the top of our list for a place to take visitors, or if we want to do something special for ourselves.

A few years after they opened, they participated in a charity action at which most of the leading chefs in town offered something special -- dinner at your house for twelve of your closest friends, for example.  What Chris & Idie put up was four seasonal tasting dinners for two.   We were able to get it, and over the course of the next year, about every three months, I'd call Chris and we'd talk about what he was fixing that was particularly suited to that season, and then he'd put together a seven course menu for us, with paired wines.  Each meal was spectacular -- and the fact that it was all prepaid, so that we never had to look at a bill, made it even more fun.

At the last of the four, we were chatting with Chris and I was bemoaning the fact that we'd come to the end of it, and joking that I'd like to take out another year's subscription.  He shrugged and said, "I'd be happy to do it anytime.  Just give me a call."  And we did.  Many times.

Given our travel schedule in the fall, we're just as likely to be in some other city on our wedding anniversary as we are to be home, so when I realized that we'd be in Birmingham this year, and that it was a Saturday night,  a tasting menu at Hot and Hot seemed like the perfect thing to do.  And just to make it a little extra special, I booked a suite for us at the Hotel Highland so we could walk to the restaurant and not have to worry about driving home afterwards.

Bill, the sous chef, was in charge and after asking us if there was anything in particular we were interested in, and hearing that we wanted to leave it entirely up to him, he came up with this menu (bear in mind that each course is half or less than half the size of the normal portion):

• Tomato Soup with Cream and Truffled Grilled Cheese
• Hot and Hot Tomato Salad with Applewood Smoked Bacon, Fresh Peas, Corn, Fried Okra and Chive Aioli
• Cauliflower and Chestnut Gratin with Herb Breadcrumbs and Truffle Oil
• Grilled Mississippi Shrimp with Local Golden Kiwi and Shaved Fennel Salad
• Garganelli Pasta and Homemade Guanciale with Wild Mushrooms, Parmesan Cheese and Truffle Oil
• Charcuterie plate with Pickled Veal Tongue and Homemade Souse Meat
• Hickory Grilled Beef Tournedos on Blue Cheese Potato Gratin, Chef's Garden Spinach and Wild Mushroom Jus
• Cheese plate of Thomasville Tomme from Sweet Grass Dairy, with Persimmon & Toasted Walnuts
• Trio of Sorbet with Homemade Cookies

John did a spectacular job of matching the wines to each course.  We sat at the chef's counter where we could watch the cooks put it all together.    It's an amazing show.

The new cookbook is just out, so we bought a copy, and Idie inscribed it for us.   When we finally waddled back to the hotel three hours after arriving at the restaurant, we sat on the couch and leafed through.   Wonderful pictures and stories, and the recipes of some of the dishes we'd eaten that very evening. 

It was a truly splendid anniversary.   May we, and the Hot and Hot Fish Club, have many, many more.