Aaron Rogier

In a post last April put forward a case for considering more responsible ways of using information in markets. I would like now to address a problem that stems from Gramm-Leach-Bliley which may have played a larger role in the current market collapse than problems of information, the lack of necessary interdependence between different financial institutions that arose out of cross sector integration.

When Gramm-Leach-Bliley repealed the restrictions from Glass-Steagall which prevented several different types of financial institutions from merging, each class of which performed different market functions, it removed and important barrier which served to assist in preventing bad transactions and toxic securities.  That barrier was the need to do business with other institutions to accomplish certain kinds of transactions. The merging of differing types of financial players into single businesses allowed internal transactions to take place which created securities that would not have been created had these securities had to have been created through the cooperation of several different businesses.

The collateralized debt obligations and mortgage backed securities which precipitated the crisis would have been much more difficult to craft had the transactions necessary to create then been made to go through outside firms rather than being crafted in house before being released for purchased by other firms. The necessity of dealing with an outsider to have individual mortgages and other debts repackaged makes it harder to include bad debts in the final securitized amalgamation of debt, because the other firm isn’t going to want to buy something that it can’t make money on.

Both parties to a transaction enter that transaction because they are under the impression that they are getting a good deal. The adversarial element that comes from the possibility of a transaction offering a lopsided benefit makes caution a virtue in deciding which transaction to enter. The diminished amount of trust involved in doing a transaction with an outside entity offers a check that isn’t present when a firm can produce a finished product internally.

The problem is one of balance.  Trust is what allows transactions to happen in a market economy, but caution is what allows for any level of market stability. The relations between different players on the market or lack thereof are the problem the meaningful stability related reforms are going to have to address as cleanup continues of the current financial mess and the economy migrates towards a more pleasant equilibrium.

From the files of the potentially scary while potentially exciting comes news of Google’s venture into what may or may not be quantum computing using technology from D-Wave company who may or may not be marketing the technology that they claim to be.

There’s a lot of coverage out there already, but I just find it interesting where a lot of the commentary is putting out comparisons of this implementation of maybe or maybe not quantum computing to neural networks.  If this connection is realized further, it would support some hunches that I have had for some time.  On the other hand it it creates a computer that is too brain like, we probably will have a good idea as to how an actual implementation of a Skynet like system may or may not differ from its portrayal in fiction.  Hopefully it will be more concerned with why the Google team used such elementary school-type branding on its predecessors than having the world all to itself.

Considering especially the application of this new technology towards image recognition, a task at which people tend to perform very well, the nature of this technology as possibly more of a cousin to cognition than earlier computing technologies sounds rather possible.  Considering also on the other hand the difficulties associated with building quantum computers in academic environments and the consideration offered in other commentaries on D-Wave that its products are likely frauds, jokes, or some form of joke there is the possibility that the Google team is working on its most elaborate April fools day project yet.

This week Newsweek is has a piece on community colleges that they are running in light of the $12 billion investment in federal money the President pledged towards them back in July.  Much like libraries, community colleges are a very valuable educational resource for the communities they serve.  The American community college has so much potential to serve as an engine for opportunity in its mission that the typical attitude and level of support directed towards community colleges is such a travesty considering their potential.

Well executed, the mission of the community college to offer a variety of vocational training and academic coursework puts it in a position to serve as an engine of economic opportunity in a very democratic manner.  The potential for the community college to play a larger role in society that complements and addresses the shortcomings of other venues of post secondary education seems to me to be a live option that ought to be explored as our country navigates its current economic situation.  I though can only wonder and speculate as to how things will play out.

The contemporary library is in the middle of a transformation. With efforts to embrace new forms of media pushing to redefine the role of the library in the community, it is still too soon to declare the traditional library dead as CNN did. The library has always been a place for the maintenance of information resources and media for the community it serves. The migration of much information to digital resources has forced libraries to provide ways to accommodate these resources. Often these changes are very visually evident as libraries adapt their layouts to physically accommodate the growing importance of digital resources.

There are examples of some libraries moving entirely away from books. It will still be a long time until it will be reasonable though for all or even most libraries to abandon books. The digitized book is just now starting to be taken seriously as a technology moving towards the mainstream. The first mp3 codec was released in 1994, but it wasn’t until 2003 that the iTunes store opened. It took a few years more for commercial digital audio distribution to become the dominant retail channel for distributing audio. Even though the internet was born as and still remains primarily a textual medium, a viable digital alternative that can completely supplant the book for both consumers and scholars. One of the smallest of the difficulties to converting the printed corpus into machine readable formats may be the actual process technologically of converting text printed text to digital formats.

The foremost issue that will slow the replacement of the printed volume will be the copyrights attached to various books, whether they are in print or not. Between the variety and quantity of commercial presses and their imprints to the number of university and other academic presses hunting down and acquiring distribution rights for every book that may hold some value to any possible inquiry of value is Herculean and potentially impossible task. On top of this is the problem of making the text of a particular work available in formats that allow for using the book across a variety of reading devices is still another challenge. The legal issues surrounding Google Book Search are just now starting to gradually wind down will larger stakeholders settling claims, but the legal skirmishes attached to old yet copyrighted works still likely continue for quite a while.

Format, quality, and access are going to continue to be foundational reasons for maintaining physical books in libraries. The circulation of books to individuals as a free service is a library function yet to be replaced with a technological alternative that is operating on a widespread basis. This singular problem will likely keep books on the shelves of just about every major academic library (or library system for Universities that host many library locations for different population) and many community libraries. Community libraries may pare down their collections as they have often done to continue to keep their collections fresh while constrained by space limitation, but the library book sale has long been a tradition in many communities. What is new and will likely remain rare are book purges as undertaken a few years ago by the San Francisco library’s main branch when they dumped roughly 100,000 books. Back in 2004 Newsweek contrasted this against the design of the new Seattle library which preserved its collection. The fate of the print academic journal is a question that really does merit treatment on its own.

So as the resources of the library shift and libraries shift priorities in filling their roles in the communities they serve, the traditional library is far from dead. This may be a renaissance for the Librarian, information specialist, as they serve to guide patrons inundated with information from a variety of media to find quality material to address the patron’s curiosity or their problems. In an era often dubbed the information age the library and librarian may now be more valuable than ever.