Multiculturalism: One Librarian's Personal Testimonial, By William Jiang MLS

I remember the first time I experienced the cultural phenomenon called multiculturalism outside of my own home. I was reading the Stony Brook University newspaper called “The Brook”. The year was either 1991 or 1992. The term multiculturalism that was used in the newspaper was new to me as well as new to the community in which I was living: Long Island, NY. However, as far back as I can remember I have lived in a multicultural house thanks to my mother. Four times a year mom had a "family food feast" where we would have one food from each of our ancestors culinary repertoires. We had delicious cheeses from France and Normandy, noodles from China, shortbread from Scotland, fish and chips from England, and much more! I still look forward to these family food feasts because not only is it a celebration of everything that I am, it is a celebration of cultures, societies, and peoples that are now dead but are not forgotten because their stories live on in books, and in our hearts.

At one point I was trying to pick up a Swedish girl at the Scandinavia House in New York City. There was a tree in the middle of the room, with no apparent point or purpose to it. It looked nice, however it puzzled me. Why was it there? The second time the Scandinavian girl came back to my table as waitress, I asked her about it. Then, suddenly, I remembered the world tree Yggdrasil upon which Odin, the most powerful god of the Norse mythos, had a vision of the runes, and thus written language was born in Scandinavia. I asked her if this tree could be Yggdrasil. she replied, “What? I don’t know anything about Norse mythology. We don’t study that in Sweden anymore.” So, I told her the story of how Odin had the vision of the runes, and she was happy to learn about it. For me, this is the best kind of multiculturalism: positive, life-affirming, and based on history and tales of long ago.

However, multiculturalism is now on the decline on the world stage. From a nascent field embraced in academia about two decades ago. Angela Merkel, the German Chancellor has called multiculturalism in Germany a failure. Sarkozy, the Prime Minister of France has said that the Burka is no longer welcome in France. It is sad to me to see this experiment that is multiculturalism in the modern world to be threatened. I believe that the old concept of America as a melting pot still is important. However, there are people in our country that are not of Anglo-American stock. Latinos and African-Americans as well as other groups deserve recognition by the libraries that serve them as well as the institutions which make up our country. I feel that we must not give up on the concept of multiculturalism as librarians because not one among us is as rich as all of us.

Southern California libraries spared damages from torrential rains of Christmas 2010 By William Jiang, MLS

The rains that hit Southern California in the week of Christmas 2010 and traveled across the country to dump over a foot of snow on New York City have done little damage to the libraries of Southern California. There are reports of tens of thousands of dollars of damage across Southern California, widespread flooding, and mudslides, however when I talked to a representative from the Southern California Library Cooperative she said that she had not heard of a single library that was closed by the storm. This is great news for the Latino community of South California. According to the 2010 census Latinos are the largest ethnic group in Southern California at almost 41% of the population followed by slightly under 40% of Caucasian and about 10% Asian-American and about 7% African-American. the fact that the Latino community depends upon the libraries of Southern California is evident in studies of usage among the Latino communities across the United States. Happy new year! This is some good news to end 2010.

e-Book lending by Amazon.com By William Jiang, MLS

Huge news! Today Amazon.com announced that their Kindle is going to allow purchasers of their e-books to lend their e-books to other people. This technology opens up worlds of possibilities for libraries to offer e-books to their patrons who have e-book readers. If libraries play their cards right they will be able to increase readership, increase circulation, and increase visits to libraries by patrons all of one fell swoop by quickly embracing this new technology. It will happen sooner or later. Exciting indeed!

Read more here:
http://forums.digitaltextplatform.com/dtpforums/entry.jspa?externalID=581

NVIDIA and GPUs VS Intel Sandy Bridge By William Jiang, MLS

In the past, all the work of computing depended on the CPU. The The more powerful the CPU, the faster programs ran. However, besides the CPU there is now the GPU (Graphical Processing Unit on the video card) revolution that NVIDIA current leads with a technology called CUDA. Desktop computers can run at speeds that rival supercomputers of 5 years ago!


the new generation of NVIDIA Echelon GPU’s run at about 10 teraflops (http://gpuscience.com/news/sc10-nvidia-details-10-teraflops-echelon-processor/)

most supercomputers still running the teraflop range. So, this is an example of technology advancing significantly until what used to be a supercomputer not too long ago that cost millions of dollars is now available on the desktop for a few thousand. the graphic below shows how powerful processors can increase their power of CPUs exponentially by using programs that use the GPU like the Mercury playback engine in Adobe Premiere CS5. Below we see that the rendering time of a video decreases by almost 10x. (http://www.tomshardware.com/reviews/xeon-x5680-5600-series-westmere-ep,2692-7.html)

Of course the giant Intel does not want to NVIDIA to have this much power in the computer market. So what Intel is doing with the Sandy Bridge processor is they are putting a middling powerful GPU right on the chip. NVIDIA GPUs still has more power, but with Intel’s economy of scale and most people going with Intel, the behemoth may make inroads into the GPU market and the crush NVIDIA. This senario may be how Microsoft crushed Netscape. With up to eight cores with an integrated GPU Intel is looking powerful.
read more about the Sandy Bridge architecture here: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sandy_Bridge_(microarchitecture)

AMD hexacore vs Intel core i7 for Libraries By William Jiang, MLS

AMD released their desktop six-core 64 bit Thuban chip in April 2010 on the 45nm process (the smaller the nanometers, nm, the better because it uses less electricity), and beat Intel to the punch of releasing the CPU processor with the most cores. The chip was able to be overclocked quite easily, and to be competitive it was released at a price point that was well below the Intel I7 32nm process CPUs. The majority of the Intel Core i7 chips have four cores and they are still more expensive than the AMD hexacore CPU, in this case if you need raw processing power and price is not an issue the Intel chip is the way to go because it is more powerful than the AMD hexacore chip.

Let us look at pricewatch.com to see how the various processors are priced.
Let’s face it, all you need is a Celeron to browse online catalogs. Libraries only need to run an internet browser. What is needed to run a library browser? Almost anything. So, just get the cheapest thing possible. According to pricewatch.com (12/26/10), the AMD Phenom II X6 1090t is $227.36, and the most inexpensive Intel Core i7-860 is $260.38. Ok, fine, so you want some speed so that you play World of Warcraft when the patrons aren’t around. Will I notice any difference between the 1090t and the i7-860 when playing games? According to cpubenchmark.net, the i7-860 at 2.8 GHz has a Passmark CPU mark of 5555, and the 1090t has a score of 6061. I don’t know what these scores mean, but an 8% difference seems like nothing, so I doubt that you’ll notice any difference while playing Warcraft.
As I said before, most library applications only need a weak computer because it doesn’t take a lot of RAM or processor speed to run a web browser, which is pretty much all one has to do when using a old-fashioned or database application. However, if you want to delve into the realm of multimedia or gaming, then you would have to go for a more powerful processor which would in theory be linked to a more powerful and pricey system overall.

If the goal of your library is to save money, and in this economy many libraries need to do this, It behooves a librarian to think of saving money on the operating systems by downloading a popular Linux distribution such as Ubuntu. It would take some learning to set up a network of Linux computers but the cost savings could be significant, especially if you are working in a cash-strapped environment. The plus side to a Linux box is that you would save on the operating system, there are many fewer viruses that could mess up your system, and Linux is quite stable. you can learn more about open source software at e-LIS which is detailed in another article on this blog, El Otro Blog Del Bibliotecario. also, it should be noted that many companies when they upgrade their computers are amenable to donating their old computers to libraries or other learning institutions. There is really no reason to buy a new computer if an old computer can serve just as well. Throw Ubuntu on it, and you have one more happy patron.