Quotes on libraries, computing, the Internet, etc.

The Importance of a Liberal Education

"One of our greatest challenges is the explosion of information and new technologies. We need to transform this information into structured knowledge, rather than factual fragments with no clear hierarchy of reason or coherence. The explosion of information and technologies to translate and transport that information makes having a liberal education even more critical. We are being overfed with facts, but we are starved for truths." Vartan Gregorian, Brown University, March 6, 1997.

Culture

"Culture may be defined as the organisation of shared experience which includes values and standards of perceiving, judging and acting within a specific social milieu at a definite historical state. In other words, culture is the complex of material and spiritual goods and values created by human activity in the process of social development." (Jefkins and Ugboajah, 1986: 151).

Computers

"Man has...advantages [over the computer]... which he may well retain even into the far-distant future... [G]iven his abilities, he weighs less than any computer yet designed or even envisaged: there seems no likelihood that an electronic computer capable of so great a variety of computational facilities can be encompassed within 150 lb..... [M]an needs far less energy... [M]an is the only computer yet designed which can be produced entirely by unskilled labour.... The push-button library is still well in the future. The librarian who visualizes himself -- or his readers -- sitting at a console and conducting a dialogue with a computer by means of a typewriter keyboard and a television screen... should set these dreams aside for a while.... On-line interrogation of large stores (to use the standard computer jargon for such a situation) exists in some applications now, and its use will increase, but such installations are costly and their utility must be proven beyond doubt... before this cost can be justified even for a large libary." -- Cox, et al., The Computer and the Library, 1967.

Books

"[The book] is such a marvelous medium. It's random-access, it's non-volatile, it's everything we want our information systems to be. We shouldn't condemn it simply because it's a 500-year-old technology." -- Ken Jensen, Regina Public Library, in an interview on CTV News, mid-1980s.

The Internet

"Increasingly, we will be looking at the Net globally, which increasingly is looking like gopherspace with a few odd library things hanging off it. [I]ndividuals are increasingly publishing direct to the net, and tools to control this in an automated fashion are developing rapidly...." -- Tony Barry, Australian librarian, 1992, quoted in Brown-Syed, From CLANN to Unilinc, 1996.

"I've been on and off the Internet since 1976, back when it was still the ARPANET -- before TCP/IP, even, and long before the Web. I don't read Usenet much these days, the volume is too high, but I used to be a regular. The net is my most effective tool and my favorite toy -- heck, without it, most of what I write about wouldn't exist!" -- Eric S Raymond, author of The New Hacker's Dictionary in an Amazon.com interview.

"The dream behind the Web is of a common information space in which we communicate by sharing information. Its universality is essential: the fact that a hypertext link can point to anything, be it personal, local or global, be it draft or highly polished. There was a second part of the dream, too, dependent on the Web being so generally used that it became a realistic mirror (or in fact the primary embodiment) of the ways in which we work and play and socialize. That was that once the state of our interactions was on line, we could then use computers to help us analyse it, make sense of what we are doing, where we individually fit in, and how we can better work together." -- Tim Berners-Lee, The World Wide Web: A very short personal history, 1998.

"What was often difficult for people to understand about the design was that there was nothing else beyond URIs, HTTP, and HTML." -- Tim Berners-Lee, Weaving the Web.

Inventions and Predictions

"Being on the cutting edge is nothing new to Xerox. Our global research and development centers include the world-famous Palo Alto Research Center, where the technology that changed the way the world works was invented - GUI, the mouse, Ethernet LANs, laser printing, fax." -- Xerox "Work at Xerox".

"The brain is comprised of billions of simple processing units (nerve cells) operating in parallel, in a massively interconnected network. Artifical neural network models, or ANNs, have the ability to emulate this remarkable power to perform complex parallel computations, and what's more, they have the ability to learn." -- McMaster University, "Neural Computation".

"The idea for the name AltaVista originally came from a white board that hadn't been erased properly. The word Alto (of Palo Alto) [California] was placed beside the word Vista and someone yelled out, "How about AltoVista!" It then became AltaVista, meaning "The view from above." -- AltaVista.com

"The memory of a classical computer is a string of 0s and 1s, and a classical computer can do calculations on only one set of numbers at once. The memory of a quantum computer is a quantum state which can be in a superposition of many different numbers at once. A classical computer is made up of bits, and a quantum computer is made up of quantum bits, or qubits. A quantum computer can do an arbitrary reversible classical computation on all the numbers simultaneously, and also has some ability to produce interference, constructive or destructive, between various different numbers. By doing a computation on many different numbers at once, then interfering the results to get a single answer, a quantum computer has the potential to be much more powerful than a classical computer of the same size.... The 0 and 1 of a qubit might be the ground and excited states of an atom in a linear ion trap; they might be polarizations of photons that interact in an optical cavity; they might even be the excess of one nuclear spin state over another in a liquid sample in an NMR machine.... It may not ultimately be possible to make a quantum computer that can do a useful calculation before decohering, but if we can get the error rate low enough, we can use a quantum error-correcting code to protect the data even when the individual qubits in the computer decohere." -- Daniel Gottesman Microsoft. October 29, 1997.

Security

"The same interconnectivity that allows us to transmit information around the globe at the click of a mouse or push of a button also creates unprecedented opportunities for criminals, terrorists, and hostile foreign nation-states who might seek to steal money or proprietary data, invade private records, conduct industrial espionage, cause a vital infrastructure to cease operations, or engage in Information Warfare." --Michael Vatis, Director, National Infrastructure Protection Center.

"They said that Osama's messages have codes in them to the terrorists. It's as if we were living in the time of mail by carrier pigeon, when there are no phones, no travelers, no Internet, no regular mail, no express mail and no electronic mail. I mean, these are very humorous things." -- Osama bin Laden, Al Jazeera interview.

HM Elizabeth II – Text of historic first posting by a head of state.

(With best wishes to HM in her Jubilee Year, 2002!)

Christopher Brown-Syed 1995- 2002.Disclaimers.