Black kites (milvus migrans) flocking to scavenge food along Kamogawa behind Kyoto Prefectural Hospital, where people are eating lunch on April 12, 2013. These raptors, called TOMBI in Kansai (TOBI in Kanto), are commonly seen in the Japanese countryside, where, as solitary hunters, they prey on bugs, field mice, and other small animals.

In spite of warnings by Kyoto City officials, some people apparently feed them by throwing pieces of food into the air. I’ve watched these magnificent creatures hunt in Shiga many times. It’s disheartening to see them in flocks as scavengers, attracted by people who, failing to respect nature, feed them for entertainment.

Yasugawa at Ritto City near Mikamiyama (2013-03-30).

I was recording Yasugawa on March 17, 2013 with an Olympus LS-10 (built-in mics) whan a firetruck drove past.

Monaural audio was recorded in moderately strong wind with a Sennheiser ME66 shotgun mic covered with a Rycote Softie. I held the mic close to the running water. Underwater stereo was captured with with two Aquarian Audio H2a-XLR-3 hydrophones. Recorder: Olympus LS-100 (XLR inputs).

This is a small truck driving very slowly through my neighborhood in Japan on February 24, 2013, a cold winter night. I dashed out with an Olympus LS-10 recorder just before the truck left the neighborhood.

Celebrating the end of 2012 and the beginning of 2013, neighborhood people took turns ringing the bell beginning 15 minutes before midnight on New Year’s Eve.

This recording is available on my Soundcloud page.

This is near my house in Shiga Prefecture, Japan. Images and sounds were gathered between December 29, 2012, and January 3, 2013. From here the river gradually slows and then enters Lake Biwa, Japan’s largest freshwater lake.

Shiga Rivers is a series of media productions about rivers in Shiga Prefecture, Japan. Yasugawa in Winter is the first video of the series.

On Twitter I saw a tweet, Deep Thought is Dead, Long Live Deep Thought. It included a link to an article by “Blake” on LISNews, Deep Thought is Dead, Long Live Deep Thought. That article was actually a quotation within a quotation. Above the article was a link to an article on a Scientific American blog, Deep Thought is Dead, Long Live Deep Thought, by Amr Abouelleil.

Ah! That’s the original article, I thought. Wrong. In the first sentence the author quotes an article in The Atlantic by Alan Jacobs on March 19th, 2012, Jobs of the Future: A Skeptic’s Response. The quote that appears in the LISNews article actually comes from the middle of that article, so the title of the LISNews article and the tweet mislead readers.

Actually, the opinions of both Abouelleil and Jacobs are far more sophisticated than we can guess from that quote in LISNews. Also, Jacobs quotes “comments on a recent Pew survey about American internet use.” So, the original source would appear to be comments on a survey.

In fact, the whole discussion actually depends on a February 29th report by Janna Anderson and Lee Rainie for the Pew Internet & American Life Project. The report, Millennials will benefit and suffer due to their hyperconnected lives, can be seen online and downloaded as a 36-page PDF file. The report shows a “tension pair” of two kinds of predictions for 2020. Fifty-five percent of respondents predicted hopeful futures and 42% were more pessimistic.

But wait, there’s even more! In a note on page 8 of the PDF version, the report states that respondents were a “non-random online sample of 1,021 Internet experts and other Internet users,” so the results cannot be projected to any population. Also, the authors state:

The “predictive” scenarios used in this tension pair were composed based on current popular speculation. They were created to elicit thoughtful responses to commonly found speculative futures thinking on this topic in 2011; this is not a formal forecast.

Anderson and Rainie make it clear that their report is about thoughtful speculation. Comments on the report stimulated interesting essays in two influential American magazines, and one of those essays was quoted indirectly in a LISNews article. But neither of the essays nor the brief quotation in LISNews cited a major source of data: Imagining the Internet at the Elon University School of Communications.

I try hard to help college students learn information and media literacy well enough to do scholarly research. When a student writes about something that is not her own original experience of idea, I ask, “How do you know that? Where did you get that information”

What can we learn from this exercise? Tweets and blogs may us lead to interesting facts and ideas, but without proper citations we have to backtrack until we find original sources. Scholars reveal their sources so that others can find them easily and read them, too.

Transcript

I have several thousand old photographs that I took more than 40 years ago. I’d like to preserve some of those memories and share them with friends and family members. In order to do that I have to digitize them. In other words, I have scan each photograph and save it as a computer file. Then I have to put them together in a personal digital collection.

I know quite a bit about digital collections, but it’s quite a challenge to actually work with such a large number of objects. I have to select a reasonable number of them for preservation. Also, I want to follow professional guidelines for digital collections, but that’s going to be difficult.

I suppose a few hundred is reasonable, but which ones shall I save? Sometimes it’s hard to decide, so I’m dividing them into groups. First, I’m throwing away photos that I know I don’t want to keep. Photos that I want to save go into two groups: Those I want to digitize for sure and those that I want to keep and maybe digitize when I have enough free time. The method works okay, but it’s a challenge to limit the number of photos to be digitized.

When we make digital collections, we need metadata, or information about each object in the collection. For example, metadata for a photograph might include a location, a date, a title, and a short description. My problem is that I can’t remember where or when I took some of the photos in my collection. At that time I was a busy college student, and until recently I hadn’t paid much attention to them. Now I wish that I’d sorted and labeled my photographs when they were fresh in my memory.

Now I understand digital collections much better than before. We should take good care of photographs and other artifacts that we want to save. It’s a good idea to organize them and record some information about them before they fade from memory.