For some interesting reasons, I’m learning Python and R. I’m done with the Codecademy introduction course in Python – and still lacking about 9000 hours of experience.

At the moment I’m doing the R introduction course from Datacamp. Not as good a course as the Codecademy, but good enough.

When I was much younger, and studying at the Technical University of Denmark, this would have been af three-week course, with an estimated workload of 140 hours (yep, we studied for almost 47 hours every week). Now, I have a lot more experience, and should be able to do it faster. On the other hand, I do not have 47 uninterrupted hours to set aside each week. More like 4. And they will be interrupted. At least twice every hour.

A post on DJØF-bladets homepage (in danish) tells of swedish research, revealing that when you are in flow, that is, when you are working at optimum efficiency, it will take 25 minutes to recover from an interruption.

A qualified guess is, that at the current level of interruptions, this three-week course, is converted to an 84 week course.

All the print journals, and all print books in closed stacks, have been moved from my little library. We started monday, and was finished friday. More or less, the materials have not yet been placed on their new shelfes at our main library. Now we’re just waiting to get rid of all the empty shelfes, and getting the new furniture for our students. More than 220 square meters for them! The students are looking forward to it, the faculty are worried that it’ll get to cozy at the library, and that the students will be late for classes. Yay!

Is everything just nice and great? No. It is strange, even for the former ebook-coordinator at the royal library, to see all the empty shelfes. Print books and journals have a permanence, that communicatets solidity and symbolises the scientific progress and knowledge in a way that digital ressources simply cannot. At least to people who grew up in the last millenium.

Moving print materials from open to closed stacks also symbolizes the changing world of libraries. We have always been the keepers of knowledge, and paper was the tangible symbols of that knowledge. We know that our mission is to provide access to information, and we know that we are able to do that much more efficiently with digital than with print materials. But it feels profoundly strange to relegate a couple of hundred years accumulated knowledge to closed stacks.

I sincerely believe that this is the future. I believe that the students will get better service even if we move the print material. But it still feels strange.

One of the more interesting talks at MakerfaireUK was “Fixing the Internet of Things” by Alasdair Allan. The way IoT is made today is with a lot of different standards of communication. That leads to the troublesome conclusion, that none of them actually are standards. And the worrying possibility, that soon we will have to choose not only the wattage of a lightbulb, and the size of it. But also which protocol our “smart” lightbulb uses to communicate with the internet.

Another problem is the lack of privacy. Everything have been hacked. Even the White House mailservers… Allan believes that it is only a matter of time, before we see the first murder committed with the help of smart, internetconnected things.

A promising trend, counteracting these problems, is the way that Moores law helps us. Smart devices are not nessecarily becoming more smart. But they do come with increasing computing power. An interesting article on version2, a danish IT-site, touches on this. Read it here, and notice the competitive advantages companies trying to get in on the german market gets, when they can say that data is not stored on american servers…

 

Last friday Students of Pharmaceutical Sciences and the Pharmaceutical Library held our third academic seminar, this time with Jesper T. Andreasen. As is our custom with the seminar in the spring, the speaker is the recipient of the prestigeous award for teacher of the year. At the School of Pharmacy, that is. Jesper spoke about his work with mice and rats as models for the study of anxiety and depression. A very enlightening talk, I did not know that (some) treatments for alzheimers address the same receptors as nerve agents!

 

 

Or – Copenhagen University Library – Nerd. A danish pun on the name of the location of our makerspace/fablab/playground.

One of the truly great things about working at this library, is the playfull attitude to innovation of our library director. About two years ago he wrote me and asked – “this 3D-printing thing, is that very difficult?”. As an engineer there is only one answer “not at all, and the printer can stay in my office”. Actually I had suggested introducing 3D-printing in the library about a year before. We bought a Makerbot, we played around with it, and made it available to the students.

And yesterday we had the grand opening of our innovation-lab (thats the official title, KUB-Nørd is so much better). Three printers, a 3D-scanner, arduinos, Raspberry Pis, Lego Mindstorm and lots of other fun stuff to play with. And the students loved it!