Book Stores

With the exception of one washout, this has been a great summer for motorcycling. Yesterday, it was a trike ride down to Bethlehem, PA taking only back roads to get there. It was about 75 miles from the lake. We saw a lot of downed trees and wires along the way. We parked the trike in the historic area of Main Street and had a nice lunch outdoors at Mamma Nina Foccacheria and then visited some of the shops. The most interesting was Seasons Olive Oil & Vinegar Taproom, which carries a large collection of exclusive, fresh extra virgin olive oils and traditional balsamic vinegars – all on tap from stainless steel Italian “fustis” for sipping before you buy.

The largest shop on Main Street is the Moravian Book Shop, the oldest continuously running bookseller in the world, founded in 1745. I don’t know what percentage of their sales comes from books, but the store offers a wide variety of distinctive merchandise. The failure of Borders leaves Barnes & Noble as the only national bookstore chain in the U.S. and it is racing to grow its e-book business with the Nook, while overall book sales continue to decline. Although printed book sales are continuing a long-term negative trend, they are not headed to zero. With unit volumes going down, printed books will surely rise in price. Some people will go to Blurb and print their own books. Many people will continue to go to book stores–maybe not the megastores like B&N–but to stores like the Moravian Book Shop where there is an entire room full of books for children and tables and displays throughout with printed books of all kinds. Then there is the Cocoon Coffee House in Hawley, PA. Many people go there for WiFi, panini, salad, and a glass of wine, but others go to buy a book. It is not exactly a book store–more of a cooperative arrangement with local libraries who may have some books to turnover. Books will be around for a long time. Libraries are not going away any time soon either. See WorldCat.

Tags: barnes & noble, bethlehem, book stores, books, cocoon, e-books, foccacheria, hawley, Mamma Nina, moravian, nook

Google Plus Nearby

A  posting on the way about what Jon Mitchel, over at ReadWriteWeb, had to say about the results of a study examining the first 10 million Google Plus adopters. More on that later. For now, I wanted to share a thought about Google Plus “nearby”. As we all know, Google Plus has circles wherein we can define our friends, biker buddies, soccer moms, left or right thinking cohorts, etc. Another “virtual” circle that you don’t have to create is the “nearby” circle. That circle includes anybody who is in the geographic vicinity of where you are. Thanks to GPS and triangulation technology, it is not hard to determine where people are — if they agree to allow their location to be used. In times like today–hurricane Irene–that can be very helpful. You can post something or read something from  “Nearby” and it will likely be neighbors or at some point first responders and government leaders. Does anyone have electricity and spare freezer capacity? Is there passage at the Nod Road and Whipstick Road intersection yet? Anyone know where to get some D-cell batteries? If you are heading out of town, don’t take route X because it is closed. In more normal times, “nearby” postings may highlight good restaurants, plays, and local activities. There are other “channels” of communication including Twitter, Facebook, SMS, email, blogs, etc. but I see G+ as a convenient private (to the degree you want) approach to local communication. Oh, you can still call people on your cell phone too.

Tags: circles, google plus, nearby

WorldCat

It is a privilege to be able to participate and contribute to various boards.  It is also a way to learn new things, meet interesting people, and gain new perspectives. That has certainly been the case since I joined the board of OCLC. Fifteen years ago some pundits — myself not included — were saying that libraries were history — as in toast — they were not long for the emerging digital world. Been to a local or college library lately? They are full of people and many are expanding their facilities. Library use has doubled over the past decade. What happened to the digital “vision”? It turns out that the digital and physical can get along together quite well.

The month after I graduated from Lehigh University in 1967, OCLC — Online Computer Library Center, Inc. –  was founded  in Dublin, Ohio as a nonprofit, membership, computer library service and research organization dedicated to the public purpose of furthering access to the world’s information and reducing information costs for libraries. More than 72,000 libraries in 170 countries and territories around the world use OCLC services to locate, acquire, catalog, lend and preserve library materials. Each of these five verbs has special and profound meaning to a very large number of librarians and library visitors.

The crown jewel of OCLC is WorldCat – the world’s most comprehensive database of resources held in libraries, connecting millions of users to the collections and services of thousands of libraries around the globe. This week marks the 40th anniversary of the launch of WorldCat. On August 26, 1971, the OCLC Online Union Catalog and Shared Cataloging system (now known as WorldCat) began operation. That first day, from a single terminal connected to a mainframe computer, catalogers at Ohio University in Athens, Ohio, cataloged 133 books online. Today, WorldCat comprises more than 240 million records representing more than 1.7 billion items in OCLC member libraries worldwide. WorldCat.org lets you search not just the collections of libraries in your community but thousands more around the world.

“We congratulate the thousands of librarians and catalogers around the world who have helped to build WorldCat over the past 40 years keystroke by keystroke, record by record,” said Jay Jordan, OCLC President and CEO.  Jay said that Fred Kilgour, the founding director of OCLC, had a vision to improve access to information through library cooperation, and the vision is every bit as vital today as it was in 1971. WorldCat is a database of bibliographic information that is being continuously enhanced by OCLC libraries around the world. Each record in the WorldCat database contains a bibliographic description of a single item or work and a list of institutions that hold the item. The institutions share these records, using them to create local catalogs, arrange interlibrary loans and conduct reference work. With budget pressures at all levels, the OCLC cataloging, resource sharing services, and library management systems are critical tools to assist librarians to improve productivity, save money, and improve access to the collections of their libraries.

WorldCat records span more than 5,000 years of recorded knowledge, from about 3400 B.C. to the present. The unique collection of information encompasses records in a variety of formats—books, e-books, DVDs, digital resources, serials, sound recordings, musical scores, maps, visual materials, mixed materials and computer files. Like the knowledge it describes, WorldCat grows steadily. Library members add seven records to the WorldCat database every seven seconds. Take a minute and visit worldcat.org and enter the title of your favoirte book to see the breadth and depth of this great resource.

OCLC Homepage
WorldCat

Tags: board of directors, board of trustees, jay jordan, kilgour, libraries, library, oclc, web management services, worldcat

Neil Sedaka in Bethel Woods

Most of the entries in the Favorite Concerts page are classical music concerts, but last night at the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts was a different kind of “classical” music. The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra was conducted by our own Jerry Steichen, music director of the Ridgefield Symphony Orchestra. The rendezvous of my brother and his wife and my wife and I was to be via our motorcycles, but the weather did not cooperate. With probability at 50% we go, but when it is 70% with large hail and severe winds, we opt out and go in the cage. Not that we are afraid of getting wet, as we have many times, but going to a concert and sitting there soaked to the bone is no fun. We made the right call as it did in fact rain quite a bit. After Jerry conducted a number of piceces, he lead the excellent orchestra in playing the legendary singer and songwriter, Neil Sedaka, who launched his official foray into classical music with Joie de Vivre, Sedaka’s first symphony.  He also performed his new piano concerto, “Manhattan Intermezzo”.  Sedaka composed a lot of music, some of which he performed, but much of which he composed for others. Connie Francis recorded his “Stupid Cupid.” and “Where the Boys Are”, which would be her biggest hit. Sedaka recorded chart toppers “The Diary,” “Oh! Carol,” ” Stairway to Heaven,” “Calendar Girl,” “Little Devil,” “Happy Birthday Sweet Sixteen,” “Next Door To An Angel,” and “Breaking Up Is Hard To Do”. The New Jersey Symphony Orchestra is said to be comprised of some of the country’s finest musicians, but accompanying pop songs from fifty years go may have been a first for them. As for Neil Sedaka– he was amazing. A spring in his step, the enthusiasm of someone less than half his age, and a voice showing no signs of age. His diversity in genre was impressive. Having sold 40 million albums and an abundance of royalty inflow from his creative efforts, he surely is not engaging in a dozen performances per year for the money. He is inspired by the excitement of entertaining others. The Bethel Woods Center for the Arts is a first class venu. Bethel Woods is in Bethel, New York,  became famous in 1969 when nearly 500,000 people gathered at Max Yasgur’s Farm for “Three Days of Peace and Music”. If you enter the Center for the Arts address of 200 Hurd Road, Bethel, NY, in your mapping software or GPS, there is a good chance it will direct you to the hamlet of Bethel which is actually part of Pine Plains, NY. The “other” Bethel is the “town” of Bethel which is actually in the unincorporated hamlet of White Lake, NY. By the way, Woodstock, where the concert was helf is 43 miles from the Bethel Woods Center for the Arts, where the Woodstock Museum is. If you dig a little deeper, you will find there is also another White Lake in upstate New York. It was a great trip and we learned a lot we didn’t know: Neil Sedaka wrote a symphony and played a concerto. We also learned there are two Bethels and two White Lakes.

Tags: bethel, bethel woods, buddy holly, chantelles, classics, doo wop, drifters, fifties, fireflies, jerry steichen, kenny vance, neil sedaka, new jersey symphony, passions, pine plains, planotones, white lake, woodstock

Scientists Report Advance in Drug Repurposing

For most of recorded history, medicine has been qualitative in nature, relying on subjective feedback from patients and anecdotal prescriptions from physicians. Medicine today is becoming more and more quantitative in nature. The Wall Street Journal yesterday reported what they described as “high-tech recycling”, where researchers have developed an innovative way to use already-approved drugs that have been used to treat a particular disease to work on diseases they were not intended to combat (see Scientists Report Advance in Drug Repurposing – WSJ.com).

Using a computer science technology called high-throughput computing (HTC), researchers were able to scan National Institutes of Health public databases containing the results of thousands of genomic studies to focus on 100 diseases and 164 drugs where normal and diseased tissue samples, drugged and not drugged, were compared. The program then looked for cases where a drug created a change in gene activity that was opposite to the gene activity caused by a disease, on the hunch that this might indicate the drug could be an effective treatment. For example, suppose a patient had a problem with their liver and the cause was an abnormality of the ABC gene. The XYZ drug used to treat heart problems happens to have an effect that corrects the abnormality of the ABC gene. Even though the XYZ drug was designed for heart problems, it may also be a cure for a liver problem. A real example is that researchers found that cimetidine, an ulcer drug, might be effective in treating lung cancer. I believe that the bioinformatic merger of biology and computer science is likely to change the practice of medicine more in the next decade than all of the changes of the past century.

Tags: bioinformatics, genetics, high-throughput computing, htc, medicine

Amazon, Boxee, Cloud

The pace of announcements from the media and technology industries will certainly be fast throughout the rest of the year. A couple of important developments this week were things that I had expected, and was very happy to see. First, was Boxee’s announcement (Boxee Blog » Boxee for iPad and more goodies) of their new app for the iPad. I have been following Boxee for years — see story from June 2010. I don’t know for sure they will be successful in the long run, but I really like what they are doing. Boxee is trying to become the TV Guide for video from the Internet. The free iPad app gives you a good view of this — just flip through many video choices and enjoy. As you would expect, a lot of their content is from YouTube, but not all of it. You can also watch video from Vimeo, Netflix’s Watch Instantly library, VUDU’s new Hollywood blockbusters, or critically acclaimed and foreign films from MUBI. There’s something for everyone. Boxee’s philosophy is to offer whatever content you want on a Boxee device connected to your TV, or with the Boxee app on your iPad, and I am sure other apps to come. Boxee provides a single interface to all the video on the Internet, regardless of who it is from. What they are doing is an important step to breaking free from the TV-Cable model of the past.

The other exciting development of the last few days is the announcement by Amazon of the Kindle Cloud Reader (see Amazon, Skirting Apple, Announces Cloud for Books – WSJ.com). The philosophy is similar — more choice for the customer, not trying to lock you in to a proprietary model from the past. Amazon believes you should be able to buy a book once, and then read it everywhere. Up until now, “everywhere” meant on your Kindle, the Kindle app on the iPhone or iPad. You could read a book on the PC or Mac with the Kindle app but that is not quite the same as the handheld devices. The breakthrough with the Kindle Cloud Reader is that it enables your Chrome or Safari browser (on any device) to look and act like a Kindle. That means that on any piece of hardware that supports one of those browsers (and no doubt more browsers to come), you can have instant access to your Kindle library and continue reading even when you are offline.

The breakthrough was achieved by Amazon developing a software version of the Kindle using HTML5, the new and evloving standard for how Web applications are developed. People like “apps” on the iPad and other devices because they are responsive and have a nice look and feel to them. They don’t feel like you are browsing a Web site; they feel like they are doing something locally on your device very specific to the “app”. If you are using Kayak to find flights or OpenTable to make a reservation, or eBay to check your auctions, these apps seem very natural. With HTML5, anyone will be able to build a Web app that is just as natural as an “app app”. The subtle and profound aspect of this is that now you can go to Amazon.com, buy a book, and read it on your Kindle Cloud Reader on your iPad. That means you don’t have to go through anyone’s app store — you just go to the Web. Apple will surely not like this since they take a 30% commission when you go through their store. Amazon will like it a lot! So will the rest of the world. HTML5 is the biggest change in the Web since the 1990′s and it will reeult in better apps and more choice for all of us.

Tags: cloud, ipad, iPhone, Kindle, kindle cloud reader

Tanglewood by Trike – 2011

It was a special treat to be able to enjoy a nice 400 mile motorcycle trip along with a memorable concert at Tanglewood. The ride from the lakehouse in Pennsylvania to Lenox, Massachusetts took us on interstate highways initially but then mostly on state and county backroads in the state of New York and then on numerous back roads to Massachusetts, through West Stockbridge and into Berkshire County to Lenox, the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.

The BSO weekend concert included one of the world’s foremost concert pianists, Emanuel Ax, performing one of my favorites, Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 22 in E-flat, K.482, written in Vienna in 1785 when the young composer was writing many new concertos for performances featuring himself as soloist. I have been listening to Emanuel Ax for decades but this is the first time I had seen him in a live performance. He was amazing. Performing the “too many notes” of Mozart seemed like a joy to him as it was to us.

Lionel Bringuier, assistant conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Orchestra, who made his BSO and Tanglewood debut in this program, was also amazing. It was great to see that there are young conductors coming up through the ranks. His energy was exciting for all.

The first concert at Tanglewood was in 1936 and since then a substantial organization and support structure has grown up around the beautiful facility. The capacity is 24,000. Not sure how many were there on Sunday but thousands for sure. Although the main gate was closed to cars when we arrived the police happily motioned us in. Most big events are very courteous to motorcyclists. They save some choice parking areas that are not big enough for cars but are perfect for bikes (or trikes). There were thousands of cars, but just two trikes!

Most people bring wagons with their folded chairs and tables and dinner. Some make quite an elaborate evening out of the free seats on the lawn and embellish their wines and dinners with candles and even candelabras. Nothing that fancy, but we had a great dinner at the Dakota Steak House in Pittsfield.

On the way back we headed across the Hudson River via the Rip Van Winkle Bridge and then up route 385 to Coxackie where we met with our daughter and grandchildren at the Blue Water Bistro. After a delightful lunch, we headed down route 209 along the historic Delaware and Hudson Canal and then back to the Lake. We dodged a few thunderstorms but did not get too wet. We look forward now to another trike trip to Bethel Woods. Stay tuned.

Tags: boston pops, boston symphony orchestra, bso, dakota, delaware and hudson, hudson, hudson river, james taylor, john williams, keith lockhart, kingston, lenox, motorcycle, mozart, pittsfield, route 209, smetana, stockbridge, tanglewood, tchaikovsky, trike, woodstock, yo-yo ma

Hospital Cafe

The merger of New Milford Hospital and Danbury Hospital into the Western Connecticut Health Network has been very successful. Both hospitals are learning from the other. Now the public is learning about the Cafe. The New York Times featured it and said New Milford Hospital Cafe Defies Stereotypes.

The 85-bed Litchfield County community hospital has a longstanding reputation for high quality and exceptionally compassionate patient care. In addition to their great food, they add many other special touches in its facilities and programs using the Planetree focus on healing and nurturing body, mind and spirit.

Tags: cafe, danbury hospital, hospital, new milford hospital, planetree, western connecticut health network