Meme Scholar with Madness (PhD)

[EndtheMadnessNow]

June 12, 1982, an estimated 750,000-1,000,000 people marched through New York City from the United Nations to Central Park to demand a halt to the dangerous, escalating, and expensive US-Soviet nuclear arms race—at the time, the largest political protest in American history.





Here's a 4-page PDF manifesto copy of the original "Call To Halt The Nuclear Arms Race: Proposal for a Mutual US-Soviet Nuclear-Weapon Freeze", which spurred a nationwide movement and led to the unprecedented 1982 march and demonstration.



As Dr. Randall Caroline Forsberg (July 23, 1943 – October 19, 2007), one of the founders of the nuclear freeze campaign and an organizer of the march, said that day, “Until the arms race stops, until we have a world with peace and justice, we will not go home and be quiet. We will go home and organize.”


Robert Richter’s documentary "In Our Hands" released June 12, 1983, produced by 43 volunteer camera teams and 12 volunteer editors and featuring ordinary citizens along with well-known performers and activists—conveys the energy and passion of that unprecedented day. "One million people. One voice: stop the nuclear arms race. The largest peace demonstration in history, a magical day when even the police were on the side of the marchers." Some notable participates: Meryl Streep, Jerry Stiller, Carly Simon, Joan Baez, Pete Seeger, Roy Scheider, Susan Sarandon, Orson Welles.





Jack Nicholson accepting his BAFTA best actor award for The Last Detail and Chinatown from the set of ONE FLEW OVER THE CUCKOO'S NEST in Oregon. It was a 'smashing' acceptance speech.






On the librarian-military-industrial complex:

As part of a telephone survey afterwards, participants were asked to provide two or three words describing the experience. Of the 78 total words provided, 21 were the same adjective: ‘frustrating’. Participants had trouble signing on to the system and experienced unpredictable failures, ‘irrelevant output’ and, most of all, not knowing ‘what words to use in a search’. Yet they also found the system intriguing and exciting (‘fun’, ‘thorough’, ‘I dig computers’), and 94 per cent said they would use SUPARS (the Syracuse University Psychological Abstracts Retrieval Service) again if it were available. Several offered to keep the experiment running past its deadline by asking their departments to contribute funding to the project.

This group of academic guinea pigs, mostly graduate students in education, psychology and librarianship, were part of a radical online search experiment run by the Syracuse University School of Library Science. SUPARS was one of many ambitious information-retrieval studies that took place between the late 1960s and mid-1970s on US university campuses. A number of factors led to the surge in this research. Developments in computer-processing capability for speed and storage had allowed academic databases and catalogues to be digitised and moved online. Computer terminals were newly modular and could be placed around campuses for decentralised access to mainframes. And military and industry funding for computer-based research was more abundant than it had ever been. Given the opportunity, academic librarians took advantage of the chance to explore this expensive new technology. In turn, universities offered unclassified environments for collaborations with corporate technology firms and military groups; SUPARS was sponsored by the Rome Air Development Center, the laboratory arm of the US Air Force.
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SUPARS was designed by a librarian named Pauline Atherton (who goes by the name of Pauline Atherton Cochrane today). In 1960, aged 30 and early in her library career, she had been the cross-reference editor of that year’s revision of the World Book Encyclopedia, ensuring thorough and accurate cross-linking between different articles. By 1966, she was working at the Syracuse University libraries and in the library school, where in 1968 she demonstrated the first use of an online decimal classification file to aid in search (AUDACIOUS). That same year, she established the first computer-based teaching lab that integrated online search into regular classroom teaching at the library school (LEEP). (In the context of the world before the internet, ‘online’ meant establishing a networked, real-time connection between a mainframe computer and some other remote device, such as a terminal.)

For example, one of the most celebrated figures in this history is Joseph Carl Robnett ‘Lick’ Licklider, whose idea of a universal network directly inspired the invention of ARPANET, often described as ‘the first internet’. (Licklider was also deeply involved with similar 1960s and ’70s campus experiments for online search; he both funded and advised on several studies at MIT libraries that ran during the same period as SUPARS.)

In 1968, the year before SUPARS was designed, Licklider’s paper ‘The Computer as a Communication Device’ declared that: ‘In a few years, men will be able to communicate more effectively through a machine than face to face’ and described a rewarding, blissful society mediated by human computer interactions. Licklider predicted that ‘life will be happier for the on-line individual’ and that ‘communication will be more effective and productive, and therefore more enjoyable’. Licklider’s essay is typically both predictive and rosy for this futuristic genre about the potential of information technology.
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In 2022 and 2023, as the first generative AI search engines, including academic search engines such as Elicit and Consensus, were introduced to a wide set of users to both great excitement and scepticism, it is similarly useful to analyse what will be lost when researchers come to rely on these tools. When we can simply enter research questions to create instantaneous literature reviews, for example, there will not be merely a great positive leap forward. This new technology will create a lack of grounding and context, even as incredible new discoveries are made – a different loss than what Atherton saw, but similarly both intangible and deeply consequential. Being able to predict these consequences in advance, not mourning them as Luddites but actively considering how to help researchers overcome them, is a lesson we can learn from the SUPARS team.

Ingenious librarians

Rome Laboratory established in 1942 (Rome Air Development Center until 1991) is the US "Air Force 'superlab' for command, control, and communications" research and development and is responsible for planning and executing the USAF science and technology program. In October 1997 the R&D lab became part of the Air Force Research Laboratory. Some of the technology developed here gradually leaked out into the consumer world.

Online Books by Rome Air Development Center


I suddenly have a case of Trypophobia...


Amazon Fashion


Recalling how rapper Freddie Gibbs 2022 album "$oul $old $eparately" featured a UFO crash landing in Las Vegas in his song/video "Space Rabbit". In the UFO were 2 passengers, including a Rabbit=2023.



On "Space Rabbit" Freddie looks in the mirror and sees his alter reflection in the form of a Rabbit. This is the exact same scene from "Donnie Darko" movie.






Reminder, some hallucinations are real!!