Something new: Interviewing at York University Libraries is, as it says at the top, “everything I can think of about the hiring process for librarians and archivists at York University Libraries (YUL) that might be useful to someone interviewing for a job.”
A couple of months ago an old friend got in touch because he knew someone who was up for a job at YUL and asked if I could give them the inside scoop on what happens at interviews. I was happy to do it, and told everything I could. Then I got to thinking about the other candidates (their names had been posted internally) and thought to be fair I should see if they wanted any tips. However, I wasn’t going to email them at their current workplace. Two had no personal web presence; the other requested everyone be in touch through Twitter. I gave up.
To stop this from happening again, I decided to write down everything here so everyone has equal access.
It may also be of interest to other academic library workers who want to compare hiring processes.
A library (the public library, I think) isn’t seen but is mentioned in “Mother Hen-Pecked,” which I read in B&V Friends Jumbo Comics 261 (July 2018). It originally appeared in Betty 125 (July 2003).
Panel with Nancy and Betty.
The story is about Betty being kept up by birds chirping outside her window, but at one point Nancy drops by and reminds her about her entry for the library’s literary contest. Later we learn Betty did not win.
The story was written by Mike Pellowski, pencilled by Stan Goldberg, and inked by John Lowe. No colourist or letterer is given. It is copyright Archie Comics Publications.
Listening to Art 03.05 is up today. It’s a field of recording of Caravaggio’s “Judith Beheading Holofernes” done at at the Palazzo Barberini in Rome. This is the second of six Caravaggios in a row, finishing up in September.
I also cleaned up the sidebar and made indexes for previous volumes.
In “A Tale of Two Papers,” which I read in Betty and Veronica Jumbo Comics 262 (June 2018), Ms Grundy assigns everyone an essay about gardening. Betty gets off to a good start by going to the library to do some research, but ends up only getting a D+ while Veronica gets an A.
Panel from A Tale of Two Papers
There’s a later panel of Archie talking to Betty in what I think is the school library, too.
This story was written by Kathleen Webb, whose Betty and Veronica stories are some of the best of the recent comics. They’re always witty and the dialogue between Betty and Veronica is far better than the male writers do. This story ends with the fourth wall breaking and Webb herself talking to the reader.
It was originally published in Betty and Veronica 170, and was pencilled by Jeff Shultz, inked by Henry Scarpelli, coloured by Barry Grossman and lettered by Bill Yoshida. It is copyright Archie Comics Publications.
There are two stories in Archie and Me Comics Digest 8 (August 2018) where Archie and the gang go the the Riverdale Public Library.
The first is “The Long and the Short,” which I think was originally published in Jughead 8 (1988). The library angle in this story is secondary to the main plot, which is about Jughead correcting his friends’ vocabulary, but it begins with Archie on his way to get more books, because it’s summertime and he wants to do a lot of reading. For our purposes it’s interesting because the library’s exterior here is different from other stories:
Panel from The Long and the Short
Notice the video shelves in the background on the left. Borrowing videos from the library was pretty important in older Archie stories.
This entrance is different from any other I remember:
Another panel from The Long and the Short
“The Long and the Short” was written by Frank Doyle, pencilled by Doug Crane, inked by Mike Esposito, coloured by Barry Grossman and lettered by Bill Yoshida. It is copyright Archie Comics Publications.
The other story is “Castles in the Sand,” two-parter originally from Archie at Riverdale High 104 (1985). Archie is out at the beach and gets challenged by kids from Oceantown to a competition to see who can build the best sand castle. His first stop is to do research at the public library.
Panel from Castles in the Sand
Looking through issue after issue of a newspaper is a very tedious way to find something. Full-text searches of back runs are available for most major newspapers now and would make this but a moment’s work.
This story was written by George Gladir, pencilled by Stan Goldberg, inked by Rudy Lapick, coloured by Barry Grossman and lettered by Bill Yoshida. It is also copyright Archie Comics Publications.
I upgraded both my home and work laptops to Ubuntu 18.04, the newest release. Both went perfectly smoothly (not like four years ago) and nothing about the interface has changed, which is just how I like it. No tweaks necessary to make the workspace grid look the way I want, or anything else like that. I freshened and recompiled Emacs and Org, and used Conforguration to move R to the new 3.5.1.
Menus are still broken for me in LibreOffice.
On my home laptop I also fixed a problem I’d noticed a little while ago: I had no swap space. I don’t know why or when—maybe at the last upgrade?—my swap partition stopped being mounted on boot, so I had my eight gigs of RAM but the eight gigs of swap was unavailable. This was only a problem when loading large data sets in R or editing long audio files in Audacity. With gparted I set /dev/sda3 to be type linux-swap (after carefully triple-checking that was the right partition) and then I used blkid to find the UUID of this partition. I edited /etc/fstab, rebooted, and all was well. (See this Ask Ubuntu answer for details.)
At Carveth’s Marina on Stoney Lake in Ontario there’s a sign up where they keep track of the day when the ice is completely out of the lake. (Being in central Ontario the lake freezes over completely in the winter.) The data is also available on their web site. I got curious about it and wondered if I could see any patterns.
I set up an Org file where I would use R. First, the raw data as a table:
The next block loads the raw data, forces the dates to be known as dates instead of just text, adds a new column for just the year, adds a num_days column that is the number of days since the start of the year (I don’t want to work with dates like “19 April,” which are clumsy, and leap years throw things off), adds a column for the decade the year is in, and then drops everything from before 1960.
Next, a chart showing, for each year, how many days it takes for the ice to go out. I add a best-fit line with the lm model (here’s a nice full explanation).
#+begin_src R :session R:ice :results graphics :file carveths-days-to-ice-out.png :width 600 :height 400
ggplot(ice_out, aes(x = year, y = num_days)) + geom_line() + geom_smooth(method = "lm") + labs(title = "Stoney Lake: days to ice out", x = "", y = "Days from start of year")
#+end_src
Chart showing days to ice out.
Visually there’s a definite downward trend there: the ice is going out earlier. I assume this is caused by climate change. Statistically, is there anything really going on here?
In the R session we can find out more about that linear regression by setting it up and then asking it to explain itself.
It’s saying this is a statistically valid model (the Pr values are small), but the R-squared measures (the coefficients of determination) are very low: about 10% of the num_days value is explained by the year.
The model is saying the line shown represents y = -0.18851*x + 481.72452. Over a range of 10 years that means the line changes by 1.8851 downwards, and -1.8851 is pretty close to -2.0, so I think of that as saying “every decade the ice goes out, more or less, almost two days earlier.” (The 481 is the intercept on the y axis, and it’s large because we’re working with contemporary years like 2015; if you subtract 1960 from the years the intercept gets much smaller but the slope of the line stays the same.)
The data does not fit close to the line, as we can see. From one year to the next the ice could go out 25 days earlier or 25 days later. As to the variance, here’s the standard deviation of the number of days to ice out over each decade:
ℝ>ice_out%>%group_by(decade)%>%mutate(std_dev=sd(num_days))%>%select(decade,std_dev)%>%distinct# A tibble: 6 x 2# Groups: decade [6]decadestd_dev<dbl><dbl>119607.43219708.60319806.92419908.70520007.526201011.1
Seems like this decade the variation in when the ice goes out is greater. That fits with the idea of climate change bringing out greater variability in weather, but of course this is just a guess here.
And then I realized that finally I had a chance to try out the ggridges library I’d heard of, because it can do just what I did, and much more, and make it look much nicer.
#+begin_src R :session R:ice :results graphics :file carveths-days-ridges-by-decade.png :width 600 :height 400
ggplot(ice_out, aes(x = num_days, y = decade, group = decade)) + geom_density_ridges(rel_min_height = 0.01, size = 0.25) + theme_ridges() + scale_y_reverse() + labs(title = "Stoney Lake: days to ice out", y = "", x = "Days from start of year")
#+end_src
Ridges of num_days
It certainly looks like things are creeping leftward: there is more > 120 at the top than the bottom, and look how there is more < 80 recently.
Now, bear in mind I’m not a climate scientist and I’m not a statistician, and all I had was a range of dates and I made a linear model and a histogram. There are many factors determining when the ice goes out: one must be the daily temperatures, and historical data on that is available from Environment Canada, but I’m not going to get into that. I have no information about when the lake froze in the first place (anecdotally, it’s later), or how thick the ice is (anecdotally, thinner; I don’t think people drive pickup trucks full of lumber over the ice any more).
Nevertheless, it seems reasonable to say that on average, more or less, since the 1960s the ice is going out almost two days earlier every decade.
For more about this, see Drew Monkman’s presentations on climate change in the Kawarthas (that’s the lake system that Stoney is in).
Miskatonic University Press
