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Canadian Government Trucking Generations of Scientific Data To the Dump
sandbagger writes "Canada's science documents are literally being taken to the dump. The northern nation's scientific community has been up in arms over the holidays as local scientific libraries and records offices were closed and their shelves — some of which contained century old data — emptied into dumpsters. Stephen Harper's Tory government is claiming that the documents have been digitized. The scientists say, 'The people who use this research don’t have any say in what is being saved or tossed aside.'"
No. Seriously.
Lay people are left out of the equation, as usual.
Ran out of igloos?
Fuck systemd. Fuck Redhat. Fuck Soylent, too. Wait, scratch the last one.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rainbows_End
... is doomed to repeat it.
Does anyone else get the impression that we're on the downside of civilization?
Slashdot itself is very much in the same situation at the moment. Its original heritage is in the process of being thrown out, for absolutely no good reason at all.
The current Slashdot site, while not perfect by any means, has many benefits above and beyond the new beta site that so many of us have been subjected to against our will. It is faster. It doesn't waste screen space. The fonts are legible. The list of stories is easy to read, and without useless large images. The discussion is much easier to read and participate in.
Just as original scientific documents may be thrown into a dumpster, I fear that we'll see the existing Slashdot site thrown in alongside them. The "digitized" scientific documents will never be the same as the originals, just like the beta Slashdot site will never be as good as the existing site. The current site contains the essence of what Slashdot was and is. The Slashdot beta site is a sad hipster-inspired parody; a Web 2.0 monstrosity that comes five years after the Web 2.0 hype blew over.
Once the originals are gone, it is quite unlikely that they'll ever be recovered. The damage, once done, is done for all eternity. I weep for these scientific documents, and I weep for what will become of Slashdot once the beta site replaces the current one. I weep, and I weep.
If it weren't for the Tory government trying to trump Science with Politics then this wouldn't be a story... I always see Libraries recycling books etc. and this will save a lot of money.
It does seem sad that digitizing books leads to destruction of physical copies. I hope they are earnestly being offered to other libraries beforehand.
Stephen Harper's Tory government is claiming that the documents have been digitized. The scientists say, 'The people who use this research don’t have any say in what is being saved or tossed aside.'
Clearly, someone should do a study.
Clearly there is a lot of smoke and hot air being generated, not sure if there is really much of a fire.
That’s no way to treat a library, scientists say
Their internationally renowned collections have been transferred to the two federal aquatic libraries that remain, in Sidney, B.C., and in Dartmouth, N.S. ...
Gail Shea, minister of fisheries and oceans, accuses critics of spreading “serious misinformation.” Her department insists there will be “no changes to the size or scope of the collection.”
In a statement emailed to the Star by her spokesperson, Shea said no more than a dozen nonemployees visited each library annually. And more than 95 per cent of documents provided to users were done so over the Internet.
“It’s not fair to taxpayers to make them pay for libraries that so few people actually used,” Shea says, explaining the government’s main reason for consolidating the collections. The closings will save $443,000 in 2014-2015, according to government estimates. .....
The research, Ayles argues, “is effectively lost because it’s no longer accessible. It’s like stuff in your grandfather’s basement.”
So the data hasn't disappeared, it's now in another library where it is less convenient to access.
much of left-wing thought is a kind of playing with fire by people who don't even know that fire is hot - George Orwell
Harper's doing a great job of dumping anything related to science into the trash. It's a sad thing to see something so fundamental pushed aside like rotten food in favour of short term economic gains. So much power with less than 40% of the vote... how about some proportional representation up here, maybe? It seems somewhat disingenuous to ignore thousands of votes and still claim to be a healthy democracy.
Truth is a matter of perspective. Wear the other guy's shoes before you dismiss him.
Google could have archived all that data like no one else on the planet. Canadian universities and libraries should have called them in before the obviously incompetent people showed up (or maybe save places not visited yet). Reminds me of the phrase: "We are from the government and we are here to help you."
They've only said that they have. I realize that it's considered poor form around here to read the article before commenting but...
---- The above post was generated by the Turing Institute. Maybe.
To researchers, academics, students and even everyday folk in Canada's most populous areas (Alberta, Ontario and Quebec), it really makes no difference if the material is in a dump somewhere, or if it's in obscure, out-of-the-way towns or cities like Sidney and Dartmouth. It's just about as inaccessible either way.
I think they've already named all the spiders.
I want to delete my account but Slashdot doesn't allow it.
There's a war on science in this country. It's a disaster. And it'll continue at least until the next election, which may be years away. I'm ashamed of what's happening to my country.
-- hendrik, a Canadian.
Stephen Harper's Tory government is claiming that the documents have been digitized
320x200 jpegs stored on 5 1/4" floppies is good enough for anyone!
Is there any substantial support for the slashdot beta?
-- hendrik
You say it's just "two points", but there are many, many more on this line. And, yes, the trend among these many points is indeed a downward sloping one.
We have these documents being made far harder to access, assuming they're not completely lost. We have "free trade" with third-world shitholes destroying the economies of all Western nations. We have rampant and unchecked immigration destroying Western nations, the most successful nations to have ever existed. We have political correctness running wild, preventing real discussion about the significant problems facing Western society today, thus preventing any sort of positive action to remedy these issues.
For some closer-to-home examples, just look at the Slashdot beta site, for crying out loud. Look at the hipsters who have done their best to destroy major open source projects like GNOME. Look at the crap we call JavaScript and Ruby on Rails. Look at Windows 8.
There are far, far more negative points in our graph than there are positive ones. The trend slopes downward at an ever-increasing rate. What was one great has been sullied. What was sullied has become soaked in the feces of a thousand cows. The trend is a downward one, and the data points are many.
Inaccessible? Because they suddenly don't have the Internet in Canada, which according to the article, is how 95% of the documents in that library were being requested anyway? Seems to me they've made it accessible not just to Canada's most populous areas, but to anyone anywhere in the world.
Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it.
Don't believe Shea's claims about the usage numbers. Those stats reflect people who requested help in using the libraries - relatively rare with specialized research collections where a host of users just get to work in what used to be showpiece collections. Many of these users came from the DFO institutions but also from outside, including academics, people in industry and other government employees. The provision of materials over the internet? Largely had to be digitized from library collections. Now we'll have neither the collections nor the librarians to do so.
The hasty closures and haphazard deaccessioning of these collections that represent substantial investments of taxpayer money over decades? Entirely the opposite of what conservatives claim to value - careful custody of a nation's heritage and citizen investment. (Canada's federal government is in the control of the Progressive Conservative party, hard at work muzzling the scientists supported by our tax dollars.)
From The Tyee's December 23 story on the topic, "What Driving Chaotic Dismantling of Canada's Science Libraries": Moreover records on library usage were overtly biased and based on who asked for help, said Burton Ayles, a retired director general for DFO who lives in Winnipeg and has used the Freshwater Institute library frequently.
"Most people that come in to the library don't have to request help. They just use the material. Just look at any regular library."
ancarett, historian and zombie gamer
And we're all Taxed to the Max. At the risk of being modded troll I'll point out that this is what happens when "Fiscal Con conservatives" get in power. You didn't think they were going to cut their own pet projects, did you? As the saying goes, this is why we can't have nice things...
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It actually makes a whole lot of sense. The reason why this is happening is not only to make room and lower storage costs but mainly that those records and other data have the potential to undermine the findings of future research. That is why it is important to have everything in digital form. That way in future data can be corrected long after it has been obtained in cases where it does not aligh with research, or discarded altogether. Every morning you wake up to a brave new world.
Actually this is a BIG deal.
The purpose of these department of fisheries and oceans (DFO) libraries was not for the general public to access them - they were for government scientists in these research centres be able able to proper research and be able to do studies on climate/fish-habitat change over time, which includes looking up past materials and reports. For a "non-employee" to access, these government libraries actually requires a fairly lengthy application process.
In the past, governments have relied on these scientists to give them accurate reports on what is happening in the environment, so the government could make informed policy decisions based on facts. Without good research materials this is very hard to do. (or maybe that's the point...)
One of the greatest losses will be "grey materials" - reports that are hard to find because they were never "officially published", and may not exist in any other library. Or they may exist elsewhere, but it requires a lengthy wait to locate the materials and have them shipped assuming the other library will lend them out. Reports are now coming in that very few of the materials are actually being scanned, and most are just being thrown out.
The move is especially disappointing because the Minister of Fisheries and Oceans (a politician) is saying this move will save "$443,000" over one year. This is the same federal government that spent $9 million dollars last year on advertising to make people feel better about their cell phone bills.
And, yes I'm Canadian. It's not a good situation.
(name withheld)
From the community, you mean? I sure haven't seen much at all. Just about every comment I've seen (must be well over 50 at this point), with the exception of maybe one or two, has not been in favor of it. Many comments have been outright hostile toward it. The couple that weren't completely against it weren't exactly for it, either. I remember one of the claims, which basically amounted to it "not being as shitty on mobile devices". That's not really what I'd consider a supportive comment.
It's a mystery why the Slashdot beta hasn't been canceled. It's a failed software project by every metric. The users hate it, it's technologically inferior, it has been in the works for a long time without any real improvements, and it'll likely be forced on us even though it is worse than what we've currently got. We've seen this play out before, and it's a disaster each and every time.
95% of requests were over the Internet, rather than in person - no surprise there, it's more accessible. We have no idea how many of the documents were available to be accessed this way, though.
No wait, we do. FTFA:
In late December, as outrage over the library closings grew, her department posted answers to 19 questions online. It gave the total size of the print collection as 660,000 items. Some 30,000 departmental publications are available online and more documents are being digitized. But many books can’t be digitized due to copyright laws.
So only 4.5% of documents are available online (assuming departmental publications == print collection, which I'm not sure about). Too soon to start throwing out entire collections, it seems - if ever.
Why would anyone engrave "Elbereth"?
"Is trucking something to somewhere meant to be a pejorative because trucking useful goods is an vital part of our economy. This shouldn't be made fun of or disparaged just because it's what many people consider 'manual labor'... Who decided that on that language? It's very troublesome."
I agree, the idea of the summary titling is offensive. And not just to trucking! Notice the use of the "dumps"?
What is wrong with dumps? I take dumps all the time! Probably about one per day, but sometimes a bit more than that!
I find the summary offensie in a great many ways.
Priest: "Universe from nothing, no laws of physics, sped up time"+ huge discrepancies. Creationism? No. Big Bang Theory
There is a difference between "inaccessible" and "in a dump somewhere". The difference being it is retrievable if it's sitting in a dusty library somewhere but not if rotting in landfill. There have been many times where I have been searching for a long lost article where the only version of it is in hard copy in the library and there is no current study that would take its place. If you are desperate and far away you can call a colleague to find the paper but you cannot find lost papers in a tip.
Throwing out these old papers would only make a skerrick of sense, and I mean a only a skerrick, if it had been directly verified that there was a digital copy. I have found that digital copies exist mainly for new papers not for old ones such as these. There is a high risk that information will be and has been irretrievably lost because of actions such as these.
Dumping of historical studies and data on this scale saddens me, who knows what we have lost?
Google works for you to fella. Do your own damn homework.
Without looking in google, can you find the street address of even one of these 9 libraries?
No? I thought not.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.
Jesus, grow some skin. It's offensive because the vital goods being moved to the dump are being *destroyed* with a thin assurance (and no proof) that they've been digitized. Truck drivers and garbage disposal workers aren't bad; people who destroy irreplaceable books are.
What the fuck good does knowing the addresses of the libraries do if the documents are no longer there? NOT A WHOLE LOT OF GOOD, DICKWAD!
And what the fuck good does Google do if the "digitized" documents really aren't accessible? NOT A WHOLE LOT OF GOOD, DICKWAD!
The GGP and you have both claimed that these documents are now easily accessible to anyone on the Internet now that they've allegedly been digitized. Yet neither you nor him can provide even a single goddamn link to any of them. PROVDE THE LINKS, DICKWAD, OR SHUT THE HELL UP!
I'm pretty sure they make chewable Haldol now. Try the grape.
Mostly random stuff.
I've been a government scientist in the USA, which may be a similar job and work culture in Canada.
I worked in a building with a disorganized library visited by a handful of people a year. There were very few people under 50 who visited. It's more than just libraries, there are entire scientific fields which are dying or dead. To carry on the work based on the material in that library, the scientists funded and advised one PhD student. They found a professor studying something close to their field, but he didn't know any of the real background or modern work. Because this was a field which the government walled off from academia (ie classified), there were very few public papers and no grants funding students.
So we had a library consisting of decades of research data taken by a team of professional scientists as well as designs and logs for the (very important) equipment the government uses based on that research. There was a small team of scientists nearing retirement and one young scientist to keep things running until the whole infrastructure falls apart.
Maybe they don't want to be the next Canadian Hoarder? Save ALL the data!
As I posted in another thread today, conservatives want to be taken seriously but who can take people who are "anti-science" seriously? Anti-fact? Anti-knowledge? I mean, what is the point, other than to lie to people or to ignore the facts? Who is stupid enough to advocate that?
Conservatism, in the US, Canada, and elsewhere, has become a joke. They've gotten away with acting crazy to intimidate people, and no surprise -- all they have to offer is more crazy.
they closed some record areas and laid off union people - books from the 60's etc all the reports are in other areas etc - just back water - sit on your ass jobs that are not needed - fake story
so when i refered to harper as a nazi....on michealgeist.ca and giest banned me what does mickey say now....
nazis did this kind a shit....then they got at putting his jews into camps then off to ovens and gas chambers.....
ye who forgets his past is doomed to relive it.
FUCK NAZIS
Can't people file freedom of information requests for this data. That should lock it up legally.
They are bamboozled by the idea of a (pretend) good economy and cutting costs -- no matter what the loss is. The American chant has caught sails here and is drowning any good sense.
Canada is vast with a small population. When things are lost, they are really gone for good. We've lost more from which we can recover already and almost no one gives a shit.
Harper is our W and the next guy to take the reigns will have a pile of crap to undo. And I think that is going to be more than the country can bear.
http://saveela.org/
You don't get to use that argument here, asshat. You are one of the first people on this site to scream [citation needed]. It doesn't feel good when someone does that to you now does it?
Did you catch this:
"“The department may remove only content that is duplicated at one or more libraries and, in rare instances, materials which fall outside the subject disciplines pertinent to the department’s mandate,” says the DFO website, describing the material discarded from its collection."
Departmental mandates are revised to suit the political flavour of the day as part of strategic planning activities (mission, vision, values, etc.) and it happens every couple of years. This allows for some really pernicious and creative manipulation of public institutions that exist to regulate and monitor shared resources. Here is the mandate for DFO. In real terms, a high level deputy minister might instruct his senior management staff that, "it is not in our mandate to keep records of X because it is not required by the legislation that defines our work." It's a very prescriptive and disingenuous approach, but it works with career bureaucrats because they lack the expertise to form a cohesive argument against it. You can be sure they're digging in their heels, but they have to pick their battles very carefully. Federal agencies have been eviscerated in the last few years and management is trying to weather the storm in the hopes that the political climate will change soon.
This is reminiscent of the de-funding of the Experimental Lakes Area in 2012, which also involved the DFO. It was a project area that had existed for 45 years and produced 745 peer-reviewed scientific articles, 126 graduate theses, 102 book chapters and synthesis papers, 185 data reports, and several books. With respect to the destruction of data, I'm sure one could argue, "Since the ELA is no longer part of the DFO's mandate, that data can be destroyed."
What's noteworthy about this article is that the DFO has impressive, far-reaching regulatory power and this cost saving measure is part of an attempt to make the department more "effective" in conducting its regulatory duties. Ultimately, the hope is that industry projects can be approved in a more timely manner. I don't think it's an evil plot to destroy the environment, rather it is a misguided attempt to make a Canadian governmental agency better able to do its day-to-day job. Ultimately, it will impede the agency's ability to adapt and respond to changing client needs. A lot of people of a certain political ideology don't value research because it is hard to describe its utility in financial terms. This is self-evidently foolish, as continuous research is essential to improving the health of the population, effectively managing resources, and developing new technologies and techniques. Unfortunately, this reasoning really appeals to the masses of Canadians who "don't want their tax dollars wasted."
It's absolutely awful. This goes beyond not liking change. It's terrible.
Stephen Harper's Tory government is claiming that the documents have been digitized.
Yeah, it's all ones and zeros now.
Harper - 1
Science - 0
What excuse does the Harper government have to burn first, ask "if" later?
Under transparency, there is no "if".
Great. While the US is using 1984 as reference, Canada settled on Fahrenheit 451. Why are governments so hell bent on using dystopian scenarios?
Personally I think the appalling beta is a ruse to make you think the current /. is actually good as anything next to that pile of poo looks exceptional.
Heh, angry much? Calm down, man. I couldn't even decipher your point, there was so much RAGE in the way.
Our current government has been anti-science in terms of their policy the whole time. one of the neatest, largest science experiments ever is our experimental lakes area.....defunded. government funded scientists are under gag orders, now this. eat a huge bowl of deez conservatives. maybe jesus will ride home on his raptor soon, but probably not.
Oh. My. God. They threw out the study that showed there was a difference between ham and backbacon down in the 7th or 8th decimal place of measurement.
(-1: Post disagrees with my already-settled worldview) is not a valid mod option.
Harper has GOT to go . He's not only a foe to science but an enemy of the People of Canada.
They've done the same at CSIRO in Australia, justified by keeping one physical copy at a single location, could be any location, on this continent. But that's only for a small portion of what was chucked. As for digitising, no not really.
Dumpster divers got some rare classic texts, with the caveat that the books had suffered the usual indignities inflicted by librarians under the banner of 'ex libris'.
We can't have nice things. (Or facts, for that matter.)
DaveyJJ
fake history math & science is obsoletely fatal now. momkind's spirit driven solutions never left they were just overwritten
what does this mean, "Trucking Generations of Scientific Data To the Dump" ?
Tricky. I'm going to go out on a limb and guess that it means that they're taking recorded scientific data, sticking it in a truck and then driving that truck to a dump. In truth they might actually be putting the data in a skip (or dumpster for you North Americans) then lifting the dumpster on to the back of a truck then driving that truck to the dump, rather than loading the data directly into the truck. The headline is admittedly unclear in this aspect.
Presumably after the trucking (with or without a skip) they then empty the truck/skip into the dump rather than return it to the depot full of data or simply park the truck (with or without a skip or possibly just the skip alone) at the dump in perpetuity. I admit that this part is implied but I feel it is not an unreasonable inference.
Is trucking something to somewhere meant to be a pejorative
Yes. It would be much more acceptable if the data was delivered to the dump by an army of bike couriers. Then there would be no complaints whatsoever.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
and the mistakes weren't picked up when they could be easily corrected either... no double checking was being done of the scanner settings or the operator feeding it in before the button was pressed to start scanning.... It wasn't until the digitised copies were being proof read against the hardcopy after having been OCR'd that the mistakes were being found... :(
Donald 'Duck' Dunn: We had a band powerful enough to turn goat piss into gasoline.
Is this really happening or is this just the typical hysterical response that many government agencies engage in when their budgets are threatened? Scientists seem particularly prone to that sort of behavior.
My own suspicion is that this is like how our American park service responded to a recent budget shutdown. They tried to inflict as much pain on the public as possible, even forcing the shutdown of private businesses who merely rented land from the park service.
In many cases--in the US and Canada--the term "public servant" no longer applies to government employees. They regard us as serving them.
Kind of easy to hurt them if they're pissing millions on the floor to make people feel better about their cell phone bills (which I think they're on record for doing) and then doing this, claiming it saved just under a half million per year.
We've got people like you here in the States...we call them Libtards right at the moment.
If it's all just "alarmism", then why get rid of the evidence?
So, we should force Canada Post to continue to deliver to homes despite losing boatloads of money at it due to union wages and the dropoff in volume because of electronic mail?
It's not like people will be forced to go to a central post office to pick up their mail, they are replacing "I walk up your driveway and stick your mail in your house" with "your mail is delivered daily to the central post box ON YOUR BLOCK into your private lockbox"
Jesus. Harper has done enough things wrong that people should have a litany of well-rounded complaints - but spreading FUD about Canada Post is just stupid.
The beta is donkey balls.
On my desktop, when scrolling up from the bottom of the front page (so I can read the stories in "first in, first out" mode) ... my cursor position is repeatedly reset down to the bottom of graphics I just scanned past.
Give me back my text-based system please!
Here's the story:
a) "the people" insist the government to scale back on spending, so they do.
b) departments cannot get $$ to build additional storage and so have to scale back holdings
c) the task is passed to the librarians who themselves have been subject to staff cuts. Why? Because a scientific department will cut 'superfluous staff', like librarians, before they cut 'necessary' staff, like scientists.
d) the librarians left have to scan what they must (can't scan it all because of $$/time limits) and dispose of what is deemed valueless
e) the librarians SOLICIT GUIDANCE FROM THE SCIENTISTS as to what should stay and what should go
f) the MAJORITY of scientists PAY NO ATTENTION UNTIL AFTER THE FACT because they are 'too busy for such things as managing archival documents'. The attitude is: they are scientists, not librarians.
g) lacking guidance and under pressure to make room for new arrivals (govt scientists order books and papers like they were free), the librarians make best guesses; and
h) bear the brunt of the abuse when some scientist decides to make an issue of the cull.
Nothing prevented the scientists from particpating in the entire process. Nothing prevented the scientists from scanning the documents themselves and holding them locally. NOTHING except their own APATHY.
The government scientists in Canada are well paid making, within a few years, over $100K/year (see DS 3-4/SE-RES-2 levels which are attained in 5 yrs or on hire and look for ) and who are not held to the publishing demands of even a small university. As public servants, they enjoy the equivalent of tenure upon hiring (very difficult to fire a public servant even during govt cuts). These facts frequently lead to apathy and a sense of privilege. There are some exceptional scientists, and then there are some who play at politics and do little else. That's what this issue is about; it's not about facts, it's about partisanship.
"Consensus" in science is _always_ a political construct.
Santana's cover charted.
I have a huge issue with digitizing documents: Not everything gets scanned. Say there's a fold-out sheet, or a map in the back pocket, or a supplemental 11x17 spreadsheet, or some other non-standard format. With many, many digitization projects, the minimum-wage scanning drones will ignore such materials, either because it doesn't fit in the scanner, or they're too lazy to unfold it. I have seen this over and over with government document archives, Google Books, scientific archives, etc. It is incredibly frustrating when the text refers to "Map B", and you find that the image for Map B is a scan of folded-up paper. It is also frustrating when the scan monkeys run the whole thing through at 100dpi black and white, losing all details from the figures, graphics, tables, etc.
So I tend to take any claims of "It's been digitized" with a huge grain of salt. You *might* get the text, but you probably won't get any of the special materials that took the bulk of time and effort to produce, and may have in fact been the meat of the document.
The dump is going to be where folks of the future mine to find out about our daily lives. Such information would be a virtual treasure-trove for posterity. We just need to properly wrap it to give it the best chance of survival.
It is not like folks today are using it.
Would be better if the data was actually online, though it isn't.
They're using Tory like an adjective, so I looked it up and it's the name of a political party in the UK (either that or it's an actress from 90210). What does that have to do with Canada?
"Pretty soon you run out of spending other people's money" {sic}. Because the money is yours, not theirs, and they used guile and subterfuge to convince you otherwise...
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The only problem with digitizing is that eventually current modern formats will be obsalete, and unless they continuously spend millions of dollars to keep updating software and hardware formats, one day that data will be lost. This is a problem nasa and other big organizations have run into; the older formats that have important, relevant data can no longer be read as no-one makes the hardware to run the storage medium or has the necessary software to read the files. Paper storage is inefficient in a lot of ways, but it's also really the only format that has the potential to last centuries...and it has.
Interesting how an all-call for the data is given in advance, to both those to whom it is likely that it would impact their daily lives first, then the general public. After this, libraries are shut down and lots of refuse is thrown out, and you've got people who could have gone to the library and taken it complaining how this is an anti-science crusade. You'd think if it was a decent special interest group, they'd just have shut down the libraries and destroyed the data rather than telling everyone about it and letting the "incriminating" data get into public hands.
It does sound like a poor idea. Perhaps the community can come up with a better way to warehouse large amounts of printed paper?
How about a distributed library: Subscribers offer to 'host' (i.e. keep at home) a small portion of the total material, and access then is managed through an online database, where readers can request to 'check out' books and other materials held by subscribers for some fee which covers the costs of couriering the documents to them.
I think, if done on a large enough scale, it could be cost effective enough to be attractive. It also eliminates the possibility of the whole collection being destroyed by vandalism or accident.
Seems like a nice synthesis of old technology and new, a sort of 'wind-up radio' internet library.
By that reckoning the Mona Lisa, black Maddonna and the shroud of Turin can all be trucked off to the dump. Why bother hiring teachers just give every kid a flash drive so they can down load the content.
By that reckoning the Mona Lisa, black Maddonna and the shroud of Turin can all be trucked off to the dump. Why bother hiring teachers just give every kid a flash drive so they can down load the content. We don't need schools libraries or art galleries. Just reduce everything to digi form