'One Small Step for Me'

We all know people with children who go on about how talented their wonderful child is,
how bright or how cute they are, forever droning on as if we care. If you don’t like listening
to the likes of that, I am going to take this opportunity here and now let you to stop reading this, put it down and walk away. After a lifetime of griping I am coming off the fence, as
proud father of a couple of wonderful little girls.

Morbid curiosity of what appealed to the masses, combined with a love for a beautiful woman. I enrolled in that great institution of marriage in 2008.  In fact, it wasn’t really a quantum leap when one considers that we had co-habited for two years prior.  We’d hardly noticed any shift in our own little matrix. Life went about it’s own routine, dinner out at the weekend, with the odd trip abroad and my Sunday running around the rugby pitches of Connacht keeping order as a referee.

There are comparisons a child’s arrival that mirror an amphibious assault landing. Any amount of training and preparation might give the troops a vague sense of what is on the cards, but not until the ramp goes down that one realises theory and practice are far removed.

For the child though it is a different scenario, catapulted for no apparent reason out of her comforts into a cold bright environment with a load of strangers looking and poking at you. I’m having none of that.

For some of our large mammal cousins life on earth may start with the ability to stand
within a few hours of birth, for logistical and security issues. Movement for Homo-sapiens
is an entirely different kettle of fish, not a curve but a vector. With movement there is a single goal, it comes with a concept, independent movement as soon as possible. I wasn’t doing all that kicking inside for your benefit mom.

Once out and about firstly comes ‘the Grip’, followed by ‘the Stretch’ and ‘the Kick’ too.
On then to rolling over on her side in preparation for the 180 degree ‘Rollover’, the ability
to go from her back to her belly ad lib, with tremendous accolades from her parents.  This
culminates with ‘the Sit Up’.  Without ‘the Sit Up’ the child is lost, and subject to a totally
abstract view of the world. Back drop of a ceiling, the most humble artifact of the domestic room. Annoying persons moving in and out into her field of vision saying ridiculous things, how stimulating? And yet you wonder I cry!

All this changes with ‘the Sit Up’. Now our young protégé gets the view in the same axis as her ‘Yoda”, Life can begin in earnest. All that is not battened, bolted or tied down is destined to becomes an appetizer. This is often in conjunction with the arrival of the first teeth, the want to start nibbling, gnawing and chomping at all and sundry. I’ll have me some of that!

With ‘the Sit Up’ the penny drops, she can deduce that limb motions equate to movement.
The concept of ‘the Pull’, dawns on her, soon followed by ‘the Kick’.  Soon first limb motions start to accumulate into traction, at last!!! Anyone for Karate?

Alas, as with all of us things never happen as quick as we like them to and our little one
starting out on her journey is no different.  She is now well on her way to developing ‘the Cry’ tactic, to which the most common counter is ‘the Ignore’, where her rebuttal is of course an increase in volume with recourse to a few tears. Playing Dad like a Stradivarius.

With the advent of ‘the Crawl’, we attain the ‘Mohammad to the mountain’ syndrome. A glance over your shoulder and you will see her constantly shuffling towards you. The first tentative crawl begins with little or no traction but soon she will be up to speed, culminating in ‘the Scoot’. Look out Usain Bolt.

‘The Scoot’ is a nasty period as her unsuspecting parent has been lulled into a sense of
security, unaware that at the slightest opportunity, a door ajar or any opening for that
matter, and she will be off like it’s Aintree in March. An inattentive guardian can find her
out wallowing in a puddle or a garden bed, oblivious to the fact that not all places are as
clean as home. But if ‘the Scoot’ is bad, the nemesis of every well intentioned parent is
looming around the corner. What is that big thing in the middle of the house?

‘The Climb’ starts off cute, lulled again by the “isn’t our child wonderful” scenario, it is the
one component that multiplies the perils of the standard home by a factor of ten. Stairs, the best toys in the house by far. Her cute grin as she set out up ‘The Ogre’ between upstairs and downstairs.  Lumbering on with scant regard to the Newtonian Laws that govern physics. On then to ‘the Stand Up’. This is what it is all about, now I’m getting like Daddy. By now the skill of pulling herself up has been honed to and Art form. Cupboards become mini ‘Narnias’ waiting to reconnoiter, by brute force if necessary, anti-child devices violently destroyed. That will teach you.

It take hours of collapsing on her bum but ‘the Stand Up’ is what it is all about. It begins the metamorphoses into a kind of primeval swing, a standing scoot between handles in various guise. Damn Newton and those pesky laws, I will triumph! But slipping and falling on the bum is a mere occupational hazard, it is apparent that engaging her upper limb in conjunction with sequential movement of her lower limbs in a common direction, is the formula that has eluded her for the year. Eureka!! Now we are motoring.

Then finally one year into the programme, after hour upon hour of hardship, up and down the stairs, in and out of every room an infinite number of times, the cranial cogs seem to mesh and it all comes together.  Ah, so that’s how this works!

Ideally at a predetermined location with notification to the local press, maybe some regional media if possible and of course, an orchestra playing ‘Also Sprach Zarathustra’ by Richard  Strauss. More likely when Dad is in the shower or Mum in loading the washing machine for the umpteenth time, finally ‘The Step’.

‘The Step’, eternally freed from the bondage of the static, she manages to loosen her grip
on the handles. I don’t need you anymore, not now not ever. We are no longer parents but
contemporaries, there’s a little glint in her eye and behind the grin is a new born confidence. One small step for me, one large leap for Mankind.

'if I had ten divisions of those men, then our troubles would be over very quickly" W.E. Kurtz

Back in my time in New York University I had a lecturer, Michael Warnham. When Micheal had something of major importance to say, he would merely repeat it in the conversation. No change of tone or no change of pitch, simply repeat the item during the normal course of the conversation, simply repeat the item during the normal course of the conversation. This was very effective as it meant that you had to listen intently.

On receiving this assignment I decided on the Jstor database and the British Broadcasting Corporation website as my two sources. As with any comparative situation, we must first lay out parameters as a standard to equate them with. So I logged on to the internet and opened the Jstor.org website and bbc.co.uk to see what they offer.

I picked two keywords ‘ONLINE’ and ‘DATABASE’. Despite the fact that both BBC and Jstor are in existence around the same time, Jstor database came into existence in 1995 while the BBC took their bbc.co.uk service online in 1997. The difference is the former is an search engine for academic writings while the latter is a derivative of the BBC’s own news journalism desk.

My experience with the BBC website is entirely a more familiar experience as I logged into it on a daily basis. I find it well designed and accessible with a high journalistic content. The standard that one would expect from them. The BBC use of a three column grid is similar to Jstor’s. Their aesthetic is masterful, clean and concise with a bold use of colour combined with good typographic treatment. Jstor’s on the other hand is functional, clearly appealing to a different market

While the BBC site search engine returned seventy three hits, broken into four main categories, News, Blog, Learning and TV/Radio. JStor returned 29,500 results to a search with the same key words, split into fifty nine separate categories. From this we must deduce that they are searching entirely different areas of the net. Jstor reaches much deeper into the web through a secure portal, as opposed to the BBC’s universal access option. 

During my long absence from academia, a lot of things have changed. Libraries in my day were stuffy rooms full of silence. As I accessed Jstor from the comforts of my own terminal, the implications of what a modern research database can be dawned on me. I felt like a pre-Christian goat herder on the steps of the Library of Alexandria gazing in, another Rubicon crossed on the eternal quest for enlightenment.

The BBC is a cornerstone for Her Majesty’s empire, they are in fact the world oldest national broadcaster. As a news source it is seen as a fair well informed opinion, although there is no doubt that is stance is conservative and in spite of a Royal charter, it is a privately owned autonomous institution.

In many ways British society stands for much I believe in. As a legacy to their empire ‘where the sun never sets’, there is a multi-ethnic society of much political correctness to which the BBC supplies fair comment too.

While my search of the BBC site seemed to return a concise search of it’s own matter from contemporary sources, the corresponding return from Jstor revealed just the tip of the iceberg, it would require more decisions of refine precisely what I was looking for.

On which database to rely on for answers would depend on a number of overriding factors. In an effort to be objective with the comparison we must compare apple with apples. In terms of data returned, they are both are effective but the Jstor results are of course deeper in the web as one needs an academic motive to access it, thus needing a lot more involvement from the recipient.

At the turn of the century Time magazine did a series of surveys to find out the impact on society of a number of topics during the last millennium. The result of the greatest invention category was ‘Gutenberg's movable type’ for its contribution to dissemination of information. With assets like Jstor this takes on and entirely new meaning.

The fact that Jstor results are in PDF format allows for much greater applications for the information returned. Operations such as OCR (optical character recognition), annotation and encryption are native to it’s format. PDF files can also be reverse engineered, if required, bearing this in mind the singularity draws ever closer, the singularity draws ever closer.