At the University of Chicago's new library, 70 students have summer jobs filling a chilly subterranean bunker 50 feet beneath the main reading room. Their mission: Load a million volumes into a machine-dominated warehouse that most library patrons will never see. "You feel like you're feeding this giant robot," says Victoria Lee, an anthropology major who earns $11.15 an hour stuffing bound journals into steel bins. Ms. Lee's insatiable robot is a computer system that directs mechanical cranes to store those bins in giant stacks and retrieve them when patrons request their contents. Another "bookless library" for the digital age? No. F or all its gee-whiz gadgetry, the building is actually an $81-million bet that researchers still need ready access to a much older technology: print. Like other libraries, Chicago's faced the problem of bulging stacks. But unlike others, it didn't relieve that crunch by exiling collections to remote locations or disposing of little-used holdings. Its underground storage system can place a bound volume in faculty fingers less than five minutes after getting the request. At Chicago, the facility houses dissertations, special collections, government documents, and journals that are available digitally. It's stuff researchers can look up in an online catalog but don't need to browse on open shelves. And by offloading this ma­terial into underground storage, Chicago is freeing up space to keep traditional books in open stacks at the adjoining Joseph Regenstein Library, where a patron can continue to scan shelves the old-fashioned way. There is a line of wooden carts along the wall. These hold the collections that Judith Nadler's team of student loaders is feeding into the 24,000 bins. Many are bound volumes of periodicals, like the Journal of Antimicrobial Chemotherapy, or old documents, like a box of Illinois Supreme Court opinions from 1972 to 1974. "We loaded yesterday over 20,000 books in one day," gushes Ms. Nadler, director and librarian at the University of Chicago . "I was just jumping around. It's magnificent." The books are stored by size rather than library classification. Each item has a bar code that students scan before loading it into a bin, so the "robot" knows where everything is. And the robot is fast. Back up at the ground-floor circulation center, David N. Borycz, project manager at the library, demonstrates what happens when a patron wants an item. He uses the online library catalog to request a dissertation, "God's Gardeners," by David Kenneth Larsen. A few clicks and it's in the retrieval queue. Then a nearby door slides open. One of the five mechanical cranes has delivered up the bin to a small loading dock. And there, tucked among a series of other bound maroon volumes, is Mr. Larsen's dissertation. http://chronicle.com/article/A-High-Tech-Library-Keeps/128370/

Marketers are spying on Internet users -- observing and remembering people's clicks, and building and selling detailed dossiers of their activities and interests. The Wall Street Journal's What They Know series documents the new, cutting-edge uses of this Internet-tracking technology. The Journal analyzed the tracking files installed on people's computers by the 50 most popular U.S. websites, plus WSJ.com. The Journal also built an "exposure index" -- to determine the degree to which each site exposes visitors to monitoring -- by studying the tracking technologies they install and the privacy policies that guide their use. As of this writing, three articles are available in the series. http://blogs.wsj.com/wtk/?mod=e2tw

When my husband and I purchased a 160-year-old schoolhouse in the rolling hills of western Massachusetts, greening it was the furthest thing from my mind. I quickly fell in love with its quirky characteristics, eleven-foot ceilings, and wavy, handmade glass windows. My New England house benefited greatly from a professional energy audit. Our auditors used a blower-door test, determined our insulation situation, coordinated the contract for the blow-in insulation into our hollow wall cavities, installed an insulated box for our drop-down attic stairway, facilitated a zero-interest loan for an upgraded heating system, and even sealed and caulked ductwork and gaps. They did this all for free. Read about the state and federal agencies who made the free audit possible. Also, get tips for every room in the house, and information on appliances, cleaners, landscaping and lawn care at: Your Green Abode: a Practical Guide to a Sustainable Home by Tara Rae Miner

The robot paused, as if it were considering the multitudes who might be dialing in to incarnate it. Lyndon, it finally declared. A small camera flipped up at the robot's crown. White headlights flashed at its base, then blue and orange lights blinked on around its monitor. The robot disengaged from its charging station and began rolling toward a doorway. A bell rang. The bot gathered speed lest it be late for its ninth-grade science class. Coach Lawson approached the robot and grinned. He's a history teacher and baseball coach at a 68-student high school in Knox City, Texas. He lifted a hand and high-fived the bot. A voice came from its two speakers. "What time do I need to be at the game on Saturday, Coach?" "One o'clock start," said Coach Lawson. "Thanks!" said the bot, the blond, bespectacled head and upper body of Lyndon Baty appearing on the robot's TV monitor and reflecting off the glass. Ever since a UPS truck had rumbled across the vast scrubland of northern Texas late last December and dropped off a big cardboard box, the best Christmas present ever, Lyndon had liked himself again, begun dreaming once more of fulfilling his life goal of becoming ... well, here's his list, in order of preference: 1) ESPN'S NBA analyst, 2) a SportsCenter host, 3) a big league P.A. announcer or, but only if all else fails, 4) a SPORTS ILLUSTRATED writer. He liked himself again even with those three vexing baby teeth that still flashed when he grinned, an odd side effect of the medication for the disease that should have killed him long ago. PKD, the docs called it—polycystic kidney disease—and Lyndon had the most devastating form of it, the one that appears at birth. He was born six weeks premature, barely breathing, with a hole in his heart, a stomach the size of a quarter, deadly high blood pressure, two pounds of fluid in his torso and two kidneys that were full of cysts, three times normal size and unable to clear protein from his bloodstream. Average life span for PKD babies back then: 14 days to two years. "None of us thought he'd make it that far," admits neonatologist James Marshall. The $6,000 VGo robot is the chrome-and-plastic child of a marriage between engineers from the cutting edge of videoconferencing technology and the progenitors of Roomba, the hot-selling robot vacuum cleaner, and PackBot, a military robot used for bomb disposal. On Monday, Jan. 3—first day of classes after Christmas—Lyndon rose at five, dressed and beat out the minutes till dawn with a pair of drumsticks. Then he wolfed down a pair of over-easy eggs, gulped his FK506, his Cellcept, his Norvasc, his sodium bicarbonate and his Prevacid ... and clicked on the Baty Bot icon on his laptop screen. A moment later he was staring at the cramped teachers' workroom, his robot's designated resting place and charging station. He clicked his mouse at the top of the white semicircle that appeared on his screen, propelling the bot toward the hallway. Oh, boy! He was there, he was finally a high schooler! Uh-oh.... He'd never even taken his robot for a test drive. It bumped into a chair, a sink and the doorway before it got out of the staff room. Click on print in order to read the article on one page: http://sportsillustrated.cnn.com/vault/article/magazine/MAG1188682/index.htm

granger (GRAYN-juhr) noun A farmer. Via French from Latin granum (grain). Earliest documented use: around 1112. A.Word.A.Day with Anu Garg

Quotes
Being a professional means that you do what needs to be done.
An optimist has a selective memory for the good things; a pessimist has a selective memory for the bad things.