As scientists understand it, Single Celled organisms first began evolving into more complex forms more than 500 million years ago, as they began to form multi-cellular clusters. What isn’t understood is just how that process happened. But now, biologists are another step closer figuring out this puzzle, by successfully replicating this key step – using an ingredient common in the making of bread and beer – ordinary Brewer’s yeast (Saccharomyces cerevisiae). While helping to solve evolutionary riddles here on Earth, it also by extension has bearing on the question of biological Evolut Ion on other planets or moons as well. - z2012-01-27-Evolving Yeast From Single Cell To Multi Cell |
IWork's Pages app can output EPub. Hmm, how well does it handle fonts? In IBooks, the book font is set to the font you choose from within the iBooks application. All the text sizes in the book are displayed only as small, medium, or large, and you can select which size within iBooks. Colors in the book may not be identical to those in its Pages counterpart. Eek. the output doesn’t render worth a fig in any of the computer-based ePub readers I tried: Stanza, Calibre, and Kindle on my Macs. No character styles, not even italic or bold, only one font size, and no font color information displays. Perhaps the Any Biz Soft app's "Each page as an image to EPUB" feature in converting a PDF is a better choice? semi-related: Elizabeth Castro wrote a book on generating EPub, with a seeming emphasis on controlling design (esp for the IPad).
- z2010-08-30-Pages To Epub |
Ink Ling, started by ex-Apple employee Matt Mac Innis, has a system for building IPad-based Multi Media Text Book-s, and is working with Mc Graw Hill. Books are available by-the-chapter as well as in entirety. (Chapters can have value as more-narrow Learning Object-s for people not using the Text Book for a class.) I wonder who's developing the Multi Media bits. Course Smart LLC, a joint venture of five higher-education publishers founded in 2007, released an iPad app for its nearly 14,000 college e-textbooks several months ago. Seton Hill University in Greensburg, Pa., for example, is giving iPads to 1,800 students this fall. Aug24 update: more from Nick Bilton, who has seen his ITP students using IPad-s in class. One unique feature the service offers is the ability to discuss passages of a book with other students or professors. Just using the web instead of closed EBook formats, with Paragraph Addressable linking, can get you pretty far... (You could have the book be in EPub, with each paragraph having a little link to a browser-based paragraph-specific Discussion Forum thread.)
- z2010-08-20-Inkling Ipad Textbooks |
The first interactive marine science Text Book for the IPad is called Cachalot (French for “sperm whale”). It’s a free, app-based book that covers the latest science of marine megafauna like whales, dolphins and seals with expert-contributed text, images and open-access studies. Through an Open Source digital publication system called FLOW, the book also offers students Note Taking tools, Twitt Er integration, Wolfram Alpha search and even National Geographic “critter cam” videos. FLOW isn’t the first or most feature-rich publication tool, nor is Cachalot the slickest interactive textbook on the market (a market in which Apple just announced its interest). But David Johnston’s title is an easy-to-update, “good-enough” product that didn’t require millions of dollars and years of effort to create and manage. A cadre of Duke University computer science graduates, in fact, built the platform in one semester on a $5,000 budget. Seems like the "Inter Active" bits are mostly supplements for which you could just link out to the Web Browser (from an EPub reader). And I don't want my Note Taking integrated into a single book or book-platform (Loosely Coupled). Duke University’s open-source effort represents a departure from Inkling and other commercial ventures. It sacrifices a wide offering of interactive features, monolithic downloads and wow-factor in exchange for simplicity, speed and flexibility. As new scientific knowledge enters a field, a leading academic could make a quick edit in FLOW to instantly and seamlessly update a student’s textbook. Books In Browsers! - z2012-01-27-Flow Open Source Interactive Textbook Builder |
Barry LRitholtz on the importance of Fram Ing the Jobless Recovery for the Presidential Election. During the interregnum, policymakers can identify the biggest obstacles towards Job Creation, and do what they can to remove them. They may determine its rising Health Care costs, or high taxes on small businesses, or its the expenses of IRS filings for new workers, or litigation exposure or whatever. Identify the key issues, and deal with them. He points to an article by Erica LGroshen and Simon Potter for the Federal Reserve. The data suggest that most of the jobs added during the recovery have been new positions in different firms and industries, not rehires. In our view, this shift to new jobs largely explains why the payroll numbers have been so slow to rise: Creating jobs takes longer than recalling workers to their old positions and is riskier in the current uncertain environment... Why might structural changes now account for a larger share of the job losses and gains during recessions? Although a definitive answer to this question must await further research, we outline here three possible "stories" that might explain the dominance of structural shifts: First, the structural decline observed in many industries might be a reaction to a period of overexpansion. Second, improved monetary and fiscal policy may have reduced cyclical swings in employment, leaving structural shifts as the prevailing form of change. Third, innovations in firm management may be promoting a structural shift toward leaner staffing... Annual averages of these data for 2001 and 2002 show that both job layoffs and new job creation (and vacancies) declined slightly in 2002. The drop in layoffs largely rules out the notion that job destruction is the key factor; the drop in new jobs suggests some role for weak job creation... Why might employers be restraining their hiring? Two likely causes are increased uncertainty and financial market weaknesses. See especially their chart 5 showing the portion of current employment held by industries going through structural changes. - z2004-03-02-Ritholtz Jobless Recovery |
WW at The Economist thinks there's something that bothers me slightly about this whole "Job Creation" discussion. The implicit idea seems to be that policy should aim to increase employer demand for employees. But it occurs to me that perhaps some of the long-term unemployed want remunerative work, but are a bit sick of "employment"... I am convinced that autonomy is profoundly important to most of us, and that the sort of self-rental involved in the employment relation is regularly experienced as a lamentable loss of autonomy, if not humiliating subjection. I think a lot of us would rather not work for somebody else. It's not necessarily that we're burgeoning entrepreneurs eager to start small businesses. It just sucks to have a boss... It could be that an economic shock like the one we've recently suffered will lead to a resurgence of the sort of economic insecurity behind our grandparents' comparatively materialist values. But it could also be that our culture's transition to post-materialism has been sufficiently thorough to have altered how even relatively low-skilled workers are inclined to respond to Un Employment... We need to stimulate the prospects for employment, but we also need to make it easier for people to just work in ways that may not show up in the official unemployment stats. You can think of this as tearing down barriers to "Self Employment", if you must. (Free Agent) - z2011-07-20-Job Creation Vs Free Agent |
I rather like the meme of there being a "Bubble" in College Education. Like the housing bubble, the education bubble is about security and insurance against the future. Both whisper a seductive promise into the ears of worried Americans: Do this and you will be safe. The excesses of both were always excused by a core national belief that no matter what happens in the world, these were the best investments you could make. Housing prices would always go up, and you will always make more money if you are college educated. Like any good bubble, this belief– while rooted in truth– gets pushed to unhealthy levels. Peter Thiel talks about consumption masquerading as investment during the housing bubble, as people would take out speculative interest-only loans to get a bigger house with a pool and tell themselves they were being frugal and saving for retirement. John Robb nails the real point. A degree is still valuable because it's valued in the workplace (even though it's not the golden ticket to employment anymore). The solution to this problem is to help create employment opportunities (like what we are doing with our open venture start-up) that don't use a degree as a gating mechanism. Network Economy ho! May26 update: Anya Kamenetz has been touching on it, esp as relates to Peter Thiel's awards. Yet since the education demands in our economy continue to rise, (David Autor at MIT is good on this topic, or the Georgetown Center on Education and the Workforce) it doesn’t follow that college is going to go by the wayside. What I see happening instead is increasing pressure on the marketplace to produce affordable quality forms of college–http://www.straighterline.com/ is a pioneer–and more intriguingly, the emergence of more specific, practical, modular forms of qualification for careers that combine some aspects of assessment, portfolio, and reputation based networks. Git Hub and Be Hance are the two examples I always use. May31: Dave Winer thinks we should aim much higher in academia. We should aim to recreate the environment that made the Internet itself spring into existence, in academic institutions. - z2011-04-11-College Education Bubble |
Michael Ellsberg just release his book The Education of Millionaires 1591844207 (focusing on millionaires who don't have a College Education) Here is the intro. There are, of course, many wonderful things you can learn in college, which have absolutely nothing to do with career and financial success. You can expand your mind, sharpen your critical thinking skills, get exposed to new ideas and perspectives, revel in the intellectual and cultural legacy of the world’s greatest thinkers. These are all worthy pursuits. But the idea that simply focusing on these kinds of things, and getting a BA attesting to the fact that you have done them, guarantees you will be successful in life is going the way of company pensions, job security, and careers consisting of a single employer for forty years... The driving theme of the stories in this book is that, even though you may learn many wonderful things in college, your success and happiness in life will have little to do with what you study there or the letters after your name once you graduate. It has to do with your drive, your initiative, your persistence, your ability to make a contribution to other people’s lives, your ability to come up with good ideas and pitch them to others effectively, your charisma, your ability to navigate gracefully through social and business networks (what some researchers call “practical intelligence”), and a total, unwavering belief in your own eventual triumph, throughout all the ups and downs, no matter what the naysayers tell you. Here are the skills his book covers: Success Skill #1: How to Make Your Work Meaning Ful and Your Mean Ing Work (Or, How to Make a Difference in the World, Without Going Broke) Success Skill #2: How to Find Great Mentors and Teachers, Connect with Powerful and Influential People, and Build a World-Class Net Work Success Skill #3: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Market Ing, and How to Teach Yourself Success Skill #4: What Every Successful Person Needs to Know About Sales (Sell Ing), and How to Teach Yourself Success Skill #5: How to Invest for Success (The Art of Boot Strapping) Success Skill #6: Build the Brand of You (Brand You) (or, To Hell with Résumés!) Success Skill #7: The Entrepreneurial Mind Set—Take Your Success into Your Own Hands
He notes that he is intentionally focusing here on skills related to success in the realms of career, money, work, and business. He did a conference call conversation with Dale Stephens of Un College on De Schooling your mind. He wrote an op-ed on "Will Drop Out-s Save America?" If Start Up activity is the true engine of Job Creation in America, one thing is clear: our current educational system is acting as the brakes. He had a blog at Forbes. Timothy Ferriss wrote about him a couple months back. Andrew Warner interviewed him. Casey Payne wrote a related piece on "4 reasons you should wait to go to college after High School" which he later linked to Michael. Jan25'2012: rough Vid Eo of Ellsberg speaking at party hosted by Peter Thiel, intro by Thiel and Sean Parker. "There are lots of careers, like being a doctor or research scientist or other traditional Profession Al, where schooling is necessary. But to be an Entrepren Eur is not one of them. College is also a bad idea if you don't know what you want to do yet." - z2011-12-07-Ellsberg Millionaires Dropouts And Deschooling |
Stop SOPA! The Protect Ip Act (short for Preventing Real Online Threats to Economic Creativity and Theft of Intellectual Property Act of 2011, also known as United States Senate Bill S.968) is a bill introduced on May 12, 2011 by Senator Patrick Leahy (D-VT)[1] and 11 original co-sponsors (later: 35 cosponsors!) aimed at disrupting the business model of "rogue" websites, especially those registered outside the U.S., which are "dedicated to infringing activities."[2] After having been passed by the Senate Judiciary Committee, the Bill was placed on hold by Senator Ron Wyden (D-OR).[3] The legislation is a re-write of the Combating Online Infringement and Counterfeits Act (COICA) which failed to pass in 2010.[4] A similar and more recent House version of the bill, officially called the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) was proposed on October 26, 2011. SOPA is HR-3261. Sponsor is Lamar Smith. Cosponsors: Howard Berman (CA), Marsha Blackburn (TN), Mary Bono Mac (CA), Steve Chabot (OH), John Conyers (MI), Ted Deutch (FL), Elton Gallegly (CA), Bob Goodlatte (VA), Tim Griffin (AR), Dennis Ross (FL), Adam Schiff (CA), Lee Terry (NE). Both bills allow the Justice Department for the first time to obtain court orders demanding American ISP-s to stop rendering the DNS for a particular website — meaning the sites could still be accessible outside the United States. The House bill also allows the Justice Department to order search sites like Google to remove the allegedly infringing site from its search results... Furthermore, the newest proposal, (.pdf) introduced by House Judiciary Committee Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), grants the U.S. attorney general sweeping powers to block the distribution of workarounds that let users navigate to sites that have been blacklisted or had their domain name seized, such as the Mafiaa Fire plugin on the Fire Fox browser. Nov16 will see American Censorship Day. Dec09: Two high level Congressional staffers (Allison Halataei, former deputy chief of staff and parliamentarian to House Judiciary Chairman Lamar Smith (R-Texas), and Lauren Pastarnack, a Republican who has served as a senior aide on the Senate Judiciary Committee) who have been instrumental in creating or moving forward both PROTECT IP (PIPA) and SOPA have left their jobs on Capitol Hill and taken jobs with two of the biggest entertainment industry lobbyists, who are working very hard to convince Congress to pass the legislation they just helped write. And people wonder why the American public looks on DC as being corrupt. (Corrupt Ion) Dec20: It has been pushed back to the new year. Dec21: a list of the corporations that have explicitly supported SOPA. Music Publishing, Book Publishing, Time Warner, Pharm Co, fashion companies. Wal Mart. Visa and Master Card? Paul Graham said: Several of those companies send people to Demo Day, and when I saw the list I thought: we should stop inviting them. So yes, we’ll remove anyone from those companies from the YCombinator Demo Day invite list... Several of the companies on the SOPA list have venture arms. I encourage startups to Boy Cott them. We’ll certainly encourage all the startups we’ve funded to. If these companies are so clueless about technology that they think SOPA is a good idea, how could they be good investors?” Go Daddy is a supporter, and may lose Cheezburger's business.
Dec29: Redd It users, having been the focus of the Go Daddy Boy Cott, are now targeting Paul Ryan, supporting his opponent Rob Zerban in the next election. Dec31: Torrent Freak, using the You Have Downloaded.com tool, have matched up the IP addresses owned by the US House Of Representatives, and noticed that they're downloading plenty of material that's likely to be infringing. There are a lot of books, but also software like Microsoft Windows, and even some porn. Jan09: Charlie ODonnell points out that NYS senators Chuck Schumer and Kristin Gillibrand are SOPA supporters, while pretending to support the NYC tech industry. Jan16: The House has held/killed SOPA! But PIPA is still moving through the Senate. Jan18: Many sites, including Wiki Pedia, are blacked out for today in protest of SOPA. I support their action, I just don't have time to figure out how to do it myself here... Jan19: Chris Dodd threatened Congress with stopping Campaign Finance money. "Candidly, those who count on quote 'Hollywood' for support need to understand that this industry is watching very carefully who's going to stand up for them when their job is at stake," Dodd told Fox News. "Don't ask me to write a check for you when you think your job is at risk and then don't pay any attention to me when my job is at stake." Jan21: The protest seems to have worked for now! Jan24: Protesters are using the US Government's recently created "We The People" online petition service to force the Barack Obama Administration to take a position on some controversial comments by former Conn. Senator-turned MPAA chief Chris Dodd to Fox News last Thursday... they ask the Obama Administration to investigate him for breaking the law. "[Dodd's comments are] an open admission of bribery and a threat designed to provoke a specific policy goal", the petiton states. "This is a brazen flouting of the 'above the law' status people of Dodd's position and wealth enjoy". With the crossing of the threshold on We The People, the ball is now placed in Obama's court. It has pledged to respond to every petition that crosses the threshold, save for select circumstances. SOPA and PIPA are hot topics, and ignoring it might not be wise for the Administration politically. A request for comment is outstanding. The Administration may defer comment until February 20. (Corrupt Ion) - z2011-11-02-Protectip And Sopa Bills |
The Mozilla Drumbeat group put on a festival/conference in Barcelona Nov3-5. Sounds like a big Edu Punk/Open Education thing. Lots of Twitt Er activity. Some folks were not happy with the vibe. Ooh, Simon Buckingham Shum was there. Hmm, his group has some new Co Here tool to create, connect and share Ideas. Wow, beautiful/gnarly report by Scott Leslie. Update: Anya Kamenetz is part of a group working on a Learning Freedom And The Web book about it. Here's the current intro: The design brief is to develop new tools and practices that can supplement, optimize, and/or replace the traditional trappings of the education system, from diplomas and textbooks to lectures and lesson plans–the better to serve learners’ needs for learning, socialization, and accreditation in open-source fashion. And amidst the code sprints, why not write a wish list too: What tools remain to be developed to allow learners of all ages to form the questions that are most salient to them, find the answers they need, build skills, and present themselves for a community’s stamp of approval? What allies and teams need to be formed to make these things happen? - z2010-11-30-Mozilla Drumbeat Barcelona |
The whacking of SOPA/PIPA has triggered lots of Dia Logue. Paul Graham wants us to kill Holly Wood. How do you kill the movie and TV industries? Or more precisely (since at this level, technological progress is probably predetermined) what is going to kill them? Mostly not what they like to believe is killing them, filesharing. What's going to kill movies and TV is what's already killing them: better ways to entertain people. So the best way to approach this problem is to ask yourself: what are people going to do for fun in 20 years instead of what they do now? There will be several answers, ranging from new ways to produce and distribute shows, through new media (e.g. games) that look a lot like shows but are more interactive, to things (e.g. social sites and apps) that have little in common with movies and TV except competing with them for finite audience attention. Giles Bowkett thinks Graham's post is silly. He asked the startup and hacker communities what the predetermined answer to Hollywood will be; Steve Jobs would ask what future we want to create. That's just a much cooler question... If we're going to kill anything, let's kill the Lobby Ing industry and replace it with a morally defensible process we don't have to be ashamed of whenever we talk to people who live in functioning democracies. Dave Winer has some ideas, mostly around the Movie Theater experience. - z2012-01-25-Internet And Hollywood |
Stanford University is offering its AI course online for free! Update: more than 58k students have registered already! Jan24'2012 update: there were ultimate 160k students! And I loved as well his story of the physical class at Stanford, which dwindled from 200 students to 30 students because the online course was more intimate and better at teaching than the real-world course on which it was based. Sebastian Thrun, one of the creators of that course, concluded that “I can’t teach at Stanford again.” He’s given up his tenure at Stanford, and he’s started a new online university called Udac Ity. He wants to enroll 500,000 students for his first course, on how to build a Search Engine — and of course it’s all going to be free. - z2011-08-10-Stanford Ai Course Online Free |
On 19 January 2012 the United States Department Of Justice seized and shut down the file-hosting site Megaupload.com (Mega Upload) and commenced criminal cases against its owners and others. On 20 January Hong Kong Customs froze more than 300 million Hong Kong dollars (US$39 million) in assets belonging to the company. Acting upon a US Federal prosecutor's request, the New Zealand Police arrested Schmitz and three other Megaupload executives in a leased $30 million luxury mansion at Coatesville near Auckland on Friday, 20 January (NZDT, UTC+13).[36] This was pursuant to a request from the U.S. Federal Bureau of Investigation that the four be extradited. The action against Megaupload took place just hours after the mass online Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) protest. Shortly afterward, the United States Department of Justice's website and a number of other organizations' websites were taken offline following concerted denial of service attacks from activist group Anonymous. The Justice Department's tactics, including accusing a file-sharing website of racketeering, money laundering, in addition to copyright violations, has some U.S. legal experts asking whether the case would stand up in court. "These actions, more suitable to the type of steps that the government takes against an Organized Crime enterprise dedicated to murder, theft, and racketeering, are astonishing," said Jeff Ifrah, an attorney who co-chairs the American Bar Association's criminal justice section and committee on white collar crime, via phone. - z2012-01-24-Megaupload Shut Down |
Venkatesh Rao notes that the Social Network (of Social Capital) has constant churn now - you can never treat anyone as a stranger, because they may not stay that way. This isn’t social mobility. The whole idea of social mobility, at least in the sense of classes as separate, self-contained social worlds, is breaking down. Instead you have context-dependent status churn... Even more unprecedented than status churn is temporal churn... Social situation awareness is not allowed to fade. The active and unstable double-take layer is constantly suggesting opportunities and ideas for deeper interaction... It is increasingly going to be a world of shifting alliances and status relationships within a larger, far more active and unstable layer in a much larger double-take zone. A world where you will never be quite sure where you stand in relation to a large number of potentially important people... I am not certain whether I like or dislike this emerging world. I think I am leaning towards dislike. The slogan, the world is small and life is long describes a tense and anxious world of constant social shadow-boxing. One where you must always be on, socially. A world where burning bridges is more dangerous, and open conflict becomes ever costlier, leading to less dissent and more stupidity. It is a situation of false harmony. One where peace is less an indicator of increasing empathy and human connection, and more an indicator of increasing wariness. This seems related to z2011-11-15-DeresiewiczGenerationSell. - z2012-01-19-Rao Social Churn |
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