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This picture is of Apple software engineers learning about Natural Language Processing. http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/121...

This is nothing new.

The effort of every individual in a group of people has been measured by Ringelmann in 1914, for army's purposes.
Here is the original article: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/121...

And the results are (number of people => measured effort)
1 => 100%
2 => 93%
3 => 85%
4 => 77%
5 => 70%
6 => 63%
7 => 56%
8 => 49%

This is called "Ringelmann effect" or more recently "social loafing".
As you can see, 8 people produce the same amount of effort than 4 individuals.

And I am SO happy that the Library of Congress is spending lots of taxpayer money studying this problem.

The Library of Congress has millions upon millions of physical artifacts, including CDs, books, newspapers, films, vinyl records, and tapes. Many of those physical artifacts contain information that can't be found anywhere else in the world. It is morally obligated to preserve them so that the information can be used by future generations. It is possible to transcribe some of this information into digital formats, but the collection is too vast to not worry about preservation. Additionally, methods of transcription are not always faithful to the original, and contain errors of their own.

For instance, many of the books at the BNF's Gallica project are comparatively low resolution. While useful to non-Parisians, the availability of digital copies does not justify the destruction or neglect of the physical volumes. Additionally, large scale imaging projects may include pictures of thumbs, pictures of fold out plates in their folded states, missing pages, or distorted and illegible text. Until the digital copies have been proofread, the paper originals are still a valuable backup.

Understanding exactly how CDs degrade and what technologies would best preserve them is exactly what a responsible archive would strive to do.

They could have thought about a study like this when they first started thinking about the green house effect and climate change:

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/121...

But no, temperature recordings normally start mid 19th century, that is tardy. Now if they had actually started doing something against climate change around 1950

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/G...
http://www.fas.harvard.edu/~ep...

that would have been wise, alas ...

No, you are totally wrong, usually people don't bother communicating, so you don't lose a lot of time on communication.

It takes longer because of Ringelmann's effect, and this had been measured in 1914, by measuring efforts.
Here is the original article in french: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k54409695.image.f14

When you have 1 guy, he works at 100%, but when you add 1 guy, you get 93% of their combined force.
Here is the table from 1 to 8:
1 => 100%
2 => 93%
3 => 85%
4 => 77%
5 => 70%
6 => 63%
7 => 56%
8 => 49%

With 8 people, you get the results of 4 people !

In fact, when you add people in a team, everybody reduces his level to the supposed level of the group.

If I'm alone, I think I'm the best, so I'll work at my best level.
If there is another guy, I'll work according to our common level, so I'll reduce my effort.

When you have a team, the team works at the lowest common level.
You can also see that when people walk in groups, they walk together at the slowest speed.

The BnF (French National Library) has started doing this in 2006 for a selection of .fr websites.
In 2011 they had 16.5*10^9 files.
They store content on "Petaboxes" made by the Internet Archive.

See http://www.bnf.fr/en/collections_and_services/book_press_media/a.internet_archives.html

All the tasks you proposed cannot be done alone, they require synchronization with several people.
Also, you don't measure individual performance, but I'm sure Ringelmann's effect apply in your cases !

BTW, I retrieved the performance factors for groups, measured by Ringelmann in 1913, you can get the original here:
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k54409695.image.f14

number of persons => percent of performance of individuals
1 => 100%
2 => 93%
3 => 85%
4 => 77%
5 => 70%
6 => 63%
7 => 56%
8 => 49%

So when you put 4 persons together, you get the amount of performance of 4 individuals.
And Ringelmann used motivated people in his experiences, they were synchronized with singing.

Scratch that you can get the full images - http://gallica.bnf.fr/proxy?method=R&ark=bpt6k3363w.f8

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3363w/f7.zoom.r=.langEN appears to work properly for me.

They use tiled sub-images to avoid you downloading the image files.

It seems weird that they chose to digitize a printed copy of the Principia that had many of its pages so badly burnt away that they can't be read. There are better copies around even in the same library that could have been scanned. Perhaps the best scanned image of Newton's Principia is one that was put online by the Bibliotheque nationale de France (http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k3363w.r=.langFR)!

do have a transmission medium (aether, ether, ), just like sound waves do propagate in air, don't they? D. Brisset was onto something big in 1911 (ToE inside, in French).

I'm sorry to say that you're wrong on most accounts.

Astrophotography did exist and Bonilla took a photograph of the phenomenon.
No, the telescope was not aimed by hand.
And no he wasn't the only guy observing the sun at that time.

Source: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2096403/f351

The 2011 paper can be read here: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1110/1110.2798.pdf
Bonilla's 1885 paper can be read here: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2096403/f351

The... interesting font choice and yahoo email address as primary contact do not instill a sense of confidence in the 2011 paper. That, and it doesn't appear to have been published anywhere other than arxiv.org. Maybe at least wait for it to make it through peer review before having big discussions about it? This is one of the problems with arxiv.org - it is an archive of preprints, which may or may not have gone anywhere. From arxiv.org:

Disclaimer: Papers will be entered in the listings in order of receipt on an impartial basis and appearance of a paper is not intended in any way to convey tacit approval of its assumptions, methods, or conclusions by any agent (electronic, mechanical, or other). We reserve the right to reject any inappropriate submissions. (Emphasis added)

So, until this actually appears in a journal it might be a bit premature for those of us not in the field to be discussing it (and some of the issues pointed out in Bad Astronomer and elsewhere probably mean that it won't be getting published, at least in the current form).

The 2011 paper can be read here: http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1110/1110.2798.pdf
Bonilla's 1885 paper can be read here: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2096403/f351

The original paper, published in 1885 in L'Astronomie can be read online here: http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k2096403

For those interested, here is a drawing of a swarm of cranes, observed on the solar disk with "slow motion": http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k209642v/f72 (this is from the same journal, L'Astronomie, which is on line on the Gallica web site) It is reported that people suspected the earth atmosphere to be responsable for many sights of objects seen across the solar disk. In this paper, the author believed at first he was observing metors. From the size of the birds (assumed to be 1 meter), he calculated they were flying at a height of 9 km.

Just a minor nitpick, they have been arguing for more than a century.

http://www.rsc.org/images/Arrhenius1896_tcm18-173546.pdf

http://gallica.bnf.fr/ark:/12148/bpt6k32227/f808.image.r=memoires+de+l'academie+des+sciences.langEN

But I admit these were cutting edge people, like early adopters or something. The best is that Arrhenius estimates are close to contemporary simulations. You would think that making people understand the paper should be easier than one of these complicated computer models.

There are already several project to scan and/or make available ancient texts [see, for example,
http://gallica.bnf.fr/ or http://www.archive.org/ , not to say of the more specialist sites like http://www.etana.org/ (for ancient near-east history) or the impressive Posner Collection at
http://posner.library.cmu.edu/Posner/ ]
However, most of these (with the remarkable exception of gallica and cmu)
  mostly present late XIX
early XX century editions of the texts. This is good, but I feel it is definitely interesting to get also some "primary texts" online, which is what this project is doing [I don't quite like that la "Description de l'Egypte" is under 8000 BC- 499 AD, rather than 1800 AD - 1849 AD: the books are ABOUT Egyptian Antiquities, yet they were written after the Napoleonic expedition!]

I was going to complain about the need to use wget to get the books to browse off line, yet I have just seen that there actually is an option to download the texts as pdf files (alas not djvu); this is really a nice surprise; actually, I was expecting the donating libraries to try their utmost to prevent this [not that it would ever works]

I would say that this is really a worthy project.

P.S.
  There is a small editorial here as well, but I don't know if it requires subscription to be read:

http://www.nature.com/news/2009/090420/full/news.2009.377.html

Google will not charge for access to this library because it will be yet another (and possibly their biggest and most concentrated) content base on which they can tack their ad programs.

I wouldn't mind this at all if the Google "reference" venture turns out to be what it says it will be - but perhaps they should "reign in" on the timeline of what they choose to publish. I know of an already-existing example of an online library, http://gallica.bnf.fr/, that is a result of an exhaustive effort to scan and publish documents from France's "Free of Rights" (meaning older than 75 years) works, plans and photos. Why must Google dig towards the "modern"? Because folks just aren't interested in all that ol' history stuff - or at least not interested in enough numbers to further fluff their ad program?

(slightly edited)

http://www.splorp.com/critique/

Spirals all come from Ubu Roi's dread Gidouille :

http://expositions.bnf.fr/utopie/pistes/grand/gido uille.htm

All five articles from Einstein (and many more important articles since 1799) have been published in the Annalen der Physik, the leading scientific journal at that time.

Thanks to the French digital national library Gallica, you can now access ALL (or nearly all) pages of the Annalen der Physik: on-line and from 1799 - 1930.

Obviously: to understand this publication, it helps a lot to read German, the former lingua franca of the science.

All five articles from Einstein (and many more important articles since 1799) have been published in the Annalen der Physik, the leading scientific journal at that time.

Thanks to the French digital national library Gallica, you can now access ALL (or nearly all) pages of the Annalen der Physik: on-line and from 1799 - 1930.

Obviously: to understand this publication, it helps a lot to read German, the former lingua franca of the science.

I am a researcher in Astronomy and I have found that Google Schalor is very lacking in my field. They have bigger competition in Astronomy than in most fields ...

I am a researcher in a humanities discipline and I find the Web of Science, Scopus, Citeseer, and eBizSearch to be completely useless to me.

Clearly if they're no use to me, these tools must be of no use whatsoever to anyone at all!

I should hope that, with a little thought, it's obvious to all here present that different tools suit different fields. In my field Google Scholar is of some use - perhaps not as useful as HighWire Press, the Bibliothèque nationale de France, and Google Print - but still of some use.

Well, BNF has it since at least 1999: check it at http://gallica.bnf.fr/

abount 70000 titles in text or image mode and lots of images, audio files etc., all for free.

Google is late ... did they deliver online one text after these months that passed since they began making noise?

On the one hand Google employees would be more likely to do the right thing technically for such a huge undertaking, but on the other hand try to actually read something on Google Print.

At least at the gallica site you can search, browse and read what has already been digitized, for Free (as in speech). They have sunk millions and made mistakes, fine. Perhaps they'll make fewer mistakes in the future.

No one can deny the project is important.

It depends on what "accessible" means. I think these guys misunderstood the motivation behind Google's effort. Google is here to organise information - not to provide it: Google Print is only there to allow you to find books that match your searches, not to read them.

Try just about any book search on Google, even about old ones. Try Austen's Sense and Sensibility. Try Hobbes' Leviathan. Whatever. Google Print will point you to a modern, copyrighted edition of the book. You will only be able to browse a few pages.

Contrast with the Gallica project at the Bibliotheque Nationale de France: thousands of digitised books, freely accessible from beginning to end, most in scanned image format, but many in full ASCII text. And Gallica is much older than Google Print (in Internet time it's about one or two generations older), though not as old as the Gutenberg project.

Judging from his language, the French dude seems to think that Google Print is a scaled-up, English-language Gallica. It isn't. But if European libraries get their act together and start a project to make literally millions of books freely accessible for all in all European languages, hey, I'm all for it !

Thomas-

Mod me down if you wish, but I have to say that I found Google Print nice, but not too useful. Sure, it's a nice thing that you can search through paper books, but in most cases you can't actually read them; you have to buy them, and this even goes for classics such as "20,000 leagues under the sea" which are already digitized by Project Gutenberg or similar organizations: Google digitizes newer, copyrighted editions even when there are older, public domain editions available. Thus, in my eyes Google Print is little more than a marketing door for on-line bookstores.

On the other hand, French digitalization project Gallica, though sometimes mocked on Slashdot, not only digitizes books, but gives the scans away freely (as in speech), so everyone can read the books in entirety or use them as they please. Both Distributed Proofreaders and Distributed Proofreaders Europe already use Gallica scans to produce completely digitized and free e-books which you can search, read, datamine, or do with them anything that suits you. If Slashdot readers are supporters of free software, this too is something they should revere.

I hope that Europeans will not compete with Google. I hope that they will make bigger, better, and more diverse Gallica.

I stand corrected on the ability to select images, this wasn't the case some 4 years ago (yes there was be copy protection)

But please, look at this document on "Marine Militaire de France: abus et réforme 1790" http://visualiseur.bnf.fr/Visualiseur?Destination= Gallica&O=NUMM-44457
and now tell me that money hasn't been stupidly spent.

I have used gallica, and I know how importants some of those books are. But scanning books whose text is available in image, or with such a low quality, prevent casual use or futur OCR if the techniques becomes reliable enough to be used on those books.

What happened up to now is that: The president of France said that he'd rather have his own "very large digital library" rather than let google do it all on their own. What some of his "minder" said in answer of a journalists question was: yes Microsoft could be a partner. Most probably if the journalist would have asked if Oracle, or Mysql or any other organisation/person/BEM the answer would have been more or less the same.

The first issue being: Should the governement fund a public "digital library" The second issue being: How.

So I do find it very unfortunate that people make a lot of "advertizement" for a mediocre propriaitary software provider (as in you can write good things or bad things about me, but first of all write about me !), based on partial information.

For the record, I do like the google search engine, but I do think that any government should make the effort of putting as much as possible of cultural content as possible online.

Of course I do hope that when the project will start it will use Free and Open Source Software, but for the time being there is not even a call for tender

BTW the french national library is called "La tres grande bibliotheque"/"Bibliotheque François Mitterand", (socialist predecessor of Chirac) no wonder Jacques wants his own.

For those actually interested in what is there http://gallica.bnf.fr/

Because France (and the rest of Europe) is in a position of weakness when it comes to ebook.

The BNF http://www.bnf.fr/ has attempted too early to scan lots of books, without the right plan.

The result? a bunch of low res image in locked PDF (can't select and copy) of some two hundred years books.

What google has done, is making a few people think in France: hey! We have completly fucked up our electronic library!
Given that it has costed several millions to citizen without any results,
maybe we should try to not suck so that the docile citizen do not notice the millions of euros which have been stupidly spent for a totaly useless project!

As much as I don't like defending France, the summary is misleading.

Mr. Jeanneney is not angry at Google. Actually he pointed out that the European Union (and France in particular) must follow Google's example and put on the Web the their own libraries so that it will be easy to access the works in not only english language, but also in french, italian, spanish and what not. I agree with him when he says that the preponderance of any single culture (in this case the Anglo-Saxon) is a BAD THING.

Actually the BNF already started with Gallica but there must be a common european effort.

And the people from Google should actually have read the editorial before answering questions.

wow, impressive amount of quotes :-) I do hope you didn't copy them by hand.
I copy/pasted from my master's thesis, some parts were originally copied by hand, yes. A collection of Poincaré texts (in French) are here.

Ignoring for the time being that 'best known for' does not imply 'creator of' ... your argument is not entirely correct either. It actually shows that more than one person contributed to the theories, which should come as no surprise.
Right, a lot of people contributed to both relativity theories. The first to write down the "Lorentz transformations" was Woldemar Voigt in 1987. In his article "Über das Doppler'sche Princip" (Nachr. Ges. Wiss. Goettingen 41), he not only gave the Lorentztransformations but also stated the absolute speed of light and applied the principle of invariance of electromagnetic laws under those transformations. It was also Voigt who in 1899 introduced the tensor as we know it (the word "tensor" was used before by Hamilton in the sense of "modulus", Levi-Civita also already worked on tensor calculus since about 1887). FitzGerald and Larmor also discovered the Lorentz Transormations - Lorentz suggested to call them "relativistic transformations" because he recognised the priority by Voigt (who was a personal friend of Lorentz) and FitzGerald. The Minkowski space of 1907, was anticipated by Roberto Marcolongo in "Sugli integrali delle equazione dell'elettro dinamica" (1906). Mathematicians working on the general theory were -among others- H.Bateman, Mie and Grosman.

For GR, you would be really hard pressed to prove that Einstein blatantly copied Hilbert's equations. Assuming, for a bit of reductio ad absurdum, that he did - publishing them without much understanding (Einstein's mathematical ability was quite below Hilbert's and the GR equations are not exactly something you just come up with) is not really believable. Moreso since Hilbert never claimed paternity for them (from your very Nobel link). It looks more likely that they exchanged notes in a late stage, which doesn't sound all that incredible in scientific research. Hilbert wasn't the only mathematician who corresponded with Einstein either, so what does this prove?
I do not know if Einstein acted in good or bad faith - I am prepared to accept that "they exchanged notes in a late stage", which is suggested by Einstein's letter to Hilbert in which Einstein writes he got to the same results as Hilbert. But on the other hand: only a week or so before that, Einstein still presented wrong formulas. Hilbert, in a footnote in his article "Die Grundlagen der Physik", writes about Einstein's theory not being invariant. Somebody who is definitely convinced that Einstein was a plagiarist and is quite polemical about this, is Christopher Jon Bjerknes.

As to the point about Poincaré, far from me to deny his contribution to the mathematical foundation of the special relativity - it would be utterly silly. However, a geometrical theory does not a physical theory make, although it can be a large part of it. Also, your choice of quotes might not be the most eloquent, as they mostly extend work previously started by Lorentz (it's rather funny, the first 2 quotes are rather a philosoplical critique that, by 1902, was already rather clear, while the 1905 one is based on a paper of Lorentz's from 1904, presenting the said transformations). Anyway, correct me if I'm wrong (as it's late and I can't seem to find online links quickly enough), but by Lorentz's own admission, the mathematical part was a rather ad hoc explanation, without much physical backing in terms of 'why' at the time.
Yes, this is the standard story, but I disagree. Lorentz had just postulated the existence of electrons (to explain the Zeeman effect) and was aware of the existence of sub-atomi

even if we disagree, I thank you for presenting arguments instead of insults.

However, let me discuss your two arguments. First, programming is far less extensible than poetry. With poetry you dont have to put that ; that at each end of your line. With computing you can't do what I just did with words (so crappy, whatever) in my last sentence.

I agree with your second argument. Code obviously reflects the personnality of the one who wrote it. But still this is not enough, in my opinion. Have you ever tried to make programs like that ?

Regards,
jdif

How do they handle ILLs when they cross provincial boundries? Is a copy of every science journal ever printed available somewhere in Saskatchewan? Of course OCLC has competitors for many of its services -- Those upstarts at the LOC and the Bibliotheque nationale de France among them. But I doubt they worry too much about Saskatchewan.

I refer you to the system used in this picture, posted earlier.

There are vertical poles, attached to the track, every few meters.

This seems to be exactly what they did in Paris, 100 years ago. Notice the poles. Notice the circular sections in the walkway. Those circular sections allow horizontal rotations at the endpoints (just think how some types of baggage claim conveyor belts at airports work)

If you ask me, this was a much better design than the neck-breaking jallopy installed in Montparnasse Station...

They also experimented some 30 years ago with one that was shaped like an integral sign; instead of a rubber plate, there were solid plates which slide sideways at the end, effectively yielding a slower speed but without the jarring hells-on-wheels acceleration.

If you ask me, this was a much better design than the neck-breaking jallopy installed in Montparnasse Station...

They also experimented some 30 years ago with one that was shaped like an integral sign; instead of a rubber plate, there were solid plates which slide sideways at the end, effectively yielding a slower speed but without the jarring hells-on-wheels acceleration.

I read the press trying to get a few hard facts on the said court ruling. All I got is from imprecise sources such as newspapers, so take it with a grain of salt.

• The ruling is a summary injunction (référé), which means that it has been issued by a single judge.
• The matter has not yet been appealed to a court of appeal. We should probably wait until such things get appealed to the supreme court (cour de cassation) before we conclude that French jurisprudence has been defined with respect to sites abroad selling forbidden material. Unfortunately, with the current overload of the supreme court, it should take several years.
• As with the Georgia Tech case, the lawsuit was not brought by the government but by private nonprofit associations, LICRA (International League against Racism and Antisemitism) and UEJF (Union of Jewish Students of France). Therefore it is wrong to conclude anything from this case about the position of either the president, the cabinet, the national assembly or the senate. They apparently ask for reparations in accordance with article 48.2 of the (revised) law on the Press of 1981 which allows a nonprofit association whose statutory goals include fighting racism to ask for reparations even though the association is no direct victim.
• Apparently, the motive of the lawsuit is article 24 of the same law, which prohibits inciting discrimination, hatred or violence against a person or a group of persons because of their origin or their belonging or non-belonging to an ethnic group, a nation or a determined religion (punishable by one year of prison and/or a 300,000 FRF fine, not precluding the civil damages). Means of such incitation to hatred include drawings or emblems (article 23).

• Whether or not a nazi emblem promotes racial hatred;
• Whether or not a French court can order an US company to comply to its rulings (apparently, the matter will have to be brought before an US court); of course, Yahoo France must comply.

Furthermore, as far as I know, are exempt from the ban prints of such items for education or scholarly research. I do not know where this comes from legally. Surely indeed, some public libraries, including the National Library of France have printouts of Mein Kampf available for readers!

I therefore think the Slashdot community should wait and see further progress in the case; jumping to conclusions is clearly overreacting.

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library) has been doing this for the last year or so: the project is called Gallica and the collection of texts is now beginning to look respectable.

Unfortunately, most documents are simply scanned and not OCR'ed, so it is nice if you wish to print the book, but not if you want to use it for, e.g. statistical or analytical purposes, or simply to grep text in it.

The Bibliothèque Nationale de France (French National Library) has been doing this for the last year or so: the project is called Gallica and the collection of texts is now beginning to look respectable.

Unfortunately, most documents are simply scanned and not OCR'ed, so it is nice if you wish to print the book, but not if you want to use it for, e.g. statistical or analytical purposes, or simply to grep text in it.

This is rather surprising.

Digitization is a massive trend all over the world. Just have a look at the home page of Bibliotheca Univeralis Project (affiliated to the G7). Among other things, you can see that almost every big national library has set up some kind of digitization project, including the LoC.

The most impressive effort to date seems to be the Gallica server at the Bibliothèque Nationale de France : 15 million pages on line, most of them as images or PDF documents (I'm sure you all dreamed of reading a XVth century bible in Middle French, didn't you ?). All documents that are copyright-free are publicly available.

I didn't check the LoC project, but the name (American Memory) sounds rather self-explaining.

Digitization is not the future : it is the present. As usual, computer scientists have paved the way (on-line papers, etc.) have paved the way, but the rest of the world are catching on.

Although Mr Billington's comments about the importance of the physical support do make sense (if you techno-junkies don't understand this, just trust me: they do ;o), using this understandable fear as a rationale for rejecting digitization altogether is plain nonsense.

There needs not be any opposition between computers and good old paper codex. They simply are different tools for different purposes, not to mention the fact that transition from electronic to physical form is a common task even among technologically oriented people (ever heard about those little boxes they call "printers" ?)

Thomas
PS: My opinion: the real reason is, they don't want to spend money in it (alt: they don't have any money to spend in it). What do you think ?