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meanwhile, plenty of books are still free by bcrowell · 2012-11-05 11:48 · Score: 1 · on Publisher of Free Textbooks Says It Will Now Charge For Them, Instead

There are hundreds of free college textbooks out there on the web -- see my sig for a catalog.

There are basically two models that have been proved to work. (1) Do it yourself. (2) Set up nonprofit online collaborations so people can cooperate on producing high-quality free books.

#1 is actually the most successful model by far. Just do it. Bite the bullet. Write the damn book and put it online for free. Here are some very high quality examples of DIY textbook projects: Hefferon, Linear Algebra, Carroll, Lecture Notes on General Relativity, Petkovsek et al., A=B.

The best example of an organization doing #2 is the Connexions project, which is run by Rice University. Other examples are Curriki and CK-12. These folks all use permissive licenses such as CC-BY, which encourages people to cooperate and view their work as contributing to a commons.

I first heard about Flat World Knowledge in 2008. What was never clear to me was what they were bringing to the table that was worthwhile or interesting. I doubt that they can afford to provide any of the services a traditional publisher would provide, such as professional copyediting or professional illustrations. Flat World Knowledge uses CC-BY-NC licensing, which is not free. That means that their authors know they're not contributing to a commons. At most they may hope to make some insignificant amount of money. What's the point?

Re:Overly dramatic title by bcrowell · 2012-01-17 10:44 · Score: 2 · on Apple Intends To 'Digitally Destroy' Textbook Publishing

One problem with "self-published homemade works" is that there are few areas where these are yet of any quality.

Totally untrue. See my sig for a catalog of free books. Many of these are of very high quality. Here are a few examples:

Hefferon, Linear Algebra, http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html
Keisler, Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals, http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html
Judson, Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications, http://abstract.ups.edu/
Thide, Electromagnetic Field Theory, http://www.plasma.uu.se/CED/Book/

Those are just the first few that came to mind.

Re:Inevitable, I Hope by bcrowell · 2012-01-05 11:54 · Score: 2 · on California State Senator Proposes Funding Open-Source Textbooks

Use an in-house written textbook custom to the department (done in a lot of lower-level classes) which will be cheaper, lets the department recoup some of the money, but is of much lower quality (fewer exercises by an order-of-magnitude, no proofreading for errors, no graphic design, no color, hand-drawn sketches, etc.)

I teach physics, not math, but here are some existing math books that I consider to be of pretty high quality:

Hefferon, Linear Algebra, http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html/ (BY-SA license)
Judson, Abstract Algebra: Theory and Applications, http://abstract.ups.edu/ (GFDL license)
Corral, Trigonometry, http://mecmath.net/trig/ (GFDL license)
Keisler, Elementary Calculus: An Approach Using Infinitesimals, http://www.math.wisc.edu/~keisler/calc.html (CC-BY-NC-SA license)
Illowsky and Dean, Collaborative Statistics, http://cnx.org/content/col10522/latest/ (CC-BY license)

The lack of color in the printed versions of free books is never going to change. The cost of producing a book in color is high enough that no significant number of students will ever choose it voluntarily over a free digital book. This may become less relevant as more and more students start carrying a tablet or a laptop in their backpacks.

Proofreading, error checking, and increasing the number of exercises are all things that could definitely benefit from a wider collaborative effort, and I don't think they require government funding as proposed by Steinberg. E.g., my own physics texts are free, and I've benefited a lot over the years from having people send me emails pointing out errors. I do have a few exercises from other people's physics books that are under compatible licenses, but not very many.

High quality art would definitely be a huge plus for free textbooks. My wife paid a couple of people to do art for her free French textbook, but in general, illustrations are an area where government funding really might make a huge difference.

Re:"the math of GR" -- how much math is that? by bcrowell · 2011-08-28 08:14 · Score: 1 · on Ask Slashdot: Math Curriculum To Understand General Relativity?

I forgot, if you want try any of the books that go beyond the level of Exploring Black Holes, you're going to need to learn some linear algebra. There happens to be an excellent free book on this topic: http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linalg.html/

Free/open textbooks by AliasMarlowe · 2010-10-25 08:38 · Score: 3, Informative · on Colleges May Start Forcing Switch To eTextbooks

Open textbooks for freshmen level classes should be possible

There are free/open textbooks in mathematics, at least at the fresher level. Here are a few:
http://www.lightandmatter.com/calc/calc.pdf some physics books are at the same site
ftp://joshua.smcvt.edu/pub/hefferon/book/book.pdf
http://www.math.uiowa.edu/~stroyan/InfsmlCalculus/FoundInfsmlCalc.pdf
http://www.mecmath.net/calc3book.pdf
http://www.opensourcemath.org/books/mauch-applied_math/applied_math.pdf
LaTeX source is available for some of them. These books mostly bridge from high school calculus to first year college vector calculus (the last one goes a bit further), but may not be aligned with a particular professor's path through the topics. There are various others at high school level, and quite a few in specialized/advanced areas, but not so many at the undergrad level. It's worth browsing through the categories at http://planetmath.org/?op=mscbrowse&from=books for slightly more advanced topics.

Re:Open Source? by bcrowell · 2008-08-19 14:17 · Score: 1 · on Open-Source College Textbooks Gaining Mindshare

What, do they come with LaTeX files or something?

Actually, the CalTech prof who's most prominently featured in the article makes his book available in PDF and MS Word format. He has the link to the Word file labeled "Source Code," so he obviously groks the open-source concept and is trying to do something similar. Of course Word is a proprietary format, but it's a proprietary format with pretty darn good OSS support.

Quite a few free textbooks do come with latex source code. Examples: [1], [2], [3], [4].

Re:Barrier to entry by wrook · 2007-03-06 15:35 · Score: 2, Interesting · on Jeff Hawkins' Cortex Sim Platform Available

I haven't really looked into what they are doing specifically, so I can't really comment on that stuff. But I've done some work in neural networks (actually 15 years ago -- I'm sure the state of the art has completely past me by ;-) ).

If you are interested in the field of AI with neural like computing, your best bet is to learn a huge amount of math. Really you can't understand anything without knowing at least 2nd year linear algebra. That's if you just want to basically understand what's going on. If you actually want to contribute, you're going to need a math degree.

This might sound like I'm discouraging you. I'm not. I just want you to understand what you're up against. You can definitely do some toy problems with neural network packages out there. You don't really need to understand what you are doing. But if you actually want to contribute, you don't really start here. You've got to do your basics and get your math chops up.

As for what you should read... Get some basic undergrad linear algebra books. A google search gave me this link:

http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/

Which looks like it will pretty much give you everything you need for the basics of neural networks (without the neural network part ;-) ) You're also going to need some basic calculus. A quick search didn't show me any introductory free books online, but that doesn't mean they don't exist. However, calculus is used for everything which means you should be able to find used books almost for free...

Once you've got that down (and maybe you already do if you've got a math or CS degree), you can start reading some basic neural network material. The wikipedia entry for perceptron:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perceptron

seems pretty good and should give you a start on how neural networks (very, very simple ones) work. It gets surprisingly complicated from there :-) There are some decent introductory texts (aimed at grad students) on the subject, but I'm afraid I'm well out of the loop now.

Things can get pretty harried math-wise once you start getting into learning algorithms. That's because you are basically trying to do a minimization with *a lot* of variables. It's not surprising that most of the innovative algorithms actually come from physics (well, in my day anyway... probably things have changed...) since when they are modeling stuff they tend to need to do the same thing. This is where you get into the scary math with multiple variate calculus and stuff... Way out of my league (I suck at math...)

Of course there are other forms of AI. But if you are trying to model the way the brain works, you need lots of math...

Re:Plastic has this problem... by rob_squared · 2005-04-11 07:33 · Score: 1 · on Keyboards are Havens for Super Bugs

Wooden keyboards? Wouldn't you rather have bugs you can't see: http://academics.smcvt.edu/sburks/BI108.htm

2 interesting themes here. by Fox_1 · 2005-03-26 07:29 · Score: 1 · on Large Prize Offered For Writing Mac Virus

It is the architecture of Apple's operating system that protects its users from these bugs. And, we are simply irritated by the near absence of major news outlets who reliably report that fact.

The major conflict in OS fundamentals, this argument has provided many hours of great reading by parties on either side. Funny story on OS history I wish though that I could find a better article outlining the battles fought between OS proponents over the years - the best I imagine are in the newsgroups, archived somewhere.
A view point issue on Linux v Windows focus on Sun - however the fundamentals in the OS are common to OSX as well.

The Current idea of "Balance" in reporting. Wall street article on changing Journalism
BBC Article on Balance in Reporting focused on Politics This one isn't technology focused, but the themes apply to technology reporting.

Re:Like the Degree I started by Anonymous Coward · 2004-05-15 04:33 · Score: 0 · on Champlain College Offers Degree in Computer Game Design

Honestly, I don't see that as happening at Champlain College. The people that you describe (only going there for fun, don't want to learn, etc.) are really the only ones who end up at Champlain. It's kind of a fallback when you get denied from St. Mike's or UVM.

Excellent Free Linear Algebra Textbook by zippe · 2004-03-08 07:44 · Score: 1 · on Five Free Calculus Textbooks

Hi,

The following textbook is being used in my honours linear algebra class. The textbook is great, well laid out, and has answers for all exercises. The link is:

http://joshua.smcvt.edu/linearalgebra/

The author once distributed the answers in PDF form but no longer does unless you request it from him. He states that the answers are no longer downloadable but if you download the full postscript package it includes the answers in postscript format. Good Luck!!

At my school... by sparty · 2003-09-05 03:14 · Score: 1 · on Universities Taken Offline to Fight Worms, Viruses

...or, rather, my alma matter, things are a mess. This, I might add, is despite a requirement instituted last year that all student systems on the campus network run Inoculate-IT from CA.

First problem: the on-campus debit-card system is Internet-reliant. No residence-area Internet == no way to pay for laundry == no laundry. Second problem: when the network gets really bad, even the non-residential areas (such as the bookstore) can't do those particular debit transactions (credit cards were not affected, at least in the bookstore). Third problem: students want to (or, rather, need to) buy books and a lot of them have hundreds of dollars locked into their debit accounts for this purpose. Fourth problem: bookstore needs to do returns by same method of payment as purchases and therefore can't do any campus-debit-based returns when system is down. Fifth problem: a lot of classes are net-dependent, and Net access has been haphazard at best and virtually nonexistant from student buildings. My girlfriend actually came over to my house last night to use the computer here because she had to do homework and couldn't do it at school.

Of course, that's all secondary.
Original problem: the IT department is horribly underbudgeted, understaffed, and overworked, so it can't keep up with the disasters that can (and will) occur on any campus with an insecure and homogenous computing environment.

Re:Open textbooks. by sparty · 2003-09-01 04:25 · Score: 1 · on University Textbook Exchange Software

One of my professors at Saint Michael's College actually wrote his own text for Linear Algebra and put it on his web site (not a deep link because the school net is slow as molasses in January right now and I'm not digging for it). I think a printed and plastic-bound copy runs in the $20-30 range in the bookstore (and the figure is based on the printing and stocking costs).

My personal pet peeve: shrinkwrapped books that need not be shrinkwrapped. The latest edition of the calc book SMC uses (Fundamentals of Calculus by authors whose names I forget, edition 5e at this point) is two editions newer than the one I used for Calc II and Calc III when I started four years ago (I'm now an alum, yes), and it now comes shrinkwrapped. That means that any student who signs up for the class, goes to a week or two of it, and then drops it won't be able to return the book for full price even if it's in like-new condition. Likewise for a few other books that the SMC bookstore stocks.

And as far as ripoffs go, the bookstores aren't the ones reaming you for books. I know people who actually work in them, and they don't make much on textbook sales; usually it's just enough to cover the cost of stocking the books, staffing the store so you can find the books you need and they can reorder them when necessary because the enrollment for a class jumped by 5 students two days into the semester, and hiring people like me to work as temp cashiers during the really heavy times. The college-logo crap...er, I mean novelty items...now that's a different story. As is the softgoods (hint: if you walk by a 50%-off rack of last season's styles on the way in to any store, there's probably a pretty good margin on the current stuff in the store).

Now, since we all know that money is going somewhere, I suggest that we indict the textbook manufacturers as imposing an undue burden on the growing number of college students and thus prolonging the recession. Make it part of the 2004 presidential race--cheap textbooks!