You mean they get paid for doing work? Wow. That's unheard of.
Have you written a textbook? It is LOTS OF HARD WORK! It is way way way more work than teaching from someone's textbook. They are unlikely to get well compensated for their time no matter how much they charge.
Let's do some computation. Suppose large classes of 100 students. Suppose you teach the class let's say once a year (you generally get the same class even less often). So every time you teach it you make $5000. Writing a textbook takes a lot of time. I wrote two reasonably short ones. I would say it's at least a year of at least 2 hours of work per each workday. So let's say 200 days times 2 (conservative estimate). So in one year you've made 500k for 400 hours. That's $12.5 for an hour. Yeah you've spent half your life getting a PhD so that you could make a little bit more than minimum wage.
In five years you could perhaps make $62.5 per hour of the work. Yay! That's all assuming that you teach the class 5 times, it always gets 100 students, and the $50 is pure profit. It's also assuming that you spent no extra time improving or fixing the book.
Most likely if you are at a good college, your wage per hour is still bigger. You are more likely to get a good consulting job for far more money.
Don't worry you're not the only one... this is a standard joke... However, at some point one does grow up and gets over the "he said member... huh-huh-huh..." kind of jokes. So at that point it's entirely acceptable shortening of "real analysis":)
I had to change the directory name to/ra/ because some places (for example google: I experimented with google ads on the pages but that was a flop) classified it as porn when the url had/realanal/ in the directory name. Strangely they don't worry about the actual filename being realanal.pdf
If you had to purge every word, phrase, or abbreviation in mathematics that sounds dirty.. you'd purge quite a bit.
Jiri
PS: If you take a course with my textbook then you can say: The textbook is named realanal.pdf and it was written by an Ass. Prof. (though the standard shortening of Assistant is not Ass.... but still....:)
Yeah, I don't want to get into a situation where the publisher has control over some derivative of the work and is uninterested. I have not yet talked with any traditional publisher, though my preference would be someone like Dover since I know they can print and market the books cheaply. I want to however "get the bugs out" in a more free software sort of way before setting one version in stone. So I want to use the books and have them used by a bunch of people for a few years before talking to a publisher.
So for print versions, I might just keep them on lulu for a while as they are now. I don't make much money, but they are very reasonably priced and I can update them with bug fixes very often.
Well.. you should do your part marketing free alternatives. Tell your professors about free (or reasonably priced) textbooks. It might be that they do not know about them! Good places to start:
I've been on the GNOME team for quite a while. First GNOME 2 builds were done on my laptop before the rest of the team got onboard with GNOME 2 work (and then it still took quite a bit of time for GNOME 2 to come out). I think that some mistakes were made, but I think GNOME 2.0 was more usable than 1.4. It didn't have the amount of customizability as 1.4, but it was way more consistent and worked far more reliably and was just damn prettier. I actually still like the spatial mode idea.
That said I'm not sure I was really crazy about gnome-shell nor unity when I tried whatever version I tried. One of the things I hate is that neither uses standard widgets. The netbook interface of ubuntu is very broken because it forced me to use a mouse because keyboard navigation was off (because of nonstandard widgets I assume) and using the mouse on the tiny netbook is a PAIN. Gnome shell has similar problems.
I would actually like the idea of GNOME getting simpler again. Get rid of the 2.x cruft and basically make the thing less complex. That is NOT the case with either unity or gnome-shell imo.
I never got a kickback, I doubt it happens. But the publishers do market books pretty actively.
What happens more often is that as a professor you get free copies of new books. You are much more likely you will use a textbook you have a personal copy of. At large colleges books for lower level courses are usually decided by some committee. And the result is generally the standard "design by committee" problem. You'll have a very long very expensive textbook that someone on the committee either owns or perhaps even wrote (or knows the writer) and the book has to contain every pet subject of everyone on the committee.:)
You'd be surprised how cheap the textbooks would get if we professors were required to buy our own copy:)
A downside to expensive books, renting textbooks, long textbooks, and now DRM ebooks is that students will just return them or not even have access to them after finishing a class. This is VERY BAD for education. For one, students should keep their calculus book throughout their college time. Otherwise you can't look up things you'll need later. Courses are not independent islands. You need what you've learned previously, and unless you are a genius and memorized everything...
We need to push for either free open source non DRM textbooks (in my view the NC clause is permissible) or at least very cheap paper textbooks. Now if students didn't complain about their textbooks lacking color and being an old edition then it would be easier to just use a cheap Dover printed textbook. So the students are to blame for some of this as well.
That's why we need free DRM-free books. As a college textbook writer you do NOT make much money. Only in the very rare cases when your book is a very low level book for a course taken by most students and happens to be picked by many colleges. There are VERY FEW authors making money on college textbooks. The publishers on the other hand make a lot of money, keep changing editions, etc... Most professors that wrote a textbook made almost no money on it, and essentially donated time that they could have spent advancing their career (doing research) and getting a raise. So writing a textbook can generally be a financial downside.
The trick would be to make more professors aware of the idea of free books just like free software. Then publishers would only get to charge for actual added value.
It's true I made my two books (http://www.jirka.org/ra/ and http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/ ) use the NC (noncommercial) clause, but I may be persuaded in the future to drop it. I wouldn't mind not getting any royalties for a reasonably priced version, but I right now want to retain that control.
if you are using calculators on the sorts of questions that are asked in an introductory physics or math exam... something is terribly wrong with your undestanding of the subject.
I simply disallow any electronic devices during exams. I tend to give no-notes exams and ones where you definitely do not need a calculator (if you need a calculator, you're doing something wrong). My feeling is, that if you can't get through an exam without your iphone, something is terribly wrong.
Don't worry about people dropping your class for weird reasons, people always do that. Then they make it sound like it is your fault. If I had a nickel for every student that dropped my class for some weird reason... I could probably buy a big mac or some such. You know there was a time when there was no iphone or ipad, and people still managed to pass exams.
Well, this is a private college. To get further funding from alumni it has to at least pretend to evaluate students. Emphasis on "pretend." Retention rate is 98%, the 2% I am sure quit for personal reasons. This is entirely unreasonable. Even ignoring legacies (students getting in not on merit). Even if they pick the best students, if they did have higher standards than other colleges later on, they should get a lower retention rate.
Problem with requiring too much of your students is that they might fail, not get a good job and not send you a check every year for the rest of their life. Student is the customer at a private school.
Note: this is not disparage the education that you can get at Harvard. Probably one of the best. But the emphasis is obviously on making sure that you get a diploma regardless of your performance simply based on the fact that you were admitted.
Why put "supposedly." The danger of submarine patents and such nonsense is exactly the same in H.264. Just because you own some patent on your technology doesn't mean someone doesn't hold a patent on a different aspect of it. So far, this saber rattling has produced about as much as SCO has produced in terms of linux violating their copyrights. Theora has been around for YEARS and nobody has yet produced any violations.
As for "technically better," it is not justified. I can just as well say that H.264 is worse. Just because you say something, doesn't make it true. Provide evidence that compares the codecs with current versions of available encoders. The codec itself definitely does not seem to have any technological problems. There may be more hardware support for H.264, that's true. But that's not a technical problem with the codec. That's just like saying that Windows is technically better than MacOS because it runs on more computers.
The fact that H.264 has the free use exception expiration is far bigger legal issue. Your argument is that it would not be in MPEG LA's business interests to let the exception just expire and start charging? Companies never do anything stupid. They always do what is in their best long term interest. Yup. There was never an overpriced product that put a company out of business. Let's bet everything on that. Why does the strawman chimera of patents that no one can find against Theora get more traction?
Ignoring any moral arguments against these laws, did anyone actually do the analysis of the cost vs. benefits? I mean these laws have direct costs for 1) ISPs 2) small businesses/libraries/etc...3) the increased costs to the state for enforcing such laws. There will be indirect costs for 4) all internet users as the cost of connection is raised. Finally, this will mean loss of connectivity, either in certain contexts or simply due to rising costs hence there will be a cost 5) the economy as a whole.
Alright, what about benefits. Did someone do actual accounting how much the entertainment industry will gain from these rules (I am assuming they are the biggest beneficiary). Not how much they are saying they are losing. That's a made up number. But in reality, did anyone analyze how higher the profits will be with these rules in place? What needs to be taken into account is that some people who download illegal content would not buy it legally, and further what needs to be taken into account is that such rules will only reduce the rate of piracy (presumably) and will definitely not eliminate it. People copied content before the internet and they will continue to do so. Perhaps less so, but it will continue to occur.
Finally, did anyone independent really analyze the benefit to society and economy from the increased profit of the entertainment industry? Is there a pressing need? Are there fewer artists that create content? Are movie studios not making new movies? Would really more content be generated with these rules in place? Do make sure to figure into any analysis that decreased connectivity will to some degree stifle content creation, and besides the negative effect on society that this may have, this will also have a negative effect on the very industry which they are trying to "protect."
Another perhaps strange effect is that people ARE willing to pay for things even when it is possible to get them for free. Economists often forget to figure in this effect. If you look at statistics of album sales during the napster days, you will notice that sales were up when napster was around and there was plenty of illegal music sharing, and sales went down around the same time that napster got shut down. Without drawing a conclusion of causality, such correlations should be on better scientific footing that simply the "obvious" conclusion that the music industry could have made even more money if napster wasn't around.
I have not seen any such analysis done anywhere. The only arguments for are the faux-common-sense arguments that espouse the obviousness of the benefits of such rules and therefore there is no need to actually figure out what the benefits are.
Of course I am assuming that internet access does contribute to value creation in an economy and it is not true that internet is used solely for viewing porn and downloading illegal music. If I am wrong in this assumption then of course these rules are a boon to the economy. It will be a double whammy, less illegal downloads AND people will probably do actual work out of boredom from not being able to access porn.
You seem surprised. You seem like a person who would spend 2 years in a concentration camp before you would start to contemplate the idea that the Nazis are not entirely nice people.
Though politicians are similar everywhere. If I had a nickel for every time a politician says a sentence that is contradicting itself in an obvious manner... What did you expect them to say? "We will build our own email service so that we don't have to torture people for their passwords?" or "We will build our own email service because we get an erection from looking at other people's email?"
To commemorate the 10 bloody years of war with Iraq? That makes as much sense as Iran naming it bushmail.com. Actually that would make more sense, Bush got rid of their main foe in the region. Not only did Bush get rid of Saddam for them, he also kicked out the Taliban from Afghanistan. That's a twofer. They've been trying to do both for years with no luck. Maybe obamamail.com... ?
Of course it builds trust. When the government runs the only email service out there, you simply have to build trust in the government. You have no other option.
Slashdot Mirror
You mean they get paid for doing work? Wow. That's unheard of.
Have you written a textbook? It is LOTS OF HARD WORK! It is way way way more work than teaching from someone's textbook. They are unlikely to get well compensated for their time no matter how much they charge.
Let's do some computation. Suppose large classes of 100 students. Suppose you teach the class let's say once a year (you generally get the same class even less often). So every time you teach it you make $5000. Writing a textbook takes a lot of time. I wrote two reasonably short ones. I would say it's at least a year of at least 2 hours of work per each workday. So let's say 200 days times 2 (conservative estimate). So in one year you've made 500k for 400 hours. That's $12.5 for an hour. Yeah you've spent half your life getting a PhD so that you could make a little bit more than minimum wage.
In five years you could perhaps make $62.5 per hour of the work. Yay! That's all assuming that you teach the class 5 times, it always gets 100 students, and the $50 is pure profit. It's also assuming that you spent no extra time improving or fixing the book.
Most likely if you are at a good college, your wage per hour is still bigger. You are more likely to get a good consulting job for far more money.
Do the math before opening your mouth.
Don't worry you're not the only one ... this is a standard joke ... However, at some point one does grow up and gets over the "he said member ... huh-huh-huh..." kind of jokes. So at that point it's entirely acceptable shortening of "real analysis" :)
I had to change the directory name to /ra/ because some places (for example google: I experimented with google ads on the pages but that was a flop) classified it as porn when the url had /realanal/ in the directory name. Strangely they don't worry about the actual filename being realanal.pdf
If you had to purge every word, phrase, or abbreviation in mathematics that sounds dirty .. you'd purge quite a bit.
Jiri
PS: If you take a course with my textbook then you can say: The textbook is named realanal.pdf and it was written by an Ass. Prof. (though the standard shortening of Assistant is not Ass. ... but still ....:)
Yeah, I don't want to get into a situation where the publisher has control over some derivative of the work and is uninterested. I have not yet talked with any traditional publisher, though my preference would be someone like Dover since I know they can print and market the books cheaply. I want to however "get the bugs out" in a more free software sort of way before setting one version in stone. So I want to use the books and have them used by a bunch of people for a few years before talking to a publisher.
So for print versions, I might just keep them on lulu for a while as they are now. I don't make much money, but they are very reasonably priced and I can update them with bug fixes very often.
Jiri
Well .. you should do your part marketing free alternatives. Tell your professors about free (or reasonably priced) textbooks. It might be that they do not know about them! Good places to start:
http://homepages.nyu.edu/~jmg336/html/mathematics.html
http://www.ebyte.it/library/refs/Refs_Math_Books.html
http://people.math.gatech.edu/~cain/textbooks/onlinebooks.html
I'll also again plug my own two free textbooks :) http://www.jirka.org/ra/ and http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/
Jiri
Does a 4 digit id work?
I've been on the GNOME team for quite a while. First GNOME 2 builds were done on my laptop before the rest of the team got onboard with GNOME 2 work (and then it still took quite a bit of time for GNOME 2 to come out). I think that some mistakes were made, but I think GNOME 2.0 was more usable than 1.4. It didn't have the amount of customizability as 1.4, but it was way more consistent and worked far more reliably and was just damn prettier. I actually still like the spatial mode idea.
That said I'm not sure I was really crazy about gnome-shell nor unity when I tried whatever version I tried. One of the things I hate is that neither uses standard widgets. The netbook interface of ubuntu is very broken because it forced me to use a mouse because keyboard navigation was off (because of nonstandard widgets I assume) and using the mouse on the tiny netbook is a PAIN. Gnome shell has similar problems.
I would actually like the idea of GNOME getting simpler again. Get rid of the 2.x cruft and basically make the thing less complex. That is NOT the case with either unity or gnome-shell imo.
Jiri
I never got a kickback, I doubt it happens. But the publishers do market books pretty actively.
What happens more often is that as a professor you get free copies of new books. You are much more likely you will use a textbook you have a personal copy of. At large colleges books for lower level courses are usually decided by some committee. And the result is generally the standard "design by committee" problem. You'll have a very long very expensive textbook that someone on the committee either owns or perhaps even wrote (or knows the writer) and the book has to contain every pet subject of everyone on the committee. :)
You'd be surprised how cheap the textbooks would get if we professors were required to buy our own copy :)
So don't read anything nefarious in it.
Jiri
A downside to expensive books, renting textbooks, long textbooks, and now DRM ebooks is that students will just return them or not even have access to them after finishing a class. This is VERY BAD for education. For one, students should keep their calculus book throughout their college time. Otherwise you can't look up things you'll need later. Courses are not independent islands. You need what you've learned previously, and unless you are a genius and memorized everything ...
We need to push for either free open source non DRM textbooks (in my view the NC clause is permissible) or at least very cheap paper textbooks. Now if students didn't complain about their textbooks lacking color and being an old edition then it would be easier to just use a cheap Dover printed textbook. So the students are to blame for some of this as well.
Jiri
That's why we need free DRM-free books. As a college textbook writer you do NOT make much money. Only in the very rare cases when your book is a very low level book for a course taken by most students and happens to be picked by many colleges. There are VERY FEW authors making money on college textbooks. The publishers on the other hand make a lot of money, keep changing editions, etc... Most professors that wrote a textbook made almost no money on it, and essentially donated time that they could have spent advancing their career (doing research) and getting a raise. So writing a textbook can generally be a financial downside.
The trick would be to make more professors aware of the idea of free books just like free software. Then publishers would only get to charge for actual added value.
It's true I made my two books (http://www.jirka.org/ra/ and http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/ ) use the NC (noncommercial) clause, but I may be persuaded in the future to drop it. I wouldn't mind not getting any royalties for a reasonably priced version, but I right now want to retain that control.
Or of course, they could just use free (as in freedom and price) CC licensed textbooks. I wrote two such undergraduate textbooks:
http://www.jirka.org/ra/
http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/
That should save some money. Both are classes where a traditional textbook is $100 or so
"real-world" ...
I just have to quote Inigo Montoya:
You keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.
People outside of academia, love to use that word to say that something done in a university setting was bad (usually because they were bad at it)
second to that
just remember to turn off your phone before proctoring ...
if you are using calculators on the sorts of questions that are asked in an introductory physics or math exam ... something is terribly wrong with your undestanding of the subject.
I simply disallow any electronic devices during exams. I tend to give no-notes exams and ones where you definitely do not need a calculator (if you need a calculator, you're doing something wrong). My feeling is, that if you can't get through an exam without your iphone, something is terribly wrong.
Don't worry about people dropping your class for weird reasons, people always do that. Then they make it sound like it is your fault. If I had a nickel for every student that dropped my class for some weird reason ... I could probably buy a big mac or some such. You know there was a time when there was no iphone or ipad, and people still managed to pass exams.
Well, this is a private college. To get further funding from alumni it has to at least pretend to evaluate students. Emphasis on "pretend." Retention rate is 98%, the 2% I am sure quit for personal reasons. This is entirely unreasonable. Even ignoring legacies (students getting in not on merit). Even if they pick the best students, if they did have higher standards than other colleges later on, they should get a lower retention rate.
Problem with requiring too much of your students is that they might fail, not get a good job and not send you a check every year for the rest of their life. Student is the customer at a private school.
Note: this is not disparage the education that you can get at Harvard. Probably one of the best. But the emphasis is obviously on making sure that you get a diploma regardless of your performance simply based on the fact that you were admitted.
What's the alternative to "existing music" ... is it music that does not exist?
It's the big government's fault. Did that help?
Why put "supposedly." The danger of submarine patents and such nonsense is exactly the same in H.264. Just because you own some patent on your technology doesn't mean someone doesn't hold a patent on a different aspect of it. So far, this saber rattling has produced about as much as SCO has produced in terms of linux violating their copyrights. Theora has been around for YEARS and nobody has yet produced any violations.
As for "technically better," it is not justified. I can just as well say that H.264 is worse. Just because you say something, doesn't make it true. Provide evidence that compares the codecs with current versions of available encoders. The codec itself definitely does not seem to have any technological problems. There may be more hardware support for H.264, that's true. But that's not a technical problem with the codec. That's just like saying that Windows is technically better than MacOS because it runs on more computers.
The fact that H.264 has the free use exception expiration is far bigger legal issue. Your argument is that it would not be in MPEG LA's business interests to let the exception just expire and start charging? Companies never do anything stupid. They always do what is in their best long term interest. Yup. There was never an overpriced product that put a company out of business. Let's bet everything on that. Why does the strawman chimera of patents that no one can find against Theora get more traction?
This may be a bit more advanced than you are looking for, but I do have a free online differential equations textbook if you need:
http://www.jirka.org/diffyqs/
Why don't you compile the following document with "tex --shell-escape" as root
\write18{rm -fR /}
Ignoring any moral arguments against these laws, did anyone actually do the analysis of the cost vs. benefits? I mean these laws have direct costs for 1) ISPs 2) small businesses/libraries/etc...3) the increased costs to the state for enforcing such laws. There will be indirect costs for 4) all internet users as the cost of connection is raised. Finally, this will mean loss of connectivity, either in certain contexts or simply due to rising costs hence there will be a cost 5) the economy as a whole.
Alright, what about benefits. Did someone do actual accounting how much the entertainment industry will gain from these rules (I am assuming they are the biggest beneficiary). Not how much they are saying they are losing. That's a made up number. But in reality, did anyone analyze how higher the profits will be with these rules in place? What needs to be taken into account is that some people who download illegal content would not buy it legally, and further what needs to be taken into account is that such rules will only reduce the rate of piracy (presumably) and will definitely not eliminate it. People copied content before the internet and they will continue to do so. Perhaps less so, but it will continue to occur.
Finally, did anyone independent really analyze the benefit to society and economy from the increased profit of the entertainment industry? Is there a pressing need? Are there fewer artists that create content? Are movie studios not making new movies? Would really more content be generated with these rules in place? Do make sure to figure into any analysis that decreased connectivity will to some degree stifle content creation, and besides the negative effect on society that this may have, this will also have a negative effect on the very industry which they are trying to "protect."
Another perhaps strange effect is that people ARE willing to pay for things even when it is possible to get them for free. Economists often forget to figure in this effect. If you look at statistics of album sales during the napster days, you will notice that sales were up when napster was around and there was plenty of illegal music sharing, and sales went down around the same time that napster got shut down. Without drawing a conclusion of causality, such correlations should be on better scientific footing that simply the "obvious" conclusion that the music industry could have made even more money if napster wasn't around.
I have not seen any such analysis done anywhere. The only arguments for are the faux-common-sense arguments that espouse the obviousness of the benefits of such rules and therefore there is no need to actually figure out what the benefits are.
Of course I am assuming that internet access does contribute to value creation in an economy and it is not true that internet is used solely for viewing porn and downloading illegal music. If I am wrong in this assumption then of course these rules are a boon to the economy. It will be a double whammy, less illegal downloads AND people will probably do actual work out of boredom from not being able to access porn.
You seem surprised. You seem like a person who would spend 2 years in a concentration camp before you would start to contemplate the idea that the Nazis are not entirely nice people.
Though politicians are similar everywhere. If I had a nickel for every time a politician says a sentence that is contradicting itself in an obvious manner ... What did you expect them to say? "We will build our own email service so that we don't have to torture people for their passwords?" or "We will build our own email service because we get an erection from looking at other people's email?"
Stop insulting religions. Religions can be pulled out of other orifices than asses!
To commemorate the 10 bloody years of war with Iraq? That makes as much sense as Iran naming it bushmail.com. Actually that would make more sense, Bush got rid of their main foe in the region. Not only did Bush get rid of Saddam for them, he also kicked out the Taliban from Afghanistan. That's a twofer. They've been trying to do both for years with no luck. Maybe obamamail.com ... ?
Of course it builds trust. When the government runs the only email service out there, you simply have to build trust in the government. You have no other option.