Doing these studies makes as much sense as doing massive, expensive studies to figure out whether I can cause my neighbors to get cancer by thinking evil thoughts about them. In both cases, there is no remotely plausible physical mechanism for the direct effect as postulated. The only reason to do the cell-phone study and not do the evil-thoughts study is that the former appeals deeply to people's folk beliefs, which have been built up from decades of movies and comic books where "radiation" causes magical effects. Never mind that electromagnetic "radiation" is necessary for photosynthesis -- "radiation" is bad, I tell you!
Of course some studies give positive results and some give null results. The studies are measuring the relative sizes of their random and systematic errors. In the studies where they succeed in getting their random errors down to a smaller level than their systematic errors, they will measure either a positive or a negative correlation with cancer. In the ones where they succeed in getting their systematic errors down to a smaller level than their random errors, they will get a null result.
Even in the case of ionizing radiation, where there is a physical mechanism for causing cancer, it is extraordinarily difficult to measure cancer caused by low doses. For instance, nobody really knows whether doubling your dose of ionizing radiation relative to average natural background would be positively correlated with cancer; there is in fact some evidence to suggest that it would reduce your risk.
The proper thing to do is launch another spin-stabilized probe on an extragalactic trajectory. I wonder how much that would cost.
I think you mean interstellar, not extragalactic.
The cost of Pioneer 10 was about $430 million in 2010 dollars. Since the Pioneer anomaly turned out to be a mistake, it is doubtful that it would be sensible to spend a similar sum on a follow-up. Furthermore, many of the systematic errors involved in measuring a spacecraft's trajectory come from parts of the tracking systems that are not aboard the spacecraft.
If the goal is simply to confirm by some independent technique that the effect is not gravitational, then that's already been done, and it didn't require spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Iorio has shown that if the Pioneer anomaly obeyed the equivalence principle, then we would see effects in the outer solar system that are not in fact observed.
We also have not found the Higgs yet there is not enough data to distinguish this from a fluctuation in the background.
Right. The Nature article has no quantitative description of the statistics, but this blog does. Note the stuff about the "look elsewhere effect." To understand what this means, imagine that you have a histogram with, say, a thousand channels in it, and let's imagine the null hypothesis, which is that in truth the histogram has nothing in it but a smoothly varying background, no peaks. But there is noise, and statistically a one-in-a-thousand fluctuation is about 3 standard deviations. That means that out of a thousand bins in your histogram, you expect to get roughly one with a +3 sigma fluctuation in it that could look like a peak. So if you run this experiment and get a 3-sigma peak, your result should be published as "we saw nothing." Taking into account the look elsewhere effect, the statistics in this experiment are nowhere near the level you'd want in order to claim detection of the Higgs -- and the collaborations involved are not claiming that.
I'd be curious, did you author or co-author any of the textbooks that you use?
Yes, but they've always been free online as PDF files. Currently I receive zero royalty from print sales, although in the past I did take nonzero royalties.
So while there might not be kickback per-se there is quite an incentive to use those books that one has written.
True. Today, IMO, it is not ethical for a professor to require his own text and not make it available for free to his students as a PDF, at least in some form such as the manuscript or lecture notes that he wrote before he got a publisher. But failing to do that is not a "kickback." It's a royalty. If the AC who used the word "kickback" meant "unethical royalty," he should have said "unethical royalty."
And I think there's a widespread and totally unreasonable perception that the authors of textbook are also the "authors" of the problem of high textbook prices. A few textbooks sell a gazillion copies and make tons of money; most sell very few copies and do not make a significant profit for their authors. Most textbook authors wrote a book simply because they weren't happy with the books that were available, not because they wanted to make a buck. When a book is priced at $200, it's the publishers that are receiving nearly all of the profit, not the author.
Traditional print publishers do indeed have an evil scam going. However, they also take a significant risk every time they bring out a new book, because a lot of new books will not end up being profitable, and setting up a printing press for a color textbook is an extremely expensive proposition. It's a basic fact of economics that any time someone assumes a risk, that risk has an cost to them. This is why there is no such thing as a mortgage or a credit card with a 0% interest rate. One of the ways publishers minimize their risk is that they make sure the book will at least be adopted at the school where the author teaches. An author who is negotiating a book contract typically has to specifically bargain for permission to make the book available for free online. This can all be complicated by the cost of photos. In a book that has a lot of photos taken by commercial photographers, the photographers get per-book royalties, so the publisher may not be able to say OK to free distribution in digital form. Sometimes you will see the prof continue to make the original version of his book freely available online, but not the fancy version that was eventually produced by the publisher, because that fancy version has all kinds of photos, line art, etc., in it that aren't the author's IP.
How about not using a new edition of the book every semester?
We did this at one time on my campus with our conceptual physics course, which was using Conceptual Physics by Hewitt. The publisher came out with a new edition that had some chapters rearranged and that was only available shrinkwrapped with some junk so that students couldn't return it. We kept on using the old edition. However, this was a difficult solution to sustain in the long term. It required a lot of good will from the person at the bookstore who was in charge of purchasing. She had to go to a lot of extra work to track down wholesale quantities of the used book in the old edition.
Or for something like Chemistry 101/Calculus how about using something in the public domain? Not like either of those fields have really changed in the past 100 years.
I can't make definitive statements about all colleges and universities everywhere, but at my school (a community college in California) we aren't allowed to do this. In the web interface we use to propose new courses, it says, "At least one textbook must be within 5 years of the effective term for the course." We're also required to update these course outlines every 5 years or so, and if we try to stick with an edition that violates this rule, it bounces back from the curriculum committee. The basic concern is that accrediting bodies want to see recent texts being used. They will ding us for it if we're using older books, and they aren't experts in the subject matter, so they can't tell whether a particular freshman calculus book from 1908 is really better than a particular book from 2008.
The real solution is for profs to write their own books and make them free online. I've done it, and if you click on my sig you'll see that hundreds of others have as well.
They should choose books that don't charge hundreds per copy. The textbook racket needs to be broken up with kickbacks to instructors or universities strictly called unethical.
Oh, please. This nonsense about kickbacks shows up every time this kind of topic is discussed on slashdot. Could we please have some evidence for these supposed kickbacks? I'm a college professor. I have never been offered a kickback by a publisher. I have never heard of a kickback being offered to any of my colleagues. It doesn't make sense to talk about kickbacks going to the school, either, because it's faculty who make decisions about textbooks, not administrators.
Yes, it would be great to have more books that don't cost the equivalent of their weight in heroin. But guess what? The traditional print publishers don't offer cheap textbooks. Using old books isn't an option, because accrediting bodies will ding you if you're using a book that's more than about 5-10 years. (Those bodies don't care if the subject is one like freshman calc that hasn't changed in a hundred years or more.)
The best thing is if faculty write books and make them free online. I've done that. (See my sig.) What have you done that makes you part of the solution rather than part of the problem?
Kindle has poor support for equations, so this is a non-starter in science, technology, engineering, and math. Amazon's page prominently shows a chem book with a big, color diagram of a molecule. But what the heck are they going to do when that chem book needs to show an equation? My understanding is that support for equations is currently extremely crude; Kindle's.azw format is mobipocket format with a layer of DRM. Mobipocket is zipped html, with no support for mathml, and images placed at the center of the page. In html I can use superscripts and subscripts to fake a certain amount of inline math, but anything beyond very basic equations is going to have to be shown as a bitmapped image standing at the center of the page on a line by itself. That just isn't how books with mathematical content are normally formatted. What about detailed diagrams like graphs or blueprints? Are these really legible on a kindle?
One thing that I can see that could be advantageous about this is that it could help to smooth out the shopping-for-classes period that happens at the beginning of every college term. The way this currently works is incredibly inefficient. Students stand in long lines at the bookstore, which typically pays for overtime and temporary student workers during that period. Students buy books for a class, drop the class, stand in line some more at the bookstore, and return the book. The bookstore either has to intentionally understock the book (meaning that some students won't be able to get a copy during the first couple of weeks) or else buy enough for every student, which means that after the shopping period is over, they'll have to return some to the publisher, paying for shipping. All of this creates lots of extra costs for the bookstore and/or publisher, which they pass on to students. It would be great if students could rent their books for the first couple of weeks, then buy once they're sure they're going to keep the course.
Personally, I have no intention of buying an ebook reader until there is a big, established market of DRM-free titles. When you buy a DRM'd book, you have to anticipate that it won't be readable in 5 years.
Yep. Here is a NASA web page where they claim that, among other things, bar codes are a spin-off of the space program. The spinoff argument is lame. There is no way to know what technologies would have existed in an alternate history in which the US didn't build a government-monopoly crewed space program as a cold-war propaganda exercise and pork-barrel project. Maybe we would have had bar codes, and maybe we wouldn't. Maybe we would have had something way more awesome than bar codes.
There's a similar fallacy that seems to come up whenever anyone criticizes NASA's crewed space program, which is that people will argue that without the shuttle, we would never have had the Hubble Space Telescope. It's true that the HST was put into orbit by the shuttle and later repaired on a shuttle mission. But that doesn't mean that in an alternate history where there was no shuttle, we wouldn't have had a similar telescope. Maybe in that alternate history, there would have been an even bigger and better space telescope, launched on an uncrewed rocket, that didn't have a flawed mirror. We just don't know.
And then we always get the argument that NASA's budget is so tiny that we shouldn't begrudge the money. Historically, NASA's budget has generally been about 1% of the federal budget, with fluctuations of a factor of 2 to 4 above and below that. The thing is, 1% of the federal budget isn't tiny, it's huge. When you add up a bunch of one-percents, it starts to build up.
I teach physics at a community college. The Wired article made me curious to see how good the Khan videos were. I went to the Khan Academy web site and viewed this one on Newton's law of gravity. He starts off with some kind of interesting, intellectually stimulating stuff about how gravity is ultimately not something we can explain. (He makes one error, but it's not crucial, and it's prefaced with a modest warning that he's not an expert.) Then he writes down Newton's law of gravity without saying anything about where it comes from, how we know it's true, or whether it's been tested by experiment. Next he spends 6 or 7 minutes, almost the entire video, solving a plug-in problem. After that he has a follow-up lecture in which he solves a problem using ratios.
IMO this video might be fine as a supplement for a student who has poor problem-solving skills and needs to see some very explicit step-by-step remedial instruction in how to solve a plug-in problem, but it would be disastrous for a student to get her first introduction to gravity from this lecture. The lecture just presents a formula and plugs in numbers. There is almost no intellectual content there, just some calculations being cranked out using a formula that pops up mysteriously out of nowhere.
A more fundamental issue is that there's a ton of educational research that shows that in physics, traditional lecturing, no matter how competently done, produces extremely poor conceptual understanding. A bunch of the classic papers are by R.R. Hake. The only techniques that lead to better success are techniques that de-emphasize lecturing to a class that sits and passively listens. Since the Khan lectures are still lectures, they are going to have the same shortcomings as any lectures.
I'm glad to see that this is finally happening. A "good" lecture on a subject needs to only be done once. It seem like a waste repeating the same thing year after year.
The problem here is that you're assuming that instruction must consist of a teacher lecturing while students sit silently in their seats. Even if one isn't a true believer in nontraditional techniques, there's a problem when students can't even ask a question.
You do see a lot of big state schools these days taking videos of lectures given in gigantic halls with 300 seats. Students can watch the videos in their jammies sitting in their dorm rooms. This is pathetic. These schools have simply given up on their educational mission for these large freshman lecture classes. The answer isn't to make the 300-student lecture more efficient, it's to admit that the 300-student lecture is a travesty.
Can slashdot start allowing posts to be modded up to Score:6, Insightful -- just so we can apply it in this one case?
But to be fair, BSD does have its problems. I ran FreeBSD on both my desktop and my server for years. It was OK as a server OS, but not so great on the desktop. I had a list of open-source apps I wanted to run, and I could only get about 85% of them to run at any given time. That's why I jumped ship when ubuntu came along.
A quick search for books by an author I like shows that only a small fraction of his books are available, so fail on #2 as well.
All epub-based formats basically fail #3. Dunno about the formats supported by google ebooks.
Albert Einstein, Helen Keller, Margaret Sanger, ..
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FBI Wiretapped Hemingway
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· Score: 5, Insightful
With just a touch of exaggeration, I'll say that any public intellectual in that era who didn't have an FBI file probably was lacking a conscience. Einstein had a 1500-page FBI file, having aroused Hoover's suspicion with his involvement in "communist front" organizations like the American Crusade Against Lynching. America had been through the worst era of unrestrained robber-baron capitalism, followed by the Great Depression. It was the height of Jim Crow. If you were engaged in the intellectual life of the country, it was very likely that you were either going to become a socialist or some other kind of radical. Just to pick two more random examples: Margaret Sanger and Helen Keller were both leftists, and both had FBI files. American leftists were the only ones who spoke up against Fascism in Spain and tried to do anything about it -- at a time when right-wingers were often huge fans of Mussolini. For a lot of folks on the left, the big disillusionment came in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
The last time I looked at moodle was in 2008, and here's what my notes say: "Looking at the log of debian bug reports, it seems that it's extremely poorly maintained and packaged. There are major outstanding bugs, including security-related bugs. Some of the bugs in the serious categories go back for over a year." Still true? No longer true?
I teach at a community college, and our district pays big bucks to run a similar system using proprietary software. The thing is, the main cost isn't software, it's hardware, administration, and support.
How about eliminate the sales tax entirely and just focus on the income tax then? Local businesses will then be able to compete better with the internet and revenue will still increase without targeting those who need to spend a greater % of their earnings to survive.
One of the reasons California is already in big trouble financially is that they depended too much on income tax rather than other sources of revenue. Income taxes are highly variable. When the economy tanked, income tax revenue went way down. We also have much lower property tax revenues than a lot of other states, due to Prop 13. A pretty sane thing to do right now would actually be to change Prop 13 so that it doesn't apply to businesses. The original reason people voted for Prop 13 was that they felt sorry for old folks who couldn't pay the property taxes on their houses. But as a side-effect, Disneyland pays property taxes based on a 1978 valuation of their property in Anaheim.
Clearly indicates that a full copy is not going to qualify, and every element must be met for fair use.
No, that's incorrect. The code does not say that all four factors must be met, and that isn't how the courts have interpreted it. The WP article specifically addresses your misconception: "Common misunderstandings: [...] If you're copying an entire work, it's not fair use. While copying an entire work may make it harder to justify the amount and substantiality test, it does not make it impossible that a use is fair use. For instance, in the Betamax case, it was ruled that copying a complete television show for time-shifting purposes is fair use."
To do what you'd like, we'd have to do in the journal system, and replace it with a government run journal, and I'm sure it would be impossible for centralized governmental control of publication to be any sort of problem for science.
Others have already pointed out that for new research, the problem is already solved. NIH already requires research they fund to be published in accessible form, and it hasn't caused the medical and life science journals to go out of business. Almost all physicists post their papers on arxiv.org, and it hasn't caused the physics journals to go out of business. Your concerns about government control of science seem kind of silly to me, a bit like the infamous "keep your government hands off my medicare" picket sign. We're talking about research that is already funded by tax dollars. The journals are just parasites on a government-funded system; they have unpaid volunteers to do all the actual editorial work for them.
They're selling convenience. How much does the gas cost? And how much at your hourly rate does your time cost?
I don't object if 7-11 sells me convenience by charging me twice as much as Safeway for a quart of milk. But the last page of the Pound-Rebka paper has the following note: "Supported in part by the joint program of the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and by a grant from the Higgins Scientific Trust." This is research that was funded by federal tax money. There is absolutely no excuse for the American Physical Society to be charging such an exorbitant amount of money for access to taxpayer-funded research.
It doesn't surprise me at all that there's a huge amount of copyright violation. Here is the paywall page for a classic physics paper describing an experiment that tested a prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity. The paper was published in 1960. They're willing to sell me the scans of this 5-page paper for $25. I teach physics at a community college, so I don't have free access to this journal online. If the price was something more reasonable, like $1 or maybe even $5, I might have considered paying. But at $25 it's not even an option. I can drive to the local Cal State campus, pull the journal off the shelf, and photocopy this paper for 50 cents. No, that's not copyright violation, because it falls under fair use.
What's really ironic is that new physics papers are essentially all available for free, whereas old ones aren't. Today, almost everyone in the field posts their papers on arxiv.org, where anyone who wants to read them can download them for free.
The slashdot summary says: "[...]within a few generations, seeing a actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion." And how do we know this? Because Kevin Kelly says so on his blog. What evidence does Kevin Kelly give that billions of people worldwide are going to throw all their paper books in a dumpster? None.
Brester Kahle says: "A reason to preserve the physical book that has been digitized is that it is the authentic and original version that can be used as a reference in the future. If there is ever a controversy about the digital version, the original can be examined. A seed bank such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is seen as an authoritative and safe version of crops we are growing. Saving physical copies of digitized books might at least be seen in a similar light as an authoritative and safe copy that may be called upon in the future." This is not a great analogy. If you want to be able to grow a plant of a certain species, currently the only way to do it is to have a seed (or a cutting or something, but they don't tend to keep as well). But there are easier, more secure ways to verify that a book hasn't been altered. To verify that all the books in Project Gutenberg have been maintained in an unaltered state, all I need is a computer file listing a hash function computed on each of the books. This is cheap to carry out, and it's very secure. I can print the hash-function file on a piece of paper and hide it somewhere, and no hypothetical evil government can make the piece of paper go away if they don't know I have it. There is no single point of failure, because any number of people can store the hash function. Kahle's cache of paper books is a single point of failure. It can be destroyed in a fire or earthquake, in case of a revolution, etc.
A better justification for maintaining caches of paper books is that in case civilization falls apart, they'll still be readable.
Another option is to require ISBNs for ebooks, which would dramatically increase the cost of submitting twenty books a day. Though they'd need some method of verifying that the ISBN is real.
ISBNs aren't really well suited to electronic publishing. For example, I write nonfiction books and distribute them for free digitally. People can also buy them in print. In the electronic versions, it's natural that if I find an error, I just want to go ahead and fix it right away. But when you have an ISBN for a book, you're supposed to throw it away and get a new ISBN when you make any change whatsoever to the book. ISBNs are also basically a scam. Bowker runs a database and charges people significant amounts of money to generate a new 500-byte database record.
From the comments I'm seeing, it sounds like the real problem is that amazon's book-reviewing system doesn't work very well on kindle books. Seems like they should just fix that problem. The one for print books seems to work reasonably well these days. You do get dishonest behavior (professors getting their grad students to write reviews, individuals posting 10 reviews a day, every day), but by and large it seems to work pretty well.
Everyone should learn how to program, because knowing how to program gives you total power over your computer. You can only say you truly control your computer when you can use programming to make it do anything you want it to do; otherwise you are at the mercy of software vendors that seek to take that control away from you.
This is completely unrealistic. Many people don't even know how to *use* a computer, or even how to type on a qwerty keyboard.
It's also completely unnecessary. Programming skills have nothing to do with being at the mercy of Evil Software Vendors. When I install ubuntu on a new machine, here is the list of packages I install, all of them open source:
Suppose I had no programming skills -- how would that change this list? Suppose I had the programming skills of Donald Knuth -- how would that change this list? Suppose the authors of some of these programs make changes I don't like, or don't maintain the program as well as I'd like so it causes me hassles, or make changes that break backward compatibility. Wait, you don't have to suppose, because it's already happened in several cases: xpdf, perl-tk, sox, ruby, lilypond. Are you suggesting that because I have some programming skills, these problems aren't problems for me? That in the cases where they made changes I didn't like, I should just maintain my own fork? That in the cases where they did a bad job of maintenance, I should do it for them? That when they break backward compatibility, I should maintain my own fork?
Why would any individual gain any advantage by participating in bitcoin, except that some early adopters may have been able to realize profits at the expense of later adopters? The closest the bitcoin FAQ seems to come to answering this is:
Is Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme? [...] Bitcoin has possible win-win outcomes. Early adopters profit from the rise in value. Late adopters profit from the usefulness of a stable and widely accepted p2p currency.
The final sentence is what is supposed to make it not a Ponzi scheme. Let's break that down into pieces:
Stable: I live in the US, so this doesn't do much for me. The dollar has had a relatively low inflation rate for decades now, whereas bitcoin could become completely worthless at any time. Even if I was living in a country like Venezuela, which has crazy inflation, I would be foolish to hold any significant portion of my assets as bitcoins. I'd be much better off stuffing US currency in my mattress. If I was the type of libertarian who gets upset about "fiat currency," I could put my money in real estate or gold coins.
Widely accepted: It's not widely accepted, and I don't think it's plausible that it ever will be.
Slashdot Mirror
Non-ionizing. Quit wasting my time.
Mod parent up.
Doing these studies makes as much sense as doing massive, expensive studies to figure out whether I can cause my neighbors to get cancer by thinking evil thoughts about them. In both cases, there is no remotely plausible physical mechanism for the direct effect as postulated. The only reason to do the cell-phone study and not do the evil-thoughts study is that the former appeals deeply to people's folk beliefs, which have been built up from decades of movies and comic books where "radiation" causes magical effects. Never mind that electromagnetic "radiation" is necessary for photosynthesis -- "radiation" is bad, I tell you!
Of course some studies give positive results and some give null results. The studies are measuring the relative sizes of their random and systematic errors. In the studies where they succeed in getting their random errors down to a smaller level than their systematic errors, they will measure either a positive or a negative correlation with cancer. In the ones where they succeed in getting their systematic errors down to a smaller level than their random errors, they will get a null result.
Even in the case of ionizing radiation, where there is a physical mechanism for causing cancer, it is extraordinarily difficult to measure cancer caused by low doses. For instance, nobody really knows whether doubling your dose of ionizing radiation relative to average natural background would be positively correlated with cancer; there is in fact some evidence to suggest that it would reduce your risk.
...is to confirm the theory by searching for fossil chibis in Antarctica.
The proper thing to do is launch another spin-stabilized probe on an extragalactic trajectory. I wonder how much that would cost.
I think you mean interstellar, not extragalactic.
The cost of Pioneer 10 was about $430 million in 2010 dollars. Since the Pioneer anomaly turned out to be a mistake, it is doubtful that it would be sensible to spend a similar sum on a follow-up. Furthermore, many of the systematic errors involved in measuring a spacecraft's trajectory come from parts of the tracking systems that are not aboard the spacecraft.
If the goal is simply to confirm by some independent technique that the effect is not gravitational, then that's already been done, and it didn't require spending hundreds of millions of dollars. Iorio has shown that if the Pioneer anomaly obeyed the equivalence principle, then we would see effects in the outer solar system that are not in fact observed.
We also have not found the Higgs yet there is not enough data to distinguish this from a fluctuation in the background.
Right. The Nature article has no quantitative description of the statistics, but this blog does. Note the stuff about the "look elsewhere effect." To understand what this means, imagine that you have a histogram with, say, a thousand channels in it, and let's imagine the null hypothesis, which is that in truth the histogram has nothing in it but a smoothly varying background, no peaks. But there is noise, and statistically a one-in-a-thousand fluctuation is about 3 standard deviations. That means that out of a thousand bins in your histogram, you expect to get roughly one with a +3 sigma fluctuation in it that could look like a peak. So if you run this experiment and get a 3-sigma peak, your result should be published as "we saw nothing." Taking into account the look elsewhere effect, the statistics in this experiment are nowhere near the level you'd want in order to claim detection of the Higgs -- and the collaborations involved are not claiming that.
I'd be curious, did you author or co-author any of the textbooks that you use?
Yes, but they've always been free online as PDF files. Currently I receive zero royalty from print sales, although in the past I did take nonzero royalties.
So while there might not be kickback per-se there is quite an incentive to use those books that one has written.
True. Today, IMO, it is not ethical for a professor to require his own text and not make it available for free to his students as a PDF, at least in some form such as the manuscript or lecture notes that he wrote before he got a publisher. But failing to do that is not a "kickback." It's a royalty. If the AC who used the word "kickback" meant "unethical royalty," he should have said "unethical royalty."
And I think there's a widespread and totally unreasonable perception that the authors of textbook are also the "authors" of the problem of high textbook prices. A few textbooks sell a gazillion copies and make tons of money; most sell very few copies and do not make a significant profit for their authors. Most textbook authors wrote a book simply because they weren't happy with the books that were available, not because they wanted to make a buck. When a book is priced at $200, it's the publishers that are receiving nearly all of the profit, not the author.
Traditional print publishers do indeed have an evil scam going. However, they also take a significant risk every time they bring out a new book, because a lot of new books will not end up being profitable, and setting up a printing press for a color textbook is an extremely expensive proposition. It's a basic fact of economics that any time someone assumes a risk, that risk has an cost to them. This is why there is no such thing as a mortgage or a credit card with a 0% interest rate. One of the ways publishers minimize their risk is that they make sure the book will at least be adopted at the school where the author teaches. An author who is negotiating a book contract typically has to specifically bargain for permission to make the book available for free online. This can all be complicated by the cost of photos. In a book that has a lot of photos taken by commercial photographers, the photographers get per-book royalties, so the publisher may not be able to say OK to free distribution in digital form. Sometimes you will see the prof continue to make the original version of his book freely available online, but not the fancy version that was eventually produced by the publisher, because that fancy version has all kinds of photos, line art, etc., in it that aren't the author's IP.
How about not using a new edition of the book every semester?
We did this at one time on my campus with our conceptual physics course, which was using Conceptual Physics by Hewitt. The publisher came out with a new edition that had some chapters rearranged and that was only available shrinkwrapped with some junk so that students couldn't return it. We kept on using the old edition. However, this was a difficult solution to sustain in the long term. It required a lot of good will from the person at the bookstore who was in charge of purchasing. She had to go to a lot of extra work to track down wholesale quantities of the used book in the old edition.
Or for something like Chemistry 101/Calculus how about using something in the public domain? Not like either of those fields have really changed in the past 100 years.
I can't make definitive statements about all colleges and universities everywhere, but at my school (a community college in California) we aren't allowed to do this. In the web interface we use to propose new courses, it says, "At least one textbook must be within 5 years of the effective term for the course." We're also required to update these course outlines every 5 years or so, and if we try to stick with an edition that violates this rule, it bounces back from the curriculum committee. The basic concern is that accrediting bodies want to see recent texts being used. They will ding us for it if we're using older books, and they aren't experts in the subject matter, so they can't tell whether a particular freshman calculus book from 1908 is really better than a particular book from 2008.
The real solution is for profs to write their own books and make them free online. I've done it, and if you click on my sig you'll see that hundreds of others have as well.
They should choose books that don't charge hundreds per copy. The textbook racket needs to be broken up with kickbacks to instructors or universities strictly called unethical.
Oh, please. This nonsense about kickbacks shows up every time this kind of topic is discussed on slashdot. Could we please have some evidence for these supposed kickbacks? I'm a college professor. I have never been offered a kickback by a publisher. I have never heard of a kickback being offered to any of my colleagues. It doesn't make sense to talk about kickbacks going to the school, either, because it's faculty who make decisions about textbooks, not administrators.
Yes, it would be great to have more books that don't cost the equivalent of their weight in heroin. But guess what? The traditional print publishers don't offer cheap textbooks. Using old books isn't an option, because accrediting bodies will ding you if you're using a book that's more than about 5-10 years. (Those bodies don't care if the subject is one like freshman calc that hasn't changed in a hundred years or more.)
The best thing is if faculty write books and make them free online. I've done that. (See my sig.) What have you done that makes you part of the solution rather than part of the problem?
Kindle has poor support for equations, so this is a non-starter in science, technology, engineering, and math. Amazon's page prominently shows a chem book with a big, color diagram of a molecule. But what the heck are they going to do when that chem book needs to show an equation? My understanding is that support for equations is currently extremely crude; Kindle's .azw format is mobipocket format with a layer of DRM. Mobipocket is zipped html, with no support for mathml, and images placed at the center of the page. In html I can use superscripts and subscripts to fake a certain amount of inline math, but anything beyond very basic equations is going to have to be shown as a bitmapped image standing at the center of the page on a line by itself. That just isn't how books with mathematical content are normally formatted. What about detailed diagrams like graphs or blueprints? Are these really legible on a kindle?
One thing that I can see that could be advantageous about this is that it could help to smooth out the shopping-for-classes period that happens at the beginning of every college term. The way this currently works is incredibly inefficient. Students stand in long lines at the bookstore, which typically pays for overtime and temporary student workers during that period. Students buy books for a class, drop the class, stand in line some more at the bookstore, and return the book. The bookstore either has to intentionally understock the book (meaning that some students won't be able to get a copy during the first couple of weeks) or else buy enough for every student, which means that after the shopping period is over, they'll have to return some to the publisher, paying for shipping. All of this creates lots of extra costs for the bookstore and/or publisher, which they pass on to students. It would be great if students could rent their books for the first couple of weeks, then buy once they're sure they're going to keep the course.
Personally, I have no intention of buying an ebook reader until there is a big, established market of DRM-free titles. When you buy a DRM'd book, you have to anticipate that it won't be readable in 5 years.
Yep. Here is a NASA web page where they claim that, among other things, bar codes are a spin-off of the space program. The spinoff argument is lame. There is no way to know what technologies would have existed in an alternate history in which the US didn't build a government-monopoly crewed space program as a cold-war propaganda exercise and pork-barrel project. Maybe we would have had bar codes, and maybe we wouldn't. Maybe we would have had something way more awesome than bar codes.
There's a similar fallacy that seems to come up whenever anyone criticizes NASA's crewed space program, which is that people will argue that without the shuttle, we would never have had the Hubble Space Telescope. It's true that the HST was put into orbit by the shuttle and later repaired on a shuttle mission. But that doesn't mean that in an alternate history where there was no shuttle, we wouldn't have had a similar telescope. Maybe in that alternate history, there would have been an even bigger and better space telescope, launched on an uncrewed rocket, that didn't have a flawed mirror. We just don't know.
And then we always get the argument that NASA's budget is so tiny that we shouldn't begrudge the money. Historically, NASA's budget has generally been about 1% of the federal budget, with fluctuations of a factor of 2 to 4 above and below that. The thing is, 1% of the federal budget isn't tiny, it's huge. When you add up a bunch of one-percents, it starts to build up.
An AC replied as well as I could have. I'm only posting this because most people won't see an AC post unless it gets moderated up.
I teach physics at a community college. The Wired article made me curious to see how good the Khan videos were. I went to the Khan Academy web site and viewed this one on Newton's law of gravity. He starts off with some kind of interesting, intellectually stimulating stuff about how gravity is ultimately not something we can explain. (He makes one error, but it's not crucial, and it's prefaced with a modest warning that he's not an expert.) Then he writes down Newton's law of gravity without saying anything about where it comes from, how we know it's true, or whether it's been tested by experiment. Next he spends 6 or 7 minutes, almost the entire video, solving a plug-in problem. After that he has a follow-up lecture in which he solves a problem using ratios.
IMO this video might be fine as a supplement for a student who has poor problem-solving skills and needs to see some very explicit step-by-step remedial instruction in how to solve a plug-in problem, but it would be disastrous for a student to get her first introduction to gravity from this lecture. The lecture just presents a formula and plugs in numbers. There is almost no intellectual content there, just some calculations being cranked out using a formula that pops up mysteriously out of nowhere.
A more fundamental issue is that there's a ton of educational research that shows that in physics, traditional lecturing, no matter how competently done, produces extremely poor conceptual understanding. A bunch of the classic papers are by R.R. Hake. The only techniques that lead to better success are techniques that de-emphasize lecturing to a class that sits and passively listens. Since the Khan lectures are still lectures, they are going to have the same shortcomings as any lectures.
I'm glad to see that this is finally happening. A "good" lecture on a subject needs to only be done once. It seem like a waste repeating the same thing year after year.
The problem here is that you're assuming that instruction must consist of a teacher lecturing while students sit silently in their seats. Even if one isn't a true believer in nontraditional techniques, there's a problem when students can't even ask a question.
You do see a lot of big state schools these days taking videos of lectures given in gigantic halls with 300 seats. Students can watch the videos in their jammies sitting in their dorm rooms. This is pathetic. These schools have simply given up on their educational mission for these large freshman lecture classes. The answer isn't to make the 300-student lecture more efficient, it's to admit that the 300-student lecture is a travesty.
This guy needs beaten just for this.
Can slashdot start allowing posts to be modded up to Score:6, Insightful -- just so we can apply it in this one case?
But to be fair, BSD does have its problems. I ran FreeBSD on both my desktop and my server for years. It was OK as a server OS, but not so great on the desktop. I had a list of open-source apps I wanted to run, and I could only get about 85% of them to run at any given time. That's why I jumped ship when ubuntu came along.
Features I'm waiting for before I buy an e-book reader:
1. I'm not touching anything with DRM, because any book I buy with DRM is virtually guaranteed to be unreadable in four years.
2. A decent selection of books.
3. Good support for books with equations in them.
Iriver apparently fails #1. The WP article on google ebooks says it's touted as open, but actually uses DRM.
A quick search for books by an author I like shows that only a small fraction of his books are available, so fail on #2 as well.
All epub-based formats basically fail #3. Dunno about the formats supported by google ebooks.
With just a touch of exaggeration, I'll say that any public intellectual in that era who didn't have an FBI file probably was lacking a conscience. Einstein had a 1500-page FBI file, having aroused Hoover's suspicion with his involvement in "communist front" organizations like the American Crusade Against Lynching. America had been through the worst era of unrestrained robber-baron capitalism, followed by the Great Depression. It was the height of Jim Crow. If you were engaged in the intellectual life of the country, it was very likely that you were either going to become a socialist or some other kind of radical. Just to pick two more random examples: Margaret Sanger and Helen Keller were both leftists, and both had FBI files. American leftists were the only ones who spoke up against Fascism in Spain and tried to do anything about it -- at a time when right-wingers were often huge fans of Mussolini. For a lot of folks on the left, the big disillusionment came in 1939 with the Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact.
The last time I looked at moodle was in 2008, and here's what my notes say: "Looking at the log of debian bug reports, it seems that it's extremely poorly maintained and packaged. There are major outstanding bugs, including security-related bugs. Some of the bugs in the serious categories go back for over a year." Still true? No longer true?
I teach at a community college, and our district pays big bucks to run a similar system using proprietary software. The thing is, the main cost isn't software, it's hardware, administration, and support.
How about eliminate the sales tax entirely and just focus on the income tax then? Local businesses will then be able to compete better with the internet and revenue will still increase without targeting those who need to spend a greater % of their earnings to survive.
One of the reasons California is already in big trouble financially is that they depended too much on income tax rather than other sources of revenue. Income taxes are highly variable. When the economy tanked, income tax revenue went way down. We also have much lower property tax revenues than a lot of other states, due to Prop 13. A pretty sane thing to do right now would actually be to change Prop 13 so that it doesn't apply to businesses. The original reason people voted for Prop 13 was that they felt sorry for old folks who couldn't pay the property taxes on their houses. But as a side-effect, Disneyland pays property taxes based on a 1978 valuation of their property in Anaheim.
Clearly indicates that a full copy is not going to qualify, and every element must be met for fair use.
No, that's incorrect. The code does not say that all four factors must be met, and that isn't how the courts have interpreted it. The WP article specifically addresses your misconception: "Common misunderstandings: [...] If you're copying an entire work, it's not fair use. While copying an entire work may make it harder to justify the amount and substantiality test, it does not make it impossible that a use is fair use. For instance, in the Betamax case, it was ruled that copying a complete television show for time-shifting purposes is fair use."
To do what you'd like, we'd have to do in the journal system, and replace it with a government run journal, and I'm sure it would be impossible for centralized governmental control of publication to be any sort of problem for science.
Others have already pointed out that for new research, the problem is already solved. NIH already requires research they fund to be published in accessible form, and it hasn't caused the medical and life science journals to go out of business. Almost all physicists post their papers on arxiv.org, and it hasn't caused the physics journals to go out of business. Your concerns about government control of science seem kind of silly to me, a bit like the infamous "keep your government hands off my medicare" picket sign. We're talking about research that is already funded by tax dollars. The journals are just parasites on a government-funded system; they have unpaid volunteers to do all the actual editorial work for them.
They're selling convenience. How much does the gas cost? And how much at your hourly rate does your time cost?
I don't object if 7-11 sells me convenience by charging me twice as much as Safeway for a quart of milk. But the last page of the Pound-Rebka paper has the following note: "Supported in part by the joint program of the Office of Naval Research and the U.S. Atomic Energy Commission and by a grant from the Higgins Scientific Trust." This is research that was funded by federal tax money. There is absolutely no excuse for the American Physical Society to be charging such an exorbitant amount of money for access to taxpayer-funded research.
It doesn't surprise me at all that there's a huge amount of copyright violation. Here is the paywall page for a classic physics paper describing an experiment that tested a prediction of Einstein's theory of general relativity. The paper was published in 1960. They're willing to sell me the scans of this 5-page paper for $25. I teach physics at a community college, so I don't have free access to this journal online. If the price was something more reasonable, like $1 or maybe even $5, I might have considered paying. But at $25 it's not even an option. I can drive to the local Cal State campus, pull the journal off the shelf, and photocopy this paper for 50 cents. No, that's not copyright violation, because it falls under fair use.
What's really ironic is that new physics papers are essentially all available for free, whereas old ones aren't. Today, almost everyone in the field posts their papers on arxiv.org, where anyone who wants to read them can download them for free.
The slashdot summary says: "[...]within a few generations, seeing a actual paper book will be as rare for most people as seeing an actual lion." And how do we know this? Because Kevin Kelly says so on his blog. What evidence does Kevin Kelly give that billions of people worldwide are going to throw all their paper books in a dumpster? None.
Brester Kahle says: "A reason to preserve the physical book that has been digitized is that it is the authentic and original version that can be used as a reference in the future. If there is ever a controversy about the digital version, the original can be examined. A seed bank such as the Svalbard Global Seed Vault is seen as an authoritative and safe version of crops we are growing. Saving physical copies of digitized books might at least be seen in a similar light as an authoritative and safe copy that may be called upon in the future." This is not a great analogy. If you want to be able to grow a plant of a certain species, currently the only way to do it is to have a seed (or a cutting or something, but they don't tend to keep as well). But there are easier, more secure ways to verify that a book hasn't been altered. To verify that all the books in Project Gutenberg have been maintained in an unaltered state, all I need is a computer file listing a hash function computed on each of the books. This is cheap to carry out, and it's very secure. I can print the hash-function file on a piece of paper and hide it somewhere, and no hypothetical evil government can make the piece of paper go away if they don't know I have it. There is no single point of failure, because any number of people can store the hash function. Kahle's cache of paper books is a single point of failure. It can be destroyed in a fire or earthquake, in case of a revolution, etc.
A better justification for maintaining caches of paper books is that in case civilization falls apart, they'll still be readable.
Another option is to require ISBNs for ebooks, which would dramatically increase the cost of submitting twenty books a day. Though they'd need some method of verifying that the ISBN is real.
ISBNs aren't really well suited to electronic publishing. For example, I write nonfiction books and distribute them for free digitally. People can also buy them in print. In the electronic versions, it's natural that if I find an error, I just want to go ahead and fix it right away. But when you have an ISBN for a book, you're supposed to throw it away and get a new ISBN when you make any change whatsoever to the book. ISBNs are also basically a scam. Bowker runs a database and charges people significant amounts of money to generate a new 500-byte database record.
From the comments I'm seeing, it sounds like the real problem is that amazon's book-reviewing system doesn't work very well on kindle books. Seems like they should just fix that problem. The one for print books seems to work reasonably well these days. You do get dishonest behavior (professors getting their grad students to write reviews, individuals posting 10 reviews a day, every day), but by and large it seems to work pretty well.
Everyone should learn how to program, because knowing how to program gives you total power over your computer. You can only say you truly control your computer when you can use programming to make it do anything you want it to do; otherwise you are at the mercy of software vendors that seek to take that control away from you.
This is completely unrealistic. Many people don't even know how to *use* a computer, or even how to type on a qwerty keyboard.
It's also completely unnecessary. Programming skills have nothing to do with being at the mercy of Evil Software Vendors. When I install ubuntu on a new machine, here is the list of packages I install, all of them open source:
fluxbox fluxconf menu feh numlockx aterm mg bluefish gedit texlive-full tipa ispell tex4ht dvipng ssed inkscape gimp imagemagick pdftk xpdf autotrace potrace gs-common netpbm xscreensaver pax rzip tnef pmount apt-file make flex bison build-essential git-core subversion sox transcode faac faad vorbis-tools alsa-utils festival bplay soundstretch lame perl-tk libterm-readkey-perl libdigest-sha1-perl libdate-calc-perl libclone-perl libterm-readline-gnu-perl md5deep libxml-simple-perl libmail-sendmail-perl libjson-perl libgtk2-perl libunicode-maputf8-perl libpar-packer-perl libyaml-syck-perl python-dev libperl-dev automake g++ gnome-devel libpng12-dev libgc-dev libgtkmm-2.4-dev libgsl0-dev libboost-dev libcurses-perl libxerces-c-dev install libgcrypt11-dev libcurl4-openssl-dev libexpat1-dev apache2 apache2.2-common libdbi-perl libdbd-sqlite3-perl dvd+rw-tools curl xclip recode atop htop ruby eruby ocaml-core emacs23-bin-common pan sqlitebrowser lilypond audacity xmix gtick madplay poc-streamer libstdc++6 yacas clisp konqueror dh-make debhelper fakeroot ltris frozen-bubble liquidwar liquidwar-server moon-lander scummvm gnupg autoconf openjdk-6-jre openjdk-6-jdk gnuplot bittorrent bittorrent-gui
Suppose I had no programming skills -- how would that change this list? Suppose I had the programming skills of Donald Knuth -- how would that change this list? Suppose the authors of some of these programs make changes I don't like, or don't maintain the program as well as I'd like so it causes me hassles, or make changes that break backward compatibility. Wait, you don't have to suppose, because it's already happened in several cases: xpdf, perl-tk, sox, ruby, lilypond. Are you suggesting that because I have some programming skills, these problems aren't problems for me? That in the cases where they made changes I didn't like, I should just maintain my own fork? That in the cases where they did a bad job of maintenance, I should do it for them? That when they break backward compatibility, I should maintain my own fork?
Most of the people trying to off themselves are, in fact, bonkers, which makes this pretty complicated.
What is your source for this fact?
I suppose a legal competency hearing would probably be required for a judge to make a judgement that the dude is not, in fact, bonkers crazy.
So everyone is considered insane by default, unless they can convince a judge that they're not?
Why would any individual gain any advantage by participating in bitcoin, except that some early adopters may have been able to realize profits at the expense of later adopters? The closest the bitcoin FAQ seems to come to answering this is:
Is Bitcoin a Ponzi scheme? [...] Bitcoin has possible win-win outcomes. Early adopters profit from the rise in value. Late adopters profit from the usefulness of a stable and widely accepted p2p currency.
The final sentence is what is supposed to make it not a Ponzi scheme. Let's break that down into pieces:
Stable: I live in the US, so this doesn't do much for me. The dollar has had a relatively low inflation rate for decades now, whereas bitcoin could become completely worthless at any time. Even if I was living in a country like Venezuela, which has crazy inflation, I would be foolish to hold any significant portion of my assets as bitcoins. I'd be much better off stuffing US currency in my mattress. If I was the type of libertarian who gets upset about "fiat currency," I could put my money in real estate or gold coins.
Widely accepted: It's not widely accepted, and I don't think it's plausible that it ever will be.
P2P: Why is this a good thing?