But I'm actually curious: if you don't think that traditional journals have a sustainable business model, and that "hitching one's wagon to new, open-access journals is a losing proposition...", which is the way forward in your opinion?
I didn't say that I didn't think traditional journals had a sustainable business model. They might or they might not. If it's not sustainable, they might have to change the way they do business.
These missile defense system can not feasibly be used offensively.
Yes it can. We make a nuclear first strike against China. China launches its own ICBMs in retaliation, but we knock them out using our missile defense system. That's an offensive use of a missile defense system. Without the missile defense, the first strike doesn't work. With the missile defence, it works.
Do you have no problem with your library paying outrageous fees too give you access to non-free journals?
I didn't say that. You said that.
After all, if everyone just reads the paper off arXiv (which is true for myself, and most people I know, as arXiv is a lot faster than any journal) anyway, why should we pay for the journals nobody reads? And if we don't pay for them, how they will survive [?][...]
I didn't say that I expected pay-for-access journals to be able to continue to exist indefinitely without changing their business model. You said that.
[...]and continue to provide the rubber-stamp refereeing process you use them for?
I hardly think that getting a paper accepted by a journal like Physical Review Letters is equivalent to a "rubber stamp." I didn't say it was. You did.
But that does not mean it's impossible like you believe!
The singularityhub.com talks a lot about open-access journals, which are a completely different thing than open access to papers. In my field (physics), most journals have no problem with authors who post their papers on arxiv.org in parallel with publication in the journal, and almost everyone does exactly that. It doesn't matter the slightest bit that Physical Review isn't open access, because essentially all the papers that appear in it these days are openly accessible on arxiv.org.
Hitching one's wagon to new, open-access journals is a losing proposition. Academia is conservative, and in fact many of the open-access journals are really of terrible quality. For instance, the Journal of Modern Physics publishes kook material like this paper, which their peer reviewers clearly weren't qualified to detect as nonsense.
The right solution is for people to refuse to publish in journals that won't let them post their own work online for free. Physicists have done this, and the battle is won -- has been, if I remember correctly, since the 90's.
The singularityhub article has a graph claiming that "open access increases citations." Well, that's kind of silly. It depends on how good, original, and important your work is, and it also depends on what venues you're comparing. There are high-quality non-free journals and there are non-free junk journals. There are high-quality open-access journals and there are open-access junk journals such as the Journal of Modern Physics. What I guarantee will increase citations is if, in addition to publishing your paper in the best (open or non-open) journal you can, you also make it available for free someplace like arxiv.org, so that your colleagues can access it easily. (Even for people who have institutional access to journals, pulling papers out of the publishers' crappy web interfaces is an extremely painful process, and every interface and database works differently.)
Open-access journals, as opposed to open access to papers, only become crucial if you're unlucky enough to be in a field where the non-open journals all actively enforce a prohibition against posting your papers online for free.
Re:I have an organ donor card...
on
When Are You Dead?
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· Score: 3, Informative
What crap. A friend of one of my daughter's friends is a transplant recipient. I met her at a Halloween party a couple of years ago. She's about 13 now, I think. Without a transplant, she'd have been dead as a toddler. She seems pretty normal and happy to me, having a good life.
Not sure I agree with this. I happen to be a card-carrying member of a teachers' union. (I teach at a community college in California.) But I think that teachers' unions have played a very destructive role in preventing the professionalization of K-12 teaching. Engineers, doctors, and lawyers all have significant licensing and educational requirements. When proposals have been made to slightly increase the requirements for K-12 teachers (e.g., requiring them take a test showing they can do reading, writing, and arithmetic at some decent level), unions have fought tooth and nail, calling it racist, etc. Better pay will not help without higher professional standards.
Better training? Specifically what would this be? For example, there have been many, many efforts over the years to improve the math and science preparation of K-6 teachers. They have all failed. Why did they fail? Well, mainly because most of the people who want to be K-6 teachers hate math and science with a passion. Why is this? Probably because anyone who's good at math and science knows they can have a more desirable job doing something other than K-6 teaching.
The reform that's really needed is to make K-12 teaching seem to young people like a desirable, enjoyable, fulfilling career, and one that they can get a job in. In California right now, we're laying off teachers left and right because of the state budget meltdown. Good luck recruiting talented young people to the profession when they know they have zero chance of getting a job. California has also abandoned class size reduction and gone the opposite direction, for budgetary reasons. Teachers now have classes of 35-40 students. I can't imagine how any young person could picture herself teaching a class of 40 students and say, "Yeah, that would be a great career." And then there's No Child Left Behind, which seems very carefully designed to make teachers as unhappy as possible. I don't have anything against standardized testing or accountability for teachers, but NCLB was designed by morons. It's a complete disaster.
The thing that makes this such a ridiculous engineering project is the requirement to carry humans, who can't be subjected to more than about 3 g's. The length of the track is inversely proportional to the acceleration, so if you're sending up steel I-beams that can withstand 3000 g's, you can shorten the track to 1 mile rather than 1000 miles. Tanks of water and rocket fuel can also be subjected to a lot more than 3 g's.
About 15% of Americans are below the poverty line. According to TFA, 19% of Americans don't own any kind of cell phone (smart or dumb). I don't know whether this says more about how Americans define poverty or more about how much Americans love cell phones. Someday soon I expect to be the last affluent, educated American under 50 who doesn't own a cell phone.
The solution is simple: use PDFs of public domain textbooks. If you like, order a cheap bound copy of the PDF to be made.
Basic math hasn't changed much in a century, and there are numerous old textbooks out there that are generally proofread better than modern textbooks. I have found the problems are often better structured and designed as well.
This is a perfectly reasonable idea, but it would require massive legislative change to implement it in K-12 education, and that legislative change isn't going to happen because of lobbying by textbook publishers.
As a random example, the California Education Code contains the following:
When adopting instructional materials for use in the schools, governing boards shall include only instructional materials which, in their determination, accurately portray the cultural and racial diversity of our society, including: (a) The contributions of both men and women in all types of roles, including professional, vocational, and executive roles. (b) The role and contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, persons with disabilities, and members of other ethnic and cultural groups to the total development of California and the United States.
It doesn't specifically say that pictures of kids in a math textbook have to include pictures of kids in wheelchairs, but it's a specific example of the extremely tight regulatory environment for textbooks. Another good example is that state law allows a school to pay $200 for a textbook, but does not allow it to spend $10 at Kinko's to print out a paper copy of a free digital textbook. When Governor Schwarzenegger started his Free Digital Textbook Initiative, one of the big obstacles was the state bureaucracy involved in textbook selection. They tried to streamline the process, but basically the initiative seems to have been a total failure.
I'm the author of some free online physics textbooks. They're written for the college level, but I have quite a few adoptions from high schools as well. Virtually all of those are from private schools, especially Catholic schools.
It's certainly true that algebra and calculus don't change very much over time. However, the public education system in my state, including both K-12 and the state college and university systems, has general rules that forbid us from using old textbooks. That makes a lot of sense, as a matter of fact, for physics, history, etc. There is no exception written into these requirements for math. In any case, if you look at the catalog in my sig, you'll see that there is not any shortage of high-quality free textbooks for math that are recent. There's no real need to use old public-domain math books rather than modern, free ones.
IMO the real problem is that the most important POV character in the book, Anderson Lake, is portrayed as a total blank. He just kind of walks on and off stage and does stuff, and you never get any insight into why he does what he does. It's not that Bacigalupi can't do characterization -- he does a very nice job with the other characters in the book. He just fails in the case of Lake.
This creates real problems when Lake uses Emiko as a sexual tool and then betrays her. It's easy to get the impression in the first half of the book that Lake is supposed to be a sympathetic character. Then when he shows himself to be a total dirtbag at the end, the lack of characterization leaves the reader wondering what effect Bacigalupi was trying to evoke. If Bacigalupi had been more successful at portraying Lake as a fully realized character, then we'd probably have an easier time contextualizing the heinous sexual abuse in the book.
The examples in the article all seem to be about learning that is at a low intellectual level, such as memorization of facts (recalling information from a lecture) and muscle memory (improving your tennis serve). Fine for learning to play my scales on the violin, memorizing words in Swahili. But what if I need to figure out that my violin vibrato is out of character for the baroque piece I'm working on, or what if I need to do a better job of speaking Swahili with idiomatic word order rather than translating word-for-word from English?
The format is apparently epub 3 with some proprietary extensions. Epub 3 is basically html bundled up in a zip file, and it handles math using mathml. There are various good tools available for converting latex math into mathml.
Here is some mathml that I generated by using open-source software to convert latex $x^2$ into mathml:
Does the authoring app give you a way to cut and paste this into your book? If so, is Apple's ibook reading software capable of rendering the book correctly?
They say they already have some math and physics textbooks for sale in the ibook store, but I don't know whether they're done using mathml or some kludgy workaround like bitmapped images (which is what you have to do in epub 2).
Books are not technically in the EPUB format, but they borrow from it (likely EPUB 3). Certain interactive elements of the books require the files to be done in the slightly different iBooks format, Apple says.
This leaves the situation very unclear.
I assume there is DRM. DRM is not part of the epub spec, but can be added on top. So the first question on my mind would be whether a book in this format bought from Apple will be DRM-unlockable on non-Apple readers.
The next issue is whether or not these added "interactive elements" are proprietary, and whether they break compatibility with readers that implement the straight epub 3 standard.
And finally, there is the question of how they're going to handle epub 3 features that are not yet implemented in any readers, including Apple's. TFA says that the initial lineup of books, which are supposed to be available already today, will include math and physics textbooks. Epub 3 has mathml, but no reader, including any of Apple's, implements this yet. So will Apple push out a software update to iPads that will add mathml support? It would be interesting if a slashdotter who owns an iPad could buy one of these books and report back on how the math is done and whether it renders properly on an iPad.
What is potentially a little sinister here is that Apple, which formerly had hitched its wagon to the open epub standard, could now be heading down the proprietary road taken by amazon. Amazon has been trying to negotiate exclusive deals with publishers to sell e-books; obviously their dream is to achieve lock-in, so that their customers become their captives. Barnes and Noble is responding by refusing to sell paper books by publishers, such as DC Comics, who won't let them sell the electronic version. If apple starts to emulate their behavior, then we're going to have a really nasty situation, where you'd have to own one handheld reader in order to read Harry Potter, and a different company's reader for Sue Grafton.
Yes, that's what they were *saying*. I was pointing out that their example of 'fuzzball' *is* a black hole, and *does* have an event horizion, and thus, like the other things, doesn't belong in their list of alternatives if no event horizon is found.
It might be a bit of an oversimplification to call this a test of relativity.
Relativity consists of special relativity (SR) and general relativity (GR). GR includes gravity.
SR has been tested in many different ways to extremely high precision. Here is a summary of experimental tests of SR. Note that even if the faster-than-light neutrino result from CERN/Gran Sasso is correct, it doesn't necessarily conflict with SR. SR doesn't forbid FTL. It only forbids an object from being accelerated from a speed less than c to a speed greater than c.
Here is an article on tests of general relativity. A nice popularization of this kind of thing is the book Was Einstein Right? by Clifford Will. Although GR has not been as thoroughly tested as SR, it has been tested in many different ways. There is not really a heck of a lot of doubt that it's right in many ways. Alternative theories exist, but they are extremely tightly constrained by observation.
We expect that Sagittarius A* is a black hole, and the definition of black hole basically means that it has an event horizon. If, contrary to everyone's expectations, it turns out not to have an event horizon, the most likely interpretation may not actually be that GR is wrong. It may actually mean that there is something wrong with relativistic particle physics. It's possible that the process of formation that we think leads to a black hole actually stops short of forming a black hole, and instead forms some other exotic object. There are various speculations about these things: gravastars, fuzzballs, quark stars, boson stars, q-balls... If we found out that Sgr A* was one of these hypothetical critters, it would be very exciting for the particle physicists, but it would not disprove GR.
I doubt that we're going to be directly imaging the event horizon for the central black hole anytime soon. [...] Now, imagine trying to see something that size, which is perfectly dark, from 27,000 light years away and you'll understand how difficult it would be to directly image it.
What? I have a Sony Pocket e-reader and PDF ebooks reflow just fine. I have a bunch of PDF ebooks I never bothered to convert to epub or native format because they work fine. You can't tell you're even reading a PDF.
Are you talking about a novel, or a calculus textbook? It's cool if it has good enough heuristics to reflow a PDF of a novel, but I can't believe it will work well on a book with a complicated layout -- which means basically all textbooks.
Is it that hard to find a decent textbook that's either in the public domain or sold cheap?
Harder than you might think.
Public domain books are going to be quite old -- at least a few decades, in the case where the book was published before 1964 and the copyright was not renewed. At my school, we are required to update the curriculum database every 5 years for every course, and the primary textbook for the course has to be one that's less than (IIRC) 10 years old. The intention is to make sure that students are getting an up-to-date education. Of course, this doesn't make a lot of sense for a subject like calculus or 19th-century English poetry, but that's the bureaucratic reality. And in any case, most subjects really do change rapidly enough that PD is not an option.
Cheap textbooks are not available from the big commercial publishers, partly because they employ a lot of people who need paychecks (graphic designers, sales reps, acquisitions editors, copy editors,...), partly because color is seen as necessary for a saleable book, and partly (mainly) because they're evil sons of bitches who know what the market will bear.
Free and cheap books are available through other channels, however; see my sig for a catalog.
People love to quote this $400... I've never seen an undergraduate textbook that costs more than $200.
Donaldson and Dunfee, Ethics in Business and Economics, is $680 on Amazon. (But it ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping!) Gotta love the combination of price and title.
In any case, even $200 is totally unacceptable.
Now, that's still a lot, but the same book can often be had for very cheap used from a previous student or off Amazon.
The publishers have gotten very good at killing off the used book market. They bring out a new edition every couple of years, making just enough superficial changes to discourage people from using an old edition. For example, in a math textbook they'll rearrange all the homework problems so the numbers are different.
I'm pretty sure some of the bigger textbooks companies pay significant kickbacks to colleges and departments to require the latest editions their overpriced crap.
No. Every time there's a textbook story on slashdot, someone posts this nonsense about "kickbacks." Every time I see it, I post a reply and ask for evidence. None is ever forthcoming.
I teach physics at a community college. I have been approached by many, many textbook reps. None has ever offered me a kickback.
Publishers do not need to offer kickbacks to get instructors to switch to the latest edition. The publisher simply stops selling the older edition, and the prof has no choice but to switch.
Yes, but the experience sucks. For example, if the pdf was formatted with lines of text 18 cm wide, but you're viewing it on a reader with a 10 cm-wide screen, you're going to have to scroll back and forth with every line you read -- or resize it so small that the font becomes illegible.
converting docs using Calibre seems to work well.
Calibre works fine on some things, but not others. For example, it has no math support (basically because none of the output formats it supports, such as epub 2, have any math support).
I don't buy the claim in the Ars article that the big thing standing in the way of digital textbooks is that the tools for creating them are nonexistent, not good enough, or too hard to use. First off, textbook publishers have paid professionals who do this sort of thing. And in any case, the real barrier is that the ebook formats are extremely limited. The big issue for math and science textbooks is that the kindle and epub 2 formats don't support math properly. (You can display equations as bitmaps, but only if they're placed on a line by themselves in the middle of the page. Bitmapped equations won't scale properly when the user selects a different font, and they aren't accessible to blind people.) Epub 3 includes mathml, which is great, but there are currently zero readers on the market that support epub 3+mathml. Amazon has recently come out with the latest version of the kindle format, and it does not include math, so it seems unlikely that there will be math on the kindle in the foreseeable future. If and when readers start to support epub 3+mathml, there is no major technical barrier to creating textbooks with math in them. If you have tools to create xhtml+mathml (which are very easy to find), then it's trivial to create epub 3+mathml, because epub is basically just a set of html files packaged together in a zip file. Some OSS, such as epubcheck, already supports epub 3. I'm sure that tools such as Calibre will provide the necessary support (which will not be hard to do) once there is support from readers, although there is little motivation for the developers to do it right now, since there will no device that can actually do anything with the resulting file.
In any case, let's be realistic about what all this means. These books will have DRM, just like all commercial ebooks have already. The books will be priced just as exploitatively as current textbooks are, because the publishers know that that's what college students are currently paying.
Slashdot Mirror
This is a record for an artificial field. The strongest naturally occurring fields are believed to be about 10^12 Tesla for some pulsars.
But I'm actually curious: if you don't think that traditional journals have a sustainable business model, and that "hitching one's wagon to new, open-access journals is a losing proposition ...", which is the way forward in your opinion?
I didn't say that I didn't think traditional journals had a sustainable business model. They might or they might not. If it's not sustainable, they might have to change the way they do business.
These missile defense system can not feasibly be used offensively.
Yes it can. We make a nuclear first strike against China. China launches its own ICBMs in retaliation, but we knock them out using our missile defense system. That's an offensive use of a missile defense system. Without the missile defense, the first strike doesn't work. With the missile defence, it works.
Do you have no problem with your library paying outrageous fees too give you access to non-free journals?
I didn't say that. You said that.
After all, if everyone just reads the paper off arXiv (which is true for myself, and most people I know, as arXiv is a lot faster than any journal) anyway, why should we pay for the journals nobody reads? And if we don't pay for them, how they will survive [?][...]
I didn't say that I expected pay-for-access journals to be able to continue to exist indefinitely without changing their business model. You said that.
[...]and continue to provide the rubber-stamp refereeing process you use them for?
I hardly think that getting a paper accepted by a journal like Physical Review Letters is equivalent to a "rubber stamp." I didn't say it was. You did.
But that does not mean it's impossible like you believe!
I didn't say it was impossible. You did.
The singularityhub.com talks a lot about open-access journals, which are a completely different thing than open access to papers. In my field (physics), most journals have no problem with authors who post their papers on arxiv.org in parallel with publication in the journal, and almost everyone does exactly that. It doesn't matter the slightest bit that Physical Review isn't open access, because essentially all the papers that appear in it these days are openly accessible on arxiv.org.
Hitching one's wagon to new, open-access journals is a losing proposition. Academia is conservative, and in fact many of the open-access journals are really of terrible quality. For instance, the Journal of Modern Physics publishes kook material like this paper, which their peer reviewers clearly weren't qualified to detect as nonsense.
The right solution is for people to refuse to publish in journals that won't let them post their own work online for free. Physicists have done this, and the battle is won -- has been, if I remember correctly, since the 90's.
The singularityhub article has a graph claiming that "open access increases citations." Well, that's kind of silly. It depends on how good, original, and important your work is, and it also depends on what venues you're comparing. There are high-quality non-free journals and there are non-free junk journals. There are high-quality open-access journals and there are open-access junk journals such as the Journal of Modern Physics. What I guarantee will increase citations is if, in addition to publishing your paper in the best (open or non-open) journal you can, you also make it available for free someplace like arxiv.org, so that your colleagues can access it easily. (Even for people who have institutional access to journals, pulling papers out of the publishers' crappy web interfaces is an extremely painful process, and every interface and database works differently.)
Open-access journals, as opposed to open access to papers, only become crucial if you're unlucky enough to be in a field where the non-open journals all actively enforce a prohibition against posting your papers online for free.
What crap. A friend of one of my daughter's friends is a transplant recipient. I met her at a Halloween party a couple of years ago. She's about 13 now, I think. Without a transplant, she'd have been dead as a toddler. She seems pretty normal and happy to me, having a good life.
Another good counterexample is cornea transplantation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cornea_transplant#Prognosis
4. Give teachers better pay and better training.
Not sure I agree with this. I happen to be a card-carrying member of a teachers' union. (I teach at a community college in California.) But I think that teachers' unions have played a very destructive role in preventing the professionalization of K-12 teaching. Engineers, doctors, and lawyers all have significant licensing and educational requirements. When proposals have been made to slightly increase the requirements for K-12 teachers (e.g., requiring them take a test showing they can do reading, writing, and arithmetic at some decent level), unions have fought tooth and nail, calling it racist, etc. Better pay will not help without higher professional standards.
Better training? Specifically what would this be? For example, there have been many, many efforts over the years to improve the math and science preparation of K-6 teachers. They have all failed. Why did they fail? Well, mainly because most of the people who want to be K-6 teachers hate math and science with a passion. Why is this? Probably because anyone who's good at math and science knows they can have a more desirable job doing something other than K-6 teaching.
The reform that's really needed is to make K-12 teaching seem to young people like a desirable, enjoyable, fulfilling career, and one that they can get a job in. In California right now, we're laying off teachers left and right because of the state budget meltdown. Good luck recruiting talented young people to the profession when they know they have zero chance of getting a job. California has also abandoned class size reduction and gone the opposite direction, for budgetary reasons. Teachers now have classes of 35-40 students. I can't imagine how any young person could picture herself teaching a class of 40 students and say, "Yeah, that would be a great career." And then there's No Child Left Behind, which seems very carefully designed to make teachers as unhappy as possible. I don't have anything against standardized testing or accountability for teachers, but NCLB was designed by morons. It's a complete disaster.
Unfortunately, none of these are open source.
Instacalc: "InstaCalc is for personal, non-commercial use only."
OpalCalc: Has a free demo, but it costs money to get the real version.
Soulver: Is shareware, puts a watermark on results if you don't pay for it.
The thing that makes this such a ridiculous engineering project is the requirement to carry humans, who can't be subjected to more than about 3 g's. The length of the track is inversely proportional to the acceleration, so if you're sending up steel I-beams that can withstand 3000 g's, you can shorten the track to 1 mile rather than 1000 miles. Tanks of water and rocket fuel can also be subjected to a lot more than 3 g's.
This is cool, but...?
Why does it matter that it's the lead developer of DragonflyBSD?
About 15% of Americans are below the poverty line. According to TFA, 19% of Americans don't own any kind of cell phone (smart or dumb). I don't know whether this says more about how Americans define poverty or more about how much Americans love cell phones. Someday soon I expect to be the last affluent, educated American under 50 who doesn't own a cell phone.
The solution is simple: use PDFs of public domain textbooks. If you like, order a cheap bound copy of the PDF to be made.
Basic math hasn't changed much in a century, and there are numerous old textbooks out there that are generally proofread better than modern textbooks. I have found the problems are often better structured and designed as well.
This is a perfectly reasonable idea, but it would require massive legislative change to implement it in K-12 education, and that legislative change isn't going to happen because of lobbying by textbook publishers.
As a random example, the California Education Code contains the following:
When adopting instructional materials for use in the schools, governing boards shall include only instructional materials which, in their determination, accurately portray the cultural and racial diversity of our society, including: (a) The contributions of both men and women in all types of roles, including professional, vocational, and executive roles. (b) The role and contributions of Native Americans, African Americans, Mexican Americans, Asian Americans, Pacific Islanders, European Americans, lesbian, gay, bisexual, and transgender Americans, persons with disabilities, and members of other ethnic and cultural groups to the total development of California and the United States.
It doesn't specifically say that pictures of kids in a math textbook have to include pictures of kids in wheelchairs, but it's a specific example of the extremely tight regulatory environment for textbooks. Another good example is that state law allows a school to pay $200 for a textbook, but does not allow it to spend $10 at Kinko's to print out a paper copy of a free digital textbook. When Governor Schwarzenegger started his Free Digital Textbook Initiative, one of the big obstacles was the state bureaucracy involved in textbook selection. They tried to streamline the process, but basically the initiative seems to have been a total failure.
I'm the author of some free online physics textbooks. They're written for the college level, but I have quite a few adoptions from high schools as well. Virtually all of those are from private schools, especially Catholic schools.
It's certainly true that algebra and calculus don't change very much over time. However, the public education system in my state, including both K-12 and the state college and university systems, has general rules that forbid us from using old textbooks. That makes a lot of sense, as a matter of fact, for physics, history, etc. There is no exception written into these requirements for math. In any case, if you look at the catalog in my sig, you'll see that there is not any shortage of high-quality free textbooks for math that are recent. There's no real need to use old public-domain math books rather than modern, free ones.
IMO the real problem is that the most important POV character in the book, Anderson Lake, is portrayed as a total blank. He just kind of walks on and off stage and does stuff, and you never get any insight into why he does what he does. It's not that Bacigalupi can't do characterization -- he does a very nice job with the other characters in the book. He just fails in the case of Lake.
****************** SPOILER WARNING ********************
This creates real problems when Lake uses Emiko as a sexual tool and then betrays her. It's easy to get the impression in the first half of the book that Lake is supposed to be a sympathetic character. Then when he shows himself to be a total dirtbag at the end, the lack of characterization leaves the reader wondering what effect Bacigalupi was trying to evoke. If Bacigalupi had been more successful at portraying Lake as a fully realized character, then we'd probably have an easier time contextualizing the heinous sexual abuse in the book.
The examples in the article all seem to be about learning that is at a low intellectual level, such as memorization of facts (recalling information from a lecture) and muscle memory (improving your tennis serve). Fine for learning to play my scales on the violin, memorizing words in Swahili. But what if I need to figure out that my violin vibrato is out of character for the baroque piece I'm working on, or what if I need to do a better job of speaking Swahili with idiomatic word order rather than translating word-for-word from English?
Does the authoring app give you a way to cut and paste this into your book? If so, is Apple's ibook reading software capable of rendering the book correctly? They say they already have some math and physics textbooks for sale in the ibook store, but I don't know whether they're done using mathml or some kludgy workaround like bitmapped images (which is what you have to do in epub 2).
>>Personally, I would prefer DRM-free PDFs or interactive and cross platform HTML 5 "books" that didn't mandate a platform.
>The ePub format is cross-platform HTML5. The .ibooks files that this tool exports are ePubs with a mime type of "application/x-ibooks+zip".
This link says:
Books are not technically in the EPUB format, but they borrow from it (likely EPUB 3). Certain interactive elements of the books require the files to be done in the slightly different iBooks format, Apple says.
This leaves the situation very unclear.
I assume there is DRM. DRM is not part of the epub spec, but can be added on top. So the first question on my mind would be whether a book in this format bought from Apple will be DRM-unlockable on non-Apple readers.
The next issue is whether or not these added "interactive elements" are proprietary, and whether they break compatibility with readers that implement the straight epub 3 standard.
And finally, there is the question of how they're going to handle epub 3 features that are not yet implemented in any readers, including Apple's. TFA says that the initial lineup of books, which are supposed to be available already today, will include math and physics textbooks. Epub 3 has mathml, but no reader, including any of Apple's, implements this yet. So will Apple push out a software update to iPads that will add mathml support? It would be interesting if a slashdotter who owns an iPad could buy one of these books and report back on how the math is done and whether it renders properly on an iPad.
What is potentially a little sinister here is that Apple, which formerly had hitched its wagon to the open epub standard, could now be heading down the proprietary road taken by amazon. Amazon has been trying to negotiate exclusive deals with publishers to sell e-books; obviously their dream is to achieve lock-in, so that their customers become their captives. Barnes and Noble is responding by refusing to sell paper books by publishers, such as DC Comics, who won't let them sell the electronic version. If apple starts to emulate their behavior, then we're going to have a really nasty situation, where you'd have to own one handheld reader in order to read Harry Potter, and a different company's reader for Sue Grafton.
Yes, that's what they were *saying*. I was pointing out that their example of 'fuzzball' *is* a black hole, and *does* have an event horizion, and thus, like the other things, doesn't belong in their list of alternatives if no event horizon is found.
Yes, I think you're correct.
It might be a bit of an oversimplification to call this a test of relativity.
Relativity consists of special relativity (SR) and general relativity (GR). GR includes gravity.
SR has been tested in many different ways to extremely high precision. Here is a summary of experimental tests of SR. Note that even if the faster-than-light neutrino result from CERN/Gran Sasso is correct, it doesn't necessarily conflict with SR. SR doesn't forbid FTL. It only forbids an object from being accelerated from a speed less than c to a speed greater than c.
Here is an article on tests of general relativity. A nice popularization of this kind of thing is the book Was Einstein Right? by Clifford Will. Although GR has not been as thoroughly tested as SR, it has been tested in many different ways. There is not really a heck of a lot of doubt that it's right in many ways. Alternative theories exist, but they are extremely tightly constrained by observation.
We expect that Sagittarius A* is a black hole, and the definition of black hole basically means that it has an event horizon. If, contrary to everyone's expectations, it turns out not to have an event horizon, the most likely interpretation may not actually be that GR is wrong. It may actually mean that there is something wrong with relativistic particle physics. It's possible that the process of formation that we think leads to a black hole actually stops short of forming a black hole, and instead forms some other exotic object. There are various speculations about these things: gravastars, fuzzballs, quark stars, boson stars, q-balls... If we found out that Sgr A* was one of these hypothetical critters, it would be very exciting for the particle physicists, but it would not disprove GR.
I doubt that we're going to be directly imaging the event horizon for the central black hole anytime soon. [...] Now, imagine trying to see something that size, which is perfectly dark, from 27,000 light years away and you'll understand how difficult it would be to directly image it.
Direct imaging of its event horizon is exactly what they're planning to do: http://arxiv.org/abs/0906.3899
What? I have a Sony Pocket e-reader and PDF ebooks reflow just fine. I have a bunch of PDF ebooks I never bothered to convert to epub or native format because they work fine. You can't tell you're even reading a PDF.
Are you talking about a novel, or a calculus textbook? It's cool if it has good enough heuristics to reflow a PDF of a novel, but I can't believe it will work well on a book with a complicated layout -- which means basically all textbooks.
Is it that hard to find a decent textbook that's either in the public domain or sold cheap?
Harder than you might think.
Public domain books are going to be quite old -- at least a few decades, in the case where the book was published before 1964 and the copyright was not renewed. At my school, we are required to update the curriculum database every 5 years for every course, and the primary textbook for the course has to be one that's less than (IIRC) 10 years old. The intention is to make sure that students are getting an up-to-date education. Of course, this doesn't make a lot of sense for a subject like calculus or 19th-century English poetry, but that's the bureaucratic reality. And in any case, most subjects really do change rapidly enough that PD is not an option.
Cheap textbooks are not available from the big commercial publishers, partly because they employ a lot of people who need paychecks (graphic designers, sales reps, acquisitions editors, copy editors, ...), partly because color is seen as necessary for a saleable book, and partly (mainly) because they're evil sons of bitches who know what the market will bear.
Free and cheap books are available through other channels, however; see my sig for a catalog.
People love to quote this $400... I've never seen an undergraduate textbook that costs more than $200.
Donaldson and Dunfee, Ethics in Business and Economics, is $680 on Amazon. (But it ships for FREE with Super Saver Shipping!) Gotta love the combination of price and title.
In any case, even $200 is totally unacceptable.
Now, that's still a lot, but the same book can often be had for very cheap used from a previous student or off Amazon.
The publishers have gotten very good at killing off the used book market. They bring out a new edition every couple of years, making just enough superficial changes to discourage people from using an old edition. For example, in a math textbook they'll rearrange all the homework problems so the numbers are different.
I'm pretty sure some of the bigger textbooks companies pay significant kickbacks to colleges and departments to require the latest editions their overpriced crap.
No. Every time there's a textbook story on slashdot, someone posts this nonsense about "kickbacks." Every time I see it, I post a reply and ask for evidence. None is ever forthcoming.
I teach physics at a community college. I have been approached by many, many textbook reps. None has ever offered me a kickback.
Publishers do not need to offer kickbacks to get instructors to switch to the latest edition. The publisher simply stops selling the older edition, and the prof has no choice but to switch.
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:
Those are just the first few that came to mind.
Aren't most e-readers able to display PDF files?
Yes, but the experience sucks. For example, if the pdf was formatted with lines of text 18 cm wide, but you're viewing it on a reader with a 10 cm-wide screen, you're going to have to scroll back and forth with every line you read -- or resize it so small that the font becomes illegible.
converting docs using Calibre seems to work well.
Calibre works fine on some things, but not others. For example, it has no math support (basically because none of the output formats it supports, such as epub 2, have any math support).
I don't buy the claim in the Ars article that the big thing standing in the way of digital textbooks is that the tools for creating them are nonexistent, not good enough, or too hard to use. First off, textbook publishers have paid professionals who do this sort of thing. And in any case, the real barrier is that the ebook formats are extremely limited. The big issue for math and science textbooks is that the kindle and epub 2 formats don't support math properly. (You can display equations as bitmaps, but only if they're placed on a line by themselves in the middle of the page. Bitmapped equations won't scale properly when the user selects a different font, and they aren't accessible to blind people.) Epub 3 includes mathml, which is great, but there are currently zero readers on the market that support epub 3+mathml. Amazon has recently come out with the latest version of the kindle format, and it does not include math, so it seems unlikely that there will be math on the kindle in the foreseeable future. If and when readers start to support epub 3+mathml, there is no major technical barrier to creating textbooks with math in them. If you have tools to create xhtml+mathml (which are very easy to find), then it's trivial to create epub 3+mathml, because epub is basically just a set of html files packaged together in a zip file. Some OSS, such as epubcheck, already supports epub 3. I'm sure that tools such as Calibre will provide the necessary support (which will not be hard to do) once there is support from readers, although there is little motivation for the developers to do it right now, since there will no device that can actually do anything with the resulting file.
In any case, let's be realistic about what all this means. These books will have DRM, just like all commercial ebooks have already. The books will be priced just as exploitatively as current textbooks are, because the publishers know that that's what college students are currently paying.