I think that my PhD helped me land a job... even though my PhD is in, of all things, historical musicology. In fact, I have a grand total of 2 hours of formal computer education (a physics lab in 1975, where we were introduced to the wonders of BASIC). Everything else I picked up on my own via reading, late nights of coding, studying other peoples' code, and from on-the-job experience.
I am now an IT manager (Technology Development Manager) at a mid-size non-profit. I love the job, make pretty good salary, and have lots of technology projects to manage, toys to play with, etc.
A large part of the problems at this organization were related to communications issues. I think that what got me the job was my experience at my previous employer (which involved a lot of interdepartmental negotiating), but the PhD definitely helped give me a certain "cachet", as it were.
Within five years of making their nuptial vows, nearly a quarter of married scientists had made their last significant contribution to history's hall of fame.
It seems quite a stretch to go from 25% of married scientists to the claim "the great minds who married virtually kissed goodbye to making any further glorious additions to their CV." Last I looked, 75% was a pretty sizable majority. And what was the percentage of unmarried men of similar ages who had also made their last significant contribution?
Of course, saying "A fair amount of married scientists" doesn't make for a good headline...
If they're going to legislate me into putting in 'assistive technology' into my websites, why don't they force magazines to put out Braille versions, or make them supply audio-cassettes or CDs with the contents transcribed ?
Well, in a way "they" do. Under the US copyright law, publishers are required to allow agencies serving people with disabilities to produce accessible versions of their books without charging royalties. Thus, for example, organizations like Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic can freely produce audio textbooks for distribution to students with print disabilities.
And there's more on the way. A bill has been introduced into congress (the Instructional Materials Accessibility Act) that will take this further, requiring textbook publishers to provide electronic text files in a uniform format for use by agencies that produce Braille and audio books for students with disabilities.
... is the distinct possibility that a catastrophic asteroid collision could happen with no advance warning at all. For example, on June 17th, the near-Earth asteroid 2002 MN was discovered. This 100-meter-wide asteroid's path was such that it came within 120,000 km of Earth (inside the orbit of the Moon) -- on June 14th, three days before anyone even knew it existed! Story (complete with graphic showing what a close shave it was) is at Sky and Telescope.
In a way, the alarmist stories about 2002 NT7 are more comforting to the public than the reality of asteroids like MN 2002 that blindside us. If people really realized how little control or even knowledge that we have about such things, they would be pretty freaked.
Actually, Cage's ideas about 4'33'' changed several times during his life. Of particular interest here is that, when he first thought of the idea of a silent piece in 1948, his intent was to sell it to Muzak (so he could get some peace & quiet in elevators, I suppose). So the notion of collecting royalties on it now just brings the piece back to its beginning...
Guess what? TV is not the real world. My bet is that very few co-workers anywhere have this fabulous social life you see on TV (much like very few bumbling, average-to-not-so-good-looking husbands have fabulous babe wives, although this seems quite common in TV sitcom-land).
I support the boycott, but the most important thing that scientists (or any writer) can do is to negotiate their contracts with publishers. The standard contract in all academic publishing -- books, journals, etc. -- assigns full copyright from the author to the publisher. Under those terms, the author has absolutely no further rights to the work, period. This is a very bad situation for academic authors, but in academia publishers can get away with this because of the "publish-or-perish" pressure: who's going to fight a publisher when they have a tenure review committee nipping at their heels?
If you sign away the rights, you have no recourse; therefore, don't sign away the rights in the first place. Negotiation need not be as difficult as it may seem -- most academic authors don't even ask, and so they don't know what's possible. I wrote a book and got an "all-rights" contract from a university publisher. I sent it back requesting that it be changed to assign only those rights they intended to use. They said "OK" right away and that was that. Most academic authors are just so glad to get that contract that they sign it without thinking.
Ironic that this story includes a link to the NY Times' coverage, since they are the ones being sued in the first place. I myself would not turn to them for information on this subject...
For balance, here's the link to the National Writers Union's page about the Supreme Court appeal, including background, the actual briefs filed, etc. (did you know that Ken Burns submitted an amicus brief on the side of the publishers? or that the American Library Association and the US Copyright Office sided with the writers?)
There's also a nice piece on "The Hypocrisy of the NY Times" that explains how the Times (and other publishers) have been trying since 1995 to make their theft legal through "all rights" or "work-for-hire" contracts (which were not the norm before). Here's an excerpt:
Until now, I only mentioned The Times' outright thievery. But, even before it was caught (you wonder what it really knew), the Times' did what every legal miscreant does-unleash its lawyers. In 1995, The Times issued a "work-for-hire" agreement, which decreed that all articles written by its freelancers would be "'works made for hire' and that, as such, The New York Times shall own all rights, including copyright, in your articles. As works made for hire, your articles may be reused by The New York Times with no extra payment made to you."
The Times wasn't alone. In the past five years, there has been a growing movement by media companies to demand from writers an ever-expanding menu of rights for no additional compensation. Virtually all contracts now demand a broad license to use a first-time print publication work in a wide array of electronic formats. The most onerous of the new contracts have been "all-rights" and "work-for-hire" contracts. There is a subtle legal distinction between those two versions: an "all-rights" contract implicitly argues that the writer owned the copyright when the work was created and is now licensing its entire use away, while under "work-for hire," the employer, from a legal standpoint, is considered the original creator of the work.
However, from an economic standpoint, the difference is effectively irrelevant. All-rights and work-for-hire contracts take away our right to decide how our work will be used, our right to make approve editorial changes and make sure our work remains as intact as it was when we typed the last period and, yes, the right to a fair return for what we create. Indeed, while the 1976 Copyright Act, in theory, protects individual authors, it is being obliterated by the sacrosanct written contract.
This is Adobe's way of dealing with the ADA. PDF has traditionally been a mostly inaccessible format for the blind and visually impaired (BVI). For an application to work with a screen-reading software package, the text within its windows has to be exposed to the screen-reader. The Adobe eBook reader does not do this -- everything just looks like a graphic. This is done for security reasons, since if the text content is exposed, someone could rip it and distribute pirated copies.
Adobe's work-around appears to be to allow the eBook application to expose the text, but to implement this as a "right" that is granted to the individual user. The rights for the book are completely individualized as part of the download. Therefore, a BVI user (presumably certified as such by Adobe?) would be able to get the "read aloud" rights to the book that would allow his/her screen-reader to read the eBook application, where a "regular" user would not. I assume that Adobe is not charging for this "right" (if they are, they will be sued for sure).
As an aside, Microsoft's Reader software has exactly the same accessibility problem, which Microsoft is aware of and is working on.
I strongly suspect that this is a fake (albeit a really funny/scary one).
I work (tangentially) in the e-book business and I always get the willies when discussions of Digital Rights Management come up. Content owners do not just want to protect their rights; they want to extend them greatly. The "read out loud" part of the pseudo-Glassbook "rights" screen is fake, but the rest of the rights (no cut-and-paste, no print, no lending, etc.) are well within the boundaries of normal e-book DRM discussions.
And DRM is not just a one-way street -- publishers are anxiously looking at this as a way to collect information back about the people who are reading their content. Not just direct customers (people who buy the book), but also people to whom the book has been lent, etc.
In my opinion, this thinking will doom the e-book business from getting off the ground. Who wants an e-cookbook, for example, if you can't just copy one of the recipes to send to a friend? Who wants to borrow an e-book from a friend when you know that it has the equivalent of a homing device on it sending information back to Time Warner?
One area that the NeXT really revolutionized was computer music. There was a whole history of Unix-based sound synthesis applications prior to NeXT, but support for recording/playback was dreadful and expensive. With NeXT, you got the DSP port that could connect you with a third-party A-D converter box (there were a couple of different ones to choose from). And most importantly, the OS came with tremendous audio software support, right out of the box. Things that caused you to tear your hair out under older systems were now implemented as a single line API call.
And, most importantly, all this on a machine that you could conceivably purchase and administer for yourself at home (especially with the academic discount). NeXT was the beginning of the end for the big university computer music studio, and the start of the high-end home digital audio workstation.
The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped -- a unit of the Library of Congress -- is very actively pursuing the creation and distribution of digital content. Check out their website for information about their Web-Braille and Digital Talking Book initiatives. The NLS is very interested in developments in the eBook world, since this has tremendous potential as a source of accessible content for their members.
I'm sure that Billington is totally unaware of what the more forward-thinking parts of his organization are up to.
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I think that my PhD helped me land a job ... even though my PhD is in, of all things, historical musicology. In fact, I have a grand total of 2 hours of formal computer education (a physics lab in 1975, where we were introduced to the wonders of BASIC). Everything else I picked up on my own via reading, late nights of coding, studying other peoples' code, and from on-the-job experience.
I am now an IT manager (Technology Development Manager) at a mid-size non-profit. I love the job, make pretty good salary, and have lots of technology projects to manage, toys to play with, etc.
A large part of the problems at this organization were related to communications issues. I think that what got me the job was my experience at my previous employer (which involved a lot of interdepartmental negotiating), but the PhD definitely helped give me a certain "cachet", as it were.
It seems quite a stretch to go from 25% of married scientists to the claim "the great minds who married virtually kissed goodbye to making any further glorious additions to their CV." Last I looked, 75% was a pretty sizable majority. And what was the percentage of unmarried men of similar ages who had also made their last significant contribution?
Of course, saying "A fair amount of married scientists" doesn't make for a good headline ...
Well, in a way "they" do. Under the US copyright law, publishers are required to allow agencies serving people with disabilities to produce accessible versions of their books without charging royalties. Thus, for example, organizations like Recording for the Blind & Dyslexic can freely produce audio textbooks for distribution to students with print disabilities.
And there's more on the way. A bill has been introduced into congress (the Instructional Materials Accessibility Act) that will take this further, requiring textbook publishers to provide electronic text files in a uniform format for use by agencies that produce Braille and audio books for students with disabilities.
In a way, the alarmist stories about 2002 NT7 are more comforting to the public than the reality of asteroids like MN 2002 that blindside us. If people really realized how little control or even knowledge that we have about such things, they would be pretty freaked.
Actually, Cage's ideas about 4'33'' changed several times during his life. Of particular interest here is that, when he first thought of the idea of a silent piece in 1948, his intent was to sell it to Muzak (so he could get some peace & quiet in elevators, I suppose). So the notion of collecting royalties on it now just brings the piece back to its beginning ...
The key phrase here:
Guess what? TV is not the real world. My bet is that very few co-workers anywhere have this fabulous social life you see on TV (much like very few bumbling, average-to-not-so-good-looking husbands have fabulous babe wives, although this seems quite common in TV sitcom-land).
I support the boycott, but the most important thing that scientists (or any writer) can do is to negotiate their contracts with publishers. The standard contract in all academic publishing -- books, journals, etc. -- assigns full copyright from the author to the publisher. Under those terms, the author has absolutely no further rights to the work, period. This is a very bad situation for academic authors, but in academia publishers can get away with this because of the "publish-or-perish" pressure: who's going to fight a publisher when they have a tenure review committee nipping at their heels?
If you sign away the rights, you have no recourse; therefore, don't sign away the rights in the first place. Negotiation need not be as difficult as it may seem -- most academic authors don't even ask, and so they don't know what's possible. I wrote a book and got an "all-rights" contract from a university publisher. I sent it back requesting that it be changed to assign only those rights they intended to use. They said "OK" right away and that was that. Most academic authors are just so glad to get that contract that they sign it without thinking.
For balance, here's the link to the National Writers Union's page about the Supreme Court appeal, including background, the actual briefs filed, etc. (did you know that Ken Burns submitted an amicus brief on the side of the publishers? or that the American Library Association and the US Copyright Office sided with the writers?)
There's also a nice piece on "The Hypocrisy of the NY Times" that explains how the Times (and other publishers) have been trying since 1995 to make their theft legal through "all rights" or "work-for-hire" contracts (which were not the norm before). Here's an excerpt:
This is Adobe's way of dealing with the ADA. PDF has traditionally been a mostly inaccessible format for the blind and visually impaired (BVI). For an application to work with a screen-reading software package, the text within its windows has to be exposed to the screen-reader. The Adobe eBook reader does not do this -- everything just looks like a graphic. This is done for security reasons, since if the text content is exposed, someone could rip it and distribute pirated copies.
Adobe's work-around appears to be to allow the eBook application to expose the text, but to implement this as a "right" that is granted to the individual user. The rights for the book are completely individualized as part of the download. Therefore, a BVI user (presumably certified as such by Adobe?) would be able to get the "read aloud" rights to the book that would allow his/her screen-reader to read the eBook application, where a "regular" user would not. I assume that Adobe is not charging for this "right" (if they are, they will be sued for sure).
As an aside, Microsoft's Reader software has exactly the same accessibility problem, which Microsoft is aware of and is working on.
I strongly suspect that this is a fake (albeit a really funny/scary one).
I work (tangentially) in the e-book business and I always get the willies when discussions of Digital Rights Management come up. Content owners do not just want to protect their rights; they want to extend them greatly. The "read out loud" part of the pseudo-Glassbook "rights" screen is fake, but the rest of the rights (no cut-and-paste, no print, no lending, etc.) are well within the boundaries of normal e-book DRM discussions.
And DRM is not just a one-way street -- publishers are anxiously looking at this as a way to collect information back about the people who are reading their content. Not just direct customers (people who buy the book), but also people to whom the book has been lent, etc.
In my opinion, this thinking will doom the e-book business from getting off the ground. Who wants an e-cookbook, for example, if you can't just copy one of the recipes to send to a friend? Who wants to borrow an e-book from a friend when you know that it has the equivalent of a homing device on it sending information back to Time Warner?
One area that the NeXT really revolutionized was computer music. There was a whole history of Unix-based sound synthesis applications prior to NeXT, but support for recording/playback was dreadful and expensive. With NeXT, you got the DSP port that could connect you with a third-party A-D converter box (there were a couple of different ones to choose from). And most importantly, the OS came with tremendous audio software support, right out of the box. Things that caused you to tear your hair out under older systems were now implemented as a single line API call.
And, most importantly, all this on a machine that you could conceivably purchase and administer for yourself at home (especially with the academic discount). NeXT was the beginning of the end for the big university computer music studio, and the start of the high-end home digital audio workstation.
The National Library Service for the Blind and Physically Handicapped -- a unit of the Library of Congress -- is very actively pursuing the creation and distribution of digital content. Check out their website for information about their Web-Braille and Digital Talking Book initiatives. The NLS is very interested in developments in the eBook world, since this has tremendous potential as a source of accessible content for their members.
I'm sure that Billington is totally unaware of what the more forward-thinking parts of his organization are up to.