Category: Technology

Whether you're a reporter, a car mechanic, a student or a steel mill operator, the odds are pretty good that you're using a computer a lot. And you're probably telling that computer what to do using an X-Y position indicator for a display system.

Of course, we no longer call it an “X-Y position indicator for a display system” (left) but that's what its inventor, Doug Engelbart, called the computer mouse when he filed the patent on it in 1967. (Englebart and his lab guys did refer to it as a mouse but they also called it a 'bug' at one point, too.)

But though the patent was filed in 1967, the first-ever computer mouse was never shown to the public until December 9, 1968 — forty years ago this Tuesday — at what later became known as the “The Mother Of All Demos” at the convention centre in San Francisco.

It was called the Mother of All Demos because Engelbart not only showed off the mouse for the first time but he also demonstrated concepts which we now can't live without including: video conferencing, e-mail, and hypertext — text on a screen that, when clicked or acted upon by the user, leads to another screen of information or to some action by the computer.

Now: If you happen to be in northern California this week, there's a whole series of events which should appeal to any uber-geek to celebrate Engelbart's invention and that amazing 1968 presentation.

Technorati Tags: cool stuff

There's not too many genres of music I don't like. As a result, I've got a massive iTunes library that's all over the map. Among the CDs and vinyl that I've recently encoded: James Levine conducting Izthak Perlman through some Mozart concertos; Canadian new wave rockers Blue Peter's 1983 record Falling (that had the hit “Don't Walk Past”); The Hives 2001 compilation, Your New Favourite Band, and The Ultimate Collection of hits by those crazy mid-century Texas swing masters, Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys.

Now it's that last one that's given me the hiccups.

When you move a new item into iTunes, iTunes helpfully checks to see if it's got the album art on some database for whatever it is you're popping in. If it does, do nothing more. Your album art appears magically. If it does not, go find it on the Web or scan it in yourself and paste it in.

Now here's the fun part with today's encoding excersie. My CD of Bob Wills and his Texas Playboys' The Ultimate Collection is popped in the computer and iTunes rips away. Then iTunes reaches out on its database looking for The Ultimate Collection and pulls up this:

Now, being Canadian and all, I'm not up on my race relations the way our American friends are but I'm pretty sure that Lionel Richie is not Bob Wills and his band, who were all white guys in Texas in the 1940s. (Oddly or coincidentally, I also have The Commodores The Ultimate Collection in my iTunes library. If you've got an “Ultimate Collection”, apparently I'm your record buyer) In any event, here's the cover that should be associated with Bob Wills' Ultimate Collection:

Now the weird thing is, iTunes lets you paste whatever cover art you want for any title. But though I was pasting Bob Wills like crazy, I'm still ending up with Lionel Richie. I can't shake it! iTunes is convinced that anyone who put out an album called The Ultimate Collection must be The Commodores.

Finally – I figured it out. If iTunes isn't accepting your album art, check to see what the 'Compilation' status is for the selected tunes. If it's 'Yes', switch it to 'No' and you'll 'ultimately' succeed …

Technorati Tags: bob wills, commodores, digital music, itunes

In the pre-Internet days, one of the standby reference books on the desks of most Canadian journalists was a book called Sources. In it, you got a listing, indexed by subject, of, well, sources. It was a great reference if you needed to find someone who could speak intelligently about rail safety or arctic wildlife or tax law. Sources is still published but I suspect most newsrooms and most journalists might use the electronic version.

Then in the early Internet days, there was a neat service called ProfNet. A journalist would e-mail a query to ProfNet and then the query would get circulated to the PR shops at universities and colleges across the continent (but mostly in the U.S.). If you were lucky, someone would call you back and, presto, you just found a new source. Somewhere along the way, ProfNet was incorporated into/bought by PR Newswire. I haven't used it in a while but it's still there.

Now there's a new service, Bob LeDrew let me know the other day, that does something similar to ProfNet. It's called JournalistSource and it's looking for journalists who want to use it and sources who might be valuable, erm, sources (!) for journalists. I encourage you to check it out.

Technorati Tags: journalism

Gene Spafford (right) is no Luddite (though he worries, below, he might sound like one with this rant he mailed in to Dave Farber's list) but he is a smart guy and a digital pioneer who worries about the implications of generations of students hooked up to Bittorrent never having to pay for a textbook.:

As noted, the whole mechanism of textbooks (and books in general) is changing.

It used to be that authors toiled over texts to present distilled information about their expertise — often hard-won, and usually with careful research. The resulting books were valuable for self-study, for teaching, and especially for reference. Books with valuable content and organization were treasured not only for classes, but for later reference. Years later it is possible to go to a particular book to find an algorithm, scientific constant, or quote that is needed.

Over time, we have seen trends that have eroded the model — and more quickly than most have realized.

First, computerized type-setting and faster printing allowed a lower barrier to entry for printing. Small publishers could get a profit from a smaller press run, and enticed many new authors to write books on topics where they perceived demand. Some also turned to cheaper materials — high-acid, low density paper, cheap glue binding, paper covers — that result in books that wear faster and don't hold up to repeated use or storage as a reference. I look at my reference library (about 800 books) and see many recent publications of very limited utility and likely short life-span. Nonetheless, we see this flood continue because there is a profit to be made and few of the audience read enough of the books to distinguish good from bad, so there continues to be a market. Plus, books with errors or are incomplete aren't a big deal anymore — put the errata on line, or wait for the next edition (sound like the software problem?). With Google, Yahoo and Wikipedia, many people don't feel the need for physical references on their shelves any more.

(Aside — our new buildings with (small) faculty offices are being constructed with limited bookshelf space. Faculty are told to either take books home or donate them to the library. The image of a learned professor surrounded by books is also becoming passé.)

As a (former) author, the question is why would I write a book in this environment? Well, it certainly isn't for the money. As Mary Shaw noted, there isn't a lot of return. I co-wrote a couple, plus many book chapters, and although they sold well, I can't say I made a lot of money. It certainly didn't cover the time away from family, and the permanent damage to my hands (which has limited my ability to write much of anything over the last decade). Many current academic colleagues — particularly the ones who don't write books — don't judge them as too significant. Furthermore, using some of the poorer books out there as metrics, they don't value the scholarly effort some of us put into our writing, either.

The textbook publishers are in business to make money. So, the ones producing the better textbooks need more incentive to offer authors, plus a bigger profit margin to cover fixed expenses with sales of fewer books. Not all their books are hits, either, so they have this balance between bringing out new titles and sustaining the long-term balance. The result is that costs creep up, even if they are trying to contain them (and I doubt they are as rapacious as the media publishers).

So, as an instructor, what do I do? I can certainly assign essays and work off the WWW, but how do I find the best ones in an area where I may not be a top expert? The input of an editor and/or co-ordinating author who expertise I can judge would be a help, but I don't get that from Wikipedia or Google.

Do I want to be teaching fundamental principles from “The Big Dummies 1-2-3 Guide to C++”, 19th edition, knowing that my students are going on to program critical infrastructure and national defense applications? I would rather include sound pedagogy, reinforcement of material on critical algorithms and data structures, issues of ethics and law, and more that is in some of the more carefully- designed textbooks.

But then I have students who balk at the $100 differential and they don't get it when I explain they are paying for quality: they're focused on getting through school as quickly and cheaply as possible to get a job. Unfortunately, many of them carry that over as a work ethic — do it is as quickly and cheaply as possible to get it out the door. 🙁

If we are trying to advance any scholarly field, we should all be working from common terminology and well-documented experiments and facts. How can we trust something we find online that has no author or reviewers listed, or else they are pseudonyms, or people we have never heard of? Is that a stable foundation on which to build future science with confidence?

And what happens 20 years from now when researchers try to go back to underlying principles and results, and cannot find canonical versions of texts to verify that they have been cited appropriately because there are dozens of versions stored electronically….and which may differ in both subtle and significant ways?

The same problems have been happening with journals and conference proceedings. People don't understand that the money they pay goes towards making a fixed archival copy, and to help ensure that there is some quality control in what is published.

I'm sure I sound like a crusty old Luddite to a few people reading this. I know all the arguments about the cyber revolution making knowledge quickly available, at how we can avoid cabals and politics by publishing new results quickly, about how scarce funds can be spent on items other than books, and how even 3rd world scholars can have instant access. I've also heard the arguments about “many eyes” fixing problems in publications and code, and it has been proved specious, and is part of the reason we have a “we'll fix it in the next release” attitude. I'm certainly both a vendor and a customer in the vast marketplace of ideas enabled by all our innovation.

Yet, as a scholar and educator, i worry how to ensure that all our students get the best, most correct materials, that our researchers use correct and commonly-available results, and that we document our progress in correct and archival formats for generations to come. I don't see a cost-effective, workable model yet. What I do see is the same problem I see in many other enterprises, and especially in software systems development — the whole rush to cheap and fast because people don't understand the lasting impact of quality.

I think those problems are part of the whole discussion, and textbook costs are only part of the issue.

Technorati Tags: copyright

Stephen Colbert tries to understand the Internet: “The routers are all the people high on ecstasy?” Actually, yes!

Harvard smart-guy and a Facebook friend Jonathan Zittrain gets a guest slot on The Colbert Report to plug his new book, The Future of the Internet and How To Stop It [you can download the book, for free with certain conditions, right here], and, among other things, uses the metaphor of a mosh pit to explain how “a guy named Jon, a guy named Vint [another Facebook friend, I might add…], and a guy named Steve” (Jonathan probably also meant to mention Len and he certainly wouldn't have wanted to leave out Bob but he definitely wouldn't have mentioned Al) invented a way to move data from this side of the network to that side of the network.

During the piece, Colbert admonishes his audience after they applaud the guys who invented Kazaa and Skype. “Applauding chaos,” Colbert frowns, as he wags his finger.

“I'd like to see a way of saving the good chaos of the Internet,” Zittrain says.

“But you're against the iPhone,” Colbert says. “How can you be against the iPhone? It's like being against warm bread!”

But seriously, Jonathan, who is also celebrating the 10th anniversary this year of the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard which he co-founded, has some important things to say in his book:

The Internet’s current trajectory is one of lost opportunity. Its salvation lies in the hands of its millions of users. Drawing on generative technologies like Wikipedia that have so far survived their own successes, [Zittrain's] book shows how to develop new technologies and social structures that allow users to work creatively and collaboratively, participate in solutions, and become true “netizens.”

Technorati Tags: digital politics, internet, jonathan zittrain, creative commons, stephen colbert

My former colleague Vito Pilieci has a nice little scoop in today's Canwest papers: A musician's group will put forward an idea today that it hopes will solve the illegal music downloading debate: Make every Internet user in Canada pay $5 a month to a musician's fund and, in exchange, you can download all the music you want for free. Seriously.

The Songwriters Association of Canada will reveal a proposal Thursday that would see every Canadian's monthly Internet bill increase by $5 in exchange for the ability to download as many “illegal” music files as they choose.

The SAC says its proposal, which would require federal approval, would wipe out the need for music-selling Web sites such as iTunes.ca and PureTracks.ca, making it legal for one person to share a music CD with as many people as he or she might wish.

“That's a very reasonable amount of money to legally, without fear of any legal repercussions, to be able to download that and share it with [whomever] you want to and as many times as you want,” said Eddie Schwartz, president of the songwriters' group. “On iTunes to download one album, it's $10. This is half of that and this is pretty reasonable to have access to the entire repertoire of Western music.”

Microsoft Corp. announced the hostile takeover of Yahoo! on Friday. Many believe Microsoft’s bid for Yahoo is a response to Google’s tremendous success and the threat Google represents to Microsoft:

———————————————–
Google's statement on Microsoft's bid for Yahoo
Posted on the Official Google Blog on 3 February 2008
http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2008/02/yahoo-and-future-of-internet.html

Yahoo! and the future of the Internet
Posted by David Drummond, Senior Vice President, Corporate Development and Chief Legal Officer

The openness of the Internet is what made Google — and Yahoo! -– possible. A good idea that users find useful spreads quickly. Businesses can be created around the idea. Users benefit from constant innovation. It's what makes the Internet such an exciting place.

So Microsoft's hostile bid for Yahoo! raises troubling questions. This is about more than simply a financial transaction, one company taking over another. It's about preserving the underlying principles of the Internet: openness and innovation.

Could Microsoft now attempt to exert the same sort of inappropriate and illegal influence over the Internet that it did with the PC? While the Internet rewards competitive innovation, Microsoft has frequently sought to establish proprietary monopolies — and then leverage its dominance into new, adjacent markets.

Could the acquisition of Yahoo! allow Microsoft — despite its legacy of serious legal and regulatory offenses — to extend unfair practices from browsers and operating systems to the Internet? In addition,
Microsoft plus Yahoo! equals an overwhelming share of instant messaging and web email accounts. And between them, the two companies operate the two most heavily trafficked portals on the Internet. Could
a combination of the two take advantage of a PC software monopoly to unfairly limit the ability of consumers to freely access competitors' email, IM, and web-based services? Policymakers around the world need to ask these questions — and consumers deserve satisfying answers.

This hostile bid was announced on Friday, so there is plenty of time for these questions to be thoroughly addressed. We take Internet openness, choice and innovation seriously. They are the core of our culture. We believe that the interests of Internet users come first -– and should come first — as the merits of this proposed acquisition are examined and alternatives explored.