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Jun
2
2012
“All sharing is not piracy. Some of it is just actually sharing…. In order to protect some people from piracy we have also violated the rights of many more to share…In the Web 2.0 world, we are all producers of data. We not only leave traces but also put out material of cultural significance–from videos of dancing babies to knowledge that we want to share–through these peer-2-peer networks. A sudden collapse of this infrastructure almost seems to show how it is only the money-making material that is important to the state…”
But in the 1980s and 1990s, the market changed drastically with the expansion of used book recyclers. They set up shop at the bookstore door near the end of the semester and bought students’ new copies for pennies on the dollar. They would show up in my office uninvited and ask if I want to sell any of the free adopter’s copies that I get from publishers trying to entice me. If you walk through any campus bookstore, nearly all the new copies have been replaced by used copies, usually very tattered and with broken spines. The students naturally gravitate to the cheaper used books (and some prefer them because they like it if a previous owner has highlighted the important stuff). In many bookstores, there are no new copies at all, or just a few that go unsold.
What these bargain hunters don’t realize is that every used copy purchased means a new copy unsold. Used copies pay nothing to the publisher (or the author, either), so to recoup their costs, publishers must price their new copies to offset the loss of sales by used copies. And so the vicious circle begins—publisher raises the price on the book again, more students buy used copies, so a new copy keeps climbing in price.
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In some cases, the costs are driven up because the market has gotten highly competitive with more and expensive features, like pricey full color throughout, and lots of ancillaries (website for the book, CD-ROM of Powerpoints or images, study guide for students, instructor’s guide, test banks, and many other extras). In the high-volume markets, like the introductory courses taken by hundreds of non-majors, these silly extras seem to make a big difference in enticing faculty to change their preferences and adopt a different book, so publishers must pull out all the stops on these expensive frills or lose in a highly competitive market. And, like any other market, the cost per unit is a function of how many you sell. In the huge introductory markets, there are tens of thousands of copies sold, and they can afford to keep their prices competitive but still must add every possible bell and whistle to lure instructors to adopt them. But in the upper-level undergraduate or the graduate courses, where there may only be a few hundred or a few thousand copies sold each year, they cannot afford expensive color, and each copy must be priced to match the anticipated sales. Low volume = higher individual cost per unit. It’s simple economics.
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the real culprit is something most students don’t suspect: used book recyclers, and students’ own preferences for used books that are cheaper and already marked with someone else’s highlighter marker!
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Jun
1
2012
So when the interviewer asked me if children need spirituality, I said sure, but offered a more helpful definition—one that doesn’t exclude 91 percent of the people who have ever lived. Spirituality is about being awake. It’s the attempt to transcend the mundane, sleepwalking experience of life we all fall into, to tap into the wonder of being a conscious and grateful thing in the midst of an astonishing universe. It doesn’t require religion. In fact, religion can and often does blunt our awareness by substituting false and frankly inferior wonders for real ones. It’s a fine joke on ourselves that most of what we call spirituality is actually about putting ourselves to sleep.
May
30
2012
the reporter Mr.Chua Eng Wee of LianHe ZaoBao told me on phone in the evening of 19 May 2012 that someone from your group had called to SPH and requested to add in one sentence for their news report. On 19 May 2012 4pm, PM Lee and his team are all with your group together for the visitation. Thus, if you don’t investigate and clarify clearly, people may think it maybe PM Lee’s team who did it.
Speaking to TODAY, PAP Member of Parliament Baey Yam Keng, who sits on the Government Parliamentary Committee for Information, Communications and the Arts, reiterated that "no one can control the media and any responsible media would want full editorial independence".
It is also worth considering that expedition leaders, and they are virtually all Sherpas, have the final decision on matters of safety. It is probably certain that almost every local leader of an expedition has had a foreign client whose instinctive response to a suggestion on canceling the summit attempt is: “No, I’ve paid to do this, I’m paying to help me do this.”
When the air is that thin, there is neither the guarantee of clear thinking nor space for lengthy debates. But if there is a waiver that has been signed by the client, let that waiver guide the decision.
If a climber takes 12 hours instead of the prescribed seven hours for the Camp 3 section, there should be no debates on whether the summit attempt should be made or not, irrespective of the US$50,000 paid.
The real risks, of death, are too high. And that risk is entirely unnecessary for the expedition leader who is advising to descend.
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a study of 20 pairs of friends published in the Journal of Social and Personal Relationships lends credence to the notion. In it, Heidi Reeder, at Boise State University, confirmed that "friendship attraction" or a connection devoid of lust, is a bona fide type of bond that people experience. Distinguishing between romantic, sexual and friendly feelings, however, can be exceedingly difficult.
"People don't know what feelings are appropriate toward the opposite sex, unless they're what our culture defines as appropriate," said O'Meara. "You know you love someone and enjoy them as a person, but not enough to date or marry them. What does this mean?"
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Topping women's list of dislikes: sexual tension. Men, on the other hand, more frequently replied that sexual attraction was a prime reason for initiating a friendship, and that it could even deepen a friendship. Either way, 62 percent of all subjects reported that sexual tension was present in their cross-sex friendships.
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Since childhood this generation has had it drilled into their heads that college is the answer to everything. It isn’t. In reality, college is the answer to nothing. Whatever you do after you finish, if you do it for money, or to make your folks happy, or because you think you have to, and not because you love it, you’re going to be miserable.
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“I can’t leave my job because of my mortgage.”
“I can’t find a new job because of my car payment.”
“I can’t quit because I have kids.”This is the Greek Chorus of any office, and you will hear a few people say this every day for years. Older people. People who have been working for about as long as you and I have been alive. They aren’t bad people. They have just been working at a job they didn’t like for so long, that they forgot that life shouldn’t suck. They are miserable, they complain about everything — and worst of all — they are hopeless. None of them looked forward to anything more than a long weekend, or a week at the beach, and retirement/death.
May
28
2012
Power used to be about whose army won, he said; in an information age, it is as much about whose story wins.
May
27
2012
Admittedly, allowing same-sex couples to marry will change the social meaning of marriage (it will no longer be part of this social meaning that every marriage is the union of a man and a woman); and for marriage to bring these intangible benefits, it needs to have a relatively stable and well-understood social meaning. However, there is no evidence that the introduction of same-sex marriage will change any other elements of this social meaning. Moreover, this social meaning has already changed radically over the years.
Marriage used to be generally understood as an unequal partnership, with the wife being subordinated to her husband, whereas now — at least in law and in most of mainstream culture — marriage is viewed as a partnership of equals. In general, the social meaning of marriage must change whenever such changes are necessary to avoid injustice; so this social meaning must now be changed so that it no longer excludes the participation of same-sex couples.
There is a lesson here for moral and political philosophy. In much of political philosophy, social institutions are conceived legalistically, as rules for the distribution of tangible benefits and burdens (such as money, health care, employment opportunities, and the like). Yet social institutions also have social meanings, which enable them to create important intangible benefits as well. Such institutions matter, not just because they are a mechanism for distributing tangible benefits and burdens, but because they create opportunities for meaningful human lives within society.
s, well ... what the Internet has always been about. Though I think it has made the lives of some IT managers easier and I do like Rdio. The second, Big Data, has lots of potential applications. But, as Tim Berners-Lee noted today, the people benefiting from more sophisticated machine learning techniques are the people buying consumer data, not the consumers themselves. How many Big Data startups might help people see their lives in different ways? Perhaps the personal genomics companies, but so far, they've kept their efforts focused quite narrowly. And third, we have the daily deal phenomenon. Groupon and its 600 clones may or may not be good companies, but they are barely technology companies. Really, they look like retail sales operations with tons of sales people and marketing expenses.
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we've reached a point in this technology cycle where the old thing has run its course. I think the hardware, cellular bandwidth, and the business model of this tottering tower of technology are pushing companies to play on one small corner of a huge field.
We've maxed out our hardware. No one even tries to buy the fastest computer anymore because we don't give them any tasks (except video editing, I suppose) that require that level of horsepower. I remember breathlessly waiting for the next-generation processor so that my computer would be capable of a whole new galaxy of activities. Some of it, sure, is that we're dumping the computation on the servers on the Internet. But the other part is that we mostly do a lot of the things that we used to do years ago -- stare at web pages, write documents, upload photos -- just at higher resolutions.
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Meanwhile, despite the efforts of telecom carriers, cellular bandwidth remains limited, especially in the hotbeds of innovation that need it most. It turns out building a superfast, ultrareliable cellular network that's as fast as a wired connection is really, really hard.
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the edible vegetable begins with the sprouts and does not end until the leaves, vines, tubers, shoots and seeds have given their all.
If home cooks reconsidered what should go into the pot, and what into the trash, what would they find? What new flavors might emerge, what old techniques? Pre-industrial cooks, for whom thrift was a necessity as well as a virtue, once knew many ways to put the entire garden to work. Fried green tomatoes and pickled watermelon rind are examples of dishes that preserved a bumper crop before rot set in.
“Some people these days are so unfamiliar with vegetables in their natural state, they don’t even know that a broccoli stalk is just as edible as the florets,” said Julia Wylie, an organic farmer in Watsonville, Calif. The produce she grows at Mariquita Farm is served at Bay Area restaurants like Delfina, Zuni Cafe and Chez Panisse.
Patterns emerged: The core-and-branch topology, of course, and patterns more fine-grained. Roughly half the stations in any subway will be found on its outer branches rather than the core. The distance from a city’s center to its farthest terminus station is twice the diameter of the subway system’s core. This happens again and again.
“Many other shapes could be expected, such as a regular lattice,” said Barthelemy. “What we find surprising is that all these different cities, on different continents, with different histories and geographical constraints, lead finally to the same structure.”
Subway systems seem to gravitate towards these ratios organically, through a combination of planning, expedience, circumstance and socioeconomic fluctuation, say the researchers.
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it’s possible that engineers were influenced by early subway networks in London, Berlin and Paris.
Despite the widespread availability of pirated releases, The Avengers just scored a record-breaking $200 million opening weekend at the box office. While some are baffled to see that piracy failed to crush the movie’s profits, it’s really not that surprising. Claiming a camcorded copy of a movie seriously impacts box office attendance is the same as arguing that concert bootlegs stop people from seeing artists on stage.
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Of all the people who downloaded a pirate copy of the film about 20% came from the US. This means that roughly 100,000 Americans have downloaded a copy online through BitTorrent. Now, IF all these people bought a movie ticket instead then box office revenue would be just 0.5% higher.
Not much of an impact, and even less when you consider that these “pirates” do not all count as a lost sale.
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We don’t think that there are many movie fans who see a low quality camcorded version of a movie as a true alternative to watching a film in a movie theater. The two are totally different experiences, and not direct competition at all.
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Generally speaking, when you go to a web site, images are downloaded to temporary storage on your computer — whether it’s a personal computer, pad, laptop or certain smartphones. This temporary storage is called “cache.” The pictures and video are temporarily stored to make it easier for your computer to display those images from the web site if you go back. It makes the processing time faster. This is an automatic process conducted by your computer’s operating system.
Yes, that means you or a client can accidentally access child pornography unknowingly. There may be pictures or videos that depict child pornography that you haven’t viewed that get automatically downloaded and stored in temporary Internet storage or cache. Yes, that means that even if you or a client accidentally access child pornography and try to delete it, if the police find out about it, they will make an arrest, push to prosecute and the resultant conviction will garner a mandatory minimum sentence of incarceration.
there were numerous small fluctuations of warming and cooling over the last 10,000 years of the Holocene. Most are well understood to be consequences of the different orbital variations of the earth around the sun (the Croll-Milankovitch cycles), with some component of solar activity. But in the case of the Medieval Warm Period (about 950-1250 A.D.), the temperatures were only 1°C warmer in the Northern Hemisphere, much less than the temperature changes since the beginning of our current global warming (Fig. 1). The warmest years of the Medieval Warm Period are comparable to the mean annual temperatures recorded about 1960—and the earth has warmed dramatically in the past 50 years.
Firestein is Professor and Chair of the Department of Biological Sciences at Columbia University, where he teaches a wildly popular course on ignorance, inviting scientists in as guest speakers to tell students not what they know but what they don’t know, and even what they don’t know that they don’t know. (Would you rather earn an A or an F in a class called “Ignorance”?, he muses.)
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Firestein captures the essence of the problem by contrasting the public’s understanding of science as a step-wise systematic algorithm of grinding through experiments that churn out data sets to be analyzed statistically and published in peer-reviewed journals after a process of observation, hypothesis, manipulation, further observation, and new hypothesis testing, with the Princeton University mathematician Andrew Wiles’ description of science as “groping and probing and poking, and some bumbling and bungling, and then a switch is discovered, often by accident, and the light is lit, and everyone says, ‘Oh, wow, so that’s how it looks,’ and then it’s off into the next dark room, looking for the next mysterious black feline” (p. 2), in reference to the old proverb: “It is very difficult to find a black cat in a dark room. Especially when there is no cat.”
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It has been estimated that from the beginning of civilization around 5,000 years ago to the year 2003, all of humanity created a grand total of five exabytes of digital information. From 2003 through 2010 we created five exabytes of digital information every two days. By 2013 we will be producing five exabytes every ten minutes. The 2010 total of 912 exabytes is the equivalent of 18 times the amount of information contained in all the books ever written. It isn’t knowledge that we need more of; it is how to think about what we know and what we don’t know that is becoming ever more critical in science, through a process Feinstein calls “controlled neglect.” Scientists “don’t stop at the facts,” he explains, “they begin there, right beyond the facts, where the facts run out” (p. 12). It must be this way, he argues, because “the vast archives of knowledge seem impregnable, a mountain of facts that I could never hope to learn, let alone remember” (p. 14). Doctors and lawyers and engineers need many facts at their ready, as do scientists, but for the latter “the facts serve mainly to access the ignorance” because this is where the action is. “Want to be on the cutting edge? Well, it’s all, or mostly, ignorance out there. Forget the answers, work on the questions” (pp. 15–16).
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Economic impacts from floods have been increasing over recent decades, a fact often attributed to a changing climate. On the other hand, there is now a significant body of scientific scholarship all pointing towards increasing concentrations and values of assets as the principle cause of the increasing cost of natural disasters. This holds true for a variety of perils and across different jurisdictions. With this in mind, this paper examines the time history of insured losses from floods in Spain between 1971 and 2008. It assesses whether any discernible residual signal remains after adjusting the data for the increase in the number and value of insured assets over this period of time. Data on insured losses from floods were sourced from Consorcio de Compensación de Seguros (CCS). Although a public institution, CCS compensates homeowners for the damage produced by floods, and thus plays a role similar to that of a private insurance company. Insured losses were adjusted using two proxy measures: first, changes in the total amount of annual surcharges (premiums) paid by customers to CCS, and secondly, changes in the total value of dwellings per year. The adjusted data reveals no significant trend over the period 1971–2008 and serves again to confirm that at this juncture, societal influences remain the prime factors driving insured and economic losses from natural disasters.
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