- Mark Your Territory — Urine integration for Foursquare. (via Beta Knowledge)
- TL;DR — news summaries. Finally.
- Zombie Ideas and Online Instruction — The repeated return of mistaken ideas captures well my experiences with technologies in schools and what I have researched over decades. The zombie idea that is rapidly being converted into policies that in the past have been “refuted with evidence but refuse to die” is: new technologies can cure K-12 and higher education problems of teaching and learning. The most recent incarnation of this revolving-door idea is widespread access to online instruction in K-12 education cyber-charter schools, blended schools where online instruction occurs for a few hours a day, and mandated courses that children and youth have to take.
- Google Open Sources Their Book Scanner — hardware designs for their clever system for high-throughput non-destructive book-scanning. (via Hackaday)
ENTRIES TAGGED "google books"
Four short links: 22 November 2012
Urine Checkins, News Summaries, Zombie Ideas, and Scanner Plans
Four short links: 28 September 2011
Future Tech, Book Lawsuits, Site Design, and Sundae Problems
- Russell Davies: Four Thought (audio) — some very nice thinking on the future of technology.
- The Fight Over the Future of Digital Books (The Atlantic) — Authors Guild v. HathiTrust is a strange legal twist. For an association of professional writers, the Guild seems to have forgotten some of the basic principles of its craft, such as not placing sympathetic figures like librarians in the role of villains. Almost comically, the Guild’s press release trumpeting its lawsuit against HathiTrust augurs a dark day in the not-too-distant future when old works, including obscure Yiddish texts, are “abducted” and “released” to thousands of students and professors.
- The Design Behind How Many Really — this is fantastic stuff, showing the evolution of their thinking.
- Science Museums are Failing Grownups — I think this is a sundae problem. A sundae is a bowl full of ice cream. You put some stuff on top of it, but it remains, fundamentally, a bowl full of ice cream. And when I talk about examples of really great adult engagement in science museums, I am, generally, talking about the sprinkles, not the ice cream. The museums acknowledge the problem, but they’re dealing with it by adding in a couple of things here and there. A traveling exhibit. One exhibit out of the whole museum. One night a month. What they really need are serious changes to the bulk of the experience. Sundae problem. I like this.
Publishing News: Newspapers finally test tablet-content bundle
Newspapers bundle tablets and content, Google gets an ereader.
In the latest Publishing News: Sister newspapers in Philadelphia announced a tablet program, Iriver launched an ereading device with the Google eBookstore on board, and Peter Meyers says digital can fix footnotes.
Publishing News: Week in Review
Amazon launched Cloud Drive, the Google Books settlement might get complicated, and good data leads to good business.
In the latest Publishing News: Amazon extended its reach into the cloud, Dana Newman looked at overlapping issues between the Google Book settlement and Golan v. Holder, and what publishers need to do with all that data.
Will Golan v. Holder affect the Google Books settlement?
Dana Newman on how a separate copyright case relates to Google Books.
The Google Books ruling raised an interesting question in regard to copyright. If Congress is to be the judge on that issue, will further negotiations be affected by the ongoing Golan v. Holder copyright case?
Google Books settlement rejected, but likely not a lost cause
Renegotiation of the Google Books agreement is a possibility, and involved parties seem amenable.
The rejection of the Google Books agreement was more of a setback than an outright rejection.
Four short links: 20 December 2010
Intrusion Recovery, MTurk Spam, Open Source, and Google Pottymouth
- Gawker Tech Team Didn’t Adequately Secure Our Platform — internal memo from CTO to staff after the break-in. Notable for two things: the preventative steps, which include things like two-factor authentication and not collecting commenter details; and the lack of defensiveness. When your executives taunt 4chan and your systems get pwned as a result, it must be mighty hard not to point the finger at those executives. I hope I can be as adult as Tom Plunkett when shit next happens to me. (via Andy Baio)
- Mechanical Turk Spam — 40% of the HITs from new requesters are spam. The list of tasks is the online fraud hitlist: faking votes/comments/etc on social sites, making fake accounts, submitting fake leads through lead gen sites, fake clicks on ads, posting fake ads to Craigslist, requesting personal info of the MTurk worker. (via Andy Baio who is on fire)
- 2010 The Year Open Source Went Invisible (Matt Asay) — All of which is a long way of saying that while open source has become integral to so much software development, it hasn’t remotely ended the reign of proprietary software. Indeed, much (most?) open-source software is paid for out of proprietary profits. This might have been shocking news in, say, 2004, but it’s common knowledge in 2010. Open source is how we do business 10 years into this new millennium.
- Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books (Science) — We constructed a corpus of digitized texts containing about 4% of all books ever printed. Analysis of this corpus enables us to investigate cultural trends quantitatively. This is related to Google Labs’ latest toy, the n-gram viewer whose correct name should be Google Pottymouth if the things people are graphing are anything to go by.
Bookish Techy Week in Review
Defending the web; Amazon on course to dominate the world; Cooks Source throws in the towel; Ari Emanuel takes on the publishing industry
In the latest Bookish Techy Week in Review: Berners-Lee defends the web; Amazon launches Kindle book gifting; Cooks Source folds; and Hachette Livre comes to an agreement with Google.
Bookish Techy Week in Review
New tools to write and publish, lost books find a home, James Bond goes e-rogue, and a look under Google Books' hood.
In the latest Bookish Techy Week in Review: News of Baker Framework and Scrivener 2.0; the FTC sensibly hires DRM basher Ed Felten; and the agency model gets a six-month evaluation.
Four short links: 15 July 2010
Measuring Life Success, Music Industry Woes, Google Humanities, Open Source Hardware
- How Will You Measure Your Life? (HBR) — Clayton Christenson’s advice to the Harvard Business School’s graduating class, every section a gem. If you study the root causes of business disasters, over and over you’ll find this predisposition toward endeavors that offer immediate gratification. If you look at personal lives through that lens, you’ll see the same stunning and sobering pattern: people allocating fewer and fewer resources to the things they would have once said mattered most. (via mjasay on Twitter)
- Lyle Lovett Yet To Make a Penny From Record Sales (TechDirt) — read with Virgin Sues Platinum-Selling Band and Zoe Keating’s ongoing exploration of life outside a label. Big record companies take the album profits but give you visibility so you can tour. This sucks if you’re a good musician but can’t tour (e.g., just had a #cellobaby). (via danjite on Twitter)
- Google’s Commitment to Digital Humanities (Google) — giving grants to universities to work with digital works. Will also be releasing more corpora like the collection of ancient Greek and Latin texts.
- Open Source Hardware Definition — up to v0.3, there’s momentum building. There’s an open hardware summit in September. The big issue in the wild is how much of the complex multi-layered hardware game must be free-as-in-speech for the whole deal to be free-as-in-speech. See, for example, Bunnie Huang’s take.
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