In the college gardens this morning. Flickr version here.
The Digger’s kids are losing their marbles
Well, well. I heard something about this on the radio this morning, but wasn’t clear about what’s going on. This post makes things a bit clearer.
Last week, the Lib-Dem candidate Nick Clegg—the third party candidate in the race—did so well in a television debate that he began to emerge as the logical alternative to Labor. This has caused the Murdoch papers to unleash a full-scale attack on Clegg—with hardly any pretense other than to help Cameron—now known as the “Kill Klegg” campaign.
In turn, the Independent newspaper ran a front pager yesterday with the headline “Rupert Murdoch will not decide the outcome of the election. You will,” challenging the Murdoch coverage of the race.
Later in the afternoon, in a coming-apart-at-the-seams scenario, Rebekah Wade/Brooks and Murdoch’s son, James—who will both face the wrath of Murdoch senior if they don’t produce a winner—stormed over to the Independent, breached its security systems, barged into the offices of the Independent’s editor-in-chief and top executive, Simon Kelner, and commenced, in Brit-speak, a giant row. Their point was that newspaper publishers don’t slag off other newspaper publishers in polite Britain, but also the point was to remind Kelner that he wasn’t just slagging off another publisher, he was slagging off the Murdochs, damn it. Indeed, the high point of the screaming match was Wade/Brooks, in a fit of apoplexy and high drama, neck muscles straining, saying to Kelner: “And I invited you to Blenheim in the first place!” Blenheim being the Murdoch family retreat and the highest social destination for all Murdoch loyalists and ambitious Brits in the media.
If true, this is truly weird. James Murdoch is a tough, aggressive cookie. But up to now I thought he had better judgement than this. Are they really so rattled about the possibility of the Lib Dems doing well enough to scupper Cameron?
UK jails schizophrenic for refusal to decrypt files
Good piece of reporting by The Register.
Exclusive The first person jailed under draconian UK police powers that Ministers said were vital to battle terrorism and serious crime has been identified by The Register as a schizophrenic science hobbyist with no previous criminal record.
His crime was a persistent refusal to give counter-terrorism police the keys to decrypt his computer files.
The 33-year-old man, originally from London, is currently held at a secure mental health unit after being sectioned while serving his sentence at Winchester Prison.
In June the man, JFL, who spoke on condition we do not publish his full name, was sentenced to nine months imprisonment under Part III of the Regulation of Investigatory Powers Act (RIPA). The powers came into force at the beginning of October 2007…
Air guitar
A friend who lives in the Barbican was raving to me about the exhibition currently in the Curve gallery there, in which a cheery flock of finches play electric guitars. I looked incredulous, so he sent me the link to this video. It may not be Art, but it’s clever and amusing. The strange thing is that the birds don’t seem to be upset by the noise. Come to think of it, they’re just like my teenage kids in that respect.
Remember when Apple was a small company?
(Flickr version here.)
From today’s New York Times.
The company said net income in the quarter that ended March 31 rose 90 percent, to $3.07 billion, or $3.33 a share, from $1.62 billion, or $1.79 a share, a year earlier, after adjustments for an accounting change. Revenue rose 49 percent, to $13.5 billion, from $9.08 billion, after adjustments.
On average, analysts had expected Apple to report net income of $2.45 a share on revenue of $12 billion.
The company said its gross profit margin rose to 41.7 percent, from 39.9 percent a year earlier.
Apple’s stock stood at $244.59 at the close of regular trading. After the company announcement, its shares rose to around $257 in after-hours trading.
As of this morning, Apple’s market cap was $235.1 billion. For comparison, Google’s is $176.3 billion and Microsoft’s is $274.8 billion. Dell is valued at $33.61 billion. Makes you think, doesn’t it?
Oxford takes on Wikipedia
From ArsTechnica:
The OBO tool is essentially a straightforward, hyperlinked collection of professionally-produced, peer-reviewed bibliographies in different subject areas—sort of a giant, interactive syllabus put together by OUP and teams of scholars in different disciplines. Users can drill down to a specific bibliographic entry, which contains some descriptive text and a list of references that link to either Google Books or to a subscribing library’s own catalog entries, by either browsing or searching. Each entry is written by a scholar working in the relevant field and vetted by a peer review process. The idea is to alleviate the twin problems of Google-induced data overload, on the one hand, and Wikipedia-driven GIGO (garbage in, garbage out), on the other.
“We did about 18 months of pretty intensive research with scholars and students and librarians to explore how their research practices were changing with the proliferation of online sources,” Damon Zucca, OUP’s Executive Editor, Reference, told Ars. “The one thing we heard over and over again is that people were drowning in scholarly information, and drowning in information in general. So it takes twice as much time for people to begin their research.”
OBO grew out of that research, with the goal of helping scholars and students deal with information overload, possibly by skipping Google entirely. The resulting bibliography is fairly simple and lean, which is exactly the point. The messy and often politicized work of sorting and sifting the information has already been done for users, so that they can drill down directly to a list of the main publications in their target area.
“You can’t come up with a search filter that solves the problem of information overload,” Zucca told Ars. OUP is betting that the solution to the problem lies in content, which is its area of expertise, and not in technology, which is Google’s and Microsoft’s.
To trust OBO’s content, you have to trust its selection and vetting process. To that end, OUP is making the list of contributing scholars and editors freely available. Each subject area has an Editor in Chief who’s a top scholar in the field, and an editorial board of around 15 to 20 scholars. The EIC and editorial board either write the bibliographic entries themselves, or they select other scholars to do the work.
The launch version of OBO covers only four subject areas: Classics, Islamic Studies, Social Work and Criminology. But OUP has plans to add 10-12 new subject areas (known as modules) within the next year. Each subject area contains between 50 and 100 individual entries, and that number should grow at the rate of about 50 to 75 entries per year.
And the cost of all this peer-reviewed quality? Why $29.95 a month or $295.00 a year
Going Out of Print
Perceptive Tech review column by Wade Roush.
For book publishers, color screens are interesting but probably not revolutionary. Vook titles like The Breakaway Japanese Kitchen ($4.99), a cookbook that bundles recipes with related instructional videos, provide a taste of what's possible. But with most long-form writing, the words are paramount. If their purpose is to stimulate the mind’s eye, then color and animation are overkill, which is why I doubt that the iPad will wholly undercut the market for the Kindle-style devices.
For magazine, newspaper, and textbook publishers, on the other hand, the iPad and the wave of tablet devices just behind it create enormous opportunities. Magazines are distinguished from books not merely by their periodical nature and their bite-size articles but by their design. If digital-age readers still want information that’s organized and ornamented in the fashion of good magazines–and there’s no reason to think they don’t–then devices that mimic the form and ergonomics of old-fashioned print pages will be needed to deliver it.
But to succeed on the new platforms, publishers will have to innovate, not simply imitate established media: they will have to move beyond the current crop of static digital magazines. The problem with most of the publications built on e-magazine platforms from Zinio, Zmags, and other startups is that they are simply digital replicas of their print counterparts, perhaps with a few hyperlinks thrown in as afterthoughts. Publishers should look for better ways to use tablet screens such as the iPad’s, with its multitouch zooming and scrolling capabilities, and to make their content interactive.
And an interesting (and much longer) New Yorker piece by Ken Auletta, which suggests that the real significance of the eBook boom will be a radical rethinking of the publishing business.
Tim O’Reilly, the founder and C.E.O. of O’Reilly Media, which publishes about two hundred e-books per year, thinks that the old publishers’ model is fundamentally flawed. “They think their customer is the bookstore,” he says. “Publishers never built the infrastructure to respond to customers.” Without bookstores, it would take years for publishers to learn how to sell books directly to consumers. They do no market research, have little data on their customers, and have no experience in direct retailing. With the possible exception of Harlequin Romance and Penguin paperbacks, readers have no particular association with any given publisher; in books, the author is the brand name. To attract consumers, publishers would have to build a single, collaborative Web site to sell e-books, an idea that Jason Epstein, the former editorial director of Random House, pushed for years without success. But, even setting aside the difficulties of learning how to run a retail business, such a site would face problems of protocol worthy of the U.N. Security Council—if Amazon didn’t accuse publishers of price-fixing first.
It’s the old story: digital technology means having to rethink more or less everything:
Jason Epstein believes that publishers have been handed a golden opportunity. The agency model, he says, is really another form of the consortium he proposed a decade ago: “Publishers will be selling digital books directly to the iPad. They are using the iPad as a kind of universal warehouse.” By doing so, they create opportunities to cut payroll and overhead costs. Epstein said that e-books could also restore editorial autonomy. “When I went to work for Random House, ten editors ran it,” he said. “We had a sales manager and sales reps. We had a bookkeeper and a publicist and a president. It was hugely successful. We didn’t need eighteen layers of executives. Digitization makes that possible again, and inevitable.”
Auletta closes his piece with speculation that Amazon (and maybe, one day, Apple) will move to exclude publishers from the process and deal directly with authors. After all, most readers don’t buy books because they’re published by a particular publishing house. For them, the author is the brand.
Interesting stuff.
Hard-core analog
From a lovely photoblog — tokyo camera style.
People who shoot film simply do because they choose to, and the Photo Culture of Tokyo is full of film camera users. When I meet them out on the streets I ask to photograph their camera, and usually post it here the same day. All of the photos were shot with a Ricoh GRDII. I trust that this irony is not lost on anyone.
Volcanic exile
Wonderful FT.com column by Gideon Rachman, who found himself marooned in Tel Aviv.
My reaction to volcanic exile has been a bit like the bereavement cycle – grief, anger, denial, acceptance. The only time I succumbed to incredulous rage was on the flight home to London on Thursday, the first day of the crisis, when the pilot announced that we were turning back to Tel Aviv. Volcanic ash? What an absurd excuse. Surely, this couldn’t be happening? I had meetings to go to in London; articles to write; family coming to dinner that night. I had heard of the right of return to the Holy Land, but I had no wish to exercise it myself. The situation must be fixable. As soon as we got off the aircraft a colleague rang a travel agent in London and grabbed the few remaining seats on the next British Airways flight out of Israel. We congratulated ourselves on our quick reactions, went out to dinner and prepared to leave the following morning. But the following morning, the cloud hadn’t moved. It was getting worse.
After a while it began to occur to me that my gathering gloom might have less to do with missing my family and several appointments, than with the unfamiliar sensation of being thwarted. Wealth and privilege has made babies of us all. Of course I should be able to get anywhere in the world in 24 hours! There is always a flight out. There is no logistical problem that cannot be solved with a mixture of ingenuity and money. Yet the volcano seemed strangely indifferent to the fact that I have a large credit limit on my Visa card. Its effects are surprisingly democratic. The cloud of ash would not even part for Angela Merkel, the German chancellor, stuck in Portugal – who had to fly to Rome and drive.
What’s most interesting about the #ashtag crisis is what it reveals about our technological arrogance. We’re so accustomed to being in control that we cannot comprehend not being able to change things. As Rachman says, wealth and privilege — and, I would add, technology — has made babies of us all. Gratification has to be instant. Why not go to New York for a weekend’s shopping? (I’ve never done it, but I know people who have.) A few days in Donegal? Or Nice? A weekend in Amsterdam? (I’ve done those.)
The ash cloud is instructive not just because it reveals our naive dependence on technology, but also because it’s a dry-run for global warming. If you take James Lovelock’s view of this as expressed in Gaia’s Revenge then this is what it’ll be like. The earth is a self-regulating system, and it is going to self-regulate global warming. In doing so it isn’t going to pay any attention to our special needs. And there will be nothing, just nothing, that we can do to stop it. We just have to try and adjust to the catastrophe. Which is what Mr Rachman and thousands of other stranded travellers are having to do.
The United States of Apple
21.6% of US adults own or use an iPod, iPhone or Mac computer. That’s right, one-fifth of Americans own some type of Apple hardware. What’s more is that 21.6% doesn’t included under-18s — and how many teens have you seen without an iPod?
It’s funny how the image of Apple as a plucky underdog still persists.
[Source.]