Reinke Faces Life

http://www.irishcentral.com/news/Irishman-sent-a-message-in-a-bottle-as-the-Titanic-sunk-132847328.html

Irishman sent a message in a bottle as the Titanic sunk
Jeremiah Burke from Co. Cork sent his family a note of farewell
By JORDANA KOZUPSKY, IrishCentral.com Staff Writer
Published Saturday, October 29, 2011, 10:41 AMUpdated Saturday, October 29, 2011, 10:41 AM

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And the message wound up on a beach near his home and it got through.

Amazing?

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http://dp.la/

The DPLA Steering Committee is leading the first concrete steps toward the realization of a large-scale digital public library that will make the cultural and scientific record available to all.

About | Elements of the DPLA | Secretariat | Steering Committee

The DPLA planning initiative grew out of an October 2010 meeting at the Radcliffe Institute for Advanced Study, which brought together over 40 representatives from foundations, research institutions, cultural organizations, government, and libraries to discuss best approaches to building a national digital library. In December 2010, the Berkman Center for Internet & Society, generously supported by the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation, convened leading experts in libraries, technology, law, and education to begin work on this problem; a two-year process of intense grassroots community organization, beginning in October 2011 and hosted at the Berkman Center, will result in a realistic and detailed workplan for launching the DPLA, as well as unveiling of a prototype of the system with specially digitized materials.

The vision of a national digital library has been circulating among librarians, scholars, educators, and private industry representatives since the early 1990s, but it has not yet materialized. Efforts led by a range of organizations, including the Library of Congress, HathiTrust, and the Internet Archive, have successfully built resources that provide books, images, historical records, and audiovisual materials to anyone with Internet access. Many universities, public libraries, and other public-spirited organizations have digitized materials that could be brought together under the frame of the DPLA, but these digital collections often exist in silos. Compounding this problem are disparate technical standards, disorganized and incomplete metadata, and a host of legal issues. No project has yet succeeded in bringing these different viewpoints, experiences, and collections together with leading technical experts and the best of private industry to find solutions to these complex challenges. Users have neither coherent access to these materials nor tools to use them in new and exciting ways, and institutions have no clear blueprint for creating a shared infrastructure to serve the public good. The time is right to launch an ambitious project to realize the great promise of the Internet for the advancement of sharing information and of using technology to enable new knowledge and discoveries in the United States.

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What about the Internet Archive, Google’s book capture, and the myriad of other such efforts?

I guess time will sort it all out.

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http://www.impactlab.net/2011/10/20/amazon-signs-up-writers-pushes-out-publishers/

October 20th, 2011 at 10:55 am

Amazon signs up writers, pushes out publishers

in: Business, Latest Trend, Science & Technology News

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Readers have been taught by Amazon.com that they do not need bookstores. Now Amazon is encouraging writers to cast aside their publishers.

Amazon will publish 122 books this fall in an array of genres, in both physical and e-book form. It is a striking acceleration of the retailer’s fledging publishing program that will place Amazon squarely in competition with the New York houses that are also its most prominent suppliers.

It has set up a flagship line run by a publishing veteran, Laurence Kirshbaum, to bring out brand-name fiction and nonfiction. It signed its first deal with the self-help author Tim Ferriss. Last week it announced a memoir by the actress and director Penny Marshall, for which it paid $800,000, a person with direct knowledge of the deal said.

Publishers say Amazon is aggressively wooing some of their top authors. And the company is gnawing away at the services that publishers, critics and agents used to provide.

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Publishers caught a glimpse of a future they fear has no role for them late last month when Amazon introduced the Kindle Fire, a tablet for books and other media sold by Amazon. Jeffrey P. Bezos, the company’s chief executive, referred several times to Kindle as “an end-to-end service,” conjuring up a world in which Amazon develops, promotes and delivers the product.

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The days of the “publisher” are over. “Dead Man Walking”.

I “LULUed” (i.e., self-published) “CHURCH 10●19●62”. Just by getting it listed on Amazon, I was automagically invited to ebook it for the Kindle. I gave the OK and they did all the work. And, then did it for Europe. Translation and all. (Wish I read German just to see how good a job it did on ½ a million words. It can’t be good, but it might be funny.)

Then, with their KINDLE DIRECT PUBLISHING program, you can get content out there for the KINDLE and get 70% of the proceeds.

It’s amazing. It’s transformative. It’s destruction and disintermediation!

Too bad for the dinosaurs.

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http://science.slashdot.org/story/11/10/16/0215224/dna-sequenced-of-woman-who-lived-to-115

DNA Sequenced of Woman Who Lived To 115
Posted by Soulskill on Sunday October 16, @02:20AM

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chrb writes

“The DNA of W115 — an anonymous woman who lived to the age of 115 years and left her body to science — has been sequenced. Despite her old age, W115 showed no signs of dementia or heart disease, and tests at the age of 113 showed she had the mental abilities of a woman aged 60-75 years. Dr. Henne Holstege of the Department of Clinical Genetics at the VU University Medical Center in Amsterdam has suggested W115 had rare genetic changes in her DNA which protected against Alzheimer’s and other late-life diseases.”

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Is this the secret of longer life?

I remember a Heinlein SciFi novel that postulated the premise that long life was genes. You wither had them or you didn’t.

Hmm?

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Designing an infinite digital bookcase
Posted: 18 Oct 2011 12:29 PM PDT

(Cross-posted on the Google Code blog)

As digital designers, we often think about how to translate traditional media into a virtual space. Recently, we thought about the bookcase. What would it look like if it was designed to hold digital books?

A digital interface needs to be familiar enough to be intuitive, while simultaneously taking advantage of the lack of constraints in a virtual space. In this case, we imagined something that looks like the shelves in your living room, but is also capable of showcasing the huge number of titles available online—many more than fit on a traditional shelf. With this in mind, we designed a digital bookcase that’s an infinite 3D helix. You can spin it side-to-side and up and down with your mouse. It holds 3D models of more than 10,000 titles from Google Books.

{Extraneous Deleted}

Posted by Aaron Koblin, Data Arts Team and Bill Schilit, Research

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I love the ability of reading books on the IPAD.

But, I’ve lost the ability of sharing a book with others.

And, it seems that everyone wants me to pay, re-pay, and pay again for the same content.

Ain’t going to happen! Can’t happen.

Reason #1: I can’t afford to buy all that content over again. Reason #2: Some of the content I want to have (i.e., Heinlein’s Starship Troopers) is not available.

And, I still have a grip with CopyRight law. If a book is “out of print”, how is that benefiting society. And seventy or more years under “protection”.

Sorry, copyrights and patents shouldn’t last more that a decade or two. And, just putting a ribbon on the donkey’s butt should give another decade or two of lock up. We, as a society, exchange the lockup for the benefit of everyone. Where’s the benefit of an extended lockup.

Argh!

# – # – # – # – # 2011-Oct-19 @ 13:18

http://lewrockwell.com/spl3/long-term-survival-tool.html

The One Long-Term Survival Tool Everyone Forgets
The Survival Mom

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We have three Kindles, and a hand cranked charger that will charge them and our MP3 player. A hand crank charger is dirt cheap, easily repaired if it breaks and takes up almost zero room (as usual, I am not affiliated with this site or product in any way, merely a happy customer). Two of the Kindles have yet more manuals on them, with duplication of the vital ones.

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I’m not so sure about the need for “entertainment” when the world is falling down around your ears.

But, I did note that Orthodox Jews have the entire Talmud, other sacred writings, and all sorts of utilities (i.e., concordances, vocabularies, dictionaries, etc. etc) on an IPAD.

Her point might be more accurately that it is possible to have the wisdom of the world on a Faraday enclosed electronic.

While technology is never cheap (i.e., matches are more expensive than Tom Hanks’ two sticks on the island), sometimes it’s “cheap” as compared to the alternative (i.e., ignorance).

imho!

I’d suggest the ipad as less “locked in” than a kindle, but that’s merely a technical opinion.

Her opinion notwithstanding, it seems like good advice.

Besides what are you going to do with your worthless fiat paper currency when it’s only value is tinder (i.e., Zimbabwe dollars)?

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http://city-journal.org/2011/21_3_the-great-courses.html

HEATHER MAC DONALD
Great Courses, Great Profits
A teaching company gives the public what the academy no longer supplies: a curriculum in the monuments of human thought.

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The canon of great literature, philosophy, and art is thriving—in the marketplace, if not on college campuses. For the last 20 years, a company called the Great Courses has been selling recorded lectures in the humanities and sciences to an adult audience eager to brush up its Shakespeare and its quantum mechanics. The company produces only what its market research shows that customers want. And that, it turns out, is a curriculum in the monuments of human thought, taught without the politically correct superiority and self-indulgent theory common in today’s colleges.

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Here’s a way to get wisdom.

<<Remember I’m a practicioner of dikw (i.e., data, information, knowledge, wisdom). Where “data” is the elemental atom of the paradigm. “Information” is data in context. “Knowledge” is actionable information. “Wisdom” is knowing the implications of knowledge. Nice to know where the world’s edge is!>>

It’s a shame that we waste children’s most productive ages for learning (imho 6-26) by follow an obsolete meme (i.e, Gooferment Skrules).

Argh!

We need to challenge the children by supplementing their education.

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http://www.impactlab.net/2011/09/04/solar-bottle-bulb-a-cheap-and-sustainable-way-to-light-homes/

September 4th, 2011 at 12:52 pm
Solar Bottle Bulb – a cheap and sustainable way to light homes
in: Great New Product, Green Friendly, People Making a Difference, Science & Technology News, Solar Power

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Now a simple innovation called the “Solar Bottle Bulb” is popping out of roofs and illuminating the lives of many.

Fixed into holes in a corrugated iron roof, the “bulb” is a recycled plastic bottle that contains bleached water. Bringing more light than a traditional window that can crack or leak during typhoon season, the bottle bulbs refract the sun’s rays to create 55-watts worth of light.

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Hmmm, a useful idea for any house, garage, or shed?

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