| Monday
February 1, 2010
Letter from England
Be happy you have a government that has to listen!
I had an interesting discussion Friday with the
lecturer who is putting together our new computer science curriculum. I was
curious why it didn't include such subjects as data structures, algorithms,
finite math (for algorithm analysis), languages, and compiler theory. To
understand the issues that he claims drove the new curriculum, you need
think of a university in microeconomic terms. A university--which in the UK
is always a private institution--has to budget for the cost of the capital
plant, university administration, management of the degree programmes and
classes, and for the per-student marginal cost of teaching. Almost all of
these costs are for labour, so efficiency savings are hard to find and costs
rise faster than the cost of living. These expenditures have to be balanced
by net income from all sources, which in the UK is mostly Government
payments and (net) student fees. The Government payments per student are
more than the marginal cost of teaching another student, so changes in
student numbers have a disproportionate impact on the university budget. In
both North America and the UK, about 25% of colleges and universities are in
a 'fragile' condition even in good economic years, with few cash reserves
and their budget barely balanced, often by deferring maintenance, avoiding
capital expenditures, and taking on an increased loan burden.
Despite similarities, the college and university
systems in North America and the UK differ in a number of significant ways.
Universities in the UK are much larger--if North America was reduced to a
proportional number of institutions, six out of ten of the existing colleges
and universities would close, including all of the smaller institutions, the
church-related colleges, and the profit-making sector. There would be
increased central control--the number of students a university recruits
within the UK and the income per UK student are both capped by the
Government. Students would be taking on a higher loan burdens at graduation,
and the loans would be paid off by a surtax on their income.
The UK Government is planning to make two changes
in the system over the next three years. First, they would like the length
of the bachelor's degree reduced to two years. This violates the Bologna
Accords <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bologna_process>
and reduces a UK bachelor's to the equivalent of a North American
Associate's degree. This change is thought to meet the needs of UK industry
better than the current 3-year degree. Second, they will be reducing the
total Government funding by 30%, with the expectation that much of the
reduction can be covered by efficiency savings. Unfortunately for this idea,
the effects of reduced funding will affect the most elastic part of the
equation first--the university student population can be expected to drop
from the present 38% of the 18-20-year old population to 20 to 25%. To keep
it above 30%, about 50 of the 160 existing universities would have to close.
This would be like closing 1200 colleges and universities in North America.
The local university serves mostly local working class
students. Our budget runs a deficit on the UK side, so we also recruit
internationally to cover our deficit with international fees. One might
expect that with the concern about the increasing class gap, the UK
Government would want universities that serve the working class to teach
courses that allow their graduates to move up in income and social class.
Instead, we find neither the Government nor students are interested in this.
Instead, they would prefer us to be a degree factory training people for the
new working class jobs of the information age. Hence none of the more
advanced topics I would expect a CS curriculum to include.
Other stories:
UK Climate Secretary 'declares war on climate change
skeptics' <http://tinyurl.com/yjyba34>
. I sent you this earlier story: <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/28/cru_foia_guilty/>
. The leaker was protesting the deliberate flouting of the UK FoIA.
This is better than the Rumanian orphanages, but is a
bit down the same road. <http://tinyurl.com/yljghat>
-- "If they do that with marks and grades, should they
be trusted with experimental data?" Harry Erwin, PhD
[Emphasis Added] Computer science degrees
in which no one has studied data structures seems a guaranteed way to a
Dark Age...
A two year degree cannot be an actual degree can
it? My mother was always a bit ashamed of having a two year Associate
degree rather than a full BA.
=============
More on climate change and
the consensus
"There is no way current climbers and mountain guides
can give anecdotal evidence back to the 1900s, so what they claim is
complete nonsense."
<http://www.telegraph.co.uk/earth/
environment/climatechange/
7111525/UN-climate-change-panel-
based-claims-on-student-dissertation-
and-magazine-article.html>
--- Roland Dobbins
Yet I have seen many insist that it was a "typo
in the executive summary".
==
Global warming vs clojure
Hi Jerry,
This article:
http://www.bestinclass.dk/index.php/2010/01/global-warming/
is mainly a great example of programming techniques in
a new lisp variant, but your readers might find his conclusions of interest
as he processes huge amounts of temperature data from NOAA.
-- Phil Rand
==
: Data breaches, statistical analysis, media and solar
flares
Jerry,
Since I do Information Security for a living, I’m
always trolling around security website and issues, and I was reading this
article. It occurs to me that this is a good example of how statistics can
mislead you…and the wild speculation that ensues (the website even suggests
it). And then I started thinking … Anthropogenic <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Anthropogenic>
global warming <http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Global_warming>
.
http://datalossdb.org/where_did_it_go
Tracy Walters, CISSP
AGW sometimes also stands for Arrhenius Global
Warming... He predicted about a degree per century from CO2 in about 1895.
That seems to be as good a prediction as the most sophisticated models.
During the colding period there was even some thankfulness for CO2
mitigating the Global Cooling. I find the
linear growth plus a
cyclical process hypothesis compelling.
==
Why the Climategate E-mails were Leaked
See <http://www.theregister.co.uk/2010/01/28/cru_foia_guilty/>
. The leaker was protesting the deliberate flouting of the UK FoIA.
-- Harry Erwin
==
The IPCC: Does Napoleon's maxim apply?
Dr. Pournelle,
Can they really be this inept?
http://blogs.telegraph.co.uk/news
/jamesdelingpole/100023598/after-
climategate-pachaurigate-and-
glaciergate-amazongate/
Embellishments of rumors masquerading as science.
Steve Chu
===========
Amazon, eBooks and
Publishing
Amazon Pulls Macmillan Books Over Pricing Rift -
NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/30/technology/30amazon.html
Francis Hamit
==
Amazon caves in to Macmillan.
<http://www.amazon.com/tag/
kindle/forum/ref=cm_cd_tfp_ef
_tft_tp?_encoding=UTF8&cdForum
=Fx1D7SY3BVSESG&cdThread
=Tx2MEGQWTNGIMHV&display
Type=tagsDetail>
--- Roland Dobbins
==
Amazon Accepts Macmillan’s Demand for Higher E-Book
Prices - NYTimes.com
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/
02/01/technology/companies/
01amazonweb.html?partner=
rss&emc=rss
Someone blinked. Amazon, for all its pretensions to
the contrary, does not have that big a share of the market.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
==
An author explains why he no longer allows Amazon
to publish his book as an eBook
'The volume is so low that with Amazon taking its cut,
and so forth, most people are seeing a couple hundred dollars here and
there.'
<http://www.tobiasbuckell.com/
2010/01/31/why-my-books-are-
no-longer-for-sale-via-amazon/>
-- Roland Dobbins
==
Francis Hamit came over for tea Friday afternoon.
We discussed eBooks and self publishing and he was kind enough to write up
these notes:
Follow-ups to our talk yesterday
Dear Jerry:
The entire area of e-publishing has gotten very
complex and I though I should give you some additional material on where
publishing is going.
First of all, I do not agree with the popular current
notion that e-books are a replacement for those in print. It's really an
apples and oranges comparison (no pun intended) because the presentations
are so different, as are the costs associated with them. Currently, the
preparation costs for e-books are quite high in terms of labor. This is not
just because to the multiple formating problems associated with the software
but the necessity of providing "covers" for every title. The design
parameters are different that for print books alone. There the cover is the
"sizzle that sells the steak". Social science research has proven that if
you have a cover that makes someone actually pick up and examine the book,
perhaps read a few pages or the reviews and summary on the back or the
inside jacket, then you hare halfway to selling it to that customer. If you
can get it into their hands, they already begin to feel a sense of
ownership. In the online world there is no such physicality, and , because
every one else has them, you need a readily discernible thumbnail image to
get people to click into the page for that book. Such thumbnails are
deliberately crude so that they can be seen and noticed. Designing the right
cover for a print book involves not just the cover image but also the
typography and the overall design. Very tricky stuff where you really want
to hire some help so you have that book whose cover makes people stop, look,
say "wow, what is this!' and pick it up. There is no thumbnail equivalent .
I think that we are now in a position where we have thumbnail images because
everyone else does. You design your print cover with the thumbnail in mind
and also the poster. It has to be scalable and work at every size. Doing it
properly costs. That book you mentioned as a possible Print on Demand (POD)
title will need a cover and your best bet there is to hire an illustrator to
do one for you on a work for hire basis so you can use the same image for
advertising everywhere. Our cover for "The Shenandoah Spy" has become pretty
ubiquitous and that is part of our strategy. We use in ads, online and in
print, on book marks, posters and even coffee cups and t-shorts. It took
several months to get right and was a major part of our initial preparation
costs. We used outside contractors and spent a lot of money on it.
One of our problems with Smashwords,com is that they
want everything to have a cover image. That's in addition to the their
unique formatting requirements. There are services that do either one of
these, but that raises the initial costs and changes the initial investment
recovery equation. The problem is that none of the titles we have published
electronically sell well enough to justify the time and money required and
we have many other demands on both at the moment. We plan to fix this in our
free time when we have some. Smashwords.com is a distributor founded by Mark
Coker, who was frustrated by the fact that he couldn't get anyone to even
read the comic novel he and his wife had written about the television
business. Smashwords.com allows people to distribute to ten different e-book
formats, including Kindle and Sony with one upload, but the files have to be
formatted their way. There is a service that will format them for you, but
it costs, of course. (Smashwords, in a very short time, has obtained wide
distribution in many channels. And they don't charge set-up fees or require
ISBNs. They are a place for self-publishers to start.) Anyone doing
self-publishing confronts these "make or buy" decisions at every turn. There
is no way to do it on the cheap. It's cheaper to do and easier to do, but
it's not cheap.
We did do the interior type design ourselves for the
printed book. We spent two days just picking out the type and then this
means printing our two pages from the book in types of various sizes and
with different spaces between the lines. The amount of white space on a page
has a huge impact on readability and consumer comfort. One rookie mistake
with POD publishers is to use a sans serif typeface and too many lines to a
page to get the overall page count down for the book, which lowers per-copy
production cost but makes the book itself hard to read for any amount of
time. That physical difficulty can impact the reader's impression of the
content and they mistake the bad design for bad content. If they can't
finish the book because of eyestrain, then the word-of-mount for that book
is going to be unfavorable. You can't just publish a book, willy-nilly. You
also have to design it as a product for easy use.
With e-books, on Smashwords.com and elsewhere, the
reader has to option of designing the page to suit themselves. They control
, within a limited range, both the type face and the size of the type, and
even the color. Most people don't bother and use the default, but this is
one of the drawbacks for e-books for the publisher and author; they loose
control of the presentation. Because of my vision problems I routinely read
Google Books at 125% of the original size, but because it is a scanned
image, I'm stuck with the original typeface. That hasn't been a problem
because those faces were actual designed to be read rather than created as
artistic elements. There are a lot of typefaces that work only for short
presentations, such as signs or short one page items. Anyone who
self-publishes has to consider these craft elements to make the best
possible presentation and product they can.
As someone observed on one of the LinkedIn groups,
printed books are intellectual comfort food and , as 7/11 proved long ago ,
people will pay extra for convenience. They pay not so much for the item
itself as for being able to get it when and where they want it. So e-books
are not going to replace printed books. They will be, at best, yet another
level of distribution. The big appeal of them right now is that they are
cheaper. But they are not easy to use. Certainly not as easy as the old
familiar printed version.
Let us turn now to the current condition of
traditional publishers. They have created a writer-hostile environment that
is driving self-publishing. One can only submit through a certain class of
agents. One hesitates to call them "literary agents" because what is going
on has little to do with literature. Traditional publishing is a commodity
business, from head to tail. I was somewhat amazed to discover that thirty
percent of the books, by volume, are sold in those airport bookstores. They
usually have about a hundred different titles, all "best-sellers", at a time
and they sell the same way that the warehouse stores do; by limiting
consumer choice. The warehouse stores are another ten percent of sales by
volume. But they do occasionally stock a non-traditional or even self
published title. One of the most notable examples was Mike Ramsey's memoir
of a CIA mission he did in the Soviet Union which was sold exclusively
through CostCo and sold over 66,000 copies. Of course, give that CostCo has
over 400 stores and millions of customers, it would have been more
remarkable if it hadn't sold that many. Books have been devalued to the
status of commodities. But getting them on the shelves in the brick and
mortar spaces is the key to getting large sales. In a chain bookstore a book
competes with about ten thousand other titles and it in the ones up in the
front of the store that sell the most. Because they are the easiest to find
and why publishers pay the same kind of shelving allowances and co-op
advertising that cereal companies do to grocery store chains.
Of course, the warehouse, airport and big chain
bookstores have skimmed off most of the volume sales, usually by offering
huge discounts which the independents couldn't match. That, in turn has
driven most of the independents out of business entirely by robbing them of
their bread and butter sales. If books are a commodity then lower prices
will predominate the market. But. now having destroyed the competition, the
big chains are in retreat everywhere because the products are not attracting
enough buyers. This means that Amazon.com has become the most convenient
bookstore for about half the population. Especially with free shipping. And
they sell lots of other things, too. I buy foot powder there because I can't
find my brand in the brick and mortar stores. But, for publishers, it's not
such a great venue. They have over three million titles and while they give
you a virtual page and runs click through ads and otherwise put you out
there, even providing a blog page, the volume is minimal. A bookstore
manager I know says that Amazon does two things very well; harvest the low
hanging fruit of 'best sellers" by offering steep discounts and exploiting
the Long Tail where the last few sales of an time can be wrung out over
time. Most self publishers are in the Long Tail part of this. It's not a
volume business and you are not competing on price alone. The problem with
Amazon is that they control the price, which is the big argument a lot of
publishers are having with them about Kindle. They can off huge discounts on
a Kindle edition because they work on the Theory of Incremental Income. If
they make a penny more, its enough for them. For the publishers, even with a
big percentage of those few sales, the damage to their mainline; hardbound
books, is significant. Anyone who owns a Kindle has a lot of money. They are
still rich enough to buy the dead tree version. And will, if that is the
only one available. Every book is unique. People pay for that. They don't
buy another book instead, because books are not really commodities. They are
entertainment and information products, each different from all the others.
.
They have also reversed the old King Gillette formula.
Gillette gave away a very expensive razor that only his blades fit and and
over a lifetime sold thousands of blades. With the Kindle, Amazon.com has
gone the other way, selling, exclusively (You can't buy one from anyone but
them) the "razor" for a lot of money up front and giving away a lot of
public domain material and hurting sales of other forms of book publication
by controlling the price of the Kindle editions. Publishers at all levels
have caught wise to the scheme and are not holding off the electronic
versions until the hardbounds and trade paperback have sold a decent amount.
If e-books are sold mainly because of their low price, then they as a mass
market product and should be released when the mass market paperbacks are.
(Of course if you are publishing only e-books, then this does not apply, but
you can charge whatever you like.)
Going back to the agents. The dynamic there has
changed. I've done sales on straight commission several times in my life and
I understand the pressures they are under, but the fact is that they
generally are not looking to serve authors, but to serve publishers. This is
my big objection. They have forgotten who their clients are and some of them
now want to be seen a cultural mavens and "taste makers". So they chase what
sold last year. They dictate what gets written. Innovation and new talent is
no longer welcome. Neither is long-term thinking. There is also a certain
amount of ageism. Carol Buchanan, who I mentioned yesterday, wrote a novel
that was good enough to win the SPUR Award for Best First Novel last year.
She could not even get it read and agents rejected it , not on merit, but
because they thought historical novels won't sell. She did it herself though
Amazon.com's Booksurge unit, promoted it heavily and now has sold audiobook
rights to BooksInMotion. Jana Oliver, who led the self-publishing panel at
the WorldCon last year, was so turned off by the submission process demanded
by agents now that she refused to play and published her first three books
herself.
Selfpublishers come in for a lot of fear mongering,
and pejorative assumptions about product quality from traditional publishers
and writers organizations, but the fact is that anyone who take sufficient
care can produce an edition as good or better than those from the mainstream
at a competitive price and get it distributed. And this is the future of
publishing because the current system is way too slow and rude.
Sincerely,
Francis Hamit
I have been giving more thought to the concept of
"enhanced" eBooks: illustrations, many maps, diagrams, charts, possibly
music and cut scenes; it would all depend on the artist, artistic
resources, and ingenuity. In reading David Gerrold's Star Wolf I was
struck with how convenient it would be to have a sort of virtual ship the
reader could walk through; or in Mote in God's Eye a virtual command
bridge. We can all think of other possibilities.
==
Amazon.com: God's Thunderbolt: The Vigilantes of
Montana (9781419697098): Carol Buchanan: Books
http://www.amazon.com/Gods-Thunderbolt-
Vigilantes-Carol-Buchanan/dp/1419697099
/ref=sr_1_1?ie=UTF8&s=books&qid=
1264880456&sr=1-1
Dear Jerry:
This is the award-winning self published book I
mentioned yesterday.
Best,
Francis Hamit
The point being that awards draw attention to
books. This book was self-published. Just as film festival awards can make
commercial success from independent films (think Juno)...
==
==
: Book reader opinion
Jerry,
One opinion on book readers: Most of the current
reading audience is older people who are used to holding paper in their
hands; for such people, ebooks are teasers (I've downloaded any number of
free books but read very few of them, and strongly prefer to print technical
papers to hardcopy for serious study). The current generation, more adept at
reading on computer, is also more likely to pursue entertainment through
alternative media and hence less likely to purchase books in large numbers.
(For that matter, a lot of my book purchasing is on momentum; I'm far from
caught up with even current fiction.)
Bottom line: as e-book reading becomes more prevalent
and the audience for e-books becomes more used to the market, pirating will
become more prolific. Scribd is the model of the future, not Baen e-books.
That's unfortunate, and a DRM that protects authors rights while not
interfering with the reading experience might change that model.
Jim
===========
From: Stephen Sniegoski <hectorpv@comcast.net>
Friends,
http://english.cri.cn/7146/2010/01/28/481s546118.htm (hour 1)
While I can't seem to get publicity for my book, "The
Transparent Cabal" in the United States, I was able to get on a news panel
on CRI (Chinese Radio International) English dealing with the subject of a
possible U.S. attack on Iran.
It is rather ironic that I was allowed on a major
Chinese government radio station but have a hard time getting on any station
in the U.S., no matter how small.
The radio program was "Today on Beyond Beijing" hosted
by Chris Gelken. The specific discussion topic was: "Is Iran Next?" The
description of the program follows:
"The threat of military action against Iran over its
nuclear program has hung over the Middle East for a number of years. Does
Iran pose a 'clear and present danger' to US or global interests? What would
be the basis for a military strike and what would be the consequences?
'Today' asks the experts." The archive is at:
http://english.cri.cn/7146/2010/01/28/481s546118.htm (hour 1)
This was a very relevant topic since the New York
Times writes that the US is increasing its missile defense system in the
Persian Gulf against a possible Iranian attack. Of course, the US would only
need to strengthen its defenses to deal with an Iranian counterattack after
the US had first bombed it.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/31/world/middleeast/31missile.html
Best, Stephen Sniegoski
I do not necessarily agree with this analysis but
it deserves presentation. I can think of circumstances in which Iran might
launch missiles at targets of value to the United States, and a missile
defense capability would b valuable. My preference for MRBM defense has
always been for sea-based when possible. I was not in favor of ringing
Russia with US bases on European soil. Strategic and Tactical rocket
defense bases don't look a lot different from other kinds. I see no
irreconcilable difference with Russia, and I see no reason to tease the
Russian Bear. On the other hand, I am not alarmed at US missile defense
deployments in the Persian Gulf.
What would Iran counterattack? The fleet? Our
field army? I suspect most Iranian targets would not be American.
===========
tax increases
http://online.wsj.com/article/
SB10001424052748704107
204575039132987274858.html
Increasing taxes on people who fuel the startup engine
to gain a mere 100 billion a year out of a 3.8 trillion dollar a year budget
is stupid.
Phil
Indeed
==
more on taxes
Of course they would quash the startup engine to raise
these paltry sums because they have yet another social program to fund, most
of which will get wasted on the bureaucracy.
Phil
===========
Bullet trains
Jerry P:
I see that there will be over $2 Billion in stimulus
money coming to California for high speed rapid transit, aka bullet trains.
That should about cover the cost of the environmental reports and subsequent
law suits. I don't expect any real ground breaking for that much. Of course
the lawyers will eat most of it as the state attempts to secure rights of
way. Some may already be state owned, but the rest will probably be held up
in court past my expiration date. This is the can-don't state you know!
CBS
A bullet train across the San Andreas Fault does
not immediately seem attractive to me.
=========
Jerry: Canada, not US, so can't blame NCLB (no child
left behind) for this:
<http://cnews.canoe.ca/CNEWS/
Canada/2010/01/31/12686831-cp.html>
(near) universal literacy could be dead in North
America.
Chris C
=============d
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