That will be $19.95 please...

The Internet is heading for disaster if the news services peruse a policy of charging for news articles. It is bad enough for scholarly journals to charge per article or high subscription rates but this will be utter confusion and wasted money from users.

"Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it."

Okay, they want web sites and blogs that reference links to articles and the like and the readers will be forced to pay for such access and information. Would it not be fair for the bloggers and web site owners who post these links be given a percent of the fees charged? Fair is fair. And, can someone accurately define the word and meaning of "news"? This scream about "intellectual property" is a ruse to boost profits. How many times have the articles been incomplete and void of content. This is not good news at all. And what if one visits 50 news sources and pays an annual subscription rate of $50...not worth the investment.

"Google to allow publishers to limit free news access"

by

Jason Deans

December 2nd, 2009

guardian.co.uk

Google is to allow publishers of paid for content to limit the amount of free access internet users have to their websites from Google News.

The move, announced by the Google senior business product manager Josh Cohen late yesterday, comes after mounting criticism of the search engine giant from newspaper publishers, not least the News Corporation chairman and chief executive, Rupert Murdoch.

Just yesterday, Murdoch accused online aggregators such as Google News of "theft" of content, speaking at a US media regulators' workshop on the future of journalism in the internet age in Washington.

Murdoch plans to put News Corp content, including from UK newspapers such as the Sun and the Times, behind a paywall and has threatened to remove it from Google's search index and Google News.

However, Cohen said publishers would be able to charge for their content and still make it available via Google following the changes announced yesterday. "The two aren't mutually exclusive," he added, on a Google News blog.

Cohen said Google had achieved this by updating its First Click Free programme, so that publishers can limit Google News users to looking at no more than five pages of content a day without registering or subscribing.

"If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles on the website of a publisher using First Click Free in a day ... while allowing publishers to focus on potential subscribers who are accessing a lot of their content on a regular basis," he added.

Cohen said that Google will also begin crawling, indexing and treating as "free" any preview pages – usually the headline and first few paragraphs of a story – from subscription websites.

"We will then label such stories as "subscription" in Google News. The ranking of these articles will be subject to the same criteria as all sites in Google, whether paid or free," he added.

"Paid content may not do as well as free options, but that is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free. It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it."

"These are two of the ways we allow publishers to make their subscription content discoverable, and we're going to keep talking with publishers to refine these methods. After all, whether you're offering your content for free or selling it, it's crucial that people find it. Google can help with that."

It remains to be seen whether this will placate Murdoch, who told the US Federal Trade Commission workshop yesterday: "Producing journalism is expensive. We invest tremendous resources in our project from technology to our salaries. To aggregate stories is not fair use. To be impolite, it is theft.

"Without us, the aggregators would have blank slides. Right now content producers have all the costs, and the aggregators enjoy [the benefits]. But the principle is clear. To paraphrase a great economist, [there is] no such thing as a free news story."


The shrinking Internet

Heavy metals from China

The elements at the bottom of the periodic table are rare and could well be monopolized by China. Maybe it might be time to adjust your investment portfolio.

"Heavy metal"

by

Robin Powell

November 18th, 2009

Prospect

China’s monopoly on rare earth metals could choke economies across the world.

Cast your eyes down to the lower reaches of the periodic table, and you find a row of exotic-sounding elements that you probably never got to in chemistry lessons. Here lie 17 elements known as rare earth metals, a group consisting of lanthanides (atomic numbers 57-71), scandium (21) and yttrium (39)—the latter owing its name to the similarly unpronounceable Swedish town where it was discovered in the late 18th century. Yet rare elements are not quite as unusual as their names might suggest. In fact, they are everywhere: in your mobile phone, hard disk drive, iPod headphones, plasma television, and hundreds of other electronic and industrial products. And now their supply is under threat.

Global demand for these metals has more than doubled over the past decade, as ever more devices make use of their unique properties. Rare earth phosphors in your television screen make the colours bright, while super-strong rare earth magnets allow electric motors to be compact enough to fit in a car, and headphones small enough to fit in your ear. Japan manufactures many of these goods and is the world’s biggest importer of the metals. The car giant Toyota aims to sell around 1m hybrid cars a year from 2010—a huge jump if you consider that it has sold 2m hybrids in total since 1997. With several kilograms of rare earth metals in each hybrid car, Toyota, Honda and other car-makers will have to stock up to avoid bottlenecks.

The problem is that there is only one seller: China, with 95 per cent of the world’s supply. Not only does China dominate the production of rare earths, it also leads the field in extraction. That means, for example, that when Japan buys rare earth minerals from countries other than China, it still has to pay Chinese factories to extract the pure metal. All of this wouldn’t be an issue if China was keen to sell. But, increasingly, it isn’t. Beijing has cut export quotas steadily, from 48,500 tonnes in 2004 to 31,310 tonnes in 2009. And in August, China proposed capping rare earth exports at 35,000 tonnes for each of the next six years; barely enough to satisfy the current Japanese market, let alone the world. Even worse for companies like Toyota, China is planning to entirely phase out some forms of dysprosium, a vital component in the magnets of electric car motors. Without dysprosium, the magnets won’t work at high temperatures, meaning in theory that your hybrid car could stop dead as you hit the motorway. Prices of the metals were rising fast before the global recession—a kilo of dysprosium hit $120 in 2007, up from $35 in 2004—and have started their rapid climb again following China’s announcement.

So what is going on? China certainly isn’t running out; it has the metals in abundance. Rather, as Shigeo Nakamura, head of the trading company Advanced Metals Japan, told me, China has a new strategy to boost its own high-tech manufacturing sector. Chinese companies stand to make handy profits by making and selling components that use the metals (like electric car motors), instead of simply selling the raw material. Such moves have already brought a chorus of corporate complaints, and the recently elected Japanese government even made securing rare metal supply a manifesto pledge. China’s response so far has been to claim that because it has such large reserves it must restrict exports, or the market would flood and global prices would fall. Unconvinced, the US and EU have already asked the WTO to investigate.

This economic gamesmanship is forcing developed countries to mimic China’s own aggressive courtship of mineral-rich African regimes: Jogmec, a Japanese body charged with securing stable resources for Japan’s industry, has already struck deals with several African countries, most recently Botswana, to develop new mines. Western companies, meanwhile, are looking anew at old assets. In California, the mining company Molycorp has reopened its Mountain Pass mine, one of the world’s richest until Chinese competition put it out of business in 2002. Yet even these efforts are unlikely to head off a bout of national panic buying. Japan has an emergency stockpile of rare metals used in steel products, and plans to increase its stock of others. But such measures won’t relieve pressure on manufacturers outside China if the cost of rare earths continues to rise; they may be faced with a stark choice of hiking up their own prices, or relocating to the People’s Republic. Senior government advisors in Britain draw a blank when asked about this scenario. Britain may not have a manufacturing sector the size of Japan’s, but the consequences of a trade monopoly in rare earths would still be disastrous.

There is no viable rare earth substitute. Other metals have been tested, but they don’t work. Scientists have had some success in reducing the amount of rare earths needed in products, but not enough. Efforts being made to reuse and recycle the many tonnes of rare earth metals currently thrown away (in discarded mobile phones, hard drives, and so on) are unlikely to make a difference on their own. Even if any of these initiatives do eventually succeed, new mines still take years to build, and new scientific techniques take just as long to be adapted for commercial use. China’s former leader Deng Xiaoping once noted that “while the middle east has its oil, China has rare earths.” His words may be even more prescient than he realised.

The shrinking Internet

This is not good news at all but time will determine its impact.

"Google to limit free newspaper articles"

by

Jefferson Graham

December 1st, 2009

USA TODAY

Google, which has come under fire for making newspaper content easier to read without buying a paper edition, made changes Tuesday to allow publishers more control of their content.

Google updated its First Click Free program to let publishers limit online readers to looking at no more than 5 pages of content per day without registering or subscribing.

"If you're a Google user, this means that you may start to see a registration page after you've clicked through to more than five articles," writes Google's senior business product manager Josh Cohen on a Google blog.

That way, the publisher still gets its articles indexed, while at the same time, can charge for reading. The pieces will be labeled as "subscription" in Google News.

Recently, the blogosphere has been aflutter over News Corp. CEO Rupert Murdoch's suggestion that he might take Wall Street Journal online content (which is a subscription service) away from Google, because WSJ.com articles can be read for free via Google.

Google's new policy might help satisfy Murdoch -- but there are potential risks. Google says subscription content won't necessarily be at the top of the search findings. "That is not a decision we make based on whether or not it's free," says Google. "It's simply based on the popularity of the content with users and other sites that link to it."

Iraq, books, Matthew Trevithick--healing

"Hingham resident collecting books for library at new university in Iraq"

by Tony Catinella

November 30th, 2009

The Patriot Ledger

Matthew Trevithick spent his college years at Boston University learning about the Middle East and its people.

Now, the Hingham native is working in Iraq to educate some of those people.

“It’s good to be on the ground in the Middle East, because you have to experience it,” the 24-year-old said. “You can’t just be in America and talk about it.”

Trevithick, who graduated in 2008 with a degree in international relations, is the librarian at a new university, American University of Iraq. He is collecting books and working to establish a library for the school, which is Sulaimani, in Iraq’s Kurdish region.

He arrived at American University three months ago after working at the Woodrow Wilson International Center in Washington, D.C., and the Center for Contemporary Arab Studies at Georgetown University.

Trevithick started at the American University of Iraq as an assistant to the provost, primarily writing handbooks and manuals. But like many other employees at this upstart university, he stepped in to fill a position when asked. The liberal arts school had no librarian, and Trevithick accepted the assignment in addition to his other duties.

“This is an all-hands-on-deck enterprise; you don’t just teach a class and go home,” he said. “You ... are constantly working and doing different jobs.”

The American University of Iraq opened in 2007 to offer a Western-style liberal arts education. Classes are taught in English and students study philosophy, computer science, business management, and European and American history. About 400 students are enrolled.

Iraqi President Jalal Talabani is chairman of the university’s board of regents, which includes Nechirvan Barzani. The two men are the top Kurdish leaders in Iraq, heading opposing political parties.

Trevithick’s goal is to make the library as large and dependable as the ones at universities in America.

“At the end of the day, the library needs books, and that’s been one of the bigger challenges – getting the raw books here,” Trevithick said. “The outpouring support is always really high, but it’s also hard to get people to spend the money required to send a few books to Iraq.”

Trevithick started contacting electronic databases such as Lexis Nexis, JSTOR and ProQuest to secure their programs. Now he is conducting a donation drive, asking libraries in the United States to donate books. He is using his bedroom at his parent’s Hingham home as a storage area for donated books that will be sent overseas.

“A box will show up every other day. Sometimes it will have one book, sometimes it will have 10 books,” said his mother, Amelia Newcomb, who is deputy international editor for the Christian Science Monitor.

Newcomb said the donations include books on Christianity, economics and political theory, copies of the U.S. Constitution, and books by Tom Brokaw and Studs Terkel.

“I think people like the idea that they can contribute to learning and see it as a positive way for Americans to support Iraq,” Newcomb said.

About 250 books have been donated from all across the United States, but Trevithick still needs to find a donor to pay to ship the books to Iraq.

He will be returning to Hingham in early December for the holidays. On Dec. 17, he will speak at the Hingham Public Library about Iraq, and he hopes to additional donations.

The Royal Society...new online papers

"The Royal Society puts historic papers online"

November 30th, 2009

BBC

One of the world's oldest scientific institutions is marking the start of its 350th year by putting 60 of its most memorable research papers online.

The Royal Society, founded in London in 1660, is making public manuscripts by figures like Sir Isaac Newton.

Benjamin Franklin's account of his risky kite-flying experiment is also available on the Trailblazing website.

Society president Lord Rees said the papers documented some of the most "thrilling moments" in science history.

The Royal Society grew out of the so-called "Invisible College" of thinkers who began meeting in the mid-1640s to discuss science and philosophy.

Its official foundation date is 28 November 1660 and thereafter it met weekly to debate and witness experiments.

Mozart study

The papers published on the Trailblazing website were first printed in the society's journal, Philosophical Transactions.

They were chosen from 60,000 printed since the journal's foundation in 1665 - a date which makes it the oldest continuously published scientific periodical in the world.

Among the highlights are a gruesome account of a 17th Century blood transfusion and the article in which Sir Isaac showed that white light is a mixture of other colours.

Also included is Mr Franklin's account of his ill-advised attempt in 1752 to show that lightning was a form of electricity by flying a kite in a storm, and a 1970 paper on black holes co-written by Professor Stephen Hawking.

There is also an entertaining paper about a study of the nine-year-old Mozart in London in 1770 to determine whether he really was a child prodigy.

Suggestions he was in fact a midget adult were dismissed by writer Daines Barrington on the grounds that young Wolfgang was more enthusiastic about playing with his cat than practising his harpsichord.

'Thrilling moments'

Lord Rees said: "The scientific papers on Trailblazing represent a ceaseless quest by scientists over the centuries, many of them Fellows of the Royal Society, to test and build on our knowledge of humankind and the universe.

"Individually, they represent those thrilling moments when science allows us to understand better and to see further."

The Royal Society is holding a series of events during its 350th year to mark the anniversary.

They include a nine-day science and arts festival next summer and a series of public lectures and debates at its London headquarters.

The Royal Society of London

St. Andrew’s Day and Scottish Inventors

"Nov. 30: A St. Andrew’s Day Salute to Scottish Inventors"

by

Lewis Wallace

November 30th, 2009

Wired

Nov. 30: It’s St. Andrew’s Day, the national day of Scotland. So we offer a toast to the great inventors who have applied Scottish ingenuity to their work over the years, helping craft the modern world in the process.

Some, like Alexander Graham Bell and James Watt, are well-known.

Others, like Arthur James Arnot — a Scot who moved to Australia, where he patented the electric drill — are less so.

In the wake of the Scottish Enlightenment, an 18th-century period during which the country achieved great intellectual and scientific accomplishments, emigrants such as Arnot spread what writer Arthur Herman calls the “Scottish mentality” well beyond the United Kingdom.

“When we gaze out on a contemporary world shaped by technology, capitalism and modern democracy, and struggle to find our own place in it, we are in effect viewing the world through the same lens as the Scots did,” writes Herman in his 2001 book, How the Scots Invented the Modern World.

Here are some of the great Scottish inventors who helped change the world:

• John Aitken: Inventor of the koniscope, or dust counter, an instrument designed to measure the content of particles in the atmosphere.
• Alexander Bain: Inventor of the electric clock.
• Patrick Bell: This Church of Scotland minister invented the reaping machine, but refused to patent his horse-powered agricultural device, because he wanted mankind to benefit freely.
• James Blyth: An electrical engineer, his pioneering windmill became the world’s first structure to generate electricity from wind.
• Dugald Clerk: Designer of the first two-stroke engine.
• Robert Davidson: Builder of the first electric locomotive.
• James Dewar: Inventor of the Dewar flask (the first vacuum flask, progenitor of the Thermos bottle).
• William Kennedy Dickson: Creator of the Kinetoscope, an early movie-projection device. (Dickson developed the machine based on an idea by his employer, Thomas Edison.)
• Patrick Ferguson: Inventor of the Ferguson rifle.
• Sir William Fergusson: Inventor of several surgical tools, including bone forceps, lion forceps and the vaginal speculum.
• William Ged: Inventor of stereotype printing.
• Barbara Gilmour Creator of Dunlop cheese, made from the unskimmed milk of Ayrshire cows.
• James Goodfellow: Invented the automatic teller machine and patented personal-identification-number tech.
• Fleeming Jenkin: Inventor of telpherage, the system for moving an aerial tram using one fixed cable and another that pulls the car.
• Charles Macintosh: Inventor of waterproof fabrics (the Mackintosh raincoat is named after him).
• John Loudon McAdam: Inventor of the road-building process called “macadamization,” which introduced tar into the materials list, paving the way for today’s modern roads.
• John Napier: Creator of logartihms and an abacus known as “Napier’s bones.”
• James Nasmyth: Inventor of the steam hammer.
• William Nicol: Inventor of the Nicol prism, the first-ever device for obtaining plane-polarized light.
• James Porteous: Inventor of the Fresno scraper, a revolutionary agricultural implement that greatly influenced modern earth movers.
• Thomas Stevenson: Creator of the Stevenson screen, an enclosure for protecting meteorological gear. He also designed dozens of lighthouses.
• Robert Stirling: Inventor of the Stirling engine.
• William Symington: Builder of the “first practical steamboat.”
• Robert Watson-Watt: Patented radar.
• Robert Wauchope: Inventor of the time ball, a shore-based device that lets mariners synchronize and check the accuracy of their marine chronometers while at sea.

How the Scots Invented the Modern World: The True Story of How Western Europe's Poorest Nation Created Our World and Everything in It

by

Arthur Herman

ISBN-10: 0609606352
ISBN-13: 978-0609606353

Who [or what] are the true explorers?

I'm not too sure that this is a real question. What difference does it make? And, doesn't it all hinge on definition? And down the road will the question be asked again when artificial intelligence is common place?

"Should NASA's Mars Rover be compared to Columbus?"

by

Dan Vergano

November 29th, 2009

USA TODAY

Christopher Columbus, Lewis & Clark and NASA's Mars rovers — which ones are true explorers?

All or none, suggest two astronomers in the current Space Policy journal, arguing that how we define "exploration" may set the success or failure of NASA's future.

Right now, that future looks very much at risk with the blue-ribbon "Augustine Commission" panel report last month calling for either adding about $3 billion a year to the agency's coffers or calling off the whole astronaut thing.

"For too long we have looked at the history of exploration selectively, seeking to find the antecedents which justify our own vision of exploration: as science, as human adventure, as geopolitical statement," write Daniel Lester of the University of Texas, Austin, and Michael Robinson of Hillyer College in West Hartford, Conn. "This is a definitional fight which cannot be won."

So, the astronomers call for redefining exploration to include endeavors such as the Hubble space telescope as much as future Mars astronauts picking up pebbles in the Red Planet. That may sound like space scientists whining for more money (where they already get about $6 billion of NASA's $18 billion budget), but defining exploration too narrowly as just humans in space risks further trapping the space agency, they warn, in the budget bind that resulted when the Apollo moon missions ended in the 1970's and funding dropped. The last few flights of the space shuttle are already booked, and its rocket replacement is looking further and further away with the federal deficit deepening.

NASA leans heavily on the word "exploration" in its strategic plans, the pair write, particularly after the 2003 Columbia tragedy, which killed seven astronauts, who were cited as explorers in the accident investigations report. Further, the Bush Administration's 2004 "Vision for Space Exploration" plans, which called for astronauts returning to the moon by 2020, made similar appeals to the idea of exploration.

"The historical record offers a rich set of examples of what we call exploration," Lester and Robinson note. "Christopher Columbus sailing to the New World, Roald Amundsen driving his dogs towards the South Pole, and Neil Armstrong stepping into the soft dust of the Moon."

But is Columbus's discovery — an accident — really exploration, they ask? Or Amundsen's trip to the South Pole, a geometric point well understood for millennia? Or even Armstrong taking an 8-day trip to a rock already visited by probes for years before his arrival?

A 1990 blue-ribbon panel on NASA's future (also led by the same Norm Augustine, then head of the defense industry's Martin Marietta corporation) made the case for astronaut flights, noting "the involvement of humans is the essence of exploration." But, "Exploration without science is merely tourism," Harvard astronomer Robert Kirshner argued in 2005, speaking as head of the American Astronomical Society. On the other hand, Planetary Society chief Louis Friedman says, "Exploration" = "Adventure" + "Discovery," and doesn't have to involve science. "To him, astronomy with telescopes is perhaps not a form of exploration at all.," write the Space Policy report authors.

"Is it all about rocks?" ask Lester and Robinson. NASA in its exploration plans, from the moon to Mars to (possibly) asteroids, follows the tradition of explorers planting flags on new territory. Werner von Braun, the German war-rocketeer-turned-NASA-engineer, envisioned just such an exploration path, most famously displayed in Collier's magazine articles from 1952 to 1954, after a childhood immersed in thrilling news report of polar explorers. "Renaissance voyagers during the 'Age of Discovery' viewed other lands — Asia, Africa, and the Spice Islands — as the goal of their voyages. Oceans, on the other hand, were treated as highways rather than habitats, a medium to traverse rather than to be investigated," they write. Polar explorers looked for snow piles to plant flags on, and deep sea explorers sought the ocean's sandy floors. "This penchant for visiting rocks in the name of 'exploration' leaves many kinds of space science at a disadvantage," the astronomers write.

NASA's $79 million Lunar Crater Observation and Sensing Satellite scientists this month reported water frozen in lunar craters, a finding that has revived hopes for human moon outposts. But Lester and Robinson note, "From scientific and budgetary points of view, one could make a case that NASA should abandon the human lunar outpost idea altogether and invest its money in telerobotic exploration of the Moon, a project that would cost a fraction of a manned outpost. The same can be said for the exploration of Mars."

That's nice, they say, but then add, "However impressive have been the gains of robotic exploration, it is unlikely that Congress or NASA will abandon human space flight on purely practical grounds to focus solely on scientific goals. If human space flight has offered poor returns for science, it has paid off handsomely in symbolic and geopolitical terms." Landing a man on the moon stands as a signal U.S. achievement, one referenced as recently as President Obama's acceptance speech last year.

So what to do? First we should accept that exploration means different things to different people, they argue, and then move on to a "hybrid" space exploration program that incorporates astronauts, robots and nations together in efforts that make economic sense to a public in the midst of a deep recession.

"That exploration has deep roots in human history is clear. Yet meanings of exploration continue to change. The models of Apollo, the Space Shuttle and the International Space Station — all conceived in an era before advanced telerobotics — now have limited value in predicting the future course of space exploration," the pair argue. "We now face a vision of exploration that is different from that of our ancestors."