Self-publishing for professors?

"New School: A Tumblr for Making Your Own Textbooks"

by

Sarah Rich
 
The Atlantic

Can a simple, easy way to build coursepacks catch on with students and professors?

Our first stop in Ann Arbor today was at TechBrewery, a co-working space for start-ups at the western edge of University of Michigan's campus. Housed in an historic building that was a brewery in the late 19th century and a foundry in the 1920s, the place has all the old industrial trappings that make for great collaborative work space -- high ceilings, big windows, steel trusses, and very few walls.

The first company we met was founded by a young married couple (the second techie love match we've encountered on this trip), Lida and Scott Hasbrouck, who sit opposite each other, bisected by two computer monitors, a stuffed koala, and their tiny, pink-sweatered dog. The Hasbroucks are working on a startup called GinkgoTree, which Scott says "will enable professors to divorce textbooks entirely."

Currently, Scott explains, "professors that are really trying to push the edge and combine textbooks with technology are hacking together all these solutions. You see Wordpress blogs for course materials ... and then there's this problem: in order to teach the majority of college courses, you need copyrighted content and textbooks. There's no good way to merge all of the cool stuff, like Khan Academy, and all this other stuff together into one solution."

Despite the dominance of educational-software giant, Blackboard, the Hasbroucks think their product's got a good shot, largely because of its relative simplicity. Ginkgo Tree presents an intuitive, visual interface, not unlike Tumblr's dashboard. For each course and subject, professors can upload links and images, embed video, post comments, and -- significantly -- import a chunk of scanned pages from print books. All of those resources get bundled into modules and arrayed in a navigable grid.

When all is said and done, the use of Ginkgo Tree will cost professors nothing, says Scott, and cost students far less than they would pay for the typical boatload of textbooks -- he estimates between $50-100 total per school term. Through an agreement with Copyright Clearance Center, scanned text costs around $0.15 per page (though it varies by book). So, as Lida points out, even a 100-page excerpt costs a fraction of a textbook's sale price.

Ginkgo Tree is set to launch in two weeks, with the goal of getting a critical mass of professors to adopt the technology for spring semester. "We just want it to be very simple, easy to use, and we're going to start small and build based on user feedback," says Scott, "Basically, it turns making your own textbook into a Tumblr blog."
They're self-funding the startup with the proceeds from 100,000 paying users of their popular notetaking app, Paperdesk.

"Alien Worlds"...radio sci fi drama from 1978 to 1980

Wikipedia...

Alien Worlds was a syndicated radio show created by radio personality Lee Hansen. It aired 26 half-hour episodes between 1978 and 1980, becoming well known for its realistic sound effects, high production values and documentary style of dialog.

Background

The science fiction show was first syndicated by Watermark Inc. after Lee Hansen was hired as their creative director. After advancing the concept of an action-adventure dramatic radio series, Lee began developing the concept in the fall of 1978. Watermark premiered the first episode, "The Sun Stealers", on January 7, 1979.

The series gained popularity thanks to its relatable characters, full symphonic soundtrack, realistic sound effects, high production values and documentary style format. Eventually over 500 US FM radio stations, along with stations in New Zealand and Australia aired the series. Between 1979 and 1980, 26 half-hour programs were broadcast at various times on weekends, where they gained favorable worldwide press acclaim. Alien Worlds was soon heard on a weekly basis by millions of fans and was eventually carried by over 1500 top-rated FM radio stations worldwide. The series' sponsor was Peter Paul, Cadbury which advertised Cadbury Caramello chocolates touting their caramel centers.

Four additional episodes were produced but never aired.The show is currently available on Sirius Satellite Radio and on the Alien Worlds website. The series is being developed for 3-D animation for television and DVD release.

Plot summary
 
The ISA, or International Space Authority, is a governing body of space development and exploration. Organized by all earth nations, it advances humans into deep space. Their base is officially named "The Arthur C. Clarke Astronomical Observatory" or "Starlab." Commissioner White commands the base, and under his command aboard Starlab are Research Director Dr. Maura Cassidy along with Starlab's Director of Operations, Jerry Lyden, and two ISA Pilots affectionately known as "rocket jockies" Captains Jon Graydon and Buddy Griff.

Production

Cast:

Roger Dressler as Narrator & Commissioner White
Linda Gary as Maura Cassidy
Bruce Phillip Miller as SET Captain Jon Graydon
Corey Burton as Starlab Controller Jerry Lyden
Chuck Olsen as SET Captain Buddy Griff

Soundtrack:

The original music score and theme, entitled The Aliens World Suite, was composed by Jim Kirk and engineered by Dick Kewzey. It was performed by the London Symphony Orchestra, comprising a 57 piece Westminster Sinfonia in Wembley, England.

Many of the realistic sound effects were recorded in four different sessions on an oil tanker in a San Pedro dry dock.

The Mystery of the Egyptian Necklace

 
Part 1

The Mystery of the Egyptian Necklace

Part 2

More episodes.

Daniel John O’Connor...a love of philosophy

"Philosopher with abiding interest in nature of truth and free will"

September 22nd, 2012

The Irish Times

DJ O'CONNOR: IN 1957, two years after Exeter University gained its royal charter, Daniel John O’Connor, who has died aged 98, set about expanding its philosophy department. Known to colleagues and students as Dan, he was a gifted communicator. His clear, precise thinking is evident in 10 books and numerous papers.

A student and then close friend of AJ Ayer and Karl Popper, O’Connor shared, but was not limited by, their commitment to logical empiricism, taking logic, mathematics and the physical sciences as a primary focus for reflection, and as a foundation for the clarification of long-disputed philosophical problems.

One of his earliest papers, “Is There a Problem About Free Will?” (1940), pointed to his abiding interest in the conflict between our beliefs in our freedom of choice and in the causal predictability of all events in the physical world. His book Free Will (1971) displays a non-partisan approach: an empiricist might have simply adopted the determinist’s generalisation that “Every event has a cause” to close the case against free choice, but instead O’Connor argues that although the generalisation may be true, it has clearly not been proved to be so.

Therefore it cannot be treated as a scientific law. Scientific laws are confirmed and falsifiable hypotheses that have not yet been falsified, he insists, while the determinist’s generalisation is neither.

The Correspondence Theory of Truth (1975) explored the difficulties in spelling out the relation between statements of empirical fact and the world which makes them true. The intent of correspondence theorists is to treat concepts as the work of the perceiving and thinking mind, which gives us our articulated experience of objects, their properties and their interrelations: the world itself is therefore lacking this conceptual articulation.

O’Connor dismisses attempts at depicting this world as a collection of “facts” or “states of affairs”, for these are already conceptually structured, and instead proposes a two-stage model of the relations between world, perception and statements. For this he introduces his own term, the status rerum, for the “raw unexperienced welter of objects and events”.

At the first stage, our sense organs provide a limited conceptual awareness of things and their properties, situations and events. At the second stage the final selection process of language results in statements that are candidates for truth. The idea of the status rerum has proved controversial, for a welter of objects and events hardly constitutes an unstructured and unconceptualised place. Welcoming the controversy, O’Connor defended his idea to the end.

An Introduction to the Philosophy of Education (1957) sparked another debate. Can theories decide such questions as whether to abolish the grammar-school system, extend formal education beyond the age of 16, or expand the university intake? O’Connor takes it that a “theory” must be both explanatory and predictive, and so open to the possibility of being falsified. Any educational theory can draw only on such sciences as psychology and sociology. What it cannot do, according to O’Connor, is lead to any prescriptions for modifications of educational practices.

This attempt to keep educational theories free of value judgments was strongly challenged by others such as RS Peters, Paul Hirst and Alan Montefiore, who sought to reintegrate values within educational theories and hence ensure their power to guide practice. O’Connor’s approach provided generations of students of education with a clear intellectual starting point, even if few agreed with him. His interest in the history of philosophy extended well beyond the empiricist tradition. He wrote influential works on John Locke (1952) and on Aquinas and natural law (1967), and compiled A Critical History of Western Philosophy (1964).

Born in Seattle, Washington state O’Connor was the son of an Irish diplomat, also Daniel, and Frances Call, from Northern Ireland. Under the stagename Joseph O’Conor, O’Connor’s brother was an acclaimed Shakespearean actor – and Old Jolyon in BBC’s 1966 Forsyte Saga. He also had a sister, Maureen.

Following a Jesuit education at Wimbledon College, southwest London, in 1933 O’Connor went to work at the ministry of education. As a part-time student at Birkbeck College, London, he gained a BA and a PhD in classics, and then a BA in philosophy. He was a Commonwealth Fund fellow at the University of Chicago, where he gained an MA in philosophy under Rudolf Carnap, another logical empiricist, in 1947.

Early posts in South Africa and at the University College of North Staffordshire led to chairs at Liverpool University (1954-57) and then Exeter (1957-79). He was at various times president of the Mind Association, the Aristotelian Society and the British Society for the Philosophy of Science.

O’Connor had a keen interest in classical music and in literature. He was an accomplished chess player and a regular figure on the cricket field for Exeter.

He married Kathleen Kemsley in 1948; she died in 2000. He is survived by his second wife, Maureen Castle, whom he married in 2003.

Daniel John O’Connor, philosopher, born April 2nd, 1914; died August 12th, 2012

A Critical History of Western Philosophy

by

D. J. O'Connor

ISBN-10: 0029238404
ISBN-13: 978-0029238400

Deceased--Claudine Walker

Gus Edwards, the director and songwriter, auditioning the Mawby Triplets.

The Mawby Triplets: Claudine [center] with Claudette [left] and Angella.

 

Claudine Walker
August 10th, 1922 to September 13th, 2012

 
"Claudine Mawby Dies at 90; Hollywood ‘Triplet’"

by

Paul Vitello

September 21st, 2012

The Telegraph

Hollywood publicity agents called them the Mawby Triplets. They were a set of adorably blond little English girls who appeared in some of the earliest talking films, cherubs adorning the celluloid canvases of the 1920s and ’30s. Cast in movies with stars like Douglas Fairbanks Jr., Gloria Swanson and John Barrymore, they were, for a time, among the most famous children in the world.

Their parents shielded them from knowing how famous they were, isolating them from their fans and other children. Their agents shielded the fans from knowing the truth about the girls — that they were not really triplets. They were actually composed of twins, Claudine and Claudette, and their sister, Angella, who was 11 months older.

“Mummy and Daddy were at first rather taken aback,” Claudine Mawby Walker recalled in an interview with The Daily Mail in 1995. “They kept saying that, contrary to appearances, we weren’t actually triplets. But the film people just said we looked like triplets, and that was what counted.”

If anyone asked, she added, “Daddy would just joke that only two of us were triplets.”

Mrs. Walker died on Sept. 13 at her home in Poole, on the south coast of England, where she lived most of her life after leaving Hollywood in the 1930s. She was 90, Reuters said, and the last surviving sister. Her twin, Claudette, died at 19, caught in a German bombing raid over Brighton in 1941. Their sister, Angella Carr, died in 2000.

When the Mawbys arrived in Hollywood, in 1928, the fledgling industry was reaping bonanzas at the box office with its child stars. Jackie Coogan and Hal Roach’s “Our Gang” kids were at their peak. Shirley Temple was in the wings.

The sisters, who appeared in films from roughly the ages of 5 to 10, later in life recalled their sojourn in that world as if it had been a dream. “No one has heard of the Mawby Triplets now,” Mrs. Carr told The Mail in 1995. “Whenever I mention it to my friends, they don’t believe it, so I just keep quiet.”

Yet the girls sang “Singin’ in the Rain” with Jack Benny in “The Hollywood Revue of 1929,” a variety show on film featuring the entire MGM pantheon, including Lionel Barrymore, Buster Keaton, Laurel and Hardy, Norma Shearer and Joan Crawford. They appeared with Swanson in “What a Widow” (1930) and with Bessie Love in “Broadway Melody” (1929), which earned Ms. Love an Academy Award nomination.

William Randolph Hearst and Marion Davies, his mistress, once took them to lunch at the Brown Derby. The girls remembered the crackling excitement in the air as members of the wedding party of Joan Crawford and Douglas Fairbanks Jr. in 1929.

It was all good, more or less — a rare sour note occurring on a visit home to England in 1930, when publicity agents arranged for them to meet George Bernard Shaw at his Hertfordshire home. The girls were not favorably impressed.

“He was a rather deaf old man with a beard, and he kept his wife locked up indoors, doing the chores,” Mrs. Walker said. “She wanted to come out to see us, but he kept pushing her back inside.”

A photo of the meeting appeared in thousands of American and British newspapers. In some, the caption described the great playwright looking from one child to another, asking, “Which is which?”

Claudine Ella Mawby and her twin sister were born on Aug. 10, 1922, in London to Claud and Ella Mawby. Her father was a captain in the British Army, her mother the daughter of a shipping magnate.

How the girls got into the movies was itself a Hollywood tale. The family was visiting Southern California in 1927 on orders from her mother’s doctors, who had recommended the balmy weather to help her recover from a kidney operation. As the Mawbys disembarked from a luxury ocean-liner at a Los Angeles pier — a favorite haunt of the paparazzi in that era — the three pretty, blindingly blond, almost indistinguishable children caught the photographers’ attention. Soon pictures of them began appearing in local newspapers.

The photos, in turn, were spotted by studio talent scouts, who persuaded the parents to sign the girls to a contract. The family rented a house in Malibu, and the sisters appeared the following year in their first film, “The Baby Cyclone,” with Lew Cody.

The adventure ended a few years later, as suddenly and unexpectedly as it had begun. The girls did not know why at the time, but they later learned that the kidnapping and murder of the 20-month-old infant son of Charles and Anne Morrow Lindbergh in 1932 had sparked their parents’ decision to return to England.

Though the girls appeared in London stage plays in their early teens, World War II ended what might have been left of their careers. In 1941, Claudine Mawby married William Walker, a British fighter pilot, who became a brewing company executive. They had seven children, five of whom survive her, as does Mr. Walker, from whom she was legally separated but never divorced.

Mrs. Walker regretted not staying in Hollywood, she told interviewers. But it was not the opportunity for stardom she missed; it was her twin.

“I used to regret bitterly that we came back,” she said in 1995, “because, almost certainly, had we stayed out there, Claudette would still be alive now.”

Not new...a social gathering like "tail gating" or "listening to the radio"

"Tailgate Parties Are a ‘Powerful Impulse’ and a Microcosm of Society"

by

Beth Carter

September 21st, 2012

Wired

Think football, and odds are you think tailgate party. And with good reason — the tailgate party is among the most time-honored and revered American sporting traditions, what with the festivities, the food and the fans. And the beer. Don’t forget the beer.

To the untrained eye, these game-day rituals appear to be little more than a wild party, a hedonistic excuse to get loaded and eat barbecue. Not at all. They are, according to Notre Dame anthropologist John Sherry, bustling microcosms of society where self-regulatory neighborhoods foster inter-generational community, nurture tradition and build the team’s brand.

Sherry didn’t always feel this way. There was a time when he considered tailgating a boisterous nuisance, little more than a gauntlet of unrelated and unruly celebrations to be run if he were to reach his seat in Notre Dame Stadium. But then he had an epiphany: What if there was meaning to the madness?

“One day I slowed down and paid attention to things that were going on that weren’t individual celebrations,” he said of research presented in A Cultural Analysis of Tailgating. “It was much more nuanced that I had thought before.”

Sherry consulted the existing literature on the subject and found bupkis. Most studies on tailgating come to Onion-esque conclusions like “tailgating leads to drunkenness” or examine the environmental impact (.pdf) of all that trash. Sherry looked deeper into tailgating and saw a whole lot of consumption akin to that of, say, ancient harvest festivals. He recruited colleague Tonya Bradford, trained a few research assistants and started attending tailgate parties and interviewing fans to learn more.

Notre Dame was a convenient place to start, given its rich football tradition. But Sherry and Co. hit the road too, attending Irish away games and checking the scene at Big Ten Conference schools. They talked to fans of every stripe, from alumni with six-figure RVs to students. And they discovered what every true football fan eventually discovers.

“What we really found was a real active and orchestrated effort in community building,” said Sherry. “People have tailgated in the same place for years, they have tailgated through generations, they have encountered strangers who have passed through and adopted them to their families and became fast friends. They have created neighborhoods.”
This much was obvious Saturday at the University of Utah-Brigham Young University game I attended. The parking lot around Eccles Stadium was thick with trucks and trailers and RVs, the air was thick with the smell of cooking meat. The lot was divided into “streets” and “neighborhoods” populated by fans who have in many cases known each other for years.

University of Utah football fan Jacque Jackman has been tailgating outside Eccles Stadium for 15 years with Gus, a fully decked-out trailer. Gus is as much a part of the scene as the barbecue and beer, and passersby join in the family tradition of “kissing Gus’ ass,” smooching the back of the trailer as if it were the Blarney Stone. Lipstick imprints are left until the next season.

Across the “street” sat Brad Shephard and his family. They’ve been tailgating since the 1970s, and people they met at the parking lot parties threw a wedding shower for her and his wife, Mary. When his father died, those same tailgating compatriots attended his funeral. Tailgating, they said, is about being part of something larger than yourself, of joining in a shared experience.

“If they’re wearing a Utah shirt, you’ll give them anything,” Mary Shephard said, serving a hungry fan, whom she just met, a heaping helping of sausage with a side of potato salad.

In that way, is about creating a sense of community — of belonging. The stadium parking lot is where people of all backgrounds come together in a common ritual. Many people go to great lengths organizing and staging their parties, creating what are, in effect, miniature kitchens and living rooms, complete with memorabilia and even photos. These fans aren’t attending something, they’re building something — so much so that Sherry met fans who bring dirt from their hometown to maintain a geographical connection.

This does more than build community. It builds a brand. Fans contribute to the creation of the culture and branding of their school as individual traditions are incorporated into the university traditions.

“They feel pride and ownership,” he said. “They are the embodiment of the brand.”

This is not to say that tailgating isn’t occasionally marred by fights and boorish behavior. Mix several thousand people, copious amounts of liquor and the charged emotions of a heated rivalry and you’ll have a few jerks and idiots. But tailgating — which has proven exceedingly difficult for schools to regulate — is in many ways self-policing, Sherry found.

“They try to avoid it being like a European soccer match,” he said. “In many cases tailgaters go out of their way to regulate each other and are conscious of over-serving. They have a lot of informal power, too.”

Although Sherry didn’t attend any pro games, he’s pretty sure he’d find the same thing there. Fans are fans whether the team plays in the NCAA or NFL, and the loyalties and rivalries are no less intense. “It’s visceral,” Sherry said. “Celebration around football is a powerful impulse.”
The American football game tailgate party combines the attributes of a carnival, the air of a festival and the tradition of a ritual to create something utterly unique in sports. Sherry and his colleagues call it a “vestaval,” after Vesta, the Roman goddess of hearth and home.

“You’re turning your house inside out so people can see your domestic life and participate in your family,” Sherry said. “That doesn’t happen anywhere else.”

Little known branch of astronomy..."Astrometry"

The Sextant of Johannes Hevelius.

Abstract...

The history of astrometry, the branch of astronomy dealing with the positions of celestial objects, is a lengthy and complex chronicle, having its origins in the earliest records of astronomical observations more than two thousand years ago, and extending to the high accuracy observations being made from space today. Improved star positions progressively opened up and advanced fundamental elds of scientic enquiry, including our understanding of the scale of the solar system, the details of the Earth's motion through space, and the comprehension and acceptance of Newtonianism. They also proved crucial to the practical task of maritime navigation. Over the past 400 years, during which positional accuracy has improved roughly logarithmically with time, the distances to the nearest stars were triangulated, making use of the extended measurement baseline given by the Earth's orbit around the Sun. This led to quantifying the extravagantly vast scale of the Universe, to a determination of the physical properties of stars, and to the resulting characterisation of the structure, dynamics and origin of our Galaxy. After a period in the middle years of the twentieth century in which accuracy improvements were greatly hampered by the perturbing effects of the Earth's atmosphere, ultra-high accuracies of star positions from space platforms have led to a renewed advance in this fundamental science over the past few years.

"The History of Astrometry" by Michael Perryman

Pyramidal Mars Rock and Curiosity get together

 

In a series of new raw images taken by Mars rover Curiosity's Navcams, it appears that mission managers have given the command for the rover's robotic arm to reach out to its first contact science target, a pyramid-shaped rock named "Jake Matijevic." The rock is named after the mission's chief systems engineer who died shortly after the Mars Science Laboratory touched down on the Red Planet on Aug. 5/6.

Not an impossible drama if you are Rod Serling and it is a script for the Twilight Zone...

Spokesperson for a massive crowd of fearful citizens:

Sire, we are so afraid of the one armed behemoth that came here six units ago. Even though it moves slowly, many citizens have been run over, crops destroyed, and we are afraid that your great funerary pyramid will be destroyed...all our labors lost.

What should we do?

"Curiosity 'Reaches Out' to Pyramidal Mars Rock: Big Pic"

by

Ian O'Neill

September 20th, 2012

Discovery News

During a press briefing at NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) on Wednesday, mission scientists pointed out that some careful maneuvering will be required to ensure the turret of the robotic arm (with a suite of scientific instruments attached) is positioned correctly before the science can begin. The shadow of the robotic arm can be seen below as it's deployed over the rocky surface. The rock, which measures about 10 inches (25 centimeters) tall and 16 inches (40 centimeters) wide, will likely be analyzed by the Alpha Particle X-Ray Spectrometer for reading a target's elemental composition and the Mars Hand Lens Imager for close-up imaging.

Curiosity is currently en-route to an interesting geological location called Glenelg where three different types of rock converge. After Glenelg, Curiosity will begin its long trek to the 3.4 mile (5.5 km) high Aeolis Mons (known unofficially as Mount Sharp) that resides in the center of Gale Crater.