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

IMPORTANT NOTICE...

I have been informed that this enterprise has been curtailed and that Matthew Trevithick has become involved in activities at another Mideastern university, thus the request for materials mentioned below are no longer solicited.

8/28/11

"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.

IMPORTANT NOTICE...

I have been informed that this enterprise has been curtailed and that Matthew Trevithick has become involved in activities at another Mideastern university, thus the request for materials mentioned above are no longer solicited.

8/28/11

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."

Deceased--Waldo Hunt

Waldo Hunt
November 28th, 1920 to November 6th, 2009

Okay, not a man of philosophy or science but one who promoted those curious pop-up books. There really is an art to making them and a knowledge of geometry. Just enter "pop-up" books in any image search engine and 100s of examples will be displayed.

"Waldo Hunt, King of the Pop-Up Book, Dies at 88"

by

Margalit Fox

November 26th, 2009

The New York Times

On the flat, foursquare pages of a printed book, Waldo H. Hunt could part the Red Sea. He could make hearts beat, lungs fill and bones rattle. He could make dinosaurs rear up, ships set sail and bats quiver in belfries.

An advertising man turned novelty-book packager, Mr. Hunt was almost single-handedly responsible for the postwar revival of the pop-up book in the United States. For decades the country’s leading producer of the books, he is widely credited with having taken a long dormant, long marginalized and long unprofitable publishing genre and making it a thriving, ubiquitous industry.

Mr. Hunt, who lived in Springville, Calif., died on Nov. 6 at 88. His death, in Porterville, Calif., was of congestive heart failure, his family said.

Mr. Hunt’s company, Intervisual Books, produced many of the best-known pop-up books of the modern era, among them “The Human Body,” by Jonathan Miller and David Pelham (Viking Press, 1983), featuring movable internal organs; “The Honeybee and the Robber” (Philomel, 1981), a moving picture book by Eric Carle; and the pop-up version of “Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets” (Scholastic, 2002).

One of Mr. Hunt’s books, Jan Pienkowski’s “Haunted House” (Heinemann, 1979), received the Kate Greenaway Medal, a prestigious British prize for children’s book illustration. It was a highly unusual honor for a pop-up book.

Besides working for commercial publishers, Mr. Hunt produced everything from pop-up books to greeting cards, table decorations and store displays for clients like National Geographic, Hallmark Cards and the Walt Disney Company.

Mr. Hunt was also an avid collector of movable books — a term encompassing pop-ups books and those otherwise set in motion — amassing more than a thousand antique and contemporary titles. In 2002 his collection formed the basis of an exhibition, “Pop Up! 500 Years of Movable Books,” at the Los Angeles Central Library.

That year Movable Stationery, the newsletter of the Movable Book Society, an organization of scholars and enthusiasts, called Mr. Hunt “the paterfamilias of pop-up.”

Waldo Henley Hunt, familiarly known as Wally, was born on Nov. 28, 1920, in Chicago and reared in California. He briefly attended Stanford University before serving in the Army during World War II. After the war he started his own advertising agency, eventually called W. H. Hunt & Associates, in Los Angeles.

In the mid-1950s Mr. Hunt sold his agency to Compton Advertising, a large New York concern, staying on as its Los Angeles manager. Growing disenchanted with the industry, he formed a new company, Graphics International, with a colleague in the early ’60s. But Mr. Hunt did not find his company’s true direction until after he came across the work of Vojtech Kubasta, a master Czech paper engineer of the mid-20th-century whose pop-up castles and cathedrals seemed to leap off the page.

Through Graphics International Mr. Hunt began producing pop-up advertising inserts for magazines, including the Wrigley Zoo, a memorable series of chewing-gum ads featuring a three-dimensional menagerie. But before he could crack the trade-book market, he had to overcome two longstanding hurdles: institutional bias and prohibitive cost.

“For the longest time, children’s books in general were considered the stepchild of publishing,” Robert Sabuda, a noted pop-up-book artist, said in a telephone interview on Monday. “Pop-up books were considered the stepchild of children’s books.”

Movable books have been around at least since the late Middle Ages. Originally aimed at adult readers, they employed cutting-edge technology — glue, paper, scissors — to illustrate three-dimensional concepts like anatomy, astronomy and landscaping. By the Victorian era, magnificent pop-up fairy-tale books were widely produced for children.

Until the early 20th century, the world’s finest movable books were made by German printers for English publishing houses. With the coming of World War I, the collaboration stopped, Ann R. Montanaro, the director of the Movable Book Society and the author of “Pop-Up and Movable Books: A Bibliography” (Scarecrow Press, 1993), explained by telephone on Monday. By the time Mr. Hunt entered the field, she said, pop-ups were published in this country only rarely, and most were of poor quality.

As a result, Mr. Hunt had to counter the pervasive belief that pop-up books were no more than shoddy toys. He also had to counter the high cost of making them: each book needed to be assembled painstakingly by hand, the method still used today.

“It’s very time-consuming and very involved,” David A. Carter, a well-known pop-up book artist, said on Monday. “The engineering changes from spread to spread and book to book. So it’s not something that can be designed on an assembly line.”

Mr. Hunt took the assembly work abroad, first to Japan and later to Latin America, where costs were lower. After Graphics International secured the contract to produce “Bennett Cerf’s Pop-Up Riddles” (Random House, 1965), his entrée into the book world was assured.

Graphics International was later sold to Hallmark; in the mid-1970s Mr. Hunt founded what became Intervisual Books. The company, which employed a world-class team of artists, designers and paper engineers, was sold several years ago to Dalmatian Press, a children’s book publisher.

Mr. Hunt’s first two marriages ended in divorce. He is survived by his third wife, the former Patricia Elliott; their daughters, Kimberly Hunt and Jamie Hunt; a daughter, Marsha Hunt, from his second marriage; a brother, Randy; and three grandchildren.

Today bookstores are awash in pop-up books, produced by a bevy of packagers around the country. “None of this would exist without Wally,” Mr. Sabuda said. “None of us would be able to be here doing this now if Wally hadn’t truly blazed the way for us to come up after.”

Pop-Up and Moveable Books

Joan Irvine: How to Make a Pop-up

"The Starry Messenger"--off Broadway flop

The Starry Messenger appears to be a flop despite the star being an astronomy instructor.

"A soggy 'Starry Messenger' sinks off-Broadway"

by

Michael Kuchwara

November 23rd, 2009

The New York Times

There's enough material for several plays in "The Starry Messenger," Kenneth Lonergan's sluggish, soggy, mid-life-crisis tale starring Matthew Broderick as an ineffectual astronomy instructor, husband, father and lover.

The drama, which The New Group opened Monday at off-Broadway's Acorn Theatre, is awash in meandering talk, conversations that push toward the three-hour mark without much resolution - or relief. And Lonergan has directed his own play, set in 1995, at such a dawdling pace that its actors might be accused of loitering.

What's needed is more than a few snips to make the playwright's portrait of a milquetoast fellow stumbling through life more compelling. And the curiously detached Broderick doesn't help matters with his remote, slo-mo performance, seeming not to connect with any of the other, much more animated actors on stage.

Broderick plays Mark, an instructor at New York's original Hayden Planetarium (a building torn down in the late 1990s). The man is stymied at work, snared in a humdrum marriage and quarreling with his teenage son. His only pleasure seems to be astronomy, a joy he tries to communicate during the classes he teaches on the subject.

These classroom situations offer at least a few moments of fun, much of it supplied by Kieran Culkin and Stephanie Cannon as two of the instructor's more exasperating students. Culkin is especially effective as a slacker who, at one point, brings in a critique of Mark's performance as a teacher. And Cannon perfectly captures that most annoying of pupils, the type who ask the most clueless of questions.

Mark's home life seems equally dreary: bickering with his wife, played by the crisply assured J. Smith-Cameron, and trying to soften a prickly relationship with his son - Culkin again, in a role than is heard from offstage but not seen.

Things change when Mark meets Angela, a sad, sweet nurse who brings her young son to the planetarium. Their romance doesn't take long to bud but both Broderick and Catalina Sandino Moreno don't generate much heat. It seems a most unlikely liaison.

The actress is much more effective in her hospital scenes where she is dealing with an elderly patient (Merwin Goldsmith) and his combative daughter (Missy Yager). Goldsmith brings refreshing directness to the role of a wise counselor offering common sense advice. He's one of the few people on stage who has a realistic view of life. But his fights with his daughter have little to do with the main plot, as does the appearance of Mark's colleague, portrayed by the likable but underused Grant Shaud.

Lonergan has written several fine plays, most notably "This Is Our Youth,""Lobby Hero" and "The Waverly Gallery." And there are flashes of his accomplished writing here, particularly near the end of the long evening when Mark attempts to explain his love of astronomy to his students during their final class. The sweet-tempered speech is filled with a sense of wonder and theatricality missing from all the earthbound chatter that has gone before.

Here is one that did work...

"Doctor Atomic"