Posts by Tim

And now for a note on the dark side of printed books: Michael Jensen, Director of Strategic Web Communications for National Academies and National Academies Press, collects and analyzes data about global warming and ecological collapse. At the AAUP meeting in Philadelphia, he presented “Scholarly Publishing in the New Era of Scarcity,” an argument that the combination of financial and environmental necessity compels university presses to move away from printing, shipping, and storing books and towards a digital-driven, open-access model, with print-on-demand and institutional support rounding out the new revenue model.

(I’m posting Part 2 of Jensen’s speech – the part that’s mostly about publishing – here. Watch Part 1 – which is mostly about the environment – if you want to be justly terrified about what’s going to happen to human beings and everything else pretty soon.)

This is one reason I’m kind of happy that we didn’t print a thousand or more copies of New Liberal Arts. We can make print rare, we can get copies straight to readers, we can make print more responsible, but mostly we have to make print count. And – of course – share the information with as many people as possible.

Are you on the east coast, or (gasp) in the Eastern Hemisphere, and can’t wait until your copy of the New Liberal Arts is delivered or late-rising Californians post the free PDF?

You can already read four of the New Liberal Arts entries for free, online, now:

• Jennifer Rensenbrink, “Home Economics“
• Matt Thompson, “Micropolitics“
• Timothy Carmody, “Photography“
• Rachel Leow, “Translation“

Enjoy.

Just sayin’:

I hate to bump the New Liberal Arts off the top of the front page – go check it out! Buy it! Do it now! – but I’ve got a related meatspace publishing story to tell you. My Chronicle of Higher Education forum contribution on scholarship and teaching in 2029 – “The Faculty of the Future: Leaner, Meaner, More Innovative, Less Secure” – is out now, but the online version is sadly behind a very 2009 subscription firewall. So you’ll have to have a login to read what Mark Bosquet, Anthony Grafton, Joseph Hermanowicz, Evelyn Hu-Dehart, Peter Stearns, and Cathy Ann Trower wrote. But here’s my piece as it appears in full:

How is academe different in 2029? Let’s begin with the basics: reading, writing, and teaching. If anything, Google is even more important. The 2009 author/publisher settlements that allowed Google to sell full access to its book collections didn’t revolutionize books in retail, but subscription sales to institutions did fundamentally alter the way libraries think about their digital and analog collections. Access to comprehensive digital libraries allows teachers at any institution to compile virtual syllabi on the fly, seamlessly integrating readings, assignments, communication, and composition.

Automated subscriptions powered by Google’s search services deliver articles on any topic or keyword of interest instantaneously; hyperlinked citations and references appear with the original document, as threads in a continuing conversation, creating the first genuinely hypertext documents.

Apple’s popular iRead application (launched in 2011) enables reading, writing, and recording on virtually any device. Some teachers and students still use laptops or tablets, but others prefer handhelds, like phones or game consoles. But users’ inherited assumptions about the casual use of these devices make both teaching and research more closely resemble the activity of online social networks than traditional lectures, seminars, or conferences. Courses typically emphasize collaborative research leading to immediate publication of short bursts of text. Reader feedback then powers incremental improvements and additions.

The curriculum, especially in the humanities, valorizes thoughtful curation and recirculation of material rather than comprehension or originality. The traditional unidirectional model of knowledge transmission (best represented by the now-deprecated “lecture”) has been effectively discredited, although it persists through habit, inertia, and whispered doubts about the efficacy and rigidity of the new model. Many professors periodically pause to lecture, but only apologetically, or when distanced by ironic quotation marks.

The ‘teens are as widely remembered for technical innovation and radical dissemination of knowledge as the ’20s are for job loss, technological retrenchment, and economic concentration. In 2019, when Google used its capital to snap up the course-management giant Blackboard and the Ebsco, LexisNexis, and Ovid databases, it effectively became the universal front end for research and teaching in the academy.

Many university presses were shuttered in the transition from print to digital, especially those affiliated with public universities looking to shed costs following the catastrophic collapse of the University of California system following state budget cuts in 2020. The remaining presses make up for lost textbook sales by hosting blogs where established scholars and high-octane amateurs brush shoulders (and compete for shared advertisement revenue). These in turn drive production of traditional monographs, whether published electronically, in print, or both. Scholars also directly market their services as virtual lecturers to students and other institutions. All authors now have a broader view of their audience, across institutions, disciplines, and peer levels.

Everyone is excited, but everything is uncertain. No one knows what will happen next. Just like 20 years ago

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Read more…

Kevin Kelly:

Cities may be engines of innovation, but not everyone thinks they are beautiful, particularly the megalopolises of today, with their sprawling rapacious appetites. They seem like machines eating the wilderness, and many wonder if they are eating us as well. Is the recent large-scale relocation to cities a choice or a necessity? Are people pulled by the lure of opportunities, or are they pushed against their will by desperation? Why would anyone willingly choose to leave the balm of a village and squat in a smelly, leaky hut in a city slum unless they were forced to?

Image via Wikipedia

Well, every city begins as a slum. First it’s a seasonal camp, with the usual free-wheeling make-shift expediency. Creature comforts are scarce, squalor the norm. Hunters, scouts, traders, pioneers find a good place to stay for the night, or two, and then if their camp is a desirable spot it grows into an untidy village, or uncomfortable fort, or dismal official outpost, with permanent buildings surrounded by temporary huts. If the location of the village favors growth, concentric rings of squatters aggregate around the core until the village swells to a town. When a town prospers it acquires a center

Rex at Fimoculous posts this insightful conclusion to the end of his post on launching new Dan-Abrams-published meta-media site Mediaite:

If you hang around in the NYC media bubble long enough, you develop the social depression of a collapsing industry. The west coast is full of a giddy frisson about the inevitable demise of big media, while the midwest is skeptical of everything that gets force-fed to them from the coasts. NYC, which has essentially zero awareness of any of this, continues to constantly be shocked! when a TMZ or Pitchfork or The Onion comes along from the hinterlands with a massively successful enterprise.

The reasons for this amounts to a lack of vision. Even smart people, vampirically bound to the past, seem completely blind to developing new formats. The standard for online innovation right now is “launch another blog,” which no one seems to recognize is about as depressing as launching another newspaper.

Sign One that Mediaite will be smarter than HuffPo: this Jeffrey Feldman column that turns Nico Pitney vs. Dana Milbank into Marshall McLuhan vs. Thomas Jefferson. Me likey, Jeffrey. Me likey a lot.

This is kind of a cool idea. Let’s say that evolution writ large is only accidentally about the preservation, transmission, and development of living species, but essentially about the preservation, transmission, and development of information. On this view, organisms are just a means to an end, particularly well-adapted couriers for all of this chemical data.

If that’s the case, then maybe there isn’t anything particularly special about the specific form of that data (i.e. DNA) or the way it’s been transmitted in humans (sexual reproduction). That’s just one way of doing things – in nonconscious, nonverbal, or nonhistorical species, genetic transmission, instinct, inherited traditions are the only means you’ve got. But once modern humans arrive on the scene, with all their increasingly sophisticated means of representing information, then Evolution 1.0, internal transmission of information, isn’t the only game in town — you’ve also got Evolution 2.0, characterized by the external transmission of information.

Once you reframe evolution in this way, then you can say that our species’ rate of evolution “over the last ten thousand years, and particularly… over the last three hundred” is actually off the charts.

So the guy who’s arguing this is a physicist named Stephen Hawking. (Maybe you’ve heard of him – he’s awfully smart, and was part of Al Gore’s Vice Presidential Action Rangers.) He also says that our tinkering with evolution ain’t over:

[W]e are now entering a new phase, of what Hawking calls “self designed evolution,” in which we will be able to change and improve our DNA. “At first,” he continues “these changes will be confined to the repair of genetic defects, like cystic fibrosis, and muscular dystrophy. These are controlled by single genes, and so are fairly easy to identify, and correct. Other qualities, such as intelligence, are probably controlled by a large number of genes. It will be much more difficult to find them, and work out the relations between them. Nevertheless, I am sure that during the next century, people will discover how to modify both intelligence, and instincts like aggression.”

If the human race manages to redesign itself, to reduce or eliminate the risk of self-destruction, we will probably reach out to the stars and colonize other planets. But this will be done, Hawking believes, with intelligent machines based on mechanical and electronic components, rather than macromolecules, which could eventually replace DNA based life, just as DNA may have replaced an earlier form of life.

I can’t decide if this is totally anthropocentric, or exactly the opposite. But it’s kind of exciting, isn’t it? I’m evolving the species right now, just by typing this! And so are you, by reading it! And so are Google’s nanobots, by recording all of it in their fifteenth-gen flash brains!

I love this; Hewlett-Packard is selling an exact copy of its HP-12C financial calculator for the iPhone.

The iPhone version of the HP-12C is a near carbon copy of the actual machine. It not only looks the same, but it actually runs the same code as do the physical calculators. The iPhone version is actually a bit better than just a clone of the original, though, because HP includes a simplified portrait-mode calculator (the 12C is a landscape-mode device). When used in portrait mode, you can use the number keys, along with all the usual math operators and a couple of other functions such as square roots and memory—perfect for those times when you just need a basic calculator.

The real power of the HP-12C is found when you rotate your iPhone to landscape mode; what appears on the screen then is a photographic reproduction of the actual HP-12C calculator, complete with the gold-brown-orange-blue color scheme that made the original so…endearing? Because the app uses the actual calculator’s code, absolutely everything works just like it does on the real calculator.

I used a calculator just like this to win a middle school mathematics competition – in those days, it was called a “Calculator Competition,” because you could (gasp!) use a calculator. There was a school-wide thing, then a regional, and then a state final; it was a whole thing. The state final was the first time I’d ever seen a graphing calculator; that shiz blew my mind.

Um, wow:

A plume of smoke, ash and steam soars five miles into the sky from an erupting volcano.

The extraordinary image was captured by the crew of the International Space Station 220 miles above a remote Russian island in the North Pacific.

The round hole in the clouds is thought to have been caused by the shockwave of the initial explosion. At the centre lies the billowing mushroom tower of grey and brown ash.

For volcano experts, the most exciting part of the image is the layer of smooth white cloud that caps the plume – a little like a layer of snow on a mushroom.

This cap of condensed air is created from the rapid rising and then cooling of the air directly above the ash column. When moist, warm air rises quickly it creates a cloud.

The NYT asked:

In history class, in seventh grade (or as we like to say in Canada, grade seven) we learned the story of the American Revolution — from the British perspective. Turns out you were all a bunch of ungrateful tax cheats. And you weren’t very nice to the Loyalists. What I miss most about Canada is getting the truth about the United States.

— MALCOLM GLADWELL, a staff writer for The New Yorker and the author, most recently, of “Outliers: The Story of Success”

I also liked this quip from Simpsons writer Tim Long:

I miss the snow. Yes, I know the United States gets snow, but to my Canadian eye, American snow is like American health care: sporadic, unreliable and distributed unevenly among the population.