RT @hmason: An amazing story of why symbols must be both machine *and* human readable

I agree with Paul Krugman on the early 80s but disagree with his characterization of the current slump.

The early-80s slump was brought on by a huge rise in the Fed funds rate, which left lots of room for cuts, and was driven by a deep slump in housing, which meant that there was lots of pent-up demand when rates fell again. The 2007-? slump was brought on by the bursting of a housing and debt bubble, and left the Fed largely pushing on a string.

So, on some level it depends on what you mean by “bursting of the bubble.” However, if you were just talking about a collapse in housing prices that left US households underwater and unable to obtain credit then I think that’s wrong.

A Minsky moment could have proceeded in the United States without a downturn of this magnitude, even with the Funds rate already so low.

What would have happened – and what was happening from 2006 – late 2007 was that the dollar was falling fast enough to outweigh the collapse in construction.

And, of course that would have been markets at work perfectly since it would have driven down US consumption and up US tradable output. There would have been a general decline in living standards but little rise in out-and-out unemployment.

Instead, we had a global financial crisis that resulting in a soaring dollar, collapsing demand around the world and the inability for the US to pay down its external debt for lack of a channel.

Thus the (too) slow process of trading private debt for public debt began.

Filed under: Economics

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If you’re looking for new ways to get around for fun or to work, or might be trying to live a greener lifestyle in 2012, why not try biking? In March 2010 we introduced biking directions and since then Google Maps has been sharing biking directions with cyclists across the U.S and Canada.Since no bike path is the same, many users have requested an easier way to differentiate the different types of bike routes that are available. Starting today, a new legend feature can help you understand what the different colors on the bike maps symbolize.Dark green is for dedicated trails and paths Light green is for roads with dedicated lanesDotted green is for roads that are friendly for cyclists Look for the biking legend in the upper right hand corner of the mapYou can view this legend by clicking on the widget in upper right corner of Google Maps and selecting the Bicycling layer. You can also access biking directions on your Android device or by going to maps.google.com on your mobile browser.Whether you want to drive, take transit, walk or even bike, Google Maps can help you get around. To see how it works on your Android phone take a tour here.Posted by Dave Kim, Product Marketing Manager, Google Maps

This post originally appeared on Joe Wikert's Publishing 2020 Blog ("iBooks Author: Appreciating Apple's Intent"). It's republished with permission.

Apple's recent announcement and release of its iBooks Author tool was met with plenty of controversy. This HuffPost article pretty well sums things up.

My question is simply this: Why all the fuss? Apple's intent has never been to improve the book publishing industry. Just like Amazon and any other ebook vendor, Apple's goal is to capture share of this rapidly growing segment. In Apple's case, it simply decided to offer an authoring tool that's capable of creating some pretty darned cool products. If Amazon were to do the same thing and create a terrific authoring tool for mobi or KF8 format, would the industry be as upset? I don't think so.

How is this any different from the App Store model itself? Developers are creating apps for the App Store, and they know they'll only run on an iOS device. They also realize they'll have to go through Apple's approval process before getting into the App Store.

Prior to the release of iBooks Author, the content creation and distribution model looked like this:

Author writes material in favorite word processor.
Author/publisher edit and convert that content into mobi format for distribution on Amazon, EPUB format for distribution through iBookstore and others, etc.

The exact same model still exists today, even with the introduction of iBooks Author. That's right. Apple's EULA doesn't really lock you into its distribution channel for your content. That restriction only applies to a "book or other work you generate using [the iBooks Author] software." All Apple's really trying to do is prevent you from tweaking the output of its tool to create content for other distribution channels. OK, that's kind of annoying, but far from the lock-in nightmare so many people are describing it as. Based on my interpretation, you're able to use the same content as input to the iBooks Author tool as you'd use for a mobi-formatted product you want to sell on Amazon.

(I should also point out that I'm far from an Apple fanboy. Anyone who knows me realizes I dumped my iPhone last year for an Android-based Samsung Galaxy S II (and yes, I love it). I also tried to dump my iPad for a Kindle Fire but found the Fire user experience to be very disappointing. I'll probably make the jump to another Android tablet later this year, once key apps like Zite are available. In the meantime though, I want to make it clear I'm not here to shill for Apple. If anything, I'm currently in a stage where I'd prefer to buy devices that aren't made by the content providers. Samsung is high on my list, for example.)

Apple doesn't have an objective to move the publishing industry forward. It sees an opportunity to reinvent this industry, and it feels it can do so within its own, closed ecosystem. It's as simple as that, and it's consistent with everything it has done in the App Store up to now.

Let's also not forget that the iBooks Author tool is free. It's not like we paid Apple $50, $100 or more for some authoring tool that we thought could work for all content formats and distribution channels. If the tool's feature set is compelling enough, I'd like to think the other ebook vendors (e.g., Barnes & Noble, Amazon, Kobo, etc.) will have to come up with something at least as powerful for their own platforms. If not, they get left in the dust and Apple gains share. Seems pretty fair to me.

In the meantime, I plan to do some hands-on testing with iBooks Author. At first, I was discouraged because you can't download iBooks Author unless you're running Lion. I'm still on Snow Leopard, but an O'Reilly colleague sent me this link that shows you how to tweak a couple of settings so you can download and run iBooks Author on a Snow Leopard system. I just tried it, and it works fine. (You just have to carefully read and interpret the steps since it's a translation from French to English.)

TOC NY 2012 — O'Reilly's TOC Conference, being held Feb. 13-15, 2012, in New York City, is where the publishing and tech industries converge. Practitioners and executives from both camps will share what they've learned and join together to navigate publishing's ongoing transformation.

Register to attend TOC 2012

Related:

A few thoughts on iBooks Author and Apple's textbook move
The textbook industry might not be as "reinvented" as Apple hoped

Jonathan L. Feng in American Scientist:

A college classmate of mine went to work for a prestigious management-consulting firm right after we graduated. Every month or so he would head out to advise a different Fortune 500 company. When I ran into him a year after he took the job, I asked him how he could possibly provide insights to top business executives when these same people had often spent entire careers immersed in their company’s work. His response? “I usually have no idea how to improve these companies, but they do. And when I come into their office and close the door, they’ll say things to me that they would never tell their colleagues.”

In The 4% Universe, Richard Panek has done something similar, not with business executives, but with physicists and astronomers who are confronting some of the biggest questions in science today. Want to hear a codiscoverer of dark matter say what she truly thinks of her legendary mentor? Want to be a fly on the wall as scientific history is shaped by the backroom dealings of a good-old-boy network? Want to read the e-mails scientists send as they jockey for position in the Nobel Prize queue? Scientists usually share such information only with their closest colleagues, but it’s all in Panek’s book, and it’s placed in enough historical and scientific context to be both intelligible and riveting.

More here.

Speaking of Kottke, I love this Gawker story by Adrian Chen he just linked to, about a freelance hacker who, among other things, sets up prepaid cell phone networks for criminal rings, a la The Wire:

With Martin’s system, each crewmember gets a cell phone that operates using a prepaid SIM card; they also get a two-week plastic pill organizer filled with 14 SIM cards where the pills should be. Each SIM card, loaded with $50 worth of airtime, is attached to a different phone number and stores all contacts, text messages and call histories associated with that number, like a removable hard drive. This makes a new SIM card effectively a new phone. Every morning, each crewmember swaps out his phone’s card for the card in next day’s compartment in the pill organizers. After all 14 cards are used, they start over at the first one.

Each day’s SIM is preprogrammed with the numbers for the other members’ phones for that day:

As long they all swap out their cards every day, the contacts in the phones stay in sync. (They never call anyone but each other on the phones.) Crewmembers will remind each other to “take their medicine,” Martin said.

 ★ 

HUD UI for Ubuntu. #ui wonder if this makes any sense in a web page instead of polluting with buttons

RT @aallan: The end of civilisation is nigh, . #walmart (via @phil_nash, @ganson)

This
New
York Times story, telling ugly stories of human suffering at Chinese outsourcers, isn’t about
Apple. It’s pure politics and
economics.

It’s Simple
The management of well-connected Chinese companies needn’t
worry much about regulation or law enforcement, because China is governed by a
corrupt autocracy. They needn’t worry much about unions or other worker
activism because that government has as a matter of industrial policy
disempowered labor, making
real unionism impossible.

We’ve seen this movie before. The description of 21st-century Chinese
political reality applies pretty well to 19th-century Europe. Not
surprisingly, so do the descriptions of the sufferings of
industrial laborers.

History says: The systemic pressures of capitalism will
always, in the absence of countervailing forces, lead to brutal
exploitation.
Fortunately, history also teaches that capitalism can still create
prosperity even when fenced in with safety, environmental, and labor-law
regulation.

Some will push back, pointing out that China’s policies have lifted the
best part of a billion people out of grinding rural poverty; also that people
take Foxconn jobs eagerly because they are an escape from the village.

I stand by my point; Europe’s industrial revolution’s backdrop was a mass
migration out of the countryside, and people lined up for jobs in Dickens’ dark
satanic mills because it was better than starving down on the farm.

That’s not good enough. It seems to me that it should hardly need saying
that just because there are worse alternatives, it’s not OK to brutalize
people so that people in my timezone can pay less for electronic
lifestyle baubles.

Something’s Gotta Give
In the short term, the most likely outcome is: no change. In a society
where there’s no transparency and no rule of law, it will remain possible, and
immensely profitable, to sweep the problems under the rug, dodge
accountability, and continue with Business As Usual.

But not for long, where “long” is measured in generations. I suspect that
the longer we go on with Business As Usual, the more violent will be the
inevitable breakthrough to modernity.

But I’m optimistic. Europe figured out that messy, petty, parliamentary
politics leading to a messy, petty, regulatory framework are sort of optimal,
if by “optimal” you mean “we haven’t been able to figure out anything
better”. I haven’t seen any evidence that the Chinese aren’t as smart or
courageous as my ethnic group; given the same opportunities, there’s no good
reason they shouldn’t get the same or better results.

Prediction
I totally guarantee this one: Eventually, the cost of buying anything that
requires
human intervention in the manufacturing process is going up. The sooner the
better.

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The stupidity of CNN #canwehaveabetterpresscorps

As part of Google's continuing quest to dole out Web pages ever more quickly, the search giant has proposed a number of changes to Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), the ubiquitous Internet protocol used to reliably deliver HTTP and HTTPS data (and much more besides) over the 'net.

Google's focus is on reducing latency between client machines and servers, and in particular, reducing the number of round trips (either client to server and back to client, or vice versa) required. When data is sent over a TCP connection, its receipt must be acknowledged by the receiving end. The sending end can only send a certain number of packets before it must wait for an acknowledgement. The time taken to receive an acknowledged is governed by the round-trip time (RTT). With high bandwidth, high latency connections, clients and servers can end up spending most of their time waiting for acknowledgements, rather than sending packets.







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JavaScript has come a long way since its inception in the 1990s. The odd language, which was once confined to simplistic tasks like form validation, has expanded beyond the browser and now powers all kinds of applications from mobile devices to server rooms.

The evolution of the language standard and the introduction of heavily optimized implementations have made JavaScript a respectable choice for building serious applications. Although the language is still burdened by some idiosyncrasies, its intrinsic flexibility is proving to be valuable.







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RT @NYTimeskrugman: Apple And Agglomeration

RT @markoff: oh my. maybe its not the economy..

Fascinating well-researched investigative report by Charles Duhigg and Keith Bradsher for the New York Times, on the rise of China as a manufacturing power and the corresponding effect on middle class jobs in the U.S., with Apple as the case study. Includes this heretofore unknown (to me, at least) story on the original iPhone’s last-minute change from a plastic to glass display:

In 2007, a little over a month before the iPhone was scheduled to
appear in stores, Mr. Jobs beckoned a handful of lieutenants into
an office. For weeks, he had been carrying a prototype of the
device in his pocket.

Mr. Jobs angrily held up his iPhone, angling it so everyone could
see the dozens of tiny scratches marring its plastic screen,
according to someone who attended the meeting. He then pulled his
keys from his jeans.

People will carry this phone in their pocket, he said. People also
carry their keys in their pocket. “I won’t sell a product that
gets scratched,” he said tensely. The only solution was using
unscratchable glass instead. “I want a glass screen, and I want it
perfect in six weeks.”

After one executive left that meeting, he booked a flight to
Shenzhen, China. If Mr. Jobs wanted perfect, there was nowhere
else to go.

The Times has quotes from former and present (unnamed in the latter case, of course) executives who all paint the same picture: that Chinese manufacturing isn’t merely cheaper, but also perhaps even more importantly, nimbler, more flexible, and faster:

“They could hire 3,000 people overnight,” said Jennifer Rigoni,
who was Apple’s worldwide supply demand manager until 2010, but
declined to discuss specifics of her work. “What U.S. plant can
find 3,000 people overnight and convince them to live in dorms?”

 ★ 

RT @peteskomoroch: 5 Billion web pages from Common Crawl will be a free Public Data Set on Amazon Web Services

RT @davewiner: MPAA Directly & Publicly Threatens Politicians Who Aren't Corrupt Enough To Stay Bought.

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Educators so far seem excited about the potential promise of a learning "revolution" enabled by Apple's new iBooks Author app. However, not everyone is feeling that same level of enthusiasm: e-book publishing experts have concerns about the formatting that iBooks Author can output, which isn't fully ePub 2 or ePub 3 compliant. Furthermore, Apple has added a clause to iBooks Author's end user license agreement that prohibits selling e-books created with iBooks Author anywhere but the iBookstore.

iBooks created by iBooks Author use ePub 2 along with certain HTML5 and JavaScript-based extensions that Apple uses to enable multimedia and interactive features. Those interactive features will only work with Apple's iBooks app, not with other e-reader software or hardware, because only Apple supports those extensions.

Still, there shouldn't be any technical limitation to exporting a strictly ePub 2-compliant ePub document if none of the interactive features are used. Unfortunately, iBooks Author only exports PDFs and text.






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RT @hmason: yay Vim for iOS! (via @edd)

Experimental support for WebRTC has landed in the Chrome developer channel. The feature is available for testing when users launch the browser with the --enable-media-stream flag. We did some hands-on testing and used some of the new JavaScript APIs to make an HTML5 photo booth.

WebRTC is a proposed set of Web standards for real-time communication. It is intended to eventually enable native standards-based audio and video conferencing in Web applications. It is based on technology that Google obtained in its 2010 acquisition of Global IP Solutions and subsequently released under a permissive open source software license.






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Yesterday Apple launched some
new applications and services
aimed at the education market. They extended the iBooks app to include
a textbook store; they announced some deals with major textbook
publishers; and they released a free application you can use to write
textbooks, and which allows you to publish them on the
store. They made their iTunes U service a separate
application. The app replicates what’s already available on
iTunes, but also seeks to replace some or all of what’s offered by
course management systems.

Something’s Always Wrong with Education

The education market is enormous and very heterogeneous. Apple’s
initiative covers both grade schools and universities. Those are very
different settings, which themselves vary hugely. And as anyone
will tell you, the American education system has been in crisis, or
facing some central challenge, or in need of some sort of fundamental
reform, for a very long time now. Everyone has a scheme designed to
fix it.

The alleged problem this time is that in the 21st century students and
teachers are being forced to use an outmoded technology from 1950: the
textbook. To be honest I was a little disappointed that the teacher in
the video didn’t just go the whole hog and condemn the printed book
itself as an outmoded technology from 1450. The solution involves Apple
selling as many iPads as possible, and taking a cut of textbook
sales as well. The demo textbooks shown at the event of course looked
terrific, as one would expect. Dynamic transitions, animations,
high-quality photography and video, highlighting and note-taking, all
that good stuff.

Technology is Always About to Transform Education

Schools have been down the techno-salvation path before with other
kinds of hardware and software. It’s worth remembering just how many
technologies we already have that were supposed to transform education
beyond all recognition. Radio, the television, the VCR, the personal
computer, email, the Internet and the web … All of these have been
trumpeted by someone as having the power to make education What It
Really Ought To Be. The same goes for smaller developments within
larger technological shifts. Chatrooms, MUDs, bulletin boards, blogs,
FaceBook, Twitter, on and on. Sometimes things do change, in big
ways. The TV and (later) the VCR helped make the
Open University
possible in the UK, for instance. (Which in turn helped make some
good comedy possible,
as well.) Of course, having a national broadcasting corporation and a
state-financed system of faculty and tutors was helpful, too.

Just this week, Wikipedia’s blackout showed how much it has insinuated
itself into people’s lives. Of course, the horrors uncovered by
Herpderpedia remind you that
it’s perfectly possible for a technology to transform how students
seek out and use knowledge while not doing much for the basically
clueless. Along with the big shifts have come mid-range changes. The
availability of free,
high-quality software for statistical analysis,
for instance, is one of dozens of changes that are
substantial or even remarkable within their domain, but which don’t
pretend to transform “school” tout court.

As for the textbooks themselves, I’m skeptical that the dynamic bells
and whistles are all that effective. I can certainly think of
particular cases where they could be. But it’s also easy to imagine
books filled with movies or demos that are watched once and then
ignored. What Apple laid out yesterday is rooted in the 1990s and its
vision of multimedia-enhanced texts. Fine as far as it goes, but don’t
pretend it’s going to revolutionize schooling. School is an
institution, not just a mode of instruction or a state of
mind. Textbooks are not what make people hate school. iPad-based
textbooks with zoomable pictures and some embedded movies will not
make students love school.

Instapaper and the Persistence of the Textbook

Phil Schiller heavily criticized the static, text-heavy format of the
traditional texbook. Far better to present information dynamically
with graphics, supporting illustrations, movies, interactive
components and all the rest of it. Sure, why not? But—consider how
many of the most sophisticated computer users consume “content”
online, perhaps especially the ones who use iPads. Do they seek out
material that looks like this? Do they want multi-modal, multimedia
formats? Do they love jazzy Infographics? No. They use
Instapaper or some equivalent tool to
create reading lists for themselves, and to read those articles in a
format that deliberately strips out a lot of the original
presentation and replaces it with simple, clean, easy-to-read, blocks
of text that look a lot like a well-designed piece of outmoded 1950s
technology.

Why do people like Instapaper so much? It’s because they’ve chosen
to read what they save, and the app lets them keep it and read it in a
straightforward, uncluttered way. Finding the good stuff is the hard
part, along with the ability, motivation, and opportunity to read
things: once you’re there, you don’t need the dynamic illustrations or
zooming or supporting illustrations. You’ll read it because you’re
already interested in it, and you’ll even seek out and pay for a way
to make the reading and learning experience static and simple, because
you don’t want to be distracted. A similar point applies in
education. The promise of “technology in the classroom” has always
been that it will magically “engage” students with what they have to
learn. But it hardly ever does, or does only at the margin. You still
need a good teacher, an opportunity to learn, and some motivation of
your own. Having a good breakfast in your belly helps as well. More
dynamic textbooks aren’t the solution to the problems of
education—they’re not even the solution to the problem of textbooks.

It’s strange to see Apple going down this well-worn road. When the
iPad was launched, a standard criticism was to say it’s a device made
for consuming content rather than actively making or doing things. But
developers quickly found ways to make it a lot more interesting than
that. Apps like GarageBand or
Star Walk or
Leafsnap—there are loads more—take
advantage of the iPad’s computing power and portability in ways that
put it in a different class of activity from watching a video, reading
a textbook, or just passively sitting at a computer. It’s these sort
of use-cases where a device like the iPad really shines. So it’s a
pity that Apple has chosen to re-enter the education market with a
pitch about Reinventing the Textbook that, frankly, sounds pretty old
hat. The reason, I suppose, is that there’s potentially a lot of money
to be made selling the things to schools as replacements for the
books.

The College Level

I teach at one of the universities mentioned in
Schiller’s talk yesterday. At the University level, the most immediate
difference from the K-12 case is that faculty typically get to choose
which textbook (if any) to use in their courses. So there’s
essentially none of the political fighting about textbook content that
bedevils public grade schools. Students also have to buy their own
books rather than rent them from the school (or have the school buy
them).

The most familiar pathology of the textbook market is that publishers
hate used booksellers. Publishers want every student to buy a new copy
of their text, but—Phil Schiller’s claims notwithstanding—books
are annoyingly durable. To fight this, publishers (and textbook
authors) produce new editions as often as possible and try to get
faculty to require the most recent iteration. There are various
inducements on offer to do this, starting with free copies for the
instructor and any TAs. As my friend Gabriel Rossman
noted the other day,
textbook catalogs pitched at faculty often come with little or no
information about how much the book will cost students.

Image courtesy of ambrown.

Apple’s proposed model would kill the used market, dead. The
presentation emphasized that once you buy a book you always own it,
and you can download it to any new devices you buy. But a corollary is
that once you’re done with the book you can’t give or sell it to
anyone else. So, at least initially, publishers can charge much less
for their textbooks and make it up on volume. That’s fine by me if
students end up paying less, though I immediately wonder whether the
next step would be for publishers to modularize the books. Instead of
your one giant Bio or Calc or Econ book for $14.99 rather than
$129.99, you can have various shorter books available for the same
price, but have to buy all of them over the course of a year or
semester—like 19th century serial novels. This would likely be
pitched to faculty as allowing for greater flexibility in curriculum
construction, but again it’s the students who end up paying for the
books.

From my point of view, both the iBooks Author and iTunes U apps are
potentially very useful for taking sets of lecture notes and making
them available to students easily. Many faculty already post their
Keynote or PowerPoint slides so students can review them (or use them
to avoid coming to class). The iBooks Author app seems like a natural
extension of this, especially given its compatability with Keynote
presentations. As for iTunes U, here Apple may be pushing into
course-management territory currently dominated by systems like
Blackboard and
Sakai. This is an easy domain for Apple to
take over if it wishes, as these systems range from the merely clunky
to the aggressively shitty.

Finally there’s the question of getting college students to buy iPads. This is a more difficult proposition than it might appear. Most students now buy a computer when entering college. As far as I can see there is essentially no compelling reason for a freshman to buy an iPad instead of something like a Macbook Air, for the[…]

I really like this idea from Mike Davidson:

As a closing thought, I’ve had this idea in my head for the last few years of what a perfect news site looks like, and it’s quite simple: a white screen with a list of 5 or 10 links that changes once a day. That’s it. Here’s the tricky part though: the 5 or 10 links need to be THE 5 or 10 links that are most useful to me on any given day.

 ★ 

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