Internet – Page 19 – Auxiliary Memory

Reading Online: Safari’s Killer Feature

I’m not a big fan of Apple. Who needs another browser after you’ve already installed IE8, Firefox and Chrome? So, I saw little point of installing Safari, Apple’s horse in the browser race. Well, it turns out Safari has a feature that other browsers lack that makes it worth the time and effort to install.

The feature is called Reader. It takes a web page that looks like this:

And makes it look like this:

If you do a lot of online reading this makes all the difference in the world. Now it doesn’t work with every web page, but it does with most, like the New York Times I’m reading here. And it’s very easy to use. If you look closely at those screen shots above, you’ll see a blue button on the right of the URL locator box, and a purple one in the Reader view. They both say “Reader.” If the button doesn’t show up, the feature is not available. That’s all there is to using it.

While in Reader there are five buttons that will appear at the bottom of the page if you hover you mouse. They do: shrink the font, enlarge the font, email the page link, print the reader view and quit Reader. I wished there was a sixth nifty button: Save for Ebook.

Reader is great for reading shorter articles online while seated at a desk, but if you find one that’s dozens of pages, it would be cool to save to my Kindle and read from my La-Z-Boy. If you have Acrobat or a clone, you can print to a .pdf file, but I’d rather have it save to a format common to most ebook reader.

I hope IE9 would add this feature, or even Chrome, because it is annoying to use four different browsers for various reasons. But as of now, when I want to read the New York Times, The New Yorker, The Atlantic Monthly Magazine, or most of my other favorite online newspapers and magazines, Safari is the go-to browser of the moment. It’s like having a special large print edition that filters out all distractions.

JWH – 9/6/10

Ebook Ethics

Everything we do in life has ethical considerations, even something simple as buying books. Ebooks represent a change, and that change has good and bad consequences.

Bad

Ebooks will put a lot of people out of work. Bookstores may disappear like record stores. This is a horrible consequence in these bad economic times. The digital world is just more efficient than the analog world and that kills jobs.
Ebooks will also kill competition, reducing the number of businesses in the marketplace. Amazon and Apple could theoretically take over all the book and music business from tens of thousands of small businesses.
Ebooks are anti-social. Instead of buying books at a bookstore and meeting other people you order books directly. Instead of sharing books with friends, readers are locked into a closed world of DRM.
Ebooks could damage cultural heritage and history. Printed books can last for hundreds of years, and people value them, but ebooks probably have no lasting power at all.
Bookstores might become extinct which would be a huge cultural loss.
Book ownership is probably a deceptive concept and sellers like Amazon shouldn’t describe their ebooks are “for sale.” To be honest, sellers should claim they are long term rentals until DRM copy protection is removed.

Good

Ebooks are extremely environmental. Wood pulp technology uses lots of water, energy and chemicals, and those chemicals get into the environment. Printing takes both energy and chemicals. Distributing books creates lots of carbon and other pollutants. The carbon footprint of ebooks is almost zero.
Ebooks could mean more money for writers, editors and publishers because ebooks could do away with the used book market. As long as DRM technology is successful, more readers would actually buy books, instead of borrowing them or buying used, which is more ethical for the writer and publisher.
Ebooks might encourage more reading and literacy because of their convenience and possibly make reading more appealing to young people because ebooks are available on smart phones, an essential device for kids.
Ebooks could enhance cultural heritage and history. It’s quite easy to load up an ebook reader with the great books of the western world. Every child or family could have their own library of thousands of free books.

Ethically, the primary conflict is jobs versus the environment. But that will be true of all industries and businesses as time passes. If all books, magazines and newspapers were read on digital readers it would have a positive impact on the environment, but at a terrible cost in jobs.

The secondary ethical concern is which format is better for promoting literacy, knowledge and culture? This is much harder to judge until after ebooks have taken over. We won’t know their full impact for a very long time. But consider this: What if you could hold a device that had every book you ever bought or read in your entire life with annotations, notes, and supplemental reference essays and reviews? Would such a superbook library have a positive social impact?

I already miss record stores and LP album covers, but I don’t miss LPs. I don’t even miss CDs, but I do miss shopping for music at record stores. I have a subscription to Rhapsody Music and can listen to as many CDs as I can cram into my month for $9.99, but the fun of discovering new albums is gone. From about 1965-1995 I bought 2-4 albums a week. I loved going to record stores, but that activity is as ancient as horse and buggy rides.

I’ve been going to bookstores 1-2 times a week since 1965. It’s about the only shopping I still like to do recreationally. I’ve bought far more books than I have ever read, or will ever have time to read. I will truly miss bookstores if they disappear.

On the other hand, I discover all my books and music now from the Internet. I’m in four online book clubs. I’m far more involved with books, authors and readers then when I only shopped at bookstores. Most of my friendships are based around talking about books or music. I never really went to bookstores or record stores to socialize with the staff, or ask them for recommendations, although I’ve always liked meeting other book and music fans.

Amazon, with its supplemental content and customer reviews has been a quantum leap in helping me discover new books to read. It’s far more social in helping me make book buying decisions than bookstores ever were. Web 2.0 technology is a different kind of socializing. It’s intellectual over physical.

JWH 8/21/10

Are You Willing to Pay for News?

If you subscribe to newspapers or magazines then you are already paying for news, so the precise question is: Are you willing to pay for news on the Internet? One June 1 The Times (London) is going behind a paywall, and The New York Times is planning on trying yet another online subscription plan next year. The gold standard of news has always been to read a world-class newspaper. For years people have gotten used to reading these papers online for free, but now it looks like free days are over.

For most of my life I got my news from the plebian news source, television. Since the 1990s, Internet has introduced me to the world’s great newspapers and I now realize their value, and I have decided to become an online subscriber. I just have to decide which paper to marry for my news partner.

The old way of doing things was to subscribe to the local paper and it would include a syndication of state, national and international news stories. Newspapers were the world wide web before the WWW. Now, I’m not sure that’s the way to go. I’m thinking I’d rather have the best news writing, and go with something like The New York Times. But if everyone thought like that, we’d end up with half a dozen newspapers for the U.S.A.

But then I’m not typical. I think most people prefer local news. It’s sad to admit, but I pay zero attention to what goes on in my city and state. My local paper has a beautiful, and extremely easy to read, free web site, but I don’t read it. They also offer a modest $10 a month digital edition that’s closer to the looks of a newspaper, but their free site is so nice I can’t imagine even spending that much money.

I think it’s going to be awhile before people pay for local news online, but if The New York Times and the The Times are indicators of the future, will people be willing to pay for a national newspaper? I don’t think we will know until publishers cut off the free news spigot. And that’s what the The Times is doing June 1. The Times will even cut Google off from indexing the paper. That’s going to be a major experiment.

So far The New York Times has always kept it’s free web edition going concurrent with any of its paid experimental editions, which have always failed. I do read the free portions of TimesReader 2.0 that I got when downloading Adobe Reader. The full edition is $4.62 a week. $20 a month seems steep compared to what I get from Rhapsody for $10 a month – access to 9 million songs across many major and minor record labels. The New York Times is preparing a new paid edition for iPad owners, and I think that might be the turning point for switching from paying for printed news to paying for online news.

If I had an iPad I would subscribe to The New York Times, if the web site edition closed down. I would also consider subscribing to magazines for the iPad. Again, which magazines I bought would depend if they weren’t available online. Right now I have little incentive to subscribe to electronic editions of The New Yorker or The Atlantic or Wired because they offer too much content for free.

I used to spend hundreds a dollars a year for magazine subscriptions, but cut them all out because I believe it’s more Earth friendly to read the content online. And I don’t always expect to get a free lunch, but as long as the content is free I have no incentive to pay either. I pay Rhapsody $10 a month because I want the music and I don’t want to steal it. There’s plenty of free legal music on the web, but it’s too much trouble to collect. For $10 a month I get legal access to 98% of what’s for sale. I’d rather pay $10 a month to a service like Rhapsody if they distributed legal news and magazines reprints, than make individual subscriptions, but that’s not available.

I’m currently pay Safari Books Online $34 a month for online access to 10,000 plus computer books. Thus, I’m proving I’m willing to pay for online content. But I don’t always like the deals being offered. The online editions of The New Yorker and Scientific American are more expensive than discount offers I get for the paper editions. No incentive there to subscribe. I don’t like paying print edition prices for digital editions – it feels like I’m getting ripped off. Publishers are saving on paper, printing, shipping, distribution, and postal costs, and they aren’t passing any of those savings on to me.

Rupert Murdoch wants people to pay for what they read on the net, at least when they are reading something he’s selling in the analog world. Now that’s totally against the way the Internet works now. The reason why the Internet is great is because you can share links. If some content goes behind paywalls, the Internet will fork into the free and non-free, that which can be linked, and that which can’t.

The Internet is big enough to handle such diversity, but what does that mean at the social level? We get part of the population reading high quality paid journalism, and the rest will live off of free blog news. It will also mean those sites that depend on ad revenue will have more readers, those fleeing the paid sites, thus beefing up their financial model.

But think of it this way. Do you prefer paying for HBO shows, without ads, or watching NBC shows with tons of ads? That also means, any content I subscribe to on the net better be ad free. If the TimesSelect 2.0 was $5 a month, instead a week, I’d probably subscribe now if it was totally ad free. The free, but extremely limited version, has a few ads, but they are still tastefully placed so I can ignore them. And the amount of great content the New York Times provides with the free edition of the TimesSelect 2.0 also discourages me from paying.

Publishers are going to have a hard time selling content online, but that doesn’t mean it won’t happen. It’s better for the economy, and creates more jobs if we pay for what we read. And we get better written news. But publishers can’t sell quality content in one place if they also give it away in another just as easy to get to location.

JWH – 3/31/10

Get Rid of Textbooks!

Every year I acquire a few K-12 textbooks that are given away where I work. I am amazed at the quality of these textbooks as compared to those I studied 40-50 years ago. Mine were much smaller, plainer, and simpler. Modern textbooks are marvels of knowledge presented in beautiful full color multimedia layouts. And they are HUGE. If children are studying these books this generation should be the most well educated generation ever. Then why all the bad press about failing schools and under achieving kids? Could the textbooks be part of the problem?

At first glance modern K-12 textbooks look more comprehensive than my general education textbooks in college. If high school students mastered these books they should be much smarter than college students from the baby boom era. But then I got to thinking, maybe these giant tomes provide too much content for young people. Could academic apathy just be a rejection of being over programmed? Are we trying to stuff too much into growing minds?

I picked up these textbooks for reference works. I can’t imagine being in the 11th grade and having to master five of them in nine months. Three of the volumes I picked up this year where American Literature (10th), British Literature (11th) and World Literature (12th). I got the teacher’s editions and each volume has hundreds, if not thousands of teaching suggestions, questions, quizzes, activities, etc. This is a lot to learn and to teach.

The goal is the systematic injection of facts, more facts, and endless concepts. On the surface, the desire to educate is motivated by wanting children to have a deep and wide knowledge of the world and history. This is great in concept, but I’m wondering is its wrong.

I can imagine an interesting experiment for some school systems to try. Take 11th graders, and instead of giving them a textbook on British Literature at the beginning of the year, start the year by telling them they are required to each edit and produce a textbook on British Literature to be handed in at the end of the year. All great literature before the 1930s is available on the Internet in public domain versions, and even selections of copyrighted material after that is available. Students could collect the content, write an introduction for each piece, and an analysis afterward. They could do the layout and graphics, and if they wanted, have a hard copy printed-on-demand for less than the cost of buying a professional textbook.

Wouldn’t students learn more by doing? Wouldn’t learning about British Literature be more fun as a treasure hunt than rote memorization? Teachers could still guide the students lesson by lesson by discussing a required reading list, but they could also expect students to find their own supplemental reading.

Teachers could lecture on authors, assign a standard poem, story or essay for all to read, and then require students to collect additional works from the author’s output that they felt an affinity for, to add to their personal textbook/anthology. Lesson plans could be built around students sharing their experiences. Competition would arise to who could find the coolest works to collect.

And why not let the students collect art work, photos, letters, diaries, and other content to supplement their poems, stories and essays. Encourage them to study history, science, social studies, economics, etc. to help explain their selections.

It we had students create their own textbooks they’d have a book for life they could keep, revise and expand, and it might be more memorable and meaningful than being forced to study a book for one year that they turned in when school was over. Also, they would have something to show their kids and grandkids.

What if college acceptance was based on the textbooks they created in high school? I know this is a bizarre, radical idea, but the Internet is changing our society in all kinds of ways. With computers, software and the Internet, students shouldn’t have too much trouble creating their own textbooks, and imagine what kind of textbooks they could create for the iPad, which adds the dimensions of sound and video.

Instead of buying students hundreds of dollars worth of textbooks, buy them Adobe Creative Suite and require them to be creative. Expect them to work instead of memorize, I believe they will learn more that way. Can you imagine a K-12 system that was based on productivity instead of passive learning? And students would learn so many practical skills as a byproduct of this kind of schooling. And the same concept could be applied to all other courses.

We might have more scientists, engineers and mathematicians if students spent their time doing productive work rather than memorizing. K-12 students in the course of their academic careers should make a telescope and microscope, design a house, assemble a car, build reproductions of all the classic science experiments, reinvent mathematics century by century, put together a radio, television and computer, and so on.

Every school year in a student’s K-12 life is really trying to learn about reality from the Big Bang to the present. We weave the language skills with math skills and then start studying the history of reality over and over again, with each school year expanding on the previous one. That’s a lot of knowledge to catch up on. Maybe kids would learn better by recreating how it was discovered rather than being forced to memorize the facts.

I remember my elementary, junior high and senior high years, they were like a 12 year prison sentence that I had to endure by sitting and being forced fed a curriculum not of my choosing. Study, memorize, test, study, memorize, test. It was all so painful.

JWH – 5/14/10

Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

Wake by Robert J. Sawyer is the first novel of a trilogy, it came out in 2009, Watch, the second book, came out this year, and Wonder will come out in 2011. Sawyer calls them the WWW Trilogy, and it has a rather slick web site, with the best production values I’ve ever seen promoting a SF novel. Personally, I found Wake as exciting as when I first discovered science fiction back in the 1960s, when I was a kid. And it’s up for the Hugo this year, so I figure Penguin knows it has a great story and its hitting warp ten to promote it.

Wake is not marketed as a YA novel, but it could have been. The main character is Caitlin Decter, a fifteen year old blind girl, who is a math wiz, computer geek, engaging blog writer, and extremely precocious. This reminds me tremendously of the Heinlein juveniles from the 1950s, and in particular Holly from “The Menace From Earth.” Like the Heinlein juveniles, Wake is chock full of educational tidbits. And Wake is the kind of novel you don’t want to put down.

Classic SF Theme: Intelligent Computers

It’s getting harder and harder for science fiction writers to come up with completely new science fictional ideas, so what we often see is a writer taking on a classic theme and having a go at evolving past ideas. Wake follows in the tradition of many fictional computers, but in particular ones about a computer becoming conscious in front of one person. These are the just the ones I’ve read, there are many others.

1966 – The Moon is a Harsh Mistress by Robert A. Heinlein
1972 – When H.A.R.L.I.E. Was One by David Gerrold
1995 – Galatea 2.2 – Richard Powers
2009 – Wake by Robert J. Sawyer

Sawyer goes further then earlier writers in trying to imagine how an artificial mind would evolve and what it would perceive as it came into being. Sawyer weaves blindness and Helen Keller, autism, apes that do sign language, Julian Jaynes’ the bicameral mind, and other explorers of consciousness into the story in a very effective way.

One reason why I love this novel so much is because I’ve been writing a novel in my head about this subject for years. It’s not likely I’ll ever become a real novelist, but if I do, I’ll have to take the concept further than Sawyer, and that’s a good challenge.

Go read Wake. End of review.

Spoiler Alert

Now I want to discuss what Sawyer is really writing about. Sawyer supposes that the Internet could evolve into a self-aware mind. That idea isn’t new, but what Sawyer does with Wake is make his case for it with series of suppositions that are wrapped in a page turning novel. In other words, he has a bunch of wild theories that he gets readers to think about one at a time.

What I’d like to do is discuss these ideas but hopefully without hurting anyone’s enjoyment of the story, but I recommend you not read beyond this point if you haven’t read Wake yet and want to get the full impact of its excitement.

Sawyer’s first theory is the emerging web mind will go through a stage much like what Helen Keller went through before she discovered language. Sawyer indirectly explores this stage in a number of ways, including quotes and references to Helen Keller, a subplot about signing apes, and references to the book The Origins of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind by Julian Jaynes, a book I found very exciting when it came out back in 1976.

But I think Sawyer is missing a piece of the puzzle, one I got from On Intelligence by Jeff Hawkins. Hawkins thinks our consciousness emerged out of a pattern recognition processor that we call the neocortex. Sawyer uses cellular automata as his theoretical model, but I’m not sure that will work. Cellular automata create patterns, but do they recognize them? I’m not sure the Internet can generate a consciousness in its current design. Oh, the Internet will make a fine nervous system for such a web being, or beings, but I think another type of device will need to be built first, and that’s a multilayer pattern recognizer that’s as good or better than our neocortex.

So far, all the writers exploring this theme have assume that when computers reach a critical mass a consciousness will spontaneously arise out of the complexity. I doubt that completely. I think at least three components are needed for self-aware consciousness: pattern recognition, mind and language. I don’t think any of these exist in the internet, or supercomputers. I think mind evolves out of pattern recognition, and self-awareness evolves out of mind, with the development of language.

Atoms and molecules have early stages of pattern recognition, but as life arises out of non-life, sense organs develop that seek out patterns in reality. Most organisms are so highly adapted to specific patterns that they will die off if they can’t find them. Evolutionary adaptation is the ability of organisms to explore and take advantage of new patterns. I believe the mind grows out of this process, and there are different kinds of minds. A dog, cat, dolphin and chimp all have minds. We aren’t sure how much they perceive, or if they have much self-awareness, but they do have minds. Language studies in dolphins and chimps hint that maybe these animals are self-aware and have identities, maybe far more than our egos want to believe, but I think their consciousnesses are limited by the state of their language abilities. I think signing will add consciousness to apes.

For an AI computer to develop a mind, I think it needs to have a focus on reality that is processed through a pattern recognition device, and then a language needs to be linked to the patterns. At first, I thought Sawyer was going to have the web mind see out of Caitlin’s artificial eye, so as the device taught her mind to see, the web mind would also learn to see, and with another fictional piece of technology, learn a language. Instead Sawyer imagines an inner world where the web is visible. I don’t buy that at all. It’s leftover fluff from cyberpunk novels. Why invent a new reality to observe, when the internet mind has millions of eyes on our reality?

Now this brings up some interesting questions about AI minds. If a web mind has millions of web cameras at its disposal, will it think think like it has millions of eyes? Or will it’s consciousness move from camera to camera and peer out at single points of reality? Omniscient life would be tough, don’t you think? I tend to believe, and I only have limited knowledge to think otherwise, that an AI mind will emerge from a limited environment. Some scientist will raise up an AI mind by teaching it to see and hear while learning a language.

But what will a hive AI mind be like? Let’s say anyone in the future can go down to Radio Shack and buy an artificial neocortex to add to their computer system and bring up an AI child. If all of these AI minds are connected by the Internet it will be like a race of telepathic beings. Now, wouldn’t that be a far out science fiction story? I still haven’t read Watch, so who knows what will happen.

JWH – 5/13/10