Cool historic Usenet posts

Usenet News, is a threaded discussion application that started in 1980, long before today's Web-based threaded discussion forums. Usenet news groups circulated globally and covered many technical and non-technical topics.

Google has archived over 800 million Usenet posts in Google Groups. You can search through them here.

They have also pulled together a timeline listing important Internet-related posts from 1981 to 2001.

For example, this is the post where Tim Berners-Lee announced the Web and invited people to download the "very alpha" software and try it out.

The Usenet map shown here was made by Brian Reid in May, 1993. He estimated that around 87,000 sites with some 2.6 million users were exchanging Usenet news at that time.

The Energy and Emergy of the Internet

(To find out what "emergy" is, you have to read the rest of this post).

Google and other operators of huge data centers spend a lot of money on power, which leads them to locate server farms near sources of cheap, renewable energy, frequently near rivers in rural areas.

Two recent news items, one on Facebook's planned data center near the arctic circle and a study of the energy and emergy of the Internet remind us that the Internet consumes a lot of energy.

Facebook announced plans to build a server farm in Luleå Sweden, about 100 kilometers from the Arctic Circle. They will benefit from low cost electricity generated by dams on the Luleå river and from savings in cooling. The average temperature is around 2 degrees centigrate, which will enable them air cool the datacenter, which will consume enough power to run about 50,000 houses.

Powering data centers and the computers and devices that use them is only about half the story according to a recent study by Barath Raghavan and Justin Ma. We must also consider embodied energy (emergy) — the energy used in making the devices and infrastructure that make up the Internet. They remind us that we can save energy by extending the life of our computers and smart phones as well as by reducing operating power.

Taking both energy and emergy into account, Raghavan and Ma estimate that the Interent consumes between 1.1 and 1.9% of the 16 TW used by humanity. That is a lot less than we devote to transportation, so we will still be ahead if we can subsitute communication for transportation.

Two studies of concentration of power -- government and industry

A study of the relationships between 43,000 transnational corporations has identified a relatively small group, including many banks, with disproportionate power over the global economy.

(Study details are available in this paper).

The image shown here (click to enlarge) represents the 1,318 transnational corporations that form the core of the economy. Superconnected companies are red and very connected companies yellow. The size of the dot represents revenue. Each of the 1,318 had ties to two or more other companies, and on average they were connected to 20. The anlysis revealed that 147 even more tightly knit companies controlled 40 percent of the 43,000 corporations analyzed.

Characterizing the concentration of power in this way is time timely in light of the recent "occupy Wall Street" demonstrations, and provides background for James Allworth's suggestion that we may be facing a choice between capitalism and democracy.

This sort of concentration is worrisome from the standpoint of stability as well as equity. What is the effect of the failure of one of a limited number of large entities -- like banks that are "too big to be allowed to fail?" Note that the database used in the study was compiled in 2007, so it does not refelct changes that have occured during the current economic crisis.

This study reminds me of another case of concentration of control. Around ten years ago, I worked on a study of the state of the Internet in Singapore for the International Telecommunication Union (ITU). I noted at the time that the government played a central role there. They picked critical areas of the economy -- oil, shipping, banking, information technology, biotechnology -- and acted as a heavy-handed venture capitalist. With the help of my nephew, who was working for Goldman Sachs in Singapore, I put together this diagram showing government ownership in the telephone and ISP industries.

The government was not a passive investor. They hired the best and the brightest coming out of the universities. They created some of the earliest strategic IT forecasts and plans, which were put into effect through significant investment. (The best and the brightest avoid government in the US, but that has not always been the case).

This approach has served Singapore well. Today, they are ranked 19th in the world on the ITU ICT Development Index. The top twenty nations all have powerful governments -- most would be considered socialist failures in tea party circles.

We've seen two studies of the concentration of power -- one in the hands of business, the other government. No study or theory will ever be able to fully comprehend anything as complex as an economy or an industry, but these cases indicate that government has a place in ensuring stability and encouraging the development of infrastructure.

Draft of IT literacy paper

I just posted the draft of a paper called IT literacy – evolution, curriculum and a modular e-text.

In the paper, I review the evolution of the IT literacy course from the 1960s to today, then describe my Internet-era curriculum and the modular e-text (currently 104 modules) I am developing to teach it.

TeleGeography’s interactive submarine cable map

I love things like TeleGeography’s interactive submarine cable map.

You can zoom and scroll and click on the map for descriptions of the cables or search their cable database.

It is an anatomy diagram for the global nervous system with us as neurons.

Compare that to this map of the NSFNet in 1986:

(Those are 64kbs links).

Worries about OpenClass -- a new learning management system from Google and Pearson

Google and Pearson, a large textbook and etext publisher, are joining forces to offer a free learning management system (LMS) called OpenClass. OpenClass will be competition for Blackboard since it will be free, and, given the skills and resources of Google and Pearson, well done. It will also compete with Moodle, which is open source, but requires a significant staff committment to run.

That is the good news for OpenClass. The bad news for OpenClass is that the LMS market is not competitve -- it is dominated by Blackboard, Moodle and a few less popular LMSs.

Even if OpenClass is better than Blackboard and Moodle -- "open and not clunky" as they claim on their Web site -- it will take time to become a major player because we are locked into current LMSs by the material we have created, the training our students and staff have accumulated, and the systems we have built around them.

Do you use an LMS on your campus? If so, how many students and faculty know how to use it? Do students expect it to be used in a class? Have faculty invested in material that is now loaded into the LMS? Do they use it to automate testing and grading? Is it integrated with student records applications and the textbooks faculty adopt?

Don't get me wrong -- this is not a defense of the current LMSs. My campus uses Blackboard, but it is way too "clunky and closed" for me to use. I am just saying that it will be hard to displace even if OpenClass is superior.

Don't get me wrong on that either. I am not enthusiastic about OpenClass. For a start, I worry that it will favor Google Apps and Pearson teaching material. More important, I worry about the pedagogical impact of any LMS. If OpenClass were to become dominant, would it push us to teach within the confines of the OpenClass LMS -- a Procrustean fit?

On my campus today, on-line education is synonymous with Blackboard. We are in the very early stages of networked education and educational technology. It is too early for such standardization.

Don't get me wrong one last time. I believe the folks working on OpenClass at Google and Pearson are smart and mean well. I just wished they worked for a small startup that did not have such deep pockets.

For more discussion see:
Google Plus discussion
Chronicle of Higher Education discussion
Pearson announcement

New IT literacy teaching modules

I've recently posted or revised 12 IT literacy teaching modules:

• The democratization of application development
  
• Application Characteristics
  
• Popular Web client and server programs
  
• Reading and writing on the Internet
  
• Rating and reputation on the Internet
  
• History of IT platforms and IT literacy
  
• Yahoo Groups
  
• The Web – vision, prototype and product
  
• Data quantity -- how much data?
  
• Innovation timing
  
• Exponential growth
  
• Technology progress
  

This brings the total to 102 modules. Each module has an annotated PowerPoint presentation and assignment, and many have videos, transcripts and other components. (I am adding them as quickly as possible).

Perhaps you can use one or more in a class or for self study. You can see how the modules are structured here and browse through them and here. You can also subscribe to announcements of future modules.

More on massive, open, online classes (MOOCs)

I recently wrote a post on the mother of all MOOCs, the computer science classes getting under way at Stanford this week.

If you found that interesting, check out this podcast interview of George Siemens, who leads Athabasca University’s Technology Enhanced Knowledge Research Institute.

Siemens is a MOOC practitioner and researcher. His classes have enrollments in the thousands, and he handles the large number by decentralizing -- encouraging students to help each other and form study and discussion groups using whichever social media tools they prefer, He is distributing the teaching responsibility to the network as a whole.

Siemens does not suggest that he has found the optimal model -- he is experimenting. He says "we need to tweak or in some cases completely remodel the university system," and he is trying to learn what works and what doesn't.

One thing is for sure -- there is no single answer. What works for a math course may not work for a literature course and what works for an upper division course may not work for a lower division course.

This interview is the latest installment of a monthly educational technology podcast from the Chronicle of Higher Education. I'd recommend checking that out too.

Open online classes starting soon at Stanford – 130,000 students in one class

Stanford's experiment with free, online classes for thousands of students is getting under way. They are offering online sections of three undergraduate computer science courses:  Introduction to Artificial Intelligence, Machine Learning and Databases.

The classes are organized around blogs, as shown here. The lectures, assignments, exams, forums, course materials, quick guides to software and optional exercises are the same whether you are online or on campus.

I took a similarly open course a few years ago from the Harvard Law School. There were three groups of students -- regular law students on campus, an extension class, which met in Second Life, and an open section for those listening to podcasts. I was in the third group, and enjoyed it very much.

The Stanford class is more highly structured and the experience of the online students will be closer to that of the on-campus students than was the case at Harvard. Also, Stanford's online students will receive a certificate of completion, showing their relative rank in the class if they complete the full course.  There was neither social media support nor formal feedback at Harvard.

Others who have offered massive, open online courses (MOOCs) are generally positive, but they report some problems with privacy and spamming and rude behavior.  Since Stanford will allow open students to take exams and do assignments, there is also the possibility of cheating. (When you enroll, you agree to abide by an honor code).

The Stanford courses are unique in several ways. They are large.  The AI class has over 130.000 students from 190 countries.  Stanford will grade and rank open students who choose to be graded. Most earlier MOOCs have been on educational technology, but these are standard academic courses offered by well-known experts in their fields. They will also be using newly developed tools. The AI course is offered in partnership with a start-up called Know Labs, but, for now, there is no information about their tools on their Web site.

This is a bold experiment -- what are the implications for future undergraduate education if these and other experiments with MOOCs succeed?

For links to and discussion of other MOOCs:

• MOOC.ca
• Wikipedia

The impact of online sales tax

It seems that Amazon will be collecting tax on California sales in a year, and I expect that to become the national norm. What might the impact of the tax be?

The US Department of Commerce estimated that online shoppers spent $165.4 billion in 2010 and Vertex Inc. estimated the average state tax rate as 5.5224% during the first nine months of 2010. That says states are losing around $9.13 billion annualy in Internet sales tax.

That may be a small portion of our 14.7 trillion dollar GNP, but it would pay the salaries of a lot of state workers (especially professors :-), which would help the economy and make a lot of people happy.

But, aren't sales taxes regressive, taking a bigger percent of a poor person's income than a rich person's? For sure.

If it were up to me, I would raise revenue with a progressive tax that came out of the pockets of those better able to pay (like me) and corporations that take advantage of unreasonable loopholes..

But we are talking about sales tax, and my guess is that a sales tax on Internet purchases is relatively fair -- less regressive than general sales tax. Online shoppers tend to be relatively well off. They have computers, broadband connections to the Internet, credit cards, can accept daytime deliveries, etc.

We need emperical data on this question -- it would make a good thesis or dissertation if economists have not already studied it.

On balance, I favor taxing online sales, but if it turned out to be as regressive as our general sales tax, I would probably change my mind.

Regressive taxes are a bad idea for a couple of reasons. Most directly, they make the lives of poor people -- little kids and adults -- less happy. But they also reinforce the growing economic inequality in the United States.

What do

Namibia, South Africa, Lesotho, Botswana, Sierra Leone, Central African Republic, Haiti, Colombia, Bolivia, Brazil, Guatemala, Honduras, Hong Kong, Paraguay, El Salvador, Chile, Panama, Papua New Guinea, Zambia, Niger, Swaziland, Gambia, Zimbabwe, Dominican Republic, Peru, Sri Lanka, Mexico, Costa Rica, Singapore, Madagascar, Mozambique, Nepal, Uruguay, Ecuador, Rwanda, Philippines, Uganda, and Jamaica

have in common?

According to the CIA World Factbook, they are the only nations with higher GINI coefficients than the United States, suggesting that their income inequality is even greater than ours. That is not very good company, and it does not make for a comfortable, sustainable place to live.

California's Internet sales tax will reshape retail

Amazon VP Paul Misener

Two months ago, the California legislature passed a law requiring Amazon to collect sales tax, and Amazon retaliated by starting a state referendum drive to repeal the law and dumping thousands of California-based affiliates. Now, it seems a settlement has been reached in this battle. It's been reported that Amazon will drop its referendum drive in return for a one year moratorium on collecting sales tax.

If you live in California, your Amazon purchases will remain tax-free for the next year, but will be taxed after that.

That will help the state budget. Amazon VP for global public policy Paul Misener said that Amazon would also "welcome back tens of thousands of California-based advertising affiliates," which means yet more tax revenue for the state.

I favored and predicted this outcome, but did not expect it to be settled so quickly. My guess is that other states will follow suit -- California is large and influential and thirteen other states are already in conflict with them over tax collection. The New York Times has also reported on Amazon's tax problems in other states.

In a comment on a previous post, Shava Nerad, suggested that the mechanics of tax collection from 50 states with different rates, forms and procedures would create a record keeping nightmare. She worried that confusion over forms and procedure would drive thousands of small mail order and catalog companies out of business.

The one year moratorium gives online retailers and states time to work out uniform, simple forms and procedures for tax computation and reporting. It seems that Amazon wants to work out such a solution. Misener says they will "work with Congress and the states to obtain a federal resolution to the sales tax issue as soon as possible."

Amazon should take the lead in designing the system. They have a large stake in having it be simple and smooth, and they have been running a complex online service since the mid-1990s. It sounds like a good Amazon Web Services application to me.

The implications of this compromise go beyond California. It tips the on-line/storefront balance, and will impact retail business throughout the nation. We might even see some Amazon stores.

US Ignite -- can the US develop innovative applications for the coming gigabit network?

In 1986, the US National Science Foundation (NSF) linked a few universities, creating a national network. The initial 56k bps links shown here were soon upgraded to T1s, and people began using applications like email, file transfer and threaded discussion..

As networks spread and increased in speed, new applications were invented. The majority of those applications were developed in the US, because we had more people using state of the art networks than other nations. Most international traffic came to the NSF backbone, where it was terminated or passed through to another nation.

But our infrastructure and connectivity lead has eroded, leaving us a typical developed nation, no longer outstanding. Nations with wide spread high-speed networks are likely to develop applications for the future.

Is there a way for us to regain momentum as we enter the gigabit era? Some US universities and cities and companies like Google have already moved in that direction. Universities are experimenting with high-speed networks and Google is connecting a few cities, but, can those efforts be connected and scaled up?

NSF hopes so. They want to connect the experimental gigabit networks at various universities and cities together to create a large enough user base to justify and spur application innovation.

The USIgnite effort is just getting off the ground -- they are now soliciting white papers and will soon hold a workshop.

For a discussion of US Ignite, check this post on Google Plus.

Amazon offers California a sales tax compromise

Two months ago, the California Legislature passed a law requiring Amazon to collect sales tax. Amazon refused, dumped all its California affiliate stores (costing the state tax revenue), claimed they were not operating in California and started a petition campaign for a ballot measure to overturn the law. In the meantime, they are not collecting tax, and when the measure qualifies for the ballot, the law will be temporarily suspended.

Now Amazon has offered to build two warehouses in California and hire 7,000 workers if the legislature will put the issue off for a few years. (Does the 7,000 include the affiliates they cut off or would it be the reinstated affiliates plus 7,000)?

I live in California and love it that Amazon is tax free -- often choosing them over another store for just that reason. Regardless, I think they should drop the referendum and start collecting sales tax and I predict they eventually will have to.

Here are a few reasons why (in no particular order):

• Amazon asserts that an online sales tax would cost California jobs. I find their faith in low taxes as an economic silver bullet reminiscent of the Tea Party. It will cost some jobs and pay to create or maintain some others. No one knows the net change.
  
• The California Retailers Association (Walmart, Barnes and Noble, etc.) says Amazon's refusal to collect sales tax cost California over 18,000 jobs and a $4.1-billion loss in sales resulting in over $7 billion in lost economic activity in 2010. I trust their figures about as much as I trust that Amazon gives a hoot about California jobs.
  
• California loses jobs when consumers pay higher taxes and when Amazon affiliates are zapped, but we also lose jobs with the bankruptcy of Amazon competitors like Circuit City and Borders Books. The same goes for laying off teachers, state employees, and others.
  
• I believe California needs added revenue and am willing to pay my share.
  
• I worry that a sales tax might be a burden for the poor, but I bet Amazon shoppers are relatively affluent. This is an empirical question that Amazon could answer.
  
• The early rationale for an online sales tax exemption was that it would allow Internet e-commerce to take off. Amazon has taken off.
  
• Amazon thinks it might be cheaper to do a ballot referendum than to fight the law in court, but what about the cost of a referendum to the taxpayers?
  
• The media and advertising business will surely like the referendum – both online and brick-and-mortar retailers will spend tons of money on misleading, simple-minded ads.
  
• Amazon cut off their California marketing affiliates in order to claim that they had no operations the state, but seven California addresses are on the list of United States Subsidiaries at Amazon’s Web site.

Let me know what I have left off this list – on both sides.

California is a large, precedent setting state, and this battle has national implications. Wikipedia lists 13 states where Amazon is in a controversy over sales and use taxes. My fearless prediction is that the list will grow, and, in the long run, we will be paying tax on online purchases. That will change the retail landscape (and maybe Amazon will open stores when it happens).

Get a free copy of Twitter for Good -- a how-to for organizations with social goals

When Twitter started up, its prompt question was "What are you doing?" A lot of early traffic was simple answers to that question -- interesting to your friends perhaps, but not particularly significant.

The prompt today is "what's happening?," which solicits a broader class of comment.

There are many stories of inventions that came to be used in ways their creators did not envision, and Twitter is one of those. In the preface of Twitter for Good, co-founder Biz Stone tells the story of James Buck, a photo journalist covering Egyptian demonstrations. When Buck was arrested during a demonstration he tweeted one word -- "arrested." The word spread via Twitter to his colleagues and diplomats, and within hours he tweeted again -- "free."

It is now clear that Twitter can be used for more than telling friends what you are doing. It has been used for disaster relief, political organizing, live reporting of events, as a broadcast medium for popular figures like athletes, actors, politicians and journalists, even, sadly, for coordination of terrorist activity.

Twitter for Good is a how-to book with tips and case studies for organizations and individuals that want to use Twitter for good. It's oriented toward social action, but many of the recommendations are also relevant to any organization that wants to use Twitter for public relations, marketing, and customer or community relationship management.

I have only skimmed the book, so cannot write a full, critical review, but, if it sounds interesting, you can get a free copy. Starting at 12:00 AM (midnight) on Tuesday, September 6, 2011 an electronic version of the book will be available for download at Amazon and Barnes and Noble. Click on the Kindle (Amazon) or Nook (B&N) edition, then purchase them for free. The B&N version is in ebook format.

The offer is good for 24 hours. If you miss the free copy, all is not lost -- you can enter to win a copy here.

AT&T (and Verizon) hypocrisy

AT&T argues that their acquisition of T-Mobile would benefit the public because they would be able to increase their fourth-generation LTE coverage from 80% to 97% of the US population, but couldn't they do that on their own without T-Mobile?

It turns out they had an internal proposal to do just that. In a recent FCC filing AT&T estimates that they could deploy the approximately 44,000 nodes needed to achieve 97% coverage by the end of 2013 at a cost of $3.8 billion.

However, in the next paragraph they say that senior management had rejected the proposed build out since there "was no viable business case for such an expansion." The extra coverage was not worth even $3.8 billion to AT&T.

Yet they have offered $39 billion for T-Mobile. Part of that is to acquire T-Mobile customers, but those folks might not stick around since they had already decided against AT&T. Still, what alternative would they have?

That pesky competitor T-Mobile would be gone and there would be only two competitors remaining. Sprint was small and not doing so well. How long until there would be only one competitor? Sweet.

Lest you think that I am an exclusive AT&T basher, let me point out that I was a Verizon customer until last year when they treated me so badly that I left them for cable.

Furthermore, Verizon can match AT&T's hypocrisy. If you want to come unglued, check this post on Verizon<.a>.

We are toast.

The 2011 Campus Technology Conference

I recently attended the 2011 Campus Technology Conference in Boston. Since I teach using Web 2.0 tools, am an e-text developer and my school is interested in using iPads, I focused on those areas and had a great time and learned a lot. I'll tell you what I saw, and you can follow the links at the end of this report to see videos and slides from presentations I missed.

Keynote session

The conference was preceded by a day of workshops featuring in-depth presentations and hands-on exercises. Two that caught my eye were Mark Frydenberg on Web 2.0 tools for the college classroom and Jenna Linskens on the applications and uses of the iPad in education.

Linskens stated that there are over 12,500 educational applications for the iPad, iPhone and iPod Touch -- that can be a bit overwhelming. Experienced teachers like Linskens and Frydenberg organize applications and focus on those that they find useful. Linskens mentioned 102 applications in 13 categories, including four "must haves." (What would be your "must have" iPad applications)?  Similarly, Frydenberg showed dozens of applications in 14 categories.

Michael Wesch

The next day, the conference got underway with an inspirational, entertaining talk by award winning teacher Michael Wesch of Kansas State University. Those familiar with Wesch and the videos he and his students have made documenting classroom atmosphere and engagement will find the first half of the presentation familiar. 

For example, over half of his students say they do not like school, but none dislikes learning and he expressed his disappointment in the kinds of questions students ask – for example "how long does the paper have to be" or "will that be on the exam?"

Wesch: required skills change over time

This presentation went beyond Wesch’s earlier work. He brought in his experience as an anthropologist in Papua New Guinea and got a bit Mcluhaneque in talking about the idea that media are more than communication tools -- they mediate and change relationships. A family gathered around a TV set at dinner time is not the same as a post-TV family. Educational needs are also different. Students who grew up during the TV era need to learn critical thinking, while those in the post TV world need media literacy for creating, filtering, organizing, distributing and rating information.

There were two and a half days of concurrent session presentations. The session format stressed quality over quantity -- each presentation was a full hour, so there was time for formal talks, demos and discussion.

Jeff Borden

Being interested in e-text, the first session I attended was "eText is Here" by Rand Spiwak and John Ittelson. They are e-text enthusiasts, but stress that the format wars were far from settled. The turbulent nature of the format and device wars was further emphasized by Jeff Borden of Pearson Learning in his presentation "Emerging Technologies in Content Delivery: eBooks and eReader Devices." Borden listed 23 e-reading devices and 18 e-text formats.

Borden is an informative, entertaining speaker. He gave two presentations, and both were recorded. I recommend watching the videos. You might also be interested in his directory of 500 e-learning tools.

Borden: tools change over time

In addition to keynotes and technical sessions, there were extended conversations with executives from Google, Apple and Microsoft. These ran concurrently with the technical sessions, and provided an opportunity to hear a strategic presentation and have plenty of time for questions and discussion. I only had time to attend one of these conversations, but will watch the videos of the other two now that I am back from traveling.

The exhibit floor

Campus Technology is not a purely academic conference -- there was a mix of academic and professional presentations, a show floor with vendor booths and an area where vendors made scheduled presentations. The exhibit area was large enough to include many interesting vendors and small enough that I had time to visit all the booths with products I wanted to learn more about -- like the three bears, it was just right.

Videos: I've just scratched the surface. Videos of the keynote sessions, conversation sessions, and featured parallel presentations are online.

Slides: The workshop and presentation slides are also online. Even if there is no video of a session you are interested in, you can download the slides, get a feel for the presentation and contact the author.

Steve Jobs is an artist

Homebrew Computer Club meeting

I only met Steve Jobs once -- at a Homebrew Computer Club meeting in 1976. Homebrew meetings were held in a stadium style auditorium at the Stanford University linear accelerator lab, and they featured a "random access" time, in which people in the audience stood up and made announcements or asked for help with a problem they were working on.

Steve Wozniak stood up and offered free copies of the schematic for the computer he and his friend had built.

After the random access session, attendees talked with each other and with vendors standing at tables in the back of the auditorium. Jobs was behind a table with a wire wrapped version of the Apple I motherboard, and we talked about the trade-offs in implementing functions in software or hardware.

Wozniak, Jobs and an Apple I

At the time, I was editor of Interface Age, a short-lived magazine with a national circulation, so I asked Jobs if he would write us an article about his ideas on design and his computer. He told me he would not be willing to write an article unless I would devote the entire issue to Apple.

I was pissed by the kid's arrogance, and walked away.

Inside the Apple I

But he was right to be arrogant. He is an artist who works on very large canvases.

Jobs does not create paintings or songs, he creates products and industries. Painters work with paint and brushes, musicians with instruments. Jobs works with organizations and capital. His artistic works include Apple Computer, Apple, Next, Pixar, Apple stores and iTunes and he's sculpted the personal computer, mobile music and phone, movie, TV and music industries. Now he is dabbling in architecture with Apple's proposed office complex.

Check this column by David Pogue for more on the industries and products Jobs imagined and then created.

Apple I

Steve Jobs' Stanford commencement speech

Steve Jobs gave this 14.5 minute address to Stanford graduates in 2005. It is an inspiring speech, which calls upon the graduating students to have the courage to follow their passion. It would have been an even more appropriate speech to give to the entering freshman class because while in school students have the freedom to seek their passion and to make mistakes.

Text transcript of the speech.

Here are a few quotes from the speech:

"The minute I dropped out (of Reed College), I could stop taking the required classes that didn't interest me and begin dropping in on the ones that looked far more interesting...None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me, and we designed it all into the Mac."

"I didn't see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me."

"Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work, and the only way to do great work is to love what you do."

"Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart."

"Your time is limited, so don't waste it living someone else's life. Don't be trapped by dogma, which is living with the results of other people's thinking. Don't let the noise of others' opinions drown out your own inner voice, heart and intuition."

"Stay hungry, stay foolish."

Facebook Evil -- they invented my "interests"

As you see here, Facebook lists my interests as: PetVille, The Global Text Project, Wondershare, Quantum Wealth Management, and Celebrity Cruises

I have never told Facebook that I was interested in these things, in fact:

• I have no interest in PetVille -- my wife plays that game with our grandchildren.
• I am interested in the Global Text Project, but have never told that to Facebook or given them permission to tell others.
• I have never heard of Wondershare and have no idea what it is.
• My son-in-law owns Quantum Wealth Management, but I've never told Facebook about that.
• I have taken some cruises, but never with Celebrity Cruises.

When people compare Google Plus and Facebook, they usually focus on features and user interface. I hope Google stays away from Facebook's Evil practices.

Recommended podcast: Maajid Nawaz on radical's use of the Internet

Maajid Nawaz

At first we naively expected the Internet and other communication technology to favor democracy over dictatorship. In a 1998 report on the Internet in Cuba, I wrote of

the 'dictator's dilemma' -- the desire to have the benefits of the Internet without the threat of political instability. How do you give people access to information for health care, education, and commerce while keeping them from political information?

Today, we have a more nuanced view of the Internet as a force for democracy -- we see that it is not only used by democrats, but by dictators and even terrorists, as illustrated by the use of Google Earth to plan missile attacks.

al-Aqsa commander in Gaza

Maajid Nawaz, presents a vivid picture of the use of the Internet by radical Islamists in his Ted Talk A global culture to fight extremism. Nawaz feels that extremists -- whether Islamists or white power advocates -- make better use of the Internet than democracy advocates. He speaks with authority, having used the Internet as a propagandist and recruiter for the global Islamist party Hizb ut-Tahrir for 13 years, including five years in an Egyptian prison for attempting to overthrow the government. He describes the use of the Net by extremists, asks why they have succeeded across borders and goes on to argue for a countervailing grass roots, youth-led movement to advocate for a democratic culture.

Directory of e-Learning tools

Jeff Borden and his colleagues at Pearson eCollege have created a directory of 500 e-learning tools. The tools are divided into several categories: Continuing Education, Data, Discipline Specific Material, Graphics & Audio, Learning Assets, Measurement, Planning, Presentation Tools, Reference, Repository/Community, Search Engine, Student Tools, Technical, Online Teaching Theory, Web 2.0, and YouTube Videos.

Nearly all of the tools are free, and there is something there for every teacher and student interested in Internet-based education.

Look the material over and, if you find a tool you like, let us know about it.

Free, online Intro to AI from Stanford University

Stanford University CS 221 Introduction to to AI will be offered free online this fall.

The lectures will be online and all students will use the same materials, do the same assignments and take the same exams. Non-Stanford students will receive a completion letter showing where they fall on the grading curve. Over 10.000 students had requested information in the first three days after the course was announced. The instructors hope they can handle 10s or 100s of thousand students using tools like Google Moderator to select questions for discussion. I am curious to see how this and other very large online courses work out.

The Net is back up in Syria -- why did they take it down? Why reconnect?

As shown in this graph from Renesys. Syria, like Egypt in January, was disconnected from the Internet for 28 hours, but is now back online.

Why did they take it down? Why did they reconnect it?

I am sure the takedown was under consideration and debated internally for some time. The deciding factor may have been the world wide revulsion at the YouTube video showing the tortured and mutilated body of 13-year old Hamza Ali al-Khateeb. (A good place to read about that is David Brooks' commentary on it in the New York Times. If you want to see the video itself, you can find it on YouTube. I've not watched it -- Brooks' description was sufficient for me.)

Why did they reconnect to the Internet? Perhaps they realized the futility of stopping the flow of information into and out of the country, as illustrated by this tweet:

@MadeInSyria Dial up access for #Syria: +46850009990 +492317299993 +4953160941030 user:telecomix password:telecomix, 11 hours ago

Perhaps it was the dictator's dilemma -- Syrian economic institutions had grown too dependent upon the Net to cut it off. Regardless, it is back up and the Twitter stream for #syria is again reporting on the situation, for example:

@MalathAumran: Hama reports tens of tanks gathering about 60 at the southern entrance of the city #Syria, 1 hour ago

@jenanmoussa: Ten dead as helicopter opens fire in #syria(n) city of #Edleb: al arabiya, 2 hours ago

@weddady: 63 peaceful protesters killed yesterday by the regime of Bashar Al-Assad in #Syria.. in other news, the world is watching.., 2 hours ago

@MalathAumran: Idleb: Military helicopters are shooting randomly on Jisr Alshghour city for half an hour now. more details @ http://j.mp/j2wR3s #Syria, 2 hours ago

@guardian: Syrian forces kill 70 protesters http://gu.com/p/2ph93/tw #Syria
2 hours ago

@FlashNewsPlus, #Syria: extremely disturbing report from witnesses that wounded are being taken from Al Badr hospital in #Hama and killed. via @MalathAumran, 8 hours ago

Messages like these are being read by government leaders and citizens around the world, and they cannot easily be ignored. They are also important for the people in Syria who can know what is going on in cities other than their own.

The Syrian government would like to suppress this news, but they cannot. Do they now wish they had reined in the Internet from the beginning, as, for example, Cuba did and continues doing? Cuba has paid a price for that decision, but it may have helped prolong Castro's regime.

The Web of Data -- WolframAlpha is two years old

We talk about different ways to retrieve stored data. Text search ala Google is most common, but we also have relational databases like Zoho Creator, hierarchical taxonomies like the Yahoo Directory or the Dewey Decimal system used in libraries, and keyword tags like the label terms in the right hand column of this blog.

Wolframalpha, which just celbrated its second birthday, stores and retrieves structured data, but it goes beyond retrieval, using the data for computation. For example, when I entered "New York to Los Angeles at 100 miles/hour," it computed the straight line distance using geo-coordinates and then computed the time to travel that distance at 100 miles/hour. (Click the image to enlarge it).

It also showed the assumptions it made -- that I meant the city New York, not the State or Financial Note and I meant Los Angeles, California, not Chile -- and it inferred that I wanted it to compute travel time from the fact that I had included a velocity (100 miles/hour) in my query. It also "knows" that a velocity is an example of a broader class, rate.

It easily handed unit conversions. When I modified the query, asking it to calculate "Los Angeles to New York at 1 inch per hour," it reversed the direction of the arrow in the diagram and told me the trip would take 17,804 years 3 months 24 days 22 hours 35 minutes.

My next query was "calories in 2 slices of bread and 2 tablespoons of peanut butter and 2 tablespoons of jelly." It calculated the weight of the ingredients, looked up the number of calories of each and displayed the result: 440 calories. It also displayed other nutrition facts like the amount of fat, cholesterol, and saturated fat.

WolframAlpha has information on many types of object, but it is limited. When I asked for the "calories in a peanut butter and jelly sandwich," it overlooked the bread, and assumed two tablespoons of peanut butter and one of jelly. It does not have data on "sandwiches."

But, the next version may. Wolfram is constantly adding new data. During their second year they added data in these categories: US Economy,International Data, US Social Statistics, Culture and Media, Geography, Astronomy, Chemistry, Earth Sciences, Engineering, Health and, medicine, Life Sciences, Materials, Physics, Money and, Finance, Units and Measures, Math, and Technology and Computer Systems.

It is noteworthy that Wolfram has decided their staff would add new data. This is in contrast to Freebase, a structured data storage and retrieval system, in which any user is able to add data, wiki style. (Freebase lacks the computation ability of Wolframalpha).

Freebase and Wolfram are building a "web of data" as opposed to a web of HTML and javascirpt pages. They include semantic information -- they know about the data they are storing.

Is this the future of the Web? Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the Web protocols, is now focusing his attention on the semantic web and Google has acquired Freebase. Google knows you are an instance of the class person -- what can they infer about you?

More on Nature's forthcoming digital texts

A few days ago, I posted a positive note about a series of electronic texts announced by Nature Publishing. It sounded like a significant improvement over the electronic textbooks being offered by other major publishers, so, I followed up with an email interview of Vikram Savkar, Publishing Director for Nature Education. The questions and answers follow, and the added emphasis is mine, not his -- all good stuff.

When will it be possible to play around with the etext or at least a sample interactive lesson or other material?

We expect to be able to demo sample modules for press in early to mid August, ahead of publication of the full product for the broader market on September 1 2011. Review access will be available to instructors from September 1, 2011.

Is the etext a collection of interactive lessons or are the interactive lessons a supplement to an integrated textbook?

The interactive lessons in fact are the textbook. Each lesson is a thorough exploration of the topic at hand, beginning with background information, followed by a discussion of core concepts, mid-point self-tests, interactive activities to allow the student to apply core concepts, and end of lesson test questions. There are approximately 200 such lessons arranged in the sequence in which introductory biology courses are usually taught. Instructors will be able to rearrange the lessons if they teach topics in a somewhat different order. The lessons are interactive in two senses. First, because they are online - and integrated with the gradebook, annotation tools, self-tests, end of lessons test questions, and so on - students will actively drive their own progress through the material, with continual feedback to let them know where they stand. Second, most lessons contain rich interactive demonstrations (available in both Flash and HTML5 versions) that immerse students even more deeply in particularly key concepts. Taken as a whole, the interactive textbook combines what is best from print textbooks (thorough text, peer reviewed figures) with the best of what is only possible online. Note that the textbook will come with a rich set of supplements, including lecture notes, instructor guides, and more.

How often will it be revised?

One of our core goals in designing Principles of Biology was to enable it to evolve frequently, in response to both emerging scientific discoveries and suggestions that instructors have on how to expand particular modules. We plan to make these revisions on an ongoing basis. Instructors will be able to choose on a case by case basis whether or not they import these revisions during the semester, so no instructors will ever be surprised by an automatic update to the text. We think of this approach as creating a "living edition".

Will it be for sale to the general public as well as students?

Yes (and I agree with you, I think there are many lifelong learners who could benefit from this book) Principles of Biology will be available for individual purchase from the Nature Education website from September 1, 2011. The general public can pay $49 by credit card and will receive the same lifetime access that students do, with the same continual revision to maintain scientific currency.

To what extent, if any, will uses be able to cache material for offline study?

Students will have access to an offline digital version, which has most of the instructional content but won't be tied into the gradebook and a few other connection-dependent features. It's not a substitute for the full interactive textbook, but it should allow students to do some good studying on a plane or wherever else they happen to have time but no internet access.

What about DRM?

There is some DRM, but the heart of the anti-piracy strategy we've chosen for this program is ensuring that the official product is so effective that there is a significant disincentive to use a pirated version. For example, the assessments that we've integrated into every page of the textbook will feed into the online gradebook that instructors use to evaluate students' progress. Students who don't purchase the digital product won't be in the gradebook . . . that will be inconvenient for them. I'm sure some people will try to bend the rules. Overall, by pricing this product affordably, adding in plenty of value online, and mixing in a little bit of DRM, I believe we've created a strong case for people to use this product as intended.

Have you any art or sample videos that we can look at or link to?

Not just yet . . . the website is still in development and testing. We'll have samples available to you in August. We do have a few mock-ups of an iPad view of Principles of Biology if you would like to use them in the BYTE.com piece. These are early design concepts at this stage. You can see an example here.

Will there be a computer science "book" in the series? Will there be versions for non-majors, for example, "IT literacy" as opposed to computer science?

Since the natural sciences are our core strength as a publisher, our primary focus is to expand the program across most of the life and physical sciences in next few years. I would say that expansion into fields like computer science would likely only be through partnerships with publishers who specialize in those spaces.

If they deliver what they seem to be promising, and live up to the policies I've highlighted above, these will be terrific books. Since they are limiting themselves to life and physical science, I hope other publishers are watching.

(Here is another interview of Savkar -- check it out).