Wishful thinking -- might Ting, Virgin America and T-mobile trigger wireless competition?

Ting pricing example, click to read

Speaking on a panel at the Geek Wire Summit in Seattle, T-Mobile Chief Marketing Officer Cole Brodman said that bundling subsidized mobile phones “distorts what devices actually cost and it causes OEMs, carriers — everybody to compete on different playing fields.” He went on to say that if he were "king for a day," he would do away with subsidized phones.

When asked why T-Mobile did not do it, he said that consumers are used to low phone prices and would not switch even if the long run cost, including usage contact rates, were less.

Well, he may be right, but ting.com is betting that if an unbundled plan is cheap and flexible enough, people will be willing to pay big bucks up front for a phone. How does, say, $62 per month for 2 phones, 500 voice minutes, 1,000 text messages and a 2 gigs of data sound to you? That is a tentative plan I priced out using Ting's rate calculator (see the image above).

But wait, it gets better. There is no contract -- service is month to month. How about their rate plans? There are 216 possibilities. Want more? Ting doesn't roll unused minutes and data over, it gives you cash credit on next month's bill if your actual use is below your plan. What if you exceed the limits of your rate plan? The rate plan is tentative, not hard and fast -- you are bumped up to the next level with not penalty charges. In other words, your bill is a function of your actual usage, not your plan.

It's not all rosy. The phones aren't cheap. For example, a Samsung Galaxy SII 4G is $465, but Ting's billing plans and rates can make up for a lost phone subsidy pretty quickly and you won't be tempted to throw away your phone every two years. For the time being, Ting offers only a few phones and you can't bring your own -- you must buy one of theirs. Another possible glitch -- Ting's carrier is Sprint, and they might have poor coverage in your area.

Virgin Mobile has launched an ad campaign for their unlimited data service. For $35 a month you get 300 minutes of voice and unlimited 3G data and messaging with no contract. Like Ting, they are on the Sprint network in the US, but their 3G phone selection is less impressive.

Might Ting and Virgin Mobile disrupt the mobile phone market? Maybe T-Mobile will jump on the bandwagon. Might we eventually see competition in the mobile market? Stay tuned.

Britannica is gone -- Grolier struck the first blow

The New York Times announced that after 244 years, the Encyclopaedia Britannica is going out of print.

Wow, I guess it was inevitable and it probably does not mean much to young folks today, but there was a time when every school and library and many middle class homes had copies of the Britannica.

I guess the handwriting was on the wall in the early 1980s, when Grolier, a less prestigous competitor, began offering subscirptions to a text version of their encylopedia through online services Compuserve, Dow Jones, and the New York Times Information Bank.

Grolier's next move was a CD-ROM version, which was developed by Gary Kildall, the creator of CP/M, the mainstream PC operating system before MS DOS. Here's a picture of Gary and the encyclopedia.

Kildall showed the encyclopedia at the 1985 Consumer Electronics Show and it went on sale the following year. The first edition was text only, with 9 million words and 30,000 entries. It was updated quarterly and pictures were added in 1990.

A CD-ROM was faster than Compuserve, but a CD-ROM drive was around $500 in those days. Philips offered a bundle of one of their CD-ROM drives and the encyclopedia. Grolier kept at it for a while, and Microsoft entered the market with their own multimedia CD-ROM encyclopedia, Encarta.

Neither of them was a blockbuster, and the Web and Wikipedia finished them off. (I have compiled a collection of Wikipedia evaluations, including a well-known comparison to Britannica that was published by Nature).

Now the Net has zapped Britannica too. It brings back nostalgic memories of Britannica set on my bookshelf and the time I was lucky to have spent with Gary Kildall back in those heady days of CP/M and CD-ROMs.

Superbowl streamed -- pirates do IPTV better than NBC

When I reported that the Superbowl would be streamed this year, I saw it as a milestone on the road to IPTV.

I was one of the 2,105,441 people who watched the stream on NBC.COM. I tuned in out of curiosity, but after watching for a few minutes and taking a few screen shots, I turned my computer off and watched the game on TV. (NBC reports that the average veiwer remained online for 39 minutes).

I was not impressed. The action was in a small window surrounded by ads and statistics on a black background. The viewer could switch camera angles by clicking on the insert window on the upper right.

IPTV done poorly -- by NBC

It was too busy and too small for my taste. There were also seemingly constant commercials and other distractions. I did not tune in at the very start, but by the third quarter, the Internet stream was a quarter behind the TV broadcast.

On the other hand, spokesmen for NBC and the NFL were pleased.

Kevin Monaghan, SVP, Business Development & Managing Director Digital Media, NBC Sports Group was pleased by the "record traffic that grew throughout the event." He was also happy with "record high engagement numbers" referring to nearly two million camera angle switches.

Hans Schroeder, NFL, SVP, Media Strategy and Development called the live stream "a tremendous success."

They might have been pleased, but I expected more because I have seen better live streaming of a sporting event. The basketball game shown below filled the laptop screen and was identical to and only four secnds behind the TV broadcast shown behind it.

IPTV done better -- by pirates

One small hitch -- the basketball game was pirated.   NBC and the NFL should check out the music industry experience with pirates. A good way to stop pirates is to offer people convenient, high quality content at a reasonable price.

Perhaps TV executives should think of pirates as market research consultants who are showing them what the public wants.  NBC needs to learn from the pirates that the distinction between "TV" and "the Internet" is broken -- it's all bits.

IT items on the Beloit College mindset list for the class of 2015

Beloit College publishes an annual list of characteristics of their incoming freshman class.  This helps them be sensitive to what their new students do and do not assume.  

Several of the items each year are related to the applications and implications of the Internet and information technology.  Here are the IT-related items for the class of 2015:

• There has always been an Internet ramp onto the information highway.
• They “swipe” cards, not merchandise.
• As they’ve grown up on websites and cell phones, adult experts have constantly fretted about their alleged deficits of empathy and concentration.
• Their school’s “blackboards” have always been getting smarter.
• Amazon has never been just a river in South America.
• Video games have always had ratings.
• Dial-up is soooooooooo last century!
• Music has always been available via free downloads.
• Electric cars have always been humming in relative silence on the road.
• Some of them have been inspired to actually cook by watching the Food Channel.
• Their parents have always been able to create a will and other legal documents online.
• They’ve often broken up with their significant others via texting, Facebook, or MySpace.
• They won’t go near a retailer that lacks a website.
• “PC” has come to mean Personal Computer, not Political Correctness.
• The New York Times and the Boston Globe have never been rival newspapers.

These are just the items relating to IT for this year.  There is a lot more from the Beloit list and other schools at the Mindset List web site.

Webcam monologues from Amanda Congdon to Felicia Day

New media lead to new art forms, and the Webcam monologue is well suited to the mobile Internet.

The first memorable Webcam monologue I recall seeing was Amanda Congdon's dramatic piece on Hurricane Katrina, in which she intersperses still images and moves the camera a few times:



YouTube is filled with Webcam rants and rambling, but Congdon's monologue was original and moving art.

Here's another example. I just stumbled upon a Web series called The Guild, and saw this clip of Felicia Day talking to a Webcam.

The clip is taken out of context, but she's a funny lady and a master of the Webcam monologue. She's expressive, over-the-top and at the same time, subtle.

These are are well above your typical YouTube videos and I can imagine many others. Have you seen any noteworthy Webcam monologues?

-----

The Felicia Day clip shown above was flagged as possibly infringing on copyright by Google. Rather than take it down, they added ads. Did you see an ad with this post? If so, what was it for? Do you think my including the clip was fair use? Why did I do it? Did I harm Felicia Day? Did I use a substantial portion of the original video?

I wonder if Google or the copyright holder gets the revenue from the ad or they split it. Was the suspected infringement discovered by a Google algorithm or one run by the copyright holder? If Google discovered it, did they ask the copyright holder whether they wanted to take it down or place ads on it?

Is Google turning evil?

Google recently announced that they will be using information from all their applications when ranking search results. (Google lists 35 data sources on their privacy page).

Their corporate motto is "don't be evil." Is Google becoming a bit evil?

When Google started, their page ranking algorithm was based on the number of links to a page. The reasoning was that a page many people linked to was more important than one with few incoming links.

Link count was the first indicator of the importance of a page, but over time, Google, and other search engines, has added ranking signals like the information in your Google profile, your language, location, previous searches, friend's "Plus 1" votes, Gmail messages, calendar entries and more. (The details of the Google search ranking algorithm are a closely guarded secret and it is frequently changed).

Google personalizes search results using these signals. You and I might get different results from the same search terms, and Google will be able to predict whether the "beetle" you are searching for is more likely to be a car or a bug. Privacy advocates are upset because Google uses information from your prior searches, location and language even if you are not logged in. Some also feel this new policy is a unilateral change in Google's terms of service.

Other critics, like Eli Pariser, argue that personalized search narrows our view of the world, creating a "filter bubble."

Google answers these critics in the following video, saying that personalized search results provide more relevant information for users:



Google has also begun promoting their own content in ranking search results. For example, I just did a Google search for Facebook founder "Mark Zuckerberg." The first result was a link to his Google Plus page, which has no posts. That was followed by images of him and a Web post about a fake Mark Zuckerberg. I had to scroll down to the second screen to see a link to his Facebook page. If I search on my own name, I am taken to my Google Plus profile, not my home page on the Web.

Google supporters point out that favoring their own content is reasonable, drawing an analogy to print publications. No one complains that we cannot see articles from the Los Angles Times sports section while reading the New York Times.

But, The Times could not do that even if they wished to, and it is easy to do on the Web. More important, Google has a conflict of interest. Unlike the New York Times, they are in the search business as well as the content business. Google runs the risk of losing brand credibility as a search engine if they start over-ranking their content. They will seem a bit greedy and evil.

And what of the future? Does Google favor YouTube videos over others? Even if they don't today, might they tomorrow?

I don't mind Google personalizing my searches, but they are not serving me well if they rank their information over better information on other sites. Google lets you show or hide personal results with a single click. Maybe they should do the same for "natural" search results in which Google content is not boosted.

Do you think Google has turned evil? Do you want personalized search? Would you want Google to rank their own content the same way they do other's content? If you are not sure, check the first half of this TWIT podcast, in which experts discuss the issue.

You can also see a pretty funny parody showing Hitler reacting to Google's policy changes, but be warned that it is full of profanity and geek in-group references.

A student's evaluation of Stanford's massive, free, online courses

I wrote a couple of blog posts about Stanford's experiment with massive, free online classes when they were announced. The courses are now over, and Ben Rudolph, a Stanford student who took one of them on campus, has written a blog post describing his experience.

The basic format of the class was: watch 5-6 short (~10 minute) videos with interspersed review questions and complete a programming assignment each week.

Rudolph thought the video lectures were excellent, but found the programming exercises and review questions too simple. It seems the programming exercises were simplified so that they could be graded automatically and, while he found that the review questions helped him refresh what he had learned, "they hardly ever asked anything that the lecture didn’t explicitly state."

(This is not surprising, since making up short answer questions that require thinking and deduction is very difficult).

The bottom line is that he considered the course to be easier than other Stanford computer science classes he had taken.

There has been lively discussion of his post on his blog and others. I would particularly recommend that you read Debating the ‘Flipped Classroom’ at Stanford, which includes the reaction of Andrew Y. Ng, the professor who taught the course, to Rudolph's criticism.

Global Voices and The Guardian review the Arab Spring

Global Voices has posted an extensive retrospective of the Arab Spring.

They've pulled together their coverage of the events in the Tunisian and Egyptian revolutions and the protests in Bahrain, Morocco, Syria and Yemen.

The retrospective includes pictures from and overview articles on each country and links to hundreds of chronologically organized posts that appeared on Global Voices during the year.

Global Voices is an international community of over 500 bloggers and translators who report on blogs and citizen media from around the world. Founded at Harvard in 2005, they emphasize content that is not ordinarily seen in international mainstream media.

For another year-end overview of the Arab Spring, check out this interactive timeline from The Gaurdian.

The Internet was an important tool during the Arab Spring, but politically oriented citizen journalism has been with us for many years. Perhaps the first example was the during the 1991 Soviet coup attempt, which was reported in real-time on Usenet. Before the Twitter revolution, there was the Usenet revolution.

Is fair use moot in the Internet era?

Today's New York Times has an excellent article on a case in which the court ruled that artist Richard Prince had broken the law by using photographs from a book about Rastafarians in a collage without permission.

The article (and its enlightening comments) goes well beyond this case. It examines the notion of "fair use" of copyrighted material, in which the result transforms the thing used, adding value to the original and culturally enriching society.

But, cultural enrichment is in the eye of the beholder.

Do you think Stephanie Lenz should pay the musician Prince a royalty because his song "Let's Go Crazy" is playing in the background of this video of her baby?

U.S. Federal District Court Judge Jeremy Fogel answered "no" and the video was restored to YouTube.

That case is pretty blatant -- it did not cost Prince sales and was not intended for the same audience as his recording. But, how about this case -- do you think 2 Live Crew should reimburse Roy Orbison for their sampling of his song "Oh Pretty Woman?"

The Supreme Court decided in favor of 2 Live Crew, ruling that their recording was a parody of Orbison's and was aimed at a different audience.

Regardless of your viewpoint on any of these cases, it is clear that there can be no definition of "fair use" that will satisfy everyone. Indeed, the whole thing may be moot in the Internet era. Do you really expect me to contact the copyright holder and get permission before I use an image I find using Bing or Google to illustrate a blog post?

I cut the cord -- no more cable TV

In this video, Verizon tells us the future of home video will be a wireless LAN connecting our TV sets and other devices to a Verizon FiOS server:



I agree that we will be distributing video around our homes on LANs, but don't expect mine to be connected to a FiOS server. For a start, Verizon does not offer FiOS in my neighborhood and from what I hear and read, they have no plans to do so.

Moreover, if they eventually do offer me FiOS, I suspect that it will be expensive and I will have to purchase a bundle of video "service" -- forcing me to pay for a lot of channels that I will never watch.

But, I don't want video service from Verizon, I just want bits.

I want my home LAN to be connected to the Internet (by Verizon or any other ISP), allowing me to watch ala carte IP video.

I've taken my first step in that direction. I “cut the cord" -- dropping our cable TV service and connecting our TV sets to our home LAN using Roku boxes. We (just barely) get local channels over the air using rabbit-ear antennas.

This set up and the available content is far from perfect, but it is my first step toward unbundled IP video.

Have you cut the cord? How do you like it?

Recommended podcast: Interpreting the Constitution in the digital era

Jeffrey Rosen asks "Can the police, without a warrant, put a secret GPS device on the bottom of someone's car and track him 24/7 for a month?"

If you are interested in legal and moral issues of privacy and autonomy, you will like Terry Gross' interview of George Washington University law professor Jeffrey Rosen, who is co-editor of a new book called Constitution 3.0 Freedom and Technological Change.

In this NPR interview, Rosen says that information technologies are "challenging our Constitutional categories in really dramatic ways" and that "none of the existing amendments give clear answers to the most basic questions we're having today." He discusses both current cases with today's technology and speculates on information and biological technology that may become available in the future and raise even thorniner problems.

The interview is 36 minutes 33 seconds, and you can stream or download it or read the transcript here.

James Fallows -- what happens when six years of Gmail is hacked and deleted?

James Fallows is a national correspondent for the Atlantic Monthly, who, in addition to award winning coverage of national and foreign affairs, has been using and writing about information technology for thirty years. (Check this 1982 article on WordStar and what word processing meant to a journalist).

This month in the Atlantic, Fallows recounts the hacking of his wife's Gmail account and the way Google dealt with it.

Everyone in her address book got one of those "I was mugged while in Madrid, please send money" messages and all of her email was deleted. After the account was restored, Fallows visited Google and interviewed security folks there. Here is one quote from the article:

At Google I asked Byrant Gehring, of Gmail’s consumer-operations team, how often attacks occur. "Probably in the low thousands," he said. "Per month?," I asked. "No, per day."

That should get your attention.

I recommend this article -- it is a harrowing story with some practical tips.

It is also a good introduction to James Fallows. If you have not read him, you should.

Data mining for science and marketing

Researchers at Google and the U. S. Centers for Disease Control discovered a correlation between an index they compiled based on health related search terms and the incidence of flu recorded by the CDC.

Vicks has taken it a step further by sending ads for a safe home thermometer to mothers in high flu regions of the country. The ads offer the thermometer and give the location of nearby stores that carry it.

Is this a spooky invasion of privacy or targeted delivery of relevant information?

Video chat and the family

The New York times has an article on the way video chat is reshaping domestic rituals like holiday parties and birth announcements. (Skype video chat averages 300 million minutes per day).

It can also reshape every day life. My wife is Chilean and chats with siblings or her mother in Santiago every day. Here you see her talking with her sister Anita, Note that they use both iPads and Skype while they are talking.

She and Anita often chat twice a day and it can easily be for more than an hour. I doubt that they would see each other that much if they were both living in Santiago.

When my grandparents came to the US from Europe, they knew they would never see the people they were leaving behind again. Times have changed.

MIT's online classes will be different than Stanford's

MIT will follow Stanford's lead in offering online classes starting in the spring of 2012. They have not yet decided which classes they will pilot, but the courses will be free and open to all.

Stanford University is already offering three free computer science courses online this term. Stanford's classes are synchronized with on-campus sections and use short presentations punctuated by frequent questioning.

Stanford seems to be sticking closer to the traditional classroom structure and pace than MIT. MIT's press release promises self-paced instruction, interactive, online laboratories, and student-to-student communication. They are building an open source platform for their courses, which other schools will be able to use for their own online offerings.

Neither university will give online students credit, but both will offer certification for the successful completion of a class. MIT students will have the option of paying a small fee for assessment and certification, done by an independent organization in order to avoid confusion with MIT itself. Stanford students can do the same assignments and take the same quizzes and exams as regularly enrolled students, and can get a certificate showing how well they did relative to the rest of the students.

Both schools will study and evaluate their online classes, and Stanford, MIT and the rest of us will learn a lot about procedures and delivery platforms for online education.

(The New York Times covered the MIT announcement).

Louis CK goes direct to the consumer on the Internet

Comedian Louis CK is distributing a high quality, DRM-free recording of a recent concert on the Internet.

After four days, he has sold 110,000 copies at $5 each

After deducting production, Web site and transaction costs, he has a profit of around $200,000 (so far). He says that is less than he would have made had a large record company produced the video, but the public is getting more this way:

• They are paying $5, not $20 for a CD.
  
• They can make all the copies they want to.
  
• They can watch it on any device they have access to.
  
• It is not restricted internationally.
  
• The record company does not have their personal information for marketing purposes.
  

There has been some piracy -- you can get it for free using Bit Torrent -- but clearly many people prefer the convenience and karma of a purchase. Louis CK points out that the concert is all new material, which to him is life-and-death intellectual property, and he reserves the right to go back to a record company in the future. I hope he doesn't.

<aside to Louis>
Louis, don't forget that this is only the first four days of sales. You have also gotten a ton of favorable publicity -- I must admit that I had never even heard of you before this and now I am going to buy the video. You also learned a lot about producing concert videos and Internet marketing, so you will have better margins on the next one.
</aside to Louis>

This is a cool example of Internet going around the (fat) middle man. Even if you don't buy the video, you should read Louis CK's insightful, humorous summary of the deal.

Kickstarter -- "wisdom of the crowds" project funding -- like the Altair

Kickstarter is a Web platform for funding projects in music, film, art, technology, design, food, publishing and other creative fields. People post project proposals on the Kickstarter Web site along with a financial goal. The public is invited to pledge financing for the project, and Kickstarter holds the pledges in escrow until the goal is reached.

The funds are only collected if the project meets its financial goal within a set time.

The folks who pledge funds do not get equity in the project, like a venture capitalist would, but they can get perqs like T-shirts or products, depending upon how much they pledge.

For example, I recently wrote a short post on a Kickstarter proposal for the TouchFire keyoard overlay, which claims it will improve touch typing on the iPad. Folks who pledged could either make a small contribution to encourage the idea or pledge more to get a T-shirt or purchase a TouchFire from the first production run.

TouchFire set a fund raising goal of only $10,000, and 3,146 people pledged $201,400 -- twenty times their funding target. (Since it was oversubscribed, the first production run is sold out, but you can place an order for one from the next batch at touchfire.com).

Kickstarter is a cool “wisdom of the crowd” way to raise capital, and the crowd seems to like this idea.

People also like the idea of Kickstarter. As of October 11, over a million people had backed projects, 166,823 of those had backed more than one, and they had pledged over 100 million dollars. To put that in context, the 2011 fiscal year budget for the National Endowment for the Arts is $154 million.

Kickstarter reminids me of the MITS Altair -- the first mass market hobbyist PC. MITS was a near-broke calculator company when they brought out Altair kits, which were featured on the cover of the January 1975 issue of Popular Electronics magazine. MITS financed the kits by asking for payment in full at the time you placed your order. I guess they cashed the checks, bought the parts, stuffed them in baggies and sent them out.

I sent my check and got my kit. There was no Kickstarter process to hold our checks in escrow, we were enthused about the Altair and trusted MITS. Those were different times.

iPad WiFi is poor

My wife just got an iPad – the first tablet in our house.  It was not easy to get it away from her, but last night I managed to take the iPad to bed.  I was expecting an insanely great experience, but my first impression was that network access was slow and flaky.

To test my impression, I compared it to a Dell Precision laptop.  First, I pinged UCLA, a nearby university, 100 times using both the laptop and the iPad.  The average ping time for iPad was 63.7 milliseconds, over twice that of the Dell, and the standard deviation four times as great.  No wonder it seemed flaky.

	Dell	iPad
Minimum	18	22.7
Maximum	120	231.9
Mean	30.2	63.7
Standard deviation	14.9	64.8

Next I tested file transfer times (Mb/s), and the laptop was faster:

	Dell	iPad
Upload	6.29	1.77
Download	1.83	.17

That was no surprise given the variability in ping times. It doesn't look like I'll be making a lot of Skype calls or watching movies in bed.

My bedroom is at the back of the house, so I checked the signal strength. As shown below, it dropped to around -65 db as I walked from the office, where the WiFi access point is located, to the bedroom.



The laptop is not perfect in the bedroom -- it does better when it is near the access point, but its radio is clearly more sensitive than that of the iPad. iPad Wifi is more like that of a netbook than a laptop.

Notes:
I measured iPad ping time using Typhuun System Scope Lite, the transfer rate using Speedtest.net and the signal strength with Metageek Inssider.

A reader pointed out that the results were affected by my pinging UCLA, which introduced Internet and server variability into the test. I repeated the test, pinging a machine within my house and found the following:

Dell: minimum 1, maximum 90, mean 5.96, standard deviation 12.6 with zero dropped packets (1 sec timeout)
iPad: minimum 5.04, maximum 202.02, mean 18.56, standard deviation 32.49 with 8 dropped packets (1 sec timeout)

Not surprisingly, the iPad remains relatively poor.

Is speech recognition finally going to catch on with Siri?

Everyone agrees that some day we will be talking to our computers -- dictating memos, asking questions, giving commands, etc. The catch is that "some day" seems to be always five or ten years in the future.

People have been working on speech recogntion for a long time. My first exposure was a demonstration of Shoebox, a calculator with speech input, at the IBM pavillion at the 1964 World Fair. In spite of years of research and hacking, speech recognition has remained niche technology.

Have we finally seen the start of practical, ubiquitous speech recognition with Apple's Siri? Maybe.

Siri has a lot of infrastructure support that earlier speech recognition systems lacked. It sends the speech back to a server for recognition and that server has assimilated clues from massive amounts of data on speech patterns. Once recognized, it relies on other services for search and to look for answers to questions. If you ask how far it is from Los Angeles to New York, it will go to WolframAlpha for the answer. Ask it where to get Indian food in your neighborhood and it will go to Yelp. (What will Apple do if you ask where to find bomb-making instructions or dirty pictures)?

Google seems to have the recognition part down, but may be playing catch up with input parsing and answer retrieval.

In spite of Apple's secrecy, Siri has attracted a hobbyist following. Check out this video of a hobbyist using Siri to control lights and other things in a room.



The developer of that app had to jump through hoops using SiriProxy to get it to work. Here's hoping Apple provides tools to encourage this sort of thing -- that might be what it takes to finally get speech recognition off the ground.

A "post Gutenberg" e-text for biology 101

In earlier posts, I talked about an electronic text Nature would publish this fall. I suggested that it was a noteworthy departure from the established textbook format and business model -- perhaps the first "post Gutenberg" text.

The etext is out now and being used on some campuses. I've had a chance to play around with it, and remain impressed. Here is what I've seen.

The professor creates a "classroom" like the one shown here. The classroom is personalized with her name and photo and an announcement welcoming the students to the class.

Click to enlarge

The classroom also contains the material she selected to include in the course. The material is organized into units, each of which contains several modules. In this example, she included four modules in the Introduction unit. She could also have included other material like summaries of and links to primary literature, and supporting topics like lab skills or hypothesis formation and data analysis.

Clicking on "textbook" takes us to the etext itself. I put quotes around textbook, because this is not a PDF-like reproduction of a typical textbook. It is not even a "book." It is a collection of 196 modules.

Each module begins with an introduction, listing the topics covered and the skills or learning objectives it teaches and concludes with a summary, which refers back to the topics and skills. Modules also have associated multiple choice quizzes. That is pretty standard textbook fare, but the teaching "pages" covering the material are not.

I've put the word page in quotes because these are not what we think of as pages. For a start, they vary in length and are significantly longer than typical book pages. Lets look at a sample page.

The page I picked is 17 screens long on my laptop. In addition to text, it contains 13 figures, a table and six test your knowledge questions. (The page I picked did not include any animations or videos, but others do).

As shown here, the figures are like those found in Scientific American Magazine -- high quality images with relatively long captions so they can stand on their own. (Nature and Scientific American are both MacMillan Publising companies).

The page I selected contained six open-ended knowledge test questions. After reading the question, the student submits then a suggested answer is displayed. This example shows a question, my answer and the suggested answer. These are not graded or reported to the professor -- they are food for thought.

The pages also include links to supplementary material like essays on the importance of this particular topic and primary references in a narrow, right hand column. The essays on the importance of a topic are written by practicing scientists and are comparable in format and quality to the text pages. The primary references include both summaries and links to the journal articles, and there are roughly 100 all together.

Modules also include multiple choice quizzes. The first time a student takes a quiz, the results are reported to the professor, but they can re-take the quiz as often as they wish. The professor has tools to analyze the quiz data, for example comparing the scores of a particular student to the class as a whole and, most interestingly, to other classes around the world which use this text. My guess is that we will see more analytic tools in the future -- perhaps one day giving very specific feedback to students.

As you see at the top of the screenshot, the classroom also contains links to a threaded discussion, grade book, and teaching resources, which include PowerPoint slides for all of the figures, a list of all the primary sources, and 2,000 test questions.

We have been talking about the professor's view of the classroom. The student view is somewhat different. They have access to flash cards and cheat sheets for each module. They can take notes while they study, and aggregate those annotations into a single study guide for the module. They can also hide or display their notes while reading.

The professor can see a student's annotations, but, at this time, there is no ability for students to share them among themselves. Students expect social networking these days, so my guess is that Nature will probably build support for study groups and sharing notes in future etexts.

The modular structure and content of this etext is different than a traditional etext and so is Nature's business model. Traditional textbooks are written by one or a small group of authors who write the entire book and receive royalties. By contrast, Nature has contracted with teachers and scientists to write specific modules and supplementary essays for a fee.

The payment model is also different. Traditional textbook publishers bring out new every two or three years to create demand for new books instead of used or rented books. Alternatively, they offer access to an electronic version for a limited time.

Nature has a different model. The student pays $49, which includes lifetime access to the material. Nature is committed to making continuous updates as the science and pedagogy change. The student gets a subscription, not a book. The $49 price is less than that of a typical print or electronic textbook, but every student in a class must subscribe. It seems to me that this would be attractive to the general public as well as enrolled students.

I don't know Nature's costs and revenues, but, since fewer than half of the students taking a class today purchase a new book, this subscription model might be more profitable than selling books. If this model catches on, it will hurt the used book, college book store and book rental (hard copy or electronic) businesses.

The reader does not have to download and install a program to use the book. The book is published in HTML and CSS, so it can be used with any modern Web browser. The server automatically detects the size and resolution of a user's display and delivers appropriate content. That allows students to use laptops, desktops, tablets, etc., but imposes extra cost on Nature -- they have to prepare around twenty different versions of each piece of art.

Gutenberg would not recognize today's books. About fifty years after Gutenberg, Aldus made signficant changes in typography, book size and production and the publishing business model. But Aldus would not recognize today's books either. Things like paragraphs, punctuation characters, chapters, indices, and tables of contents would seem to be radical innovations.

Nature has gone beyond the traditional ebook with this text, but, as with Aldus, I think this is just the first step.

Recommended podcast: State for Sale

I just listened to a Terry Gross interview of Jane Mayer on her New Yorker article "State for Sale," in which she describes project Red Map, which has the goal of winning control of state legislatures by conservative Republicans. Mayer's article and the interview focus on one state, North Carolina, because it is an important swing state and provides an example of Red Map in action.

She reports that foundations controlled by Art Pope, a discount-store multimillionaire, have spent $35 million pushing a far-right political agenda in North Carolina during the last decade. In 2010, they spent $2.2 million on state legislature elections, defeating 18 of 22 targeted democrats. Republicans now control both both North Carolina legislative houses for the first time since 1870.

There is a lot more in the podcast. For example, Mayer discusses the collaboration between Pope and the Koch brothers, backers of the Tea Party movement, the impact of the Citizens United Supreme Court ruling on large, tax-decutible political contributions, and the critical role of state legislatures in Congressional re-districting.

The interview reminded me of an earlier post on James Allworth's Harvard Business Review post suggesting that we may have to choose choose between democracy and captialism and a quote by Supreme Court Judge Louis Brandeis, who stated that "We may have democracy, or we may have wealth concentrated in the hands of a few, but we can't have both."

It is also noteworthy that Creative Commons founder Larry Lessig, who has shifted his interest from Internet copyright reform to campaign finance reform, offers an antidote to concentrated political influence in his new book, Republic, Lost: How Money Corrupts Congress -- and a Plan to Stop It, which is reviewed here.

I feel a little guilty about recommending an explicitly political podcast, but there is a connection between Red Map and the anti-competitive political efforts by large Internet service providers. For example, I doubt that new North Carolina legislature will be supportive of efforts at municipal ownership of local backbones.

Irony: Perhaps the Chinese can bring competition to the US wireless market

The US Congress tried unsuccessfully to introduce competition into our telecommunication industry with the passage of the 1996 Telecommunication Act. Congress and the FCC were no match for the incumbent telephone companies with their lobbyists and legal staffs, and their efforts were defeated.

Might the Chinese have a better chance than the US Congress and FCC?

China Telecom intends to enter the US market as a "virtual" mobile network operator. They will partner with a US carrier and plan to sell handsets and services to Chinese Americans and to students and tourists who travel regularly between the US and China.

Donald Tan, president of China Telecom Americas, said they may even consider building or buying their own wireless network in the US -- "If the service is growing fast, maybe we can set up our own infrastructure. The money is no big problem for us."

Of course bastions of capitalism like AT&T and Verizon will do their best to stop Chinese competition. This was foreshadowed last month, when the US Department of Commerce excluded Huawei from bidding on a national emergency network project.

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.