Developing and deploying applications on the Internet is getting easier

There have been several major changes in the way we develop and deliver IT applications. We began with batch processing in the 1950s and progressed to time sharing, personal computers and now the Internet.  With each new platform, application development has become easier.

To develop an application in the days of batch processing, you had to be a nerd -- a professional programmer.  We used to keypunch assembly language programs then hand the card decks to operators who fed them to the computer in batches.  It typically took a couple of hours to get your results back.  Timesharing shortened the turnaround time, but professional programmers were still needed, and applications took months or years to build.

The personal computer enabled users to develop applications like newsletters, simple accounting systems, small databases and so forth using productivity software.  Today one can develop a complex application like a blog, database, wiki or social network on the Internet with little effort.

But, what if you want to run your own applications on your own server? That is also getting easier and cheaper.

In the early days, you needed a computer to run the service and a connection to the Internet.  It might have been a personal computer in your bedroom or on a shelf in a server room.

If the load grew, you could afford denser server blades in racks, but you were still responsible for maintenance and connectivity.

You could take care of the connectivity by moving your server into a data center, but it was still your server.

As personal computer power increased, we were able to borrow a page out of the mainframe book and partition a single physical server into several virtual servers.  Then Amazon and others took it one step further -- taking care of scaling and connectivity by offering virtual servers in their data centers, but it still took a nerd to configure and manage them.

Today, companies like Bitnami are raising the abstraction level and lowering the nerd bar, making it possible to deploy a server with installed applications in just a few minutes.

To demonstrate the ease of deploying applications, I created a virtual machine on the Amazon cloud and installed Web, wiki and blog servers.  You can visit the server and check the three applications here.  Go there and you will see three fully operational applications.

I am not a system administrator or network engineer, but I was able to create the virtual server in the Amazon cloud and install and deploy the three applications in about ten minutes using Bitnami. (You can see the step-by-step installation here).

Bitnami and others like it are raising the abstraction level. Soon we may be able to describe a virtual machine – its speed, memory and storage – and deploy it and its applications using a form like the one shown here.

In addition to specifying the server and its applications, this hypothetical form allows one to select cloud vendors.  Today, Bitnami is tied to Amazon’s cloud, but one can easily imagine them offering a choice of cloud vendors.

If we were to dynamically allocate the resources needed to run an application -- changing them automatically when some performance thresholds was crossed -- one could just pick a vendor, select the applications to deploy and click submit.

When that happens, your grandmother can be her own system administrator.

The online education market is global

There has been a lot of talk about and investment in open online classes from elite US universities like MIT, Harvard and Stanford, but let's not lose sight of the fact that online education is a global market -- on both the supply and demand sides.

Excellent universities in other nations than the US are offering classes, certificates and degrees online. There are Big Names like the Inidan Institutes of Technology, Cambridge, and Oxford and not-so-big names like the University of Namibia. Universities big and small in every language group are thinking about distance education today -- we can look forward to a lot of competition and choice.

The student population is also global. Stanford's AI course had students from 190 countries.  The class was also free, and the most exciting promise of open online education is that it can reach the disenfranchised.

One is reminded of the story of the young mathematician Srinivasa Ramanujan rising to fame after writing Professor G.H. Hardy at Cambridge from his village in Southern India. (His first two letters to Hardy are said to have been returned unopened). Tomorrow's Ramanujan will have a much easier time getting the attention of his tutors. How many Ramanujans will we find enrolled online and what will be their contribution to humanity?

I can't leave this post without pointing out the irony that Springer publishes a math journal named after Ramanujan. The print version of Ramanujan is $719 per year plus $67.50 shipping and handling and the electronic version is $590. Ramanujan could not have afforded it -- but the disruption of academic publishing is a different post.

Google goes beyond text search with their Knowledge Graph

Soon after he created the World Wide Web, Tim Berners Lee turned his attention to the semantic Web -- a Web of data rather than documents. Google is now rolling out their first step in that direction, the Knowledge Graph.

Google's 2010 purchase of Freebase and Metaweb, the system used to create it, was a key step toward Knowledge Graph. Freebase is a semantic database, which knows the attributes of entities and the relationships between them. For example, Freebase knows that Larry Press is a person and the value of his city of birth attribute is Pasadena, California (not Pasadena Texas).

Google started with the Freebase concept and added data to create the Knowledge Graph database, which now contains 500 million entities with 3.5 billion attributes and connections.

Let's look at an example. I started with a vanity search for myself, and the following profile was displayed on the right hand side of the screen:

Note that it did not know the value of any of my attributes, it just returned a link to my Google Plus profile and the first few sentences of my most recent posts. I guess I am not one of the 500 million entities included in Google's Knowledge Graph.

Next I searched for George Washington, who is a bit better known than me, and is included among Google's 500 million entities.

In this case, it knows his nicknames, date of birth, etc. Since he is not just a person, but a president, he also has a vice president attribute.  It also knows that he died at Mount Vernon, which is another entity that is included in Google's Knowledge Graph:

While the Knowledge Graph was developed using the Freebase tools, Google did not import the user-contributed Freebase data. (I am in Freebase, but not in the Knowledge Graph). That says Google is abandoning the Wikipedia-like openess of Freebase, in which users could add entities and change the values of their attributes, for a database that is currated in house. That will limit its growth and its "Internetness."

This is an interesting announcement, but Google is not the only player in the Web of data game.

Apple has attracted a lot of attention with Siri, a speech-driven application that answers questions by querying Wolframalpha, another semantic database system. Knowledge Graph gives Google an answer to Siri and Wolframalpha. (Wolframalpha goes further, incorporating a powerful symbolic math engine).

Microsoft is also working on the semanticly rich Web of data. They characterize Bing as an "answer engine" rather than a "search engine," and Microsoft Research has a Semantic Computing Intitative. Microsoft will no doubt incorporate their work into Bing.

The Web is getting smarter -- we may move from today's Web of documents to a Web of data and eventually a Web of knowledge (an ill-defined wannabe buzz word I've heard).  It makes you wonder what it will be like in fifty years.

John Boyer's massive face-to-face class at Virginia Tech

There has been a lot of talk about massive, open, online classes (MOOCs) like those taught at Stanford earlier this year.  But what about massive face-face classes?

Last year I saw John Boyer give a presentation on his 2,670 student, face-to-face World Regions geography class at Virginia Tech.

Boyer teaching his class

The class typically had 50-70 students when Boyer began teaching it in 1998. As the word got out, enrollment grew and the class moved from a classroom to a lecture hall to a large auditorium.

The weekly class meets for four hours, with a one hour dinner break. He has students interact with each other during the class, and also conducts Skype interviews on stage. His most famous interview was with Myanmar's Aung San Suu Kyi.

He and his class invited her to do the interview in a short (1:36) video clip. Check it out and you will see his trademark plaid jacket and get a feel for his style. You will also see nearly 3,000 cheering students.

Aung San Suu Kyi interview

She accepted their invitation and you can see the interview (33:37) in which students ask questions below. Be sure to watch the last couple of minutes.

As you see, Boyer is a flamboyant teacher who takes plenty of risks and they seem to pay off.

He holds his office hours online and the class uses the hashtag #wrvt. For his office hours, textbook, weekly news and more, go to his Web site.

Boyer concluded the presentation I attended with a few of the things he has learned teaching this large class:

• A class this large needs less structure, not more. For example, he provides a menu of activities and allows students to select what they will do to accumulate points toward a grade.
• A class this large cannot work unless students communicate with and help other students.
• The teacher knows a lot about the topic, but the students collectively know a lot he does not know. (Michal Wesch, who teaches anthropology says the same thing).

Office hours

I did not get around to writing this post when I saw Boyer last year, but was reminded of him by an article in the Chronicle of Higher Education today. Check it out and see his student's comments here.

Finally, I saw Boyer's presentation at the Campus Technology Forum.  I've been to three of them, and they were all excellent learning experiences.

Requiem for the textbook

At first, new media mimic old media. Early movies were made by filming stage plays with a stationary camera. We still see a few movies based on stage plays, but they are uncommon today.
Early television shows often had performers acting in play-like sets or standing on a stage reminiscent of vaudeville.
Books followed a similar pattern. Johannes Gutenberg’s 1455 bible was the first book printed using movable metal type. The Gutenberg Bible resembled the hand written manuscripts on which it was based. It did not have punctuation or paragraphs, the pages were around 12 by 17.5 inches and its illustrations were added for beauty and feeling, not clarification. It was like the hand copied books that preceded it -- a religious book suitable for contemplative reading in a library. Gutenberg’s breakthrough was in production, not format or content.
Fifty years after Gutenberg, Aldus improved production by printing eight pages on a single sheet. This led to smaller, portable books that could be carried or placed in a saddle bag. Aldus also introduced punctuation like the commas, periods and semicolons shown here, and italic type, which fit more letters on a page. But, like Gutenberg, Aldus would be surprised by the variety of punctuation and typography in today’s textbooks as well as innovations like chapters, callouts, indices, tables, diagrams, tables of contents and images with captions.
Textbooks today are at the “Gutenberg bible” stage. Textbook publishers have digitized their books, making them available online in various formats. Many maintain the notion of a book-sized page and often preserve the page numbering of the print version. These e-books look better than PDF documents, but they are constrained by the previous format. Like Aldus, they have gone somewhat beyond their predecessor, but remain tied to the notion that the course is contained in a book of pages.
Many universities are offering online classes, but these also emulate the past. They typically offer the "same" course online as they teach in the classroom. They may record lectures, use digital textbooks, and substitute threaded discussion for in-class discussion and administer assignments and tests using a course management system, but the course and teaching material are not radically changed.
There is a lot of institutional inertia. Textbook publishers want to stay with their old, profitable business models. Faculty are used to adopting a single textbook with ancillary material like PowerPoint slides and test banks. Adopting the same textbook year after year is expedient. They have investments in familiarity with a given textbook, prepared lectures, course outlines, and so forth.  School administrators are also slow to change. For example, little or no consideration is given to time spent developing new teaching materials during faculty evaluation.
We don't know the future of teaching and teaching material, but it won't center on digital textbooks, learning management systems and recorded lectures. We will have things like modular teaching material, peer teaching, open source and subscription models rather than book purchases, very large classes and things yet to be dreamed up. Teaching material will be fine grained and narrowly focused on a specific concept or skill and will be used by faculty, students and self-learners.
Change will come faster than in Gutenberg's time or the era of movies and television. The cost of experimentation is greatly reduced in the Internet era, and as we see here, there is an attractive economic incentive. The textbook industry is an oligopoly and textbook prices have risen faster than inflation for many years.
Faculty members at every university are creating and experimenting with new teaching materials. There are many non-profit and publicly-funded experiments in creating and curating teaching and leaning material. And, as we see here, the private sector has noticed the opportunity provided by the price gap shown above.
The Internet has disrupted many industries and organizations. Will the university be next? For example, what would happen if massive classes with hundreds of thousands of students turn out to be good alternatives for, say, half of the undergraduate curriculum? Which will look better on your resume – a certificate of completion from Stanford or MIT or a bachelors degree from California State University, Dominguez Hills?  Will schools that focus on teaching survive?  Will universities be able to fund research?  Will a better educated work force improve the overall economy?
For more information, see this teaching module.

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Update 7/3/2013

The first shoe drops as Cengage files for Chapter 11 protection That is what happens when you mix the greed of a private equity fund with falling market demand for print textbooks.

Some faculty will have to revise their courses (shudder) if they drop unprofitable print textbooks.

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Update 8/18/2013

Google has joined Amazon in selling electronic text books.

For more on the decline of the textbook, click here.

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Update 8/30/2014

The Economist reports that US textbook prices have risen much faster than general consumer prices. (ITextbook prices increased over fifteenfold since 1970, three times the rate of inflation).

Prices increase because the students who purchase the books are not the customers of the textbook publishers -- textbooks are sold to professors who adopt them for their classes. Professors are very busy (and some are lazy) so they like textbook packages which include PowerPoint slides, ancillary material, test banks, etc. It's also easiest for them to teach using a new edition of last year's textbook.

Textbooks are still with us, but these price increases cannot be sustained.

The Public Interest Research Group reports that 65% of college students have opted not to purchase the textbook for a class and 94% of them think it has hurt them academically. (That makes me wonder about the 6% who feel fine without the textbook).

Students have alternatives to the purchase of print textbooks -- e-textbooks, open educational resources, library reserve copies, textbook rentals and, most important, a variety of online courses and materials.

The print textbook market is beginning to crack.

Google is ready to roll out fiber in Kansas City

A while ago, Google invited cities to apply for subsidized installation of fiber infrastructure, and Kansas City was selected.

They have now completed detailed engineering plans and are ready to begin installing fiber in Kansas City.

There are many models for fiber infrastructure ownership -- a mix of private companies, government agencies, home and building owners, etc. For example, the ownership of a portion of the infrastructure by Swedish government agencies has enabled them (and others) to surpass US Internet service.

Here's to the Google experiment and what we may learn from it!

(This fell through the cracks and was not posted at the time I wrote it -- better late than never).

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?

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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.