LibraryLink

No More Nooks, Sorry Christmas Shoppers.

Administrator — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 22:28:13 +0000

Barnes and Noble booksellers launched their e-reader not long ago. The company had tagged it as the Nook, I guess for New Book, or something. Nook sounds suspiciously like “nuke” to me, but what do I know and they didn’t ask me. Anyway, B&N was surprised (”hey, these things are moving”), pleased (”Oh good, we won’t get stuck with unsold units!”) and dismayed (”Oh God, we don’t have enough”), all in short order, to find out that their inital order for the gadgets was way too small. People were snapping them up like Billy-Be-Damned. And now, the whole first shipment of Nooks is gone, all sold out. This is really not bad for a first-generation gadget launch, so B&N has a little room to be pleased. But, I guess they didn’t understand how quickly the scene had changed. Amazon’s Kindle really broke the ice on the reader front, introducing some very swift motion after a long period of stasis. So, B&N under-ordered and now they have a bunch of ticked off customers who will either wait for their Nook, or go to the Kindle. I think SONY is having some of the same problems with its Reader device.

Despite the general satisfaction, all the makers and sellers of e-readers are tugging their collars nervously in anticipation of the 800 lb gorilla’s advent. And that is, the much vaunted and feared Apple E tablet. Nobody knows for sure if Apple really is working on something like this. And nobody knows what kind of a thing it will turn out to be, if they are. But, the general expectation is that the company which brought you the Ipod, the Iphone and the changes that came with these products, will not pass up a chance to go for the hat trick and launch a large-format reader cum other stuff device that will be a significant jump in capacity and function. Some support was given to the speculation by the news that Apple had commissioned Conde-Nast publishers, owners of some big glossy print mags, to prepare a digital version of WIRED magazine. So, we shall see what we shall see. But,
“Christmas is coming and the goose is getting fat”, so if Apple doesn’t launch soon, they’ll miss the holiday season entirely. On the other hand, so? We’ll keep you posted.

CHROME plating.

Administrator — Fri, 20 Nov 2009 21:56:32 +0000

Google gave some industry observers the first for-real look at its new operating system, called CHROME. The new software has been designed to make intensive use of internet capabilities, and devices running CHROME will not even have hard drives. Users will not have to worry about upgrading or installing software any more, ever. All data will be stored in the Cloud, etc, etc. Actual equipment running CHROME won’t appear for several months yet. Of course, the Cloud is just more Newspeak, in which either a neologism of some sort is introduced, to describe a concept so utterly mind-smashing that mere human speech cannot possible cover it, or in which some common, everyday word is given a ten-buck makeover and invested with all kinds of pseudo-mysterious attributes. And the latter is the case with Cloud. In essence, it seems to me, that CHROME allows you to go back to the 1970s or so, in which dumb terminals worked from a central, smart processing unit, on which was stored the OS and where all partial results were parked. The Clound, my foot!
CHROME
More CHROME

DAILY NEWS Backs Print.

Administrator — Wed, 18 Nov 2009 17:56:53 +0000

Everybody, almost, has been predicting the end of the newspaper, and surely the end of the printed newspaper any day now. Well, if that’s true, you can tell it to the guys who run the New York Daily News. This tabloid’s managers have recently sunk a great deal of money into the installation of new, fancy, improved, more economical and energy efficient….presses! You know, those big things you see in movies, which print the paper on paper, collate it, cut it, fold it, stack it, bind it and all the rest. It’s definitely a contrarian move, but the News says it was a smart one too. The owners obviously expect the rag to be around for a while, and, as one of them said, “we didn’t do this to lose money”. The nice, new shiny machines are the very latest thing in printing devices, and will save the paper plenty on operating costs and paper. But the biggest departure is in quality. Color images can be printed on every page, something no other paper can do, and advertisers really like that, because it makes their ads loolk a great deal better. In fact, the whole paper looks very good, slick even, which is something nobody said about the old format, and that may well attract new readers. Of course, the downturn has hurt the circulation (it dropped by almost 200,000) and ad revenue, but the News’s bet is that the $150 million investment will pay off. The new equipment can also print other newpapers as well as the News, offering another source of revenue. The previous equipment was installed in the 1950s. Cheez Louise! I was still in high school.

Books In Which Scientists Do Stuff.

Administrator — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 19:28:51 +0000

The holidays are coming and, depending on your plans and circumstances, that could mean having some extra time, at the airport for example, when your flight has been delayed or canceled. So, why not plan ahead, and get something to read, something in which scientists do scientist stuff, but in novels. Dr. Jennifer Rohn of the LabLit fliter blog, and herself a published novelist, has a list of books in which scientists of some sort are main characters and scientific doings are in some way important to the story. There are mysteries, thrillers, disaster books, spy stories, historical re-creations (Turbulence, for example is a novel about the attempts to forecast the weather before the Normandy landings in 1944), humor…yes, humor. The list is a continuing project, so if you know of a good book in which scientists are involved that’s not on the list, nominate it for inclusion.
List

Happy Birthday August Ferdinand!

Administrator — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:50:32 +0000

Moebius! Yes, he of the strip, was born on this day in 1790. In addition to the one edged, one-sided figure which bears his moniker, AFM made a number of other contributions to Math, and was the director of an observatory for a while. Maybe somebody came up with the strip before Moebius, but he got the credit and the ink.
Click on the link in the last line and read for yourself.

Strip

Google Offers New Version Of The Deal.

Administrator — Tue, 17 Nov 2009 16:36:33 +0000

The parties in the suit over Google’s digitization project have offered a new version of the settlement to the judge presiding over the case. It is intended to meet objections raised by the Dept. of Justice and by other groups, claiming that the previous draft of the agreement gave Google way, way too much clout. So, the judge ordered everyone to get back to work and come up with something better. The new draft will doubtless by parsed in excruciating detail by all those involved and by interested outsiders, so it looks as though we will have to keep an eye on this for a while. There is general agreement about the benefits to be expected from the availability of millions of books online, but that’s about where the agreement stops. Everybody is leery of Google, and the DOJ, after years of indifference, is watching very closely. Reports I’ve seen so far are a bit sketchy, but some things emerged: books from non-English speaking nations are excluded, more attention is paid to the problem of “orphan” works, etc. But, more substantial account will be coming out soon. In the meantime, read this summary from WIRED:

Deal2

Concurring Opinions is a blog for law profs, and I look in on it from time to time to see what’s going on there in terms of copyright, patent, IP and similar considerations. A recent post has a discussion of the revised Google book deal, with an embedded link to another story on CNET.
Concur

Another Book on Google.

Administrator — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:41:45 +0000

The G has been the subject of several books, written from different slants. Another entry has appeared: Googled: The End of the World as We Know It. By Ken Auletta. Penguin Press; 384 pages; $27.95. Auletta is a seasoned reporter who has written about Wall St., the Media Biz and other business topics. I’ve haven’t read everything of his, but what I did read impressed me. The new work concentrates on the complex interplay of Google and the big media companies, how this dance will play out and what it means for users everywhere. Even analytical profiles merged with a little prediction have to get into personalities, so there are some “profiles” of the Google founders, and some discussion of how they work and of how it is to work with them. It was reviewed favorably in The Economist
Book

Does The Electronic Medical Record Make A Dif?

Administrator — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 17:04:05 +0000

Not so far, anyway. In the future, maybe, but at the moment, it’s hard to say. This is a little bit disappointing to those circles that were hoping for big cost savings through the implementation of EMR systems. But, Administration potentates counter that not enough places have come online as of now, and that the true savings won’t appear for some time, maybe, for another five years or so. This rains on the Obama reform parade, a little, since encouraging the introduction of EMR methods in one of the big goals the Administration has set for itself, in the conviction that a lot of money spent on duplication, errors, missing data, etc. could be saved, and all add up to a big hit on the health care outlay of the nation. Right now, the only places with EMR systems in place, that also have been thorougly studied are big systems such as Kaiser Permanente or Cleveland Clinic, and these are atypical. We would all like it to be the case that great savings can be realized through implementing the correct technology, but Jiminny Cricket to the contrary notwithstanding, wishing does not make it so.

EMR

Safety in the Cloud.

Administrator — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:48:20 +0000

Cloud computing is among the latest buzz-terms being tossed about. It’s come up before in these lines, with some lip-pursing and wincing on my part about another goofy Internet metaphor. CC simply means that you are using remote systems to manipulate and store your work, rather than having capable software on your machine proper. There are some pluses and many,many minuses, at least as far as I’m concerned. Among these are the loss of “control”, (OK, I have control “issues”) and security. How can you know that your whiz bang idea is not being poached by some clever dude who would rather use somebody else’s stuff rather than come up with his own? There has been a fair amount of beard-tugging about this, and among the beards being tugged is that of one Whitfield Duffie. You kids may not know the name, but us old-timers will recognize Duffie as one of the pioneers in the “public key” cryptography movement of the Seventies. Users would have two keys to use in encrypting and decrypting messages: one known only to them and another “public” one readily available to anybody. A message could be encoded with the public key, but decoded only with the private one. That’s about as far as I can take you, sorry. So, WD has been pondering cyber security matters for a while now, and his views are worth hearing. My view, for what it’s worth, is that we should be careful with this whole cloud thing, and I’ve said as much before.
Cloud

How To Fix Email.

Administrator — Mon, 16 Nov 2009 16:30:37 +0000

It.s a blessing and a curse. It makes a number of things easier to do and can really save time that otherwise would have to be spent in phone-tag, memos and face-to-face sessions that shouldn’t be taken up with routine matters. It’s also a colossal pain in the kiester. We’re talking about email of course, the original “killer app” for the Internet. Organizations may deplore it and employees of the same may despise it, but it’s here to stay, so some people are looking at ways to make it all more useful. Technology Review has a good story on some experimental efforts to get email to behave, and it’s certainly worth a read. One idea is to let the software do a certain amount of categorizing, based on topic or persons involved, so that the incoming items could be grouped thematically, so to say, rather than handled serially. It would all have to be done without user interaction, otherwise you’re just giving the user another thing to do, which is really not the point. All early days yet, but some big players are involved.
Email