Consilience

I actually find these types of blog posts useful. I tell you I’m going to be a certain city for a while and would love meeting up with interested folks and if you’re in that city you come hang out. It’s great! :)

Leave a comment if you want to meet up and you don’t have my contact info.

May 29th – June 3rd
Minneapolis, MN – OPEN4Us Kick Off Conference

• I’ll be busy until Friday with the conference, but that day looks like a good one for a get together.

June 3rd – 5th
Washington, DC – Content in Context – Metadata Lab

• This one is a bit tighter, schedule wise. But doable.

June 24th – 27th
San Diego, CA – ISTE 2012

• My first time in San Diego. Where should I go?

July 11th – 15th
Washington, DC – STATS-DC and Wikimania

• Hopefully see a lot of you at Wikimania!

If you want to be updated on my travel via Tripit, I do have a profile.

Trust is a very complicated human condition. We trust millions of people every day to a certain extent (other drivers on the road not to hit us, other cyclists the same, the people who designed the bicycle, the people who built it, the people who grew our food, etc etc) but at the same time we also vehemently distrust everyone. We feel it is OK to trust a corporation to build us a safe product to give to our 5 month old children, but at the same time don’t trust other people around us to take turns or not steal our money.

One great example of this condition can be found in Chicago at a great hot dog joint called Hot Doug’s. Hot Doug’s is a gourmet hot dog joint that sells your typical chicago hot dog for around $3. But next to that, and the hot dogs that most people get, are special. Like the one I got this past Friday; Smoked Yak Sausage with Roasted Garlic Dijonnaise and Horseradish Havarti Cheese (see the specials). I’m normally a vegetarian; but knowing that yaks aren’t terribly domesticable, and that I wouldn’t have this opportunity very often, I went for it.

But the point of this is not the yak sausage. The point is that this is an extremely popular place.

That’s the line. It stretched out the door and half way down the block.

Now, at most any restaurant like this seating would be a pain. You go order and try to scout out a place to seat, hovering over those people you think are closest to leave all the while making them feel uncomfortable. Or, you send a friend up ahead, remembering what they want so you can order it for them, so they can go do the same hoping they’ll find a table by the time you order.

But at Hot Doug’s they have a simple request:

Please do not sit at the table until you have placed your order.
This assures that everyone will have a place to sit when their food is ready.
Trust us, it works.

And guess what. It works. Flawlessly. When you’re done ordering your hot dog and duck fat fries there are at least 2 tables open for your and your 4 friends. You can calmly walk over to one and sit down and enjoy your yak or wild boar hot dog.

Why do we, as a culture, not remember that we are here together? And if we just took our turn it would all turn out alright? It seems to me that when we add in unneeded competition we all lose.

How about instead we decide to work together. Maybe then we’ll accomplish more and things wouldn’t be as crazy all the time. We see that from many examples of different cultures that are not as competitive as ours. They seem to be telling us that it is better when we’re not as cut-throat.

They seem to be telling us, “Trust us, it works.”

Tonight we had a fairly sad conversation with a couple of our house mates (actually, a couple). It started off with them saying they were going to move out. We pretty much saw it coming, and it is probably the best thing to do (it is the way my partner and I were leaning as well), but it is never a fun conversation to have (“we just aren’t getting along” basically).

But, within minutes of the conversation starting my 5 month old son, Rowan, changed his attitude completely. This boy is usually one of the most active and demanding kids I’ve seen. He’ll be fine with a toy for about 3 minutes then need a change, NOW. Basically, there is no way we could practice any other parenting style than Attachment Parenting (unless we could deal with listening to a constantly crying baby, which we can’t).

But after they said they were moving out, Rowan just sat there and stared at them. He likes them. They hold him and play with him. He bonded with them. But he just stared. We talked for a little longer and I noticed him starting to have the saddest pouting face I have ever seen on him. It turned in to full fledged crying and tears of sadness.

This was not a “I’m just a fussy baby” thing. This was Rowan realizing something sad was happening to people he loved. And he wasn’t happy about it. He wasn’t happy at all.

The whole situation is hard enough, but adding on top of it the fact that my 5 month old son is sad about it too really makes it tough.

Babies know things. They feel it. He felt that tension. He didn’t like it. He knew more than that, too, because he wasn’t looking at his mom or dad, he was looking at the couple that was leaving.

Babies know more than we give them credit for. Rowan knows more than I can imagine right now.

I recently had the chance to hear a proposal on how we could increase the production of quality open access monographs (not scholarly articles, but monographs).

The method proposed can be summarized fairly easily:

1. An author pitches a book to a publisher.
2. The publisher and author work on it, as they do.
3. The publisher submits the work to an Open Access Monograph Clearinghouse (OAMC).
4. The OAMC then sends the list and descriptions of all submitted monographs that month/quarter/whatever to a group of institutions (libraries, universities, etc) that select books they want to fund.
5. The funding level is set by the publisher depending on, presumably, their fixed costs and a margin for profit.
6. If a sufficient number of institutions agree to fund a work, it is funded and made available as open access online under a CC:BY-NC license (the publisher reserving the commercial rights).

The benefits are pretty straight forward, as well:

• The publisher gets their fixed costs covered (eliminating most risk) for these monographs.
• The publisher then can provide add-on services (value add) on top of the underlying work and make (more) profit.
• The institutions (and the public) get a lot of (presumably quality) open access monographs.

Now, I have some issues with this model.

Luckily, Mike Masnick of Techdirt wrote recently about part of my issue with this model: “Nobody Cares About The Fixed Costs Of Your Book, Movie, Whatever”

His relevant points are:

If you did pricing based on the average cost, including fixed costs, you actually lose the incentive to be more efficient and lower your fixed costs, since you get to just bake them into the price. But the public doesn’t care about how much you spent. As far as they’re concerned, you may have spent stupidly and inefficiently. They only care about the marginal benefit they get from the copy.

In many ways this is reminiscent of the stupid debate we’ve had for years, where a lobbyist from NBC Universal kept challenging me to explain how he could keep making $200 million movies. But that’s stupid. If you start from the assumption of a high cost, you’re not building value, you’re just spending budget. All we should care about is how people can make profitable offerings, and there are lots of ways to do that at a variety of price points — but you should never set the pricing decisions on the fixed costs, because the buyer simply doesn’t care.

My additional points:

Let’s not forget about the “stakeholder-ness” of those who invest by covering the fixed costs. I argue that if we want to maximize social welfare (which, I assume, we do), those who invest by covering fixed/up-front costs should either:

• receive sufficient rights that they are all equals (equal with the service provider, aka publisher, that produced the book) and thus are able to compete against each other (all of the investors) for commercial gains in the value add (supplemental material) markets.
• the work itself should be shard with the world such that everyone can compete on the value add markets as the costs of the original are already fully recouped.

Having the service provide (publisher) be the only entity that has the ability to commercialize the base (paid for) work needlessly restricts future investment by the public.

“Why would they invest in the value add markets if they don’t have a monopoly on them?” you may ask.

They would hold a monopoly on any value add features (eg: audiobook, videos, supplemental material, etc, etc) of course. And that is where they should compete, on the additions.

This is the same argument that many make regarding publicly funded research (see: [1], [2], [3]. It is normally argued that those works should be available under the terms of (at most) CC:BY. This model maximizes public welfare two ways: the public get free access to the base works and everyone, including commercial publishers, are able to compete in the value add market.

… if I had more time this week.

1. A new #bikelockfailblog post of a bike at the Glen Park Festival where the u-lock went around the fork. I failed to take a picture of it (forgot camera, and was too far away [looking down from parking lot] for my crap camera on my phone).

2. A discussion of money in politics, specifically political ads and Super PACs. Luckily, there is a campaign going on here in CA to get all political ads to disclose their top 3 funding sources at the end of the ad in a sort of video bumper. I support this, enough so to sign a petition while at the aforementioned festival.

3. The answer to the question “Which is more intense, your nose or my nipple?”

Twitter just released a great little piece of legal hackery that is a great thing on its surface.

Basically, it shows that Twitter promises not to use its patents for evil (ie: suing another company) but instead only for defensive purposes (an unfortunate reality in our current software patent vs innovation climate).

It has a neat way of ‘enforcing’ this even after the patents are sold away from Twitter. It gives the original patent inventor (which is different from the patent holder, as most inventors don’t hold the rights to their patents when they work for corporations) the ability to unilaterally give the entity being sued a license to use the patent. In doing so, effectively making any lawsuit null and void.

However, there is a huge loop-hole here: All a company needs to do is acquire a few patents from Twitter (every company goes into hard times, trust me) and find the patents they want to use in a innovation-stopping lawsuit and then pay off the original inventor. That price is probably pretty low, relatively.

What is a real solution? License all your patents for free to everyone under a Free/Open source software model that has a nice “if you sue me I revoke your license” clause (see Apache 2.0 section 3 for a start). That way, no one has to worry about the patents being used for offensive (pun intended) reasons but, you can still use them for defensive reasons if you are sued.

Done and done.

I have long been really interested in learning how to use an Arduino board for some fun projects but I never really got around to it. I did go to one class on a Saturday morning at the Ann Arbor hackerspace (AHA, All Hands Active) but I didn’t do anything more than making the LED blink.

Rowan might change that.

He has an “exersaucer” which is very loud; not only in colors but also the sounds it makes. Now, I actually am not too annoyed by the fact that it makes artificial noise like some new parents I know, but I do draw the line at what it teaches my son about music.

You see, three of the buttons play music when pressed. Three different songs. One of them I am fine with. However, the other two make me cringe every time I hear them. Why? They made the percussion sounds play the wrong beat! One song the percussion sounds are literally in a different time signature and the other they sound like they are sped up to twice the beats per minute.

So, I guess I’ll just have to get an Arduino board, program it with some well composed songs, and replace the crappy songs that my son is forced to listen to.

That should be a fun project…

Yesterday the decision was made that Rowan’s nickname will be a variation of “pup,” (eg: little pup, my puppy, etc) but only when I refer to him. Carrie will use another nickname. Potentially even the one our roommate Parker uses, “Row Row.” (I do admit to liking that one as well)

This decision was made while on a walk with Rowan, Carrie, my sister and her husband. We were at a park (Glen Canyon) were there were some signs to inform park goers where dogs were and were not allowed.

All of this is to say: I hope my little pup won’t let any silly sign tell him what he can and can’t do.

OpenHatch is an open-source involvement engine.

Or, OpenHatch “is a non-profit dedicated to matching prospective free software contributors with communities, tools, and education.”

OpenHatch does a lot of great things, actually. Including aiding in the formation and running of some really effective Boston Python Workshops.

OpenHatch was also very active at PyCon this year. Asheesh and Jess gave a great talk on diversity in user groups and ten (10!) contributors hacked on OpenHatch during PyCon sprints. That was a productive weekend!

First of all, full disclosure: I own a Kindle. It is registered with my partner’s Amazon account, but we share it and I do most of the reading on it since I travel more often. I know the inherent issues with DRM and Kindles but this post is about the topic more generally.

I’m going to tell you why I do not buy ebooks anymore.

1. Lack of DRM visibility

Mako brought this up in a quick post a couple of weeks ago which I won’t repeat other than saying: Since I am unable to tell which ebooks I’m buying are encumbered with DRM I am in a situation where I don’t even know which ebooks fall into the category of those I’m willing to buy. I am a sharer and love to share good books with friends. If I can’t even legally share/lend a book that I have read with a friend, then I won’t buy the book.

2. Inferior product to physical books
or
“Why ebooks are only for novels”

Ebooks are, by definition, electronic books. They can be read on an ebook reader (Kindle, Nook, etc) or on some other computing device (phone, laptop, desktop, whatever will run the software). All of these devices have a mechanism where by the reader can interact with the text. This is usually through at least a few buttons. On ebook readers there are special purpose-built buttons for things like turning the pages but there is also normally some method of doing general navigation (like scrolling, selecting from a list, etc). Thus, ebooks are able of being interacted with in much the same way we interact with other electronic content.

BUT! We can’t.

My example is a great book I’m reading by David Graeber called Debt: The First 5000 Years. It is a ~500 page book with endnotes and bibliography. He’s an academic, so he makes use of those endnotes. There are actually a few layers of wrongness here.

A) Academic books should not use end-of-book notes (where the notes are after the end of the book). That way I don’t have to use two bookmarks to read a book. Right now, with Debt, you can watch me on the Caltrain in the morning flipping back and forth between page 150 and 400. This is a total waste of time. Especially so when the end-of-book notes are made up of both extra content/asides and simple citations (eg: Graeber, 2008).

B) Simple citations such as “end of the sentence (Graeber 2008).” should be in-line. They don’t take up much room and are easy to read past quickly and ignore if you don’t care.

C) Academic books should use footnotes (notes at the bottom of the page), not even endnotes (where the notes are at the end of the chapter). This way I can most efficiently read what the note says. No page flipping just a quick glance down and there we are, done. With endnote or end-of-book notes I have to flip a bunch of pages forward, look for a number that I forgot, flip back to where I was, get the number, flip back to the endnotes, find the number, read the note, then go back to where I was.

On this point, David Graeber even agrees with me.

D) This applies doubly so to ebook versions. If I were to read Debt on the Kindle I would probably ragequit within 5 minutes. How am I supposed to deal with end-of-book notes on a Kindle? Sure, I can use the buttons on the kindle to move a cursor down along the left to the correct line, then move it over to the right to the correct endnote number, then select, read it, then hit back to get where I was. That actually isn’t horrible but it is surprisingly slow. Simply moving the cursor down and over takes a long time given the response time of the Kindle.

This may be fixed with newer Kindles. I have a 3rd Generation Kindle.

This would be fixed if they simply added in a small amount of logic to the text display engine that puts the relevant footnotes at the bottom of the current screen.

Solution?
Academic book publishers should:

• A) Tell me if they impose DRM.
• B) Don’t use DRM, of course :)
• C) Use footnotes at the bottom of the current page.
• D) Profit!

Yep. If I can find good academic oriented books that follow those two rules, I’ll purchase them (lots of them) for my ereader.

Addendum:
My good friend Molly just posted about how she also is sad about academic ebooks in her post “citing from the kindle.”