MetaBlog

2008-07-04T10:09:00.000+02:00

F-Origin, which closed a $5 million third round of capital a few months ago, sees eBook readers such as Amazon’s Kindle as a natural market for its touchscreen technology, which provides tactile user feedback.

But the company already has orders from a mobile phone company, a firm making touchscreen picture frames, and a point-of-service kiosk product maker. CEO Joe Carsanaro is a serial entrepreneur who previously founded venture-backed Bloodhound Software. “I started Bloodhound in my closet in France,” Carsanaro tells TechJournal South. “I got it going and on my first trip back to the United States I came to give a pitch at a venture conference, and got two term sheets.” RTP-based Bloodhound sells software for claims overpayment protection services for health care payers. F-Origin evolved from another of Carsanaro’s previous gigs. As general manager of a Motorola phone business, he was asked to start a group to develop innovative products in the messaging space. A company that wanted to sell its touchscreen phones to Motorola approached the new group. “I didn’t like the phone per se, but liked the technology,” Carsanaro says. When the company failed, he joined several other investors to buy its software and licensing rights to its patents. They include patents on motion (gesture) control of devices, haptics (touch feedback) and innovative touchscreens. The 10-employee company wants a chunk of the estimated $2.6 billion touchscreen market.

Carsanaro says F-Origin’s HaptiTouch products not only provide pressure-sensing touch feedback, they also have good light and low power consumption, he says. “They have the ability to drive the user interface via a finger, a stylus, or a pen,” he says. That means that medical professionals could use a device equipped with the technology while wearing gloves. Its touchpads can be programmed to provide different responses depending on touch force, and the touch sensitive area can be any shape. HaptiTouch supports devices of all kinds, and displays ranging from small mobile phones to screens as large as 15 inches. Its customizable API can be implemented with multiple operating systems. In a previous interview, Carsanaro noted that while portable devices are becoming very sophisticated, that means users have to navigate a bewildering plethora of multi-function buttons. “The result is function fatigue syndrome,” he says.

The company introduced its first product in the third quarter of 2007 and expects to ramp up sales in the third and fourth quarters this year. Carsanaro says the company will likely increase its staff up to 15 to 17 in a year.

On the Web: http://www.f-origin.com/

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Metabole and tragedy

2008-07-03T10:00:00.000+02:00

The word metabole is employed by Aristotle in his definition of peripety (Poet. 1452a 22-23), which Anton F. Harald Bierl, Dionysos und die griechische Tragödie.1991) regards as somehow connected with Dionysus.

He is tempted by the thought that Aristotle borrowed it from the poets, or at least that it belonged to a dramaturgical vocabulary that had already sprung up by the time of HF (143 n. 88, 225). This word, Bierl thinks, signals metatragically the critical moment when the action is about to take a sudden turn (it does just that at the conclusion of the third stasimon, 815ff.). The mad Heracles is characterized in Dionysiac imagery (esp. 889-98, just before he kills his children). According to Bierl, Heracles unites the two sides of Dionysus: he reflects the positive, cultic side of the god in the first half of the play, where he is the embodiment of Bacchic hope in the eyes of his loved ones, and the negative, mythical side in the second half, where he becomes their murderer.
In sum, an evocation of the Dionysus in his theatrical dimension might
(a) serve as a dramaturgical signal, a device to prepare the audience for a subsequent turn of events. It might
(b) induce the audience to experience vicariously the optimism of the dramatis personae (e.g. of the chorus in Sophocles' plays) by calling forth the "positive" cultic context. It might
(c) call attention to the operation of tragedy, especially the sudden reversal, which Aristotle called peripety; theatrical metalanguage (e.g. metabole [HF 735], eleos and phrike [Phoen. 1284-87], phroimion [HF 753]) can suggest the tragic principle of sudden reversal. Finally, it might (d) cause the audience to reflect on the theatrical illusion (Hel., cf. Cho., IT) or on the value of the theater for the polis (Bacch. does this by dramatizing, through the monitory example of Pentheus, the breakdown of theatrical communication).

Retrouvez ce post traité par huit algorithmes différents dans La métabole
Rejoignez le journal de l'H ypertexte en anglais (posts du jour différents) -
Connectez-vous sur hypertextual.net l'Hypertexte Principal de la Solution -

Theory of meaning and circularity

2008-07-02T05:20:00.000+02:00

Intention-based semantic theories are still popular and are actively pursued.

But they have not entirely succeeded in reducing meaning and psychology to actions and utterances. If meaning is defined as acting so as to induce belief and action in another, theories of meaning must be grounded in non-semantic terms to avoid circularity. And there is some doubt whether this can be done. Individuals act according to beliefs, and the communication of these beliefs eventually and necessarily calls on public beliefs and language.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Google at the top

2008-07-01T10:34:00.000+02:00

In the space of a year, Google supplants Microsoft as No. 1 in a survey of the level of trust American consumers have in various companies, while Microsoft drops to No. 10. Another triumph for the Windows Vista operating system.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Underlying structure

2008-06-30T02:32:00.000+02:00

Chomsky argued that our astonishing creativity with words, and the phenomenal ease with which children learn a language, meant that language users employed and intuitively recognized an underlying structure.

Not a structure, moreover, resting on phonemes or individual words as Ramon Jakobson would have it, but a sort of fundamental, proto-syntax. Any well-formed sentence, for example, contains a noun-phrase (NP) and verb-phrase (VB). From this we could create all possible sentences: The old tutor well described the difficulties. Or: The difficulties were well described by the old tutor. By transformation rules the deep structure can be converted to surface sentences with the correct syntax.

But what of: The old tutor elaborated the difficulties? The meaning is practically the same: we might chose either. But is this a different transformation or a different deep structure? And how do we make the choice or substitution? Critics say that Chomsky's grammar is simply formalizing what is still a mystery.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

What is revelancy?

2008-06-29T04:06:00.000+02:00

Google=Stupid? Published June 12, 2008

Ever since I officially began my professional measurable marketing career back in 1988, one argument has persisted: long copy vs. short copy. “People will never read that. It’s too long. People are too busy to read all that” Clients almost always want to shorten the copy. Rarely, if ever, have I heard, “Can you make this longer?”

The best answer to the question on copy length came to me at a seminar I attended: “People don’t read long copy or short copy. They read what interests them.” That’s why relevancy is even more important today then it was in 1988. People have information overload and, because of Google, perhaps, people have shorter attention spans. That was the theory I came across at a recent Wall Street Journal Blog entitled: “Is Google making us stupid?”

Maybe 1 out of 100 tests I have conducted have proved that shorter copy wins, but as readers of this blog know, you should always test to lift results. The web has added a new dimension, as you can drive them to a site with shorter copy and have virtually no limits on copy length once they click your desired URL.

As for email, it seems to me that the long form email format does a better, more complete job of selling, yet clients still want copy short, especially because it’s email. And, as such, may be short changing their ROI.
I’d love to hear your results…

Grant A. Johnson
Johnson Direct LLC
1-800-710-2750

So clever yes we are

2008-06-28T09:46:00.001+02:00

Dual Display

2008-06-27T09:26:00.001+02:00

It's no surprise that more displays is always better, but when it comes to mimicking the act of reading a book, dual displays is a clear step forward. Researchers at Maryland and Berkeley Universities developed a prototype dual-face, modular e-book reader that allows readers to fan pages to advance in a book or via trackball. If you're doing some serious research, the displays separate from one another, allowing one to display in landscape mode while the other runs in portrait. To complete the book meme, the device can be folded over to run in a more compact manner, and a simple flip changes the page. Possibilities for future e-book readers are endless here, so we applaud Maryland and Berkeley for using those research dollars.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Pond-skater minds with Google

2008-06-24T10:51:00.001+02:00

Andrew Sullivan

Here’s something : Friedrich Nietzsche used a typewriter. Many of those terse aphorisms and impenetrable reveries were banged out on an 1882 Malling-Hansen Writing Ball. And a friend of his at the time noticed a change in the German philosopher’s style as soon as he moved from longhand to type.

“Perhaps you will through this instrument even take to a new idiom,” the friend wrote. Nietzsche replied: “You are right. Our writing equipment takes part in the forming of our thoughts.”

Gulp. The technology writer Nicholas Carr, who pointed out this item of Nietzsche trivia in the new issue of The Atlantic, proceeded to make a more disturbing point. If a typewriter could do this to a mind as profound and powerful as Nietzsche’s, what on earth is Google now doing to us?
Are we fast losing the capacity to think deeply, calmly and seriously? Have we all succumbed to internet attention-deficit disorder? Or, to put it more directly: if you’re looking at a monitor right now, are you still reading this, or are you about to click on another link?

The astonishing benefits of Google are barely worth repeating. When I started to contribute this column, I used to keep a month’s worth of The New York Times stacked in my study. If I recalled an article or a report that I wanted to refer to, I’d spend a happy few minutes wrestling with frayed and yellowing paper, smudging myself with ink, and usually ended up reading an article that had nothing to do with my search.

I needed a good memory – even visually – to track my vague recollection down. I needed time. I needed to think a little before I began my research. Now all I do is right-click and type a few words. And all is instantly revealed.

I spend most of my day blogging – at a current rate of about 300 posts a week. I’m certainly not more stupid than I used to be; and I’m much, much better and more instantly informed.
However, the way in which I now think and write has subtly – or not so subtly – altered. I process information far more rapidly and seem able to absorb multiple sources of information simultaneously in ways that would have shocked my teenage self.

In researching a topic, or just browsing through the blogosphere, the mind leaps and jumps and vaults from one source to another. The mental multitasking – a factoid here, a YouTube there, a link over there, an e-mail, an instant message, a new PDF – is both mind-boggling when you look at it from a distance and yet perfectly natural when you’re in mid-blog.

When it comes to sitting down and actually reading a multiple-page print-out, or even, God help us, a book, however, my mind seizes for a moment. After a paragraph, I’m ready for a new link. But the prose in front of my nose stretches on.
I get antsy. I skim the footnotes for the quick info high that I’m used to. No good. I scan the acknowledgments, hoping for a name I recognise. I start again.
A few paragraphs later, I reach for the laptop. It’s not that I cannot find the time for real reading, for a leisurely absorption of argument or narrative. It’s more that my mind has been conditioned to resist it.

Is this a new way of thinking? And will it affect the way we read and write? If blogging is corrosive, the same could be said for Grand Theft Auto, texting and Facebook messaging, on which a younger generation is currently being reared. But the answer is surely yes – and in ways we do not yet fully understand. What we may be losing is quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives.
The playwright Richard Foreman, cited by Carr, eulogised a culture he once felt at home in thus: “I come from a tradition of western culture, in which the ideal (my ideal) was the complex, dense and ‘cathedral-like’ structure of the highly educated and articulate personality – a man or woman who carried inside themselves a personally constructed and unique version of the entire heritage of the West.
“[Now] I see within us all (myself included) the replacement of complex inner density with a new kind of self – evolving under the pressure of information overload and the technology of the ‘instantly available’.”
The experience of reading only one good book for a while, and allowing its themes to resonate in the mind, is what we risk losing. When I was younger I would carry a single book around with me for days, letting its ideas splash around in my head, not forming an instant judgment (for or against) but allowing the book to sit for a while, as the rest of the world had its say – the countryside or pavement, the crowd or train carriage, the armchair or lunch counter. Sometimes, human beings need time to think things through, to allow themselves to entertain a thought before committing to it.

The white noise of the ever-faster information highway may, one fears, be preventing this. The still, small voice of calm that refreshes a civilisation may be in the process of being snuffed out by myriad distractions.
I don’t want to be fatalistic here. As Carr points out, previous innovations – writing itself, printing, radio, televi-sion – have all shifted the tone of our civilisation without destroying it. And the capacity of the web to retrieve the old and ancient and make them new and accessible again is a small miracle.

Right now, we may be maximally overwhelmed by all this accessible information – but the time may come when our mastery of the new world allows us to gain more perspective on it.
Here’s hoping. Shallowness, after all, does not necessarily preclude depth. We just have to find a new equilibrium between the two. We need to be both pond-skaters and scuba divers. We need to master the ability to access facts while reserving time and space to do something meaningful with them.

It is inevitable this will take our always-evolving species and ever-malleable brains a little time – and the Google era in a mass form is not even a decade old.
Some have suggested a web sabbath – a day or two in the week when we force ourselves not to read e-mails or post blogs or text messages; a break in order to think in the old way again: to look at human faces in the flesh rather than on a Facebook profile, to read a book rather than a blog, to pray rather than browse.

I think I’ll start with Nietzsche at some point. But right now I have a blog to fill.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Is Google making us stupid?

2008-06-23T10:44:00.001+02:00

Idea Watch: Is Google Making Us Stupid?
Posted by Tom Weber

Ever worry that all that time you spend on the Web might be rewiring your brain? In the July/August issue of the Atlantic magazine, writer Nicholas Carr confesses to that fear–and explores this question: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”

In a nutshell, Mr. Carr’s argument is this: Spending so much time reading on the Web is training us to accept information in small bites, and that’s worrisome. He writes:
“Immersing myself in a book or a lengthy article used to be easy … That’s rarely the case anymore. Now my concentration often starts to drift after two or three pages. I get fidgety, lose the thread, begin looking for something else to do. I feel as if I’m always dragging my wayward brain back to the text. The deep reading that used to come naturally has become a struggle.”
Of course, the notion that the surf-happy world of the Web is affecting our attention span isn’t new. Even before the rise of the Web, other types of media–such as music videos–were being blamed for the same thing. But Buzzwatch suspects many readers will see something of themselves in the article’s description of people cramming ever-more bits of information into every last moment online.

Writes Mr. Carr:
If we lose those quiet spaces, or fill them up with “content,” we will sacrifice something important not only in our selves but in our culture.
Readers, do you feel that spending time on the Web is rewiring your brain? And if yes, do you care?

Permalink Trackback URL: http://blogs.wsj.com/buzzwatch/2008/06/10/idea-watch-is-google-making-us-stupid/trackback/

Save & Share:
wsj:http://blogs.wsj.com/buzzwatch/2008/06/10/idea-watch-is-google-making-us-stupid/
Yahoo! Buzz Share on Facebook Del.icio.us Ever worry that all that time you spend on the Web might be rewiring your brain? In the July/August issue of the Atlantic magazine, writer Nicholas Carr confesses to that fear–and explores this question: “Is Google Making Us Stupid?”
In a nutshell, Mr. Carr’s argument is this: Spending so much time reading on the Web is […]
--> Digg this Email This

Read more: Memes, Search, Idea Watch

Comments
I don’t know — what was the question again? My attention drifted off before the end of the post . . .
Comment by Independent Girl - June 10, 2008 at 2:17 pm
I did have a comment on this article but I’ve moved on in the past couple of minutes.
Comment by Common Sense - June 10, 2008 at 2:17 pm
Susan Jacoby, former Washington Post reporter and author of The Age Of American Unreason, talked about this back in February.

“A Nation Of Idiots?”http://www.boom2bust.com/2008/02/19/a-nation-of-idiots/
Comment by Boom2Bust.com - June 10, 2008 at 2:20 pm
I’ve found I’m just as able to immerse myself in some books and articles, but less so for other books and articles. Generally, the ones I’m able to immerse myself in are those that are good, and those I’m not able to immerse myself in are those that are mediocre or bad. If there is a crowding-out effect, it’ll be on bad books, and I don’t really have a problem with that.
Comment by Bob's My Uncle - June 10, 2008 at 2:21 pm

Why is this blog so slow?
Comment by Nevermore - June 10, 2008 at 2:21 pm
The same effect has been proven with television and kids, so it makes sense. Too many changes (commercials), too much content.
Comment by Sorry...wasn't paying attention... - June 10, 2008 at 3:06 pm
Its easy to see Mr. Carr has been Googling way too much
Comment by 823077 - June 10, 2008 at 3:37 pm
i definitely agree with this and have felt it much more difficult to read an “e-book” than a real book… If I print the book out then I’m fine…
Comment by boner to boner - June 10, 2008 at 8:45 pm
I’m an old guy. I am so much better informed now then in pre-google. And, because of these vast information tools I now am able to accomplish life’s tasks better and quicker. I now have time to appreciate a good read, nature, art and travel. I am in my best of times. And, not dumber but smarter I should think. Appreciate the gains you can expect from these tools in the future. Lucky you.
Comment by mark - June 11, 2008 at 8:34 pm
stupid google
Comment by s - June 11, 2008 at 8:58 pm
i shall perform a google search to find the answer to this question
Comment by e$ - June 12, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Trackbacks
[…] our look earlier today at concerns that the Web may be rewiring our brains for short attention spans, Buzzwatch thought it appropriate to highlight this video making the […]
Trackback by Buzzwatch : Daily Diversion: The Democratic Primary--For Short Attention Spans - June 10, 2008 at 4:51 pm
[…] The best answer to the question on copy length came to me at a seminar I attended: “People don’t read long copy or short copy. They read what interests them.” That’s why relevancy is even more important today then it was in 1988. People have information overload and, because of Google, perhaps, people have shorter attention spans. That was the theory I came across at a recent Wall Street Journal Blog entitled: “Is Google making us stupid?” […]
Trackback by Google=Stupid? « Marketing That’s Measurable - June 12, 2008 at 1:38 am

Google's effect on our mind

2008-06-22T10:35:00.000+02:00

In the debate over Google’s effect on humanity, everyone is missing one big issue
Posted on June 19, 2008 by Douglas Bell

Yes, again: The cover story that launched a thousand blog posts.
For the second time this week, I’m taking my lead from The Atlantic (it’s the best magazine in the world right now, making even The New Yorker appear precious and overwrought). Unsurprisingly, the two articles that stirred me to blog were both (a) about the Web and (b) rife with fundamental, flummoxing misperception. I’ve already written about Mark Bowden’s piece on the Web-induced demise of The Wall Street Journal. Now for the big kahuna: Nicholas Carr’s take on Google. Titled “Is Google Making Us Stupid,” this cover story has been sticking in bloggers’ craws all week, inspiring them to pee on hydrants to mark their view on the current state of media, the Web and the human condition. Carr’s view is clear: the hypertext world of Google is slowly eroding our capacity for sustained contemplation, thereby flattening our collective intelligence. One thing is also clear: the piece has an enormous blind spot.

Some agree with Carr, of course:
Is this a new way of thinking? And will it affect the way we read and write? If blogging is corrosive, the same could be said for Grand Theft Auto, texting and Facebook messaging, on which a younger generation is currently being reared. But the answer is surely yes—and in ways we do not yet fully understand. What we may be losing is quietness and depth in our literary and intellectual and spiritual lives. —Andrew Sullivan in The Times of London

Some disagree:
Maybe the reason why Nick and so many other literati are losing their patience with long form information is that it is so fundamentally inefficient and inferior to connected bits of information.
You look at a book, read a book, and you easily perceive a coherent whole. You look at all the information on that book’s topic on the Web, all connected, and you can’t see the sum of the parts—but we are starting to get our minds around it. We can’t yet recognize the superiority of this networked thinking process because we’re measuring it against our old linear thought process.
Nick romanticizes the “contemplation” that comes with reading a book. But it’s possible that the output of our old contemplation can now be had in larger measure through a new entirely non-linear process.—Scott Karp at seekingalpha.com

But here’s what both sides in the debate missed: Google’s motivation in all this is money. For all their drivel about corporate responsibility (Google’s motto is the impossibly pretentious “Don’t be evil”), Google “monetizes” (lovely word that) what Karp calls “networked thinking” by charging fractions of whatever currency to place links nearer to the front page of a given search.
And guess what? Google couldn’t care less whether this new form of thought is our salvation or our damnation. In business speak, they’re “content agnostic.” The debate about which is the better mode of rumination for optimal human development—algorithmic/hypertext or monastic/contemplative—is nothing but a sideshow.

So long as the dollar calls the tune at Google, it seems to me that how we read—Carr’s po-faced lament notwithstanding—is somewhat less problematic than whether what we read is the straight goods or just another ad campaign done up in digital drag.

• Is Google Making Us Stupid? [The Atlantic]• Idea Watch: Is Google Making Us Stupid? [Wall Street Journal]• Google is giving us pond-skater minds [The Times]• Connecting the Dots of the Internet Revolution [Seeking Alpha]• How Google ate my brain [Globe and Mail]
Back to Spectator Home
Categories: General, Internet, Over the Border, Magazines
Permalink

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Ebook market

2008-06-21T22:35:00.000+02:00

Select O'Reilly Books Soon on Kindle, and as Digital Ebook Bundles

Update: On his New York Times blog, David Pogue has noted O'Reilly's pilot in the context of the recent discussion prompted his column on ebooks and piracy (which brought insightful responses from Adam Engst and Mike Masnick, along with a follow up from David).

Ebooks are certainly nothing new for us at O'Reilly. We've offered PDFs of hundreds of our titles for some time now, and as noted here before on Radar, until quite recently Safari Books Online (our online-publishing joint venture with Pearson) generated more revenue than was typically associated with the entire downloadable ebook business.

But it's clear that things are changing in the ebook market (though precise numbers are proving hard to come by), so we've decided to officially announce two new e-publishing programs that have been in the works for some time:

First, through oreilly.com we will soon offer a select number of books as a bundle of three ebook formats (EPUB, PDF, and Kindle-compatible Mobipocket) for a single price -- at or below the book's cover price -- starting in early July. Since we began selling PDFs directly some time ago, we've given those customers free updates to the PDFs to reflect published changes in the books; the same will apply to the ebook bundle, which will replace the PDF option on those titles. That also means that although the ebooks aren't yet available, if you buy the PDF now, you'll receive the EPUB and Mobipocket versions as a free update once they're available in early July. These files (like all our PDFs currently for sale) will be released without any DRM, though we are exploring some custom watermarking options. With these three formats, customers should be able to read the books with most current ebook software and devices, including Adobe Digital Editions, Kindle, Blackberries, and Sony Reader (Sony announced in May that EPUB support is forthcoming in a firmware update for their Reader).

Second, O'Reilly has agreed to sell select ebooks for the Kindle through Amazon. We hope to see those ebooks available for sale through the Kindle store in the near future.
Full details over on the TOC blog.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Books as dead things

2008-06-20T22:43:00.000+02:00

The Guardian,
Tuesday June 17, 2008

"Books," John Milton observed nearly 400 years ago, "are not absolutely dead things." What he would make of the new lease of life they are taking on now can only be guessed at. They are starting to migrate in earnest to electronic reading devices, and the interesting thing is that early adopters are surprised at what an agreeable experience it is. So-called "ebooks", such as Amazon's Kindle, the Sony eBook and the iLiad, enable you to read on a device lighter than a paperback but with electronic ink. The ebook can be read comfortably in almost any light conditions, including on beaches. It has no need for a backlit screen that fades away at inopportune moments.

In important ways they are better than traditional books: they save paper and can be reproduced at low cost; users can increase the type size and read while eating, using a finger as a page-turner; hundreds of books can be downloaded from the web. On the downside, they are expensive, difficult to lend, easier to steal and could be destined for oblivion if formats change in the future.

More worryingly, as with so many innovations, manufacturers try to build a walled garden around their products in the hope that they will become the standard for the world. Thus Sony's impressive eBook offers the books Sony wants to sell (without internet access so far) and Kindle, which has been well received despite problems with some screens, aims to sell books that Amazon stocks. That is an extremely large library, and already ebooks account for 6% of Amazon sales of books with dual formats. Both of these ebooks are only sold in the US at the moment. The main European competitor, the iLiad, is based on open source software (built by volunteers) and has web access, but is more complicated to operate than the others. Users can download anything from the vast free library of Project Gutenberg on the web.

It would be nice to think that ebooks will avoid the format wars between the likes of Apple and Microsoft that have dogged the development of digital music players, but that seems unlikely. An ebook without a proprietary walled garden would offer the best opportunity for books, not least because it could provide an outlet not just for mainstream works but also for self-published books. This would create an online marketplace in which they could be sampled and voted on by peer groups, as digitised music is. This doesn't mean that the writing is on the wall for the traditional book. Its texture and the ease with which it can be browsed makes it almost perfect for purpose. But in future books will have to welcome a new member to the family with which they will share more similarities than differences.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Browers and ebooks

2008-06-19T22:55:00.000+02:00

Newton ebook reader for Mozilla now supports newest builds
By Erik Kennedy Published: June 15, 2008 - 09:19AM CT

Are you burned out on iPhone 3G news following the whirlwind events of the past week? How about a little old-school portable computational device news instead, then?
The developers behind the Newton Book Reader Mozilla extension released version 0.3.6 this week, which brings compatibility with the most recent versions of Firefox and Mozilla. The update builds on the 0.3.5 release, which fixed several bugs and laid the path for compatibility with newer versions of the Mozilla-based family of browsers.

A Newton Book, for those of you who aren't me, is an open format for PDA-based text, supporting Unicode, hypertext, and character styles. Despite the discontinuation of its primary user platform over ten years ago (NEVER FORGET), the Newton Book format is still in use today. A number of titles can, not coincidentally, be found at Newton's Library, or of course you could delve into your personal collection...what?

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Iphone Reader

2008-06-14T19:25:00.001+02:00

I read so many ebooks and I do it using the great reader application eReader.

I have over 350 books in my eReader bookshelf and was happy to hear from the Fictionwise founder that they would continue to develop versions of eReader for different platforms. You may recall that Fictionwise recently bought eReader from Motricity and it was good to hear that they intended to keep eReader growing in the future. Now that I'm tempted to pick up an iPhone 3G when it's released next month I began thinking that I would need a version of eReader to use for my ebooks. I feel pretty confident that the big screen of the iPhone would make for a sterling ebook reader but I'd need Fictionwise to pump out a version for that phone.

I reached out to the folks at Fictionwise and asked them if they plan on a version of eReader for the iPhone and this is what they said:

Apple released their SDK for iphone/itouch on March 6. We have two Mac development experts doing the work to make eReader function on the iphone/itouch right now. Apple will allow third party applications, like eReader, to be used by customers after the next iPhone/iTouch firmware

update which is currently estimated to be released on June 30 and we expect to be done with our porting work at about the same time.

However, there is also a wild card in that Apple must approve of each and every application released for iphone/itouch, and we are currently seeking information about what the criteria are to qualify. We will certainly support these devices if we possibly can and Apple allows it.
Thank you!

Best Regards,
Fictionwise/eReader Support Team
Woot! Come on Apple, get the iPhone eReader version approved ASAP!

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

How to read on line

2008-06-13T19:32:00.000+02:00

That's Jakob Nielsen's theory. He's a usability expert who writes an influential biweekly column on such topics as eye-tracking research, Web design errors, and banner blindness. (Links, btw, give a text more authority, making you more likely to stick around.)

Nielsen champions the idea of information foraging. Humans are informavores. On the Internet, we hunt for facts. In earlier days, when switching between sites was time-consuming, we tended to stay in one place and dig. Now we assess a site quickly, looking for an "information scent." We move on if there doesn't seem to be any food around.

Sorry about the long paragraph. (Eye-tracking studies show that online readers tend to skip large blocks of text.)
Also, I'm probably forcing you to scroll at this point. Losing some incredible percentage of readers. Bye. Have fun on Facebook.

Screens vs. PaperWhat about the physical process of reading on a screen? How does that compare to paper?

When you look at early research, it's fascinating to see that even in the days of green phosphorus monitors, studies found that there wasn't a huge difference in speed and comprehension between reading on-screen and reading on paper. Paper was the clear winner only when test subjects were asked to skim the text.
The studies are not definitive, however, given all the factors that can affect online reading, such as scrolling, font size, user expertise, etc. Nielsen holds that on-screen reading is 25 percent slower than reading on paper. Even so, experts agree on what you can do to make screen reading more comfortable:

Choose a default font designed for screen reading; e.g., Verdana, Trebuchet, Georgia.
Rest your eyes for 10 minutes every 30 minutes.
Get a good monitor. Don't make it too bright or have it too close to your eyes.
Minimize reflections.
Skip long lines of text, which promote fatigue.
Avoid MySpace.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

What is a signification

2008-06-12T19:56:00.001+02:00

A signification is indefinitely determinable (and the ‘indefinitely’ is obviously essential) without thereby being determined. It can always be marked out, provisionally assigned as an identitary element to an identitary relation with another identitary element […] and as such be ‘a something’ as the starting point for an open series of successive determinations. These determinations, however, in principle never exhaust it.

The ‘being of signification’, Castoriadis goes on, has been inadequately de-
scribed by «the distinctions between proper and figurative meaning, central
signification and semantic aura, denotation and connotation»
In fact there is no denotation opposed to connotations, there are only connotations or as
Castoriadis argues, «every expression is essentially tropic»
All language is essentially the ‘abuse of language’. Any formal rule of language, any structural
setting of language, is only applicable insofar as it allows for creation of significations in the sense of letting the creative organization of the magma prevail. Being in language means to accept that there is no final and in this sense determinate response to the issue of identity, that is, to ‘accepting to be in signification’s possibility of taking their bearings in and through what they say in order to move within it […] to use the code of designations in order to make other significations appear».

David Pogue's point of view

2008-06-08T23:31:00.000+02:00

Here is the answer of D. Pogue:

“Unfortunately, I’ve had terrible experiences releasing my books in electronic form. Twice in my career, ‘blind’ people e-mailed me, requesting a PDF of one of my books. Both times, I sent one over–and both times, it was all over the piracy sites within 48 hours, free for anyone to download.
“I’ve got a mortgage and three kids to put through college, and it broke my heart! Unfortunately, the bad apples have once again spoiled it for everyone else.”
Now, I realize that my position is unpopular in some circles. And the piracy issue really does bum me out, because some of my how-to books (on Windows Vista and Mac OS X, for example) are 900-page behemoths that would be so much easier to carry, read and search right on the screen.
But this week, I came across a blog post by author Steven Poole on just this topic. (It’s at http://stevenpoole.net/blog/free-your-mind, and it contains a couple of naughty words.) He recently conducted an experiment: he offered an electronic download of one of his books, called “Trigger Happy,” on a “pay what you like” model. In assessing the results, he writes:
“Is this, as some people say, an exciting new Internet-age business model for writers and other creative types?
“Er, not really. The proportion of people who left a tip after downloading “Trigger Happy” was 1 in 1,750, or 0.057%.”
Mr. Poole, as it turns out, is just as disinclined as I am to make free electronic delivery his primary distribution channel. Here’s how he covers the “information wants to be free” line of reasoning, which he calls “the Slashdot argument”:
“It says that books, music, films, software and so on ought to be freely distributed to anyone who wants them, simply because they can be freely distributed.
“What is the writer or musician to do, though, if she can’t earn money from her art? Simple, says the Slashdotter: earn your money playing live (if you’re one of those musicians who plays live), or selling T-shirts or merchandise, or providing some other kind of ‘value-added’ service. Many such arguments seem to me to be simple greed disguised in high-falutin’ idealism about how ‘information wants to be free.’
“…I think the Slashdot argument can actually be disposed of rapidly with one rhetorical question, as follows.
“Oh Mr. Freetard, you work as a programmer, do you? How interesting. So do you perform all your corporate programming duties for free, and earn your keep by selling personally branded mousemats on the side?
“Didn’t think so.”
But what about the Radiohead experiment, where the band released an album online using a “pay what you like” system–and succeeded?
As Mr. Poole points out, that’s fine if you’re already an established name: “If there’s been a comparable success by a band that hasn’t already gained its cultural capital and name-recognition through the evils of copyright and corporate promotion, I’d like to know about it.”
So yes, this is how I, as an author who’s been twice-burned, truly feel. And yet I realize that it puts me, rather awkwardly, on the same side of the piracy issue as the record companies and movie companies, who are suing teenagers for downloading songs, and of whom I’ve made endless fun.
Actually, authors like me are lucky; our work is, at this point, pretty much protected with unbreakable copy protection. That is, our bound and published books can’t be duplicated infinitely and distributed by the millions online.
So what would I do if I were in the business of music or movies, where piracy is so much easier?
I’m just happy I don’t have to answer that question.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Ebook piracy

2008-06-07T12:48:00.000+02:00

In "Can e-Publishing Overcome Copyright Concerns?," David Pogue of the New York Times talks about why he doesn't make electronic versions of his books available, supporting his position as ebook nay-sayer with a blog post by an author whose voluntary payment experiment for the digital release of an outdated book was a dismal failure.

Apparently, Pogue has twice sent PDF versions of a book to someone claiming to be blind and each time, he claims, the book was all over the "piracy sites" within 48 hours. In a subsequent post, Pogue relayed and responded to reader comments, which spanned the gamut of opinions.

I normally appreciate what Pogue has to say in his print and email columns due to the way his technology sensibilities have been honed by years of being a Mac user. But in this situation, and I say this with all respect due to a fellow author with whom I've written a book, I disagree with him pretty much completely. I'm not just spouting off like some of the people commenting on his blog posts - my point of view comes as the result of selling over 150,000 ebooks with virtually no copies being shared widely.

(Ironically, despite Pogue saying that he doesn't make electronic versions of his Missing Manuals available, a quick scan of O'Reilly Media's Web site showed that 5 of his 24 books are in fact for sale in PDF format. When I asked him about this, he admitted that he knew that "iPhone: The Missing Manual" had been released in PDF to get it to market faster last year. Three of the others were older books, and he was surprised to learn that "Windows XP Home Edition: The Missing Manual, Second Edition" was available in PDF. This lack of awareness is understandable: the royalty statements for a print-book author as prolific as Pogue are undoubtedly voluminous and may be quasi-incomprehensible.)

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Endless ideas and Bebook

2008-06-05T07:11:00.000+02:00

The latest ebook reader to market is called the BeBook and it prices around $400.

The BeBook is produced by a company named Endless Ideas. The device sports a six-inch screen and makes use of special E-ink technology so you can read on-screen contents in bright daylight. The BeBook has an internal rechargeable battery which lets you get an estimated 7,000 page turns of an on-screen book, which is plenty for most travels.

Other features of the BeBook include internal memory for book storage which can be increased via SD memory cards, support for a variety of related digital document formats such as .doc and .pdf, and USB connectivity. It should be available for purchase now.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Mouse button or cursor

2008-06-02T08:24:00.000+02:00

Donna Leishman’s latest piece of electronic literature, “Contemplating Flight” viewers help shape the plot depending on where they click a mouse button or move their cursor.

Leishman fans who come to Clark College this weekend to explore the digital narrative will first see an image of a bird sitting on a branch. Using a mouse to navigate the screen, the viewer can make the bird blink or tweet, or move fruit on the tree. Ultimately, how the mouse moves helps determine the story.

Electronic literature such as Leishman’s narrative can’t fully be appreciated in print. It’s part of an art form whose entire history spans just a few decades and has expanded in scope along with computer technology.

This weekend Washington State University Vancouver, Clark College and North Bank Artists Gallery will team up to trace the evolution of media art. They’ll present everything from pioneering digital fiction from the mid-1980s, computer-based pieces using hypertext to move readers sequentially through stories, to recent, more pictorial Web fiction and avant-garde multimedia performance art created on the spot with dynamic combinations of sound and video.

The exhibits are being held in conjunction with the Electronic Literature Organization’s 2008 conference. Hosted by WSU Vancouver, the event will bring 120 scholars and artists from the United States, Europe, Canada, Asia and South America to Vancouver to share their work and discuss the field. Artists will be on hand tonight and Saturday evenings at the exhibits to talk about their work.
Seeing media art’s progression from simple computer text to flashy colors, sounds and games will help drive home how dependent artists working in the genre are on evolving technology, said Dene Grigar, associate professor and program director of digital technology and culture at WSU Vancouver.

The advent of Web browsers and high-speed Internet connections, for example, allows color and sound to be used in ways that weren’t possible for early media artists such as Michael Joyce, Grigar said.

Today’s media art includes, among other things, Internet radio, story-driven online games and virtual environments such as Second Life.

Venues participating in this weekend’s show will emphasize different aspects of media art past and present.

North Bank Artists Gallery will focus on current trends. It will spotlight such work as Kate Pullinger’s complex multimedia story “Inanimate Alice” and an improvisational sound and video show, “Exploding Plastic and Inevitable Redux,” by Steve Gibson and Stefan Müller. In Gibson and Müller’s performance, notes on their instruments are programmed to correspond to certain images. As they play, these visuals will be projected onto overhead screens.

The Clark College exhibit also will showcase work by today’s leaders in media art, including Leishman’s “Contemplating Flight.”

WSU Vancouver will take a step back, tracing the roots of media art. Scholars don’t all agree on when the art form emerged. Some argue it was in the 1950s and ’60s, when mainframe computers dominated the technology scene. Most say it was 1984, when Apple introduced the Macintosh desktop computer.

WSU Vancouver’s exhibit will include examples of early electronic literature by media art pioneers such as Joyce, Judy Malloy and Jim Rosenberg.

Grigar hopes the show will help raise awareness about this relatively new type of art and way of reading.

“We want to introduce people to an art form not prevalent yet,” she said.

MARY ANN ALBRIGHT can be reached at maryann.albright@columbian.com or 360-735-4507.

Moving to the computer

2008-06-01T08:27:00.000+02:00

Web is abstract in way that books can’t link to
Dharmishta Rood,

It’s no surprise that books, ordinarily comprised of words on paper, are now moving to the computer.

The personal screen is a place where students are authors, but also a place for reading social, cultural and academic information.

Katherine Hayles, professor of English and Design | Media Arts, researches the movement of books from traditionally written literature, to envelop code, image and nonlinear format, both on screen and in their pages.

Her most recent book, “Electronic Literature: New Horizons for the Literary,” comes with a CD. This CD contains many examples of online literature that are interacting in new ways with the idea of a written work moved online.

The online book lends itself to an associative mind with hypertext, nonlinearity and the ability to execute multiple activities at a time.

Vannevar Bush argued in 1945 in an article called “As We May Think” that the mind thought in paths associations. The text outlines a machine called a memex, commonly cited as a predecessor to the Internet, as it shows a chain of associations similar to browsing a site like Wikipedia.

Linear associations are what we normally use in argumentative essays, with the “if a, then b” sort of relationship, and associative thinking is based on more nebulous associations, such as that apples remind me of my grandmother’s house, which reminds me of wind chimes.

“It seems to me that we have intensive training in linear thinking ... (and) by the time someone gets into college she or he has already had 12 some years, at least, in intense linear thinking. I rather imagine that it’s some combination of association and linear thinking, but I do also think that there is a spectrum along which people fall,” Hayles said.

Her book focuses on the ways in which online literature is changing with new technology forms, which allow for nonchronological storytelling.

This type of associative thinking is also part of her teaching strategy, encompassing these practices, which are not only shifting literature, but also affecting collaborative effort in the classroom.

Hayles said she finds students are increasingly collaborative with regard to projects and writing, often having multiple conversations in online media, telephones and additionally engaging in multiple activities online at once.

“Writing is rapidly moving toward collaborative activity, and one approach to that is to regard such practices as illegitimate, because the students are offering help to their friend. I think that’s the wrong approach. I think instead, collaborative authorship should be made a part of the assignment,” Hayles said. “And to really take advantage of these new modalities and see what can be done with them. That I think is much more exciting.”

I, too, engage in collaborative writing, often bringing friends into the conversation about papers and columns I write and ideas, even at their nascent stage.

Zach Blas, a graduate student of Design | Media Arts who has worked with Hayles, said he finds the online community of media scholars effective in that they link to sources, allowing them to speed up research and truly function at the speed of digital media.

In a class with Hayles, he collaborated on a blog rather than turning in assignments.

Nick Kusnezov, a third-year bioengineering student, said he would prefer a more creative assignment for collaboration, though he said he does enjoy classroom-wide collaborative efforts on South Campus.

Hayles, who has worked on collaborative drafts herself, finds the process liberating, though a bit intimidating as the trade-off for more ideas is less control over your own work.

Her book talks about not the end of the book as a medium but rather a shifting conversation about the book. For her, the conversation between books and screens is a two-way street.

“It’s multifaceted, it affects design, for example, so we get screens that are designed to look like books and books that are designed to look like screens. We get books adopting the symbolic language, functioning in a different way than pages used to function,” Hayles said.

What does this mean about the future of the book, in an age of digital file copying, hyperlinking and potential for nonlinearity? It means that books aren’t going away for good, but they will be responding to digital media.

“I think the book has great potentialities. In some ways it’s far superior to electronic media: It’s backward compatible, it’s robust, it’s simple, it always works when you open it,” Hayles said with a laugh.

I must say, I read her book in print, which is still my preference, but then I looked her up on Wikipedia and somehow ended up at a page about aliens and outer space within a few links.

I guess there is something to this nonlinearity.

What is an hypertextual author

2008-05-26T14:12:00.000+02:00

The creators of digital works will need to be a new kind of artist , or team, with a distinct mix of expertise in at least three areas – the specific subject matter and associated critical and analytical techniques, technical computing processes, and principles of content selection and organization...

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -

Hypertextual experiment

2008-05-25T14:17:00.000+02:00

Is there something personal in my work, other than my "personal" intellectual interests and political opinions?

There is always mention of mental relationship with otherness therefore. The work is also much more technically sophisticated, using HTML, Flash, sound software such as ACID, Photoshop, PHP, etc. At the end, the sound should be turned on for the whole thing because there is sound on the main menu page, but some pieces use sound and some don't.

Metabole is a collection of electronic textual experiments where the goal was to make philosophy interactive in a new and different way in each piece. I was experimenting with user interface design, and my goal was to have a unique user interface and programming in each text. For that reason, I did not make any traditional hypertext literature where you click on words in the text to get to new sections. Instead, each piece has its own kind of interaction. Some works are best seen as texts in their own right with fixed content, in which the user interaction just serves to explore the content, whereas other pieces are games or tools for users to create their own point of view. See the introduction for more on this.

In most texts, if there is fixed or dynamic content, it is on behalf of political reasons...

2008-05-23T09:11:00.000+02:00

Why images on the screen of the hypertext?

Visual culture is on the rise, so we've decided to give our own spin to the old adage that a picture is worth a thousand words, and turn it on its head. Here's how our version works: we pick one image, use it as keywords for a web-based image search, and present the results here with words.

Download ebooks on http://www.frenchtheory.com/ - See that post with different algorithms in metabole - See the journal French Metablog with today different posts -