Monthly Archive for April, 2011

Rising in the East

Published on April 27, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Times Higher Education

Margaret Cavendish, Duchess of Newcastle, herself a natural philosopher and early science fiction writer, is reputed to have said that the idea would never catch on because there were no pubs along the way. She meant that long-distance journeys in the 17th century were very much dependent upon inns and taverns en route to provide shelter, sustenance and a change of horses for weary travellers.

When John Wilkins, Bishop of Chester, a founder of the Royal Society and one of the few men to have been master of a college at both the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, wrote the first tale about a spaceship in 1640, it could hardly have been said to be an instant success. A Discourse Concerning a New Planet (the follow-up to his 1638 work The Discovery of a World in the Moone) discusses a voyage to the Moon, but it was ridiculed left, right and centre.

Adverse opinions didn’t stop Wilkins and his student, Robert Hooke – destined to be famous in his own right as a philosopher, architect and inventor – experimenting with an idea for using gunpowder to launch space vehicles 20 miles into the air, waiting for the Earth to turn and then bring them back to terra firma thousands of miles away. These were primitive satellites. Nor did they stop the great Sir Isaac Newton from refining their idea by pointing out in Principia Mathematica (1687) that, because of gravity, a cannonball fired with sufficient velocity from a mountain top would go into orbit.

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A Digital Rallying Cry

Published on April 25, 2011 in News and Newsletter. 0 Comments

From, The Economist

The Twitter account of Ai Weiwei, China’s foremost artist-activist, fell silent when he was arrested on April 3rd. Chinese state media suggest that he is guilty of “economic crimes” and a bevy of other reputation-killers such as plagiarism and being “erratic.” But his imprisonment is clearly a means of shutting him up. A forceful advocate of democracy and free speech, Mr Ai used his blog to confront the fictions of government propaganda. With belligerent conviction, he railed against the inhumanity of a regime with no respect for the truth.

“Twitter is most suitable for me. In the Chinese language, 140 characters is a novella,” says Mr Ai in an interview at the back of “Ai Weiwei’s Blog”, a collection of over a hundred translated pieces culled from over 2,700 posts. Mr Ai’s father, Ai Qing, was a poet who was deemed an enemy of the state in 1957, rehabilitated only when the Cultural Revolution died down in 1976. But Mr Ai had written very little himself. In fact, the visual artist barely knew how to type when he was invited by Sina, China’s largest internet portal, to write a blog for their website.

A proponent of simple, authentic architecture, not fancy forms for form’s sake, Mr Ai has overseen some 70 architectural projects, and was a consultant on Herzog & de Meuron’s “Bird’s Nest” stadium for the Beijing Olympics. Some of Mr Ai’s most memorable writings weave personal history with political and aesthetic principles. For example, his “earliest experience with architecture” took place when his father was sentenced to hard labour and re-education and the family was forced to live in an earthen pit in Xinjiang. “In political circumstances like those, living underground can provide an incredible feeling of security,” he writes. “In the winter it was warm, in the summer it was cool. Its walls were linked with America.” Mr Ai’s father raised the ceilings of this home by burrowing down another 20 centimetres, and he dug out a bookshelf that eight-year-old Weiwei considered “the best”. For these reasons, concludes the artist, “I don’t believe in ideal architecture.”

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The Kindle Swindle

Published on April 19, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Laura Hazard Owen, Publishing Trends

Mike Essex, a Search Specialist at UK digital marketing agency Impact Media, believes that ebooks are the next frontier for content farmers and is already noticing an increasing number of spam e-books hitting ebookstores like the Kindle Store. He originally wrote about his discovery on the Impact Media blog.

Many ebook vendors don’t check copyright on works that are submitted, and Essex noticed that people are stealing content from the web, quickly creating ebooks about the same topics from multiple angles in order to target different keyword variants, and publishing them—some Kindle authors have “written” thousands of books in a single year. The Amazon.com domain name gives these books an added boost in search results; royalty payouts are high even when a book is priced at $0.99, and reviews aren’t a surefire solution to combating the problem.

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Passing Through: Why the Open Internet Is Worth Saving

Published on April 7, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From Boston Review

In 2003 Tim Wu, a professor at Columbia Law School, published an article on the once-sleepy subject of telecommunications policy. In it, he coined the term “net neutrality” to capture the idea that network operators—the Comcasts and Verizons of the world—should not be in the business of regulating the information traffic that passes through their networks. The term took hold, and the article launched Wu to cyber-rock-star status.

Net neutrality is a simple idea with powerful implications. A neutral net would, for example, prevent cable providers from slowing down their customers’ connections or, worse, banning them from running certain services. That is good for customers, who get equal treatment whether they are streaming movies on Netflix, chatting on Skype, or shopping on Amazon. And it is also good for Netflix, Skype, and other companies that have grown using an Internet infrastructure they do not own and have been able to innovate without worrying about shifting rules of the road.

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Book Review: ‘The Information’ by James Gleick

Published on April 1, 2011 in News. 0 Comments

From David L. Ulin, Los Angeles Times

Partway through “The Information: A History, a Theory, a Flood,” James Gleick describes a technological innovation so transformative that it was heralded as “one of the grand way-marks in the onward and upward march of the human intellect” by the New York Times. “What was the essence of the achievement?” Gleick asks. “‘The transmission of thought, the vital impulse of matter.’ The excitement was global but the effects were local. … Information that just two years earlier had taken days to arrive at its destination could now be there — anywhere — in seconds. This was not a doubling or tripling of transmission speed; it was a leap of many orders of magnitude. It was like the bursting of a dam whose presence had not even been known.”

Sound familiar? It should. The telegraph, after all, changed everything when it was popularized in the 1840s; by 1858, a transatlantic cable had put Britain’s Queen Victoria and President James Buchanan in direct contact, while news, gossip and commercial orders blazed across the wires. “Some worried that the telegraph would be the death of newspapers,” Gleick writes, although “newspapers could not wait to put the technology to work.” All of a sudden, information was not just a tool but also a commodity. “Because the telegraph was an information technology,” he posits, “it served as an agent of its own ascendency.”

The story of the telegraph is central to “The Information,” which is a wide-ranging, deeply researched and delightfully engaging history — going back to Homer and Socrates (who distrusted written language as a corruption of pure memory) and extending, in loosely chronological fashion, to our contemporary culture of downloads and data clouds — of how we have come to occupy a world defined in bits and bytes. For Gleick, information has always been our medium; since cave dwellers painted the first animal forms on their walls, we have existed in two parallel universes, the biosphere and the infosphere.

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