I am … unhindered by talent

Courtesty of Status-Q, I’ve just run across this amazing and wonderful little project: WW1: Experiences of an English Soldier.

Bill Lamin is posting the letters his grandfather (Harry Lamin) wrote home from the front of WWI as a blog. Each letter is posted 90 years after (to the day) Harry wrote it, so following the blog is somewhat like being his family, waiting for news, hoping it’s good.

What a brilliantly simple idea, absolutely full of potential and possibility. Our family is fortunate enough to have a number of excellent diaries, letter collections, and such, and I’ve often thought of “doing something” with them. My thoughts had always been fairly traditional; this opens all sorts of doors.

Wow.

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The death of the book has been oft prophesied, and so far the old dear keeps hanging in there. Here Bill Janssen is quoted by Peter Brantley, suggesting that what the casualties may be are forms of content rather than forms of publishing.

Will the novel become a marginal form like opera?

In the hype around the Kindle, I haven’t noticed a mention of Monday’s NEA report, To Read or Not To Read. Seems much more interesting.

I’ve been saying for a few years that we are entering an age where textual fiction is becoming less and less significant, particularly for the canonical long text, the novel. The novel is a relatively recent innovation in entertainment, and the popular novel is a product of cheap production and distribution, thanks to the industrial revolution.

The delivery channels have multiplied, and the economics have changed. Television killed off the pulp magazine (and crippled the market for short stories). What would replace the novel? Something which would produce a ludic experience for hours at a time — a movie. But movies have not succeeded in killing off the novel. They’re too expensive and too complicated, and major players control the distribution channels. The best they could do was to absorb years of talents like Chandler and Faulkner.

But now we have kids who don’t read, the Web, game engines, and the writers’ strike. Game engines and machinima make it possible for writers to produce and direct their own work without actors or sets, for a relatively modest capitalization (a game machine). The Web provides free distribution. Kids provide a hungry audience. But the wild card here is the WGA strike. Suddenly all the folks who normally spend their days creating teleplays are looking for other outlets for their creative energies. Maybe write that novel they’ve been talking about? Maybe not. People like Rob Long (Cheers) are suddenly blogging. Maybe someone will tell them about machinima. We may be entering a twilight for the popular novel, perhaps relegating it to a niche more like opera.

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Big ups to open… for the tip.

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There’s been much written and said about Radiohead’s decision to let punters name their price when downloading their new In rainbows album. While some of this heat and noise as been quite sensible, much has been predictable tripe about how stupid and naive the band has been. There is some evidence, however, that the band wasn’t so daft, and that their monetary take may have indeed been not to far from what they (as the band) would have seen through traditional marketing channels.

More importantly, though, I think most of this blather totally fails to grasp the more central question: Most bands (artists, writers, open source programmers, etc., etc.) aren’t in it for the money. If you take out the handful that make a fortune (can we please take out the reformed Spice Girls? please?), most people who do this sort of thing aren’t looking to get rich, and many don’t even expect to pay the bills (hence the term “day job”). For them, the value is often much more in being heard (or read or whatever).

As a concrete example, Bill Langdon, Riccardo Poli, and I are considering expanding a chapter we’ve (in fairness, mostly they’ve) written on genetic programming into a full on book. The traditional model would be to find a (science) publisher (which we could easily do), and then have them produce and market the thing. It would sell a few copies, and we’d make a few bucks along the way. That kind of book is never gonna sell 10M copies, however, and we know going in that we’ll never make very much monetarily. But that’s not why most academics write papers and books; if it was we’d be the daftest lot on the planet. (No, don’t go there…)

What we’re after is, in a crude sense, references. Since we’re not going to get rich, we’ll settle for famous (at least in our circles). So we want as many people to read, use, and reference our book as possible, for that’s really the currency of the realm where we live. (And, in truth, that currency converts back to hard cash in complex and indirect ways, through pay raises, increased odds on grant applications, invitations to give talks and tutorials, etc., etc.)

So our intention is to follow a model not so far removed from Radiohead’s (although we’ll probably not get nearly as much press). Our tentative plan is to self-publish using one of the many print-on-demand sites, so there will be a printed, bound copy people can buy; we’ll keep the price low, because we’re more interested in volume than immediate profit. We’ll also give the book away, probably in HTML and PDF formats, to encourage people to check it out, use it, and refer to it, regardless of whether they ever actually buy a copy. We might have a PayPal donation button, sort of like Radiohead’s download for free and pay us what you think makes sense. Or we might not; that’s a bridge we’ll cross when we get there. We’ll do most of the marketing, taking copies to conferences, getting it mentioned on the relevant web sites and discussion groups, and hopefully picking up a fair bit of word of mouth along the way.

I don’t expect we’ll ever see much money on this deal, but I’m quite optimistic that the three of us can put together a book that’ll get used, and that’s the point for us. Similarly, Radiohead’s made enough money on their music that I doubt they’re deeply concerned about a few dollars here or there. They want to be heard and talked about, and they are. Hopefully we can have a somewhat similar experience.

I should also be clear that just because people like Radiohead (or struggling new bands) choose to give away their music, we shouldn’t just write them off as fools and rip them off at every opportunity. We all benefit from their passion, and it’s in our collective interest to support that when we can. That’s part of why I do my darndest to avoid giving money to bands that are already making a ton - they don’t need my support. I prefer instead to spend my money on the zillions of cool, but virtually anonymous, acts that can really benefit from a few bucks.

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I was pottering in the kitchen (probably making tea or some such) while WeatherGirl was listening to a comedy program on the radio in the sitting room. I’m half hearing the words as they gently waft my direction, when a woman on the program says “shit” quite clearly and plainly. Matter of fact, no big deal, middle of the sentence.

“Shit”

But it popped out at me like a glowing ember and smacked that neural structure from 1974 that said “Hey - people aren’t supposed to say things like that on radio!” Which was a little odd, since I’m typically not very good at noticing such things (which is sometimes a problem when reviewing CDs for the radio station). Yet there it was, and it certainly caught my attention this time.

I suspect that in 1974 the BBC never would have never aired such language, except perhaps in the wee hours, or with bleeping. Times change, however, as the recent UK re-rating of Christopher Lee’s 1958 Dracula from X to 12A (!) makes clear.

In a larger sense, however, it seems like we’ve turned a huge collective corner and, short of some catastrophic change, aren’t likely to come back. It’s clear that people swear, are quite fascinated by sex, and enjoy the occasional fart joke. Various folks like the Victorians and the FCC might have attempted to deny these basic facts, but it didn’t make them any less true, it just drove them underground.

The web, however, is rapidly washing away any such pretense. Without any sort of centralized control over content (and none on the horizon), we end up with the great unwashed, and almost entirely unedited, rambling burps of the world. And we can no longer pretend that it’s not out there, that people don’t say these things. All these past forms of mass censorship have been based on the flimsy notion that we were protecting someone from something. Now, short of an off-grid survivalist camp in Montana (where I’m sure no one swears, talks about sex, or tells fart jokes), you just can’t pretend it’s not out there. Mulder would be proud.

As a result, we’ll just have to grow up and take some responsibility, for ourselves and our children, and not assume that someone else will handle it for us. We’ll no doubt run across some things that aren’t to our liking (American Idol anyone?). Assuming they’re not illegal or harming others, we’ll need to just look away and hit the back button. Kids are gonna run into things that lead to awkward questions. But heaven knows they talked some crazy shit in the playground when I was in elementary school, so I suspect all that’s really changed is our ability to pretend it wasn’t happening.

This is one of those moments where something huge has changed, incrementally but fairly quickly, and will not likely change back in many-a-lifetime. And that little “shit” was just one of the hinge creaks as the door opened on this new world.

Credit to Neil101 for the great image.

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Britain apparently now has 4 million bloggers:

Of Britain’s web population of 26 million [a study] found that 15% kept a blog. Of those running a personal website, almost one in five were blogging at least once a day - the high water mark for an internet phenomenon that is transforming the way people voice their opinions.

But what’s the value of voicing one’s opinion if no one’s actually listening? It would be particularly interesting to study how much of all that text is being read, and by who? (In fairness, of course, there aren’t that many folks reading this, so mea culpa, etc., etc.)

Thanks to John Naughton for the pointer.

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There are those rare, but wonderful, moments when you realize that the tool you’ve always wanted (but didn’t actually realize that you desired) was right there in front of you.

I just had one.

I’ve used LaTeX for preparing my scientific documents for nigh on two decades now. For all its oddities and annoying little bits, it’s the standard for technical writing in computer science as well as numerous other areas in math and science, and it allows you to make and manage complex documents that stay consistent and look really nice.

Through most, if not all of that time, I’ve used various weird hacks to leave notes for myself in the document where I wouldn’t miss them. A paragraph in bold face, for example, reminding me to double check a formula, or go get the right reference for a certain idea. They’ve worked, but none of the mechanisms have been optimal. They’ve often been more missable than something like that should be, and they’ve frequently broken the flow of the document, making it harder to check for things like page counts and widows.

Working with Tyler on IM tonight on a paper he, Brian, and I are trying going to finish by Sunday, Tyler was musing about how it would be nice to be able to put notes like that in the margins in red.

And the lightbulb went off.

Of course! LaTeX can do that, and I’m pretty sure it can do it easily! (At least the margin part - I didn’t really care about the red either way.) Sure enough a 10 second search on Google confirmed that the command existed and was trivial. \marginpar{ ... }

Duh.

Now those little notes are set out in the margins, not affecting the flow of the document, and quite unmissable. Now a quick scan of the document will immediately verify that we’ve removed (and hopefully addressed) all of them before we submit the final copy. Now they really work.

Simple, clean, and effective.

And it only took me twenty years to figure out.

Damn.

Thanks to Tyler for sparking the idea, and to all the crazy nuts that have poured their sweat into TeX, LaTeX, and the various related tools (I really like TeXShop for the Mac!) over the years.

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Yesterday I had the happy experience of finding out that my photos were being used in two rather unexpected (but cool!) ways.

The first was completely out of the blue. I got a nice note from the on-line editor of Moreover letting me know that they had used one of my photos (”Alice, and her beside book of birds“) as the starting point for a new banner image (above) for their website. I don’t know anything about the blog than what a quick look around would indicate, but it seems a reasonable blog of book commentary and review, as part of a (new?) magazine (Intelligent Life) owned by the Economist magazine. They presumably found my photo through a search on Flickr (probably looking for books), so thanks to Flickr, and thanks to Mary and Larry, whose house the photo was taken in.

The second was a little less suprising, but still cool. Dad’s an active member of the Benton County Master Gardeners group in NW Arkansas, so I showed him my notes and examples on photographing gardens that I put together for a garden and art tour earlier in the summer. He then asked if he could share them with his group, and what were really just some rough notes have subsequently turned into the lead article in their monthly newsletter! Dad had told me that they were probably going to use some of my notes, but I certainly didn’t expect them to feature so prominently, or to be included in toto (over two issues).

Hee, hee, hee…

And just a few hours after posting this, I found out that a photo from our previous UK sabbatical is being used on the Tate St. Ives Wikipedia page!

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I’ve been warning people about the many problems with Microsoft Word (and all of Office, really) for years (I gave a talk entitled “Is Microsoft Word Inherently evil?” five years ago), with about as much success as Don Quixote. The problem, ultimately, isn’t that Microsoft is evil or their software sucks (although arguments could be made…), but that they continue to build their empire on closed document formats that they change quite arbitrarily from version to version, and without reliable support for converting between versions. This leaves everyone who lives in this bizarre world where Word is assumed to be some sort of “standard” scrambling to keep up with these changes. The scramble that M$ would obviously prefer is that we would all keep buying newer versions of Office on their whim. Those who can’t or (like me) won’t go down that road use cool things like OpenOffice, but the people that (mostly) donate their time to develop that sofware then have to reverse engineer (i.e., guess intelligently and test a lot) the format so that we can open everyone else’s Word/Excel/Office documents. Oh, joy.

Government and public entities who have some bizarre notion that their documents need to be readable into the foreseeable future have been growing increasingly concerned about this for several years now, and in several cases no longer allow documents of record to be stored in Word format for fear that they will be unreadable at some point in the future. Well, it would appear that some of the biggest guns in scientific publishing have also put their feet down in this mess, as the mega-journals Science and Nature are officially asking authors to not use Word 2007 formats for submissions. As reported by Rob Weir:

It appears that Science, the journal of the America Association for the Advancement of Science, itself the largest scientific society in the world, has updated its authoring guidelines to include advice for Office 2007 users. The news is not good.

“Because of changes Microsoft has made in its recent Word release that are incompatible with our internal workflow, which was built around previous versions of the software, Science cannot at present accept any files in the new .docx format produced through Microsoft Word 2007, either for initial submission or for revision. Users of this release of Word should convert these files to a format compatible with Word 2003 or Word for Macintosh 2004 (or, for initial submission, to a PDF file) before submitting to Science.”

That’s annoying and stupid, but not devastating. If I was silly enough to write serious technical work (complete with those crazy formulas and graphs that are at the core of most good science) in Word, I could always save in an older Word format or the much more sensible choice of PDF and submit that way. Presumably Science will get their workflow updated at some point, further enabling my Microsoft addiction.

Ah, but here’s the kicker:

“Users of Word 2007 should also be aware that equations created with the default equation editor included in Microsoft Word 2007 will be unacceptable in revision, even if the file is converted to a format compatible with earlier versions of Word; this is because conversion will render equations as graphics and prevent electronic printing of equations, and because the default equation editor packaged with Word 2007 — for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us — was not designed to be compatible with MathML. Regrettably, we will be forced to return any revised manuscript created with the Word 2007 default equation editor to authors for re-editing. To get around this, please use the Math Type equation editor or the equation editor included in previous versions of Microsoft Word.”

You gotta love it when serious academic journals use phrases like “for reasons that, quite frankly, utterly baffle us”. Sounds like Microsoft really stepped in something this time, as good equation editing and formatting is crucial to a major part of scientific research publishing, and damned important to much of the rest! No one’s ever argued that LaTeX was particularly easy to use (although practice and good tools like TeXShop do make it pretty straightforward), but it still dominates large parts of the scientific publishing universe because it supports open, standard formats, and generates gorgeous results. I can tell you that when I’m reviewing conference submissions, it’s almost always immediately obvious when a submission was written in Word instead of LaTeX, and the difference never makes Word look good…

Weir’s piece continues with quotes regarding a similar position being taken at Nature, and one of the comments on Weir’s post indicates Wiley is disallowing Word 2007 for all of their journals.

Oh, but wait! Microsoft does (sort of) support open formats! They’ve had lots of opportunities to incorporate support for existing standards like the Open Document Format and, uh…, didn’t. They instead invented their own open format, while totally failing to support the reading of or writing to the existing standards. But you can get a plug-in for Office that will allow you to convert between their open format and a slightly out-of-date version of the standard. If that’s the best that a giant like M$ can do, we’re all in serious trouble!

Now if we can get some entities with similar levels of clout to disallow PowerPoint the world would truly be a better place…

Big thanks to John Naughton for the initial pointer.

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I recently ran across two unrelated but interesting posts about issues of bias on Wikipedia. It should hardly come as a shock that a huge community generated blob like Wikipedia has weirdnesses that reflect the properties of that community. That particular blob plays an important role in the world (I know look up stuff on Wikipedia all the time), so a better understanding those biases certainly has significant value.

TechCrunch reports on a piece on SomethingAwful.com about WikiGroaning. The idea is simple - compare the write-up on Wikipedia of things that are of arguably important in the “big sense” (say, Aristotle) to things that are well known now but arguably ephemeral in the long view (say, Oprah). Gee, now that’s probably not the balance an editorial board would have planned for, eh? This isn’t entirely surprising, but still disappointing. The pieces I’ve linked to have numerous pairs to compare, although the fact that they’ve brought those pairs to the attention of a wider audience may lead to at least some of the imbalances being addressed. Many of the pairs show a definite “nerd bias” (e.g., Lizard vs. Dragon), but others (like the aforementioned Aristotle vs. Oprah) are arguably a more general “current events and pop culture bias”.

And because none of us have any real work to do, some silly people created WikiGroaning.com, where one can type in pairs of words or phrases and they’ll compute the “nerd points” for each based on the contents and edit history of the appropriate entries on Wikipedia. I did a comparison of Jon Stewart and Edward Murrow and, big surprise, Stewart racks up way more nerd points than Murrow (113,720 vs. 14,380). Ditto when comparing Stewart to Walter Cronkite (14,462), and Stephen Colbert has even more nerd points than Stewart (141,964).

As is pointed out multiple times in the discussion of the TechCrunch piece, Wikipedia is still largely driven by the early adopters, and those are (not surprisingly) still nerds to a large degree. The real question will be whether the demographics of Wikipedia contributors will become more “mainstream” over time. If it does, some of the bias goes away of its own accord. If the bias, however, works to prevent that mainstreaming we could get a feedback loop that traps Wikipedia in this nerdly space. I don’t honestly consider that terribly likely ’cause the kids are growing up with it, but we’ll have to wait and see. The pop culture bias is perhaps more chronic, as most people in most times tend to dwell inordinately on the people and events of their day. At some level, though, I don’t really mind Jon Stewart having some huge entry as long as Edward R. Murrow has gotten his due.

The other (and arguably more important in the long run) issue is raised by John Naughton, who reports on serious gaps in the Wikipedia entry on “Spreadsheet”. Naughton is picking up on a post by Dan Bricklin (a key developer of VisiCalc - the first spreadsheet I had any contact with), who discusses his concerns at some length and raises important questions about how a community project builds “neutral” content in a way that incorporates the experience of heavily invested experts like Bricklin in the process. Important stuff and worth the read.

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