[FRIAM] iClarified - Apple News - Amazon Launches Textbook Rentals for the Kindle
Interesting: digital rental of text books at amazon: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=16101 Others have done this sort of thing but this is pretty big-time. And I notice that this is not only for the kindle device, but also for your computer, phone, ipad via their kindle apps, which now allow color, even though the kindle itself is black/white only. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] iClarified - Apple News - Amazon Launches Textbook Rentals for the Kindle
Hmmm... strikes me as another attempt to extract rents from an already monopolistic market (you must use textbook X for this course and you will pay Y). 80% off list price for a 30 day rental? So if I want it for a year, that's about 240% of list price? Nice business model. —R On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: Interesting: digital rental of text books at amazon: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=16101 Others have done this sort of thing but this is pretty big-time. And I notice that this is not only for the kindle device, but also for your computer, phone, ipad via their kindle apps, which now allow color, even though the kindle itself is black/white only. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] iClarified - Apple News - Amazon Launches Textbook Rentals for the Kindle
OReilly's Safari likely would be better: a fixed price ($22/mo for standard) for a fixed number of books (10 for standard) that can change over time. OReilly has been bring in other publishers, so may include textbooks eventually. Still, as you point out, its not cheap .. $200/year .. but that's less than the textbooks themselves. It is a bit awkward: you get online access to your entire shelf but not download access, which is metered out a bit at a time using download tokens for parts of a book as a pdf. Probably can game the system, but basically there isn't a way yet to own a pdf yet lend it to someone. DRM of some sort. Do you know how UK's Open University handles text books? I believe its fully accredited, right? -- Owen On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 9:55 AM, Robert Holmes rob...@holmesacosta.comwrote: Hmmm... strikes me as another attempt to extract rents from an already monopolistic market (you must use textbook X for this course and you will pay Y). 80% off list price for a 30 day rental? So if I want it for a year, that's about 240% of list price? Nice business model. —R On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 at 9:17 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.netwrote: Interesting: digital rental of text books at amazon: http://www.iclarified.com/entry/index.php?enid=16101 Others have done this sort of thing but this is pretty big-time. And I notice that this is not only for the kindle device, but also for your computer, phone, ipad via their kindle apps, which now allow color, even though the kindle itself is black/white only. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Invitation to connect on LinkedIn
LinkedIn Rich Murray requested to add you as a connection on LinkedIn: -- J T Tom, I'd like to add you to my professional network on LinkedIn. - Rich Accept invitation from Rich Murray http://www.linkedin.com/e/-1hr2nv-gqb4ceu3-u/doOl3guGhiY6zsFTdoY1Mg3IxiP5/blk/I139691351_15/1BpC5vrmRLoRZcjkkZt5YCpnlOt3RApnhMpmdzgmhxrSNBszYRclYNdjcNejoVcP59bSAPll1ehB1RbPgRcjASd3cMdj8LrCBxbOYWrSlI/EML_comm_afe/ View invitation from Rich Murray http://www.linkedin.com/e/-1hr2nv-gqb4ceu3-u/doOl3guGhiY6zsFTdoY1Mg3IxiP5/blk/I139691351_15/3kNnP4RcP4VdzAPckALqnpPbOYWrSlI/svi/ -- Why might connecting with Rich Murray be a good idea? Have a question? Rich Murray's network will probably have an answer: You can use LinkedIn Answers to distribute your professional questions to Rich Murray and your extended network. You can get high-quality answers from experienced professionals. http://www.linkedin.com/e/-1hr2nv-gqb4ceu3-u/ash/inv19_ayn/ -- (c) 2011, LinkedIn Corporation FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
[FRIAM] Uncertainty vs Information - redux and resolution
In a thread early last month I was doing my thing of stirring the pot by making noise about the equivalence of 'information' and 'uncertainty' - and I was quoting Shannon to back me up. We all know that the two concepts are ultimately semantically opposed - if for no other reason than uncertainty adds to confusion and information can help to clear it up. So, understandably, Owen - and I think also Frank - objected somewhat to my equating them. But I was able to overwhelm the thread with more Shannon quotes, so the thread kinda tapered off. What we all were looking for, I believe, is for Information Theory to back up our common usage and support the notion that information and uncertainty are, indeed, semantically opposite; while at the same time they are both measured by the same function: Shannon's version of entropy (which is also Gibbs' formula with some constants established). Of course, Shannon /does/ equate them - at least mathematically so, if not semantically so. Within the span of three sentences in his famous 1948 paper, he uses the words information, uncertainty and choice to describe what his concept of entropy measures. But he never does get into any semantic distinctions among the three - only that all three measured by the same formula. Even contemporary information theorists like Vlatko Vedral, Professor of Quantum Information Science at Oxford, appear to be of no help with any distinction between 'information' and 'uncertainty'. In his 2010 book _Decoding Reality: the universe as quantum information_, he traces the notion of /information/ back to the ancient Greeks. The ancient Greeks laid the foundation for its (information) development when they suggested that the information content of an event somehow depends only on how probable this event really is. Philosophers like Aristotle reasoned that the more surprised we are by an event the more information the event carries Following this logic, we conclude that information has to be inversely proportional to probability, i. e. events with smaller probability carry more information But it was the Russian probability theorist A. I. Khinchin who provides us the satisfaction we seek. Seeing that the Shannon paper (bless his soul) lacked both mathematical rigor and satisfying semantic justifications, he set about to set the situation right with his slim but essential little volume entitled _The Mathematical Foundations of Information Theory_ (1957). He manages to make the pertinent distinction between 'information' and 'uncertainty' most cleanly in this single paragraph. (By scheme Khinchin means probability distribution.) Thus we can say that the information given us by carrying out some experiment consists of removing the uncertainty which existed before the experiment. The larger this uncertainty, the larger we consider to be the amount of information obtained by removing it. Since we agreed to measure the uncertainty of a finite scheme A by its entropy, H(A), it is natural to express the amount of information given by removing this uncertainty by an increasing function of the quantity H(A) Thus, in all that follows, we can consider the amount of information given by the realization of a finite scheme to be equal to the entropy of the scheme. On 6/6/11 8:17 AM, Owen Densmore wrote: Nick: Next you are in town, lets read the original Shannon paper together. Alas, it is a bit long, but I'm told its a Good Thing To Do. -- Owen On Jun 6, 2011, at 7:44 AM, Nicholas Thompson wrote: Grant, This seems backwards to me, but I got properly thrashed for my last few postings so I am putting my hat over the wall very carefully here. I thought……i thought …. the information in a message was the number of bits by which the arrival of the message decreased the uncertainty of the receiver. So, let’s say you are sitting awaiting the result of a coin toss, and I am on the other end of the line flipping the coin. Before I say “heads” you have 1 bit of uncertainty; afterwards, you have none. The reason I am particularly nervous about saying this is that it, of course, holds out the possibility of negative information. Some forms of communication, appeasement gestures in animals, for instance, have the effect of increasing the range of behaviors likely to occur in the receiver. This would seem to correspond to a negative value for the information calculation. Nick From: friam-boun...@redfish.com [mailto:friam-boun...@redfish.com] On Behalf Of Grant Holland Sent: Sunday, June 05, 2011 11:07 PM To: The Friday Morning Applied Complexity Coffee Group; Steve Smith Subject: Re: [FRIAM] Quote of the week Interesting note on information and uncertainty... Information is Uncertainty. The two words are synonyms. Shannon called it uncertainty, contemporary Information theory calls it information. It is often thought that the
[FRIAM] /. Aaron Swartz Indicted in Attempted Piracy of Four Million Documents (JSTOR)
From the This-Is-To-Good-To-Believe dept: http://yro.slashdot.org/story/11/07/19/1839237/Aaron-Swartz-Indicted-in-Attempted-Piracy-of-Four-Million-Documents JSTOR is the outfit that creates pay-walls for a huge number of important papers. -- Owen FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] What philosophers do
I did not read all of the explosion of posts about philosophy (I was at a conference when it happened), but... This is a very limited view of what it is that Philosophers do. One of the main points to come out of the American Philosophical tradition is the notion that philosophy must continuously reinvent itself in ways that are relevant to the here and now (i.e., the particular place and time the philosopher finds herself in). The traditional idea that philosophers today should be obsessed with the same things that philosophers were obsessed with centuries ago is the cause of much of the trouble that people on this list are rightly complaining about. (When philosophers buy the traditional notion, it causes them to do things that aren't very valuable, and when lay people buy the traditional notion it causes them to misunderstand the philosophers who are trying something new and potentially valuable.) For example, if modern philosophers are to have anything to do with the word truth, they probably should be investigating the shifting meaning of the term, rather than engaging in an antiquated quest for truth as understood based on centuries-old categories. Based on skimming the deflationism article, it seems as if the point is to deflate people who try to puff up their chests with talk of truth. While there might be much more mumbling about philosophical things that necessary - it is, after all, part of an academic game - that seems like a pretty reasonable goal, potentially relevant as a commentary on modern political and scientific discourse. It is also worth noting that, as many people on this list know, it is unfair to judge the merits of an academic discipline based on finding out that some of the work done in that field seems trivial. I'm sure it would not be hard to find research done by complexity theorists that seems just as trivial and parochial as discussion of deflationism. Eric On Tue, Jul 19, 2011 12:25 AM, Russ Abbott russ.abb...@gmail.com wrote: I just came across http://ndpr.nd.edu/review.cfm?id=24291 a new book on truth. The review says, in part, The volume is an ambitious attempt to survey the field of current work on truth as it relates to a variety of topics. ... It may thus be recommended as an excellent primer for anyone looking to get an overview of current work on issues concerning truth in areas including norms of belief, relativism, color, truth-making, critical reflection, autonomy, as well more traditional themes such as paradoxes, deflationism, coherence, correspondence, pluralism, and the status of bivalence. Since I had no idea what deflationism means with respect to truth, I looked it up and found that there is http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/truth-deflationary/ in the Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. This seems to me to be typical of the sort of work that philosophers do. The distinctions that are analyzed are real--and in some cases even interesting. But somehow the effort seems to me to be much to parochial, which is a strange thing to say considering that it is dealing with a notion as general and important as truth. -- Russ FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org Eric Charles Professional Student and Assistant Professor of Psychology Penn State University Altoona, PA 16601 FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
Re: [FRIAM] iClarified - Apple News - Amazon Launches Textbook Rentals for the Kindle
I hope the Open University is accredited, that's where I got my MBA! They had an interesting approach in the late 90s ( don't know if is the same now): course fees included textbooks, so a week after signing up you would get a big box through the mail full of the textbooks you would need for the year. Saved a lot of time! --Robert On Jul 19, 2011 11:37 AM, Owen Densmore o...@backspaces.net wrote: FRIAM Applied Complexity Group listserv Meets Fridays 9a-11:30 at cafe at St. John's College lectures, archives, unsubscribe, maps at http://www.friam.org
