Social Mode

It’s on….

digital books just got way more interesting.

Here’s the big differences between the devices and services:

Kindle

Basics: Low powered device that can run for days without a recharge. Black and white epaper / eink screen. 3g connectivity. Ability to add storage via SD card.

Pros: Closest thing to a real book out of all the devices and digital book ideas. Amazon ebookstore is huge.

Cons: single purpose device. read books. and make sure the books don’t have pictures, diagrams or anything other than text.

Get Specs Here

Nook

Basics: Similar to Kindle. It’s a slightly more functional kindle. Has a nice color screen for media browsing. Books through Barnes and Noble.

Pros: Nice feel to the device. Color is nice.

Cons: Single purpose device. BN ebookstore is not as robust or easy as Kindle bookstore.

Get Specs Here

iBooks/iPad

Basics: Apple’s fully featured tablet. Basically a decent computer with eBooks reader software.

Pros: Multi purpose device. Can actually compute. Beautiful screen. Possible to have nice reading+interactivity.

Cons: Battery life is more like a phone, less like a book! Glossy screen. Not quite as “rugged” as kindle.

Get Specs here.

Pricing:

Kindle and Nook are around $250. Entry level iPad is $499.

Pricing on all of these are within $150or so. Amazing that iPad is that low. Almost impossible to pick a single use device that costs as much.

Conclusions

For me, what wins is the best book/publication selection. Amazon is really hard to beat in that area.

Prediction – Kindle app on iPad pretty quickly! I think Amazon will have to give up on the Kindle if it doesn’t come out with something the publishers want to push hard. You can’t beat Apple at hardware on a grand scale. not yet.

[UPDATE 4/25/2010: I’ve been using my iPad for several weeks now. I haven’t turned on my Kindle since I got my iPad with the Kindle software. There’s simply no need. I’m amazed by the iPad battery life. I also didn’t anticipate how useful it is that you don’t need light to read on the iPad. Like duh! iBooks isn’t quite good enough to compete with the Kindle store based on inventory but I suspect that will change quickly.]

iPad/iBooks vs. Kindle vs. Nook

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Jan 27
The rumors are finally rumors no more. The iPad is out.

When the iphone came out it was clear it was going to change phones.

the iPad… hmmmm…. where does it fit? what does it advance? what experience does it enhance?

the only obvious thing I see right now is video gaming and ebooks/publishing.

but…… 10 hour battery life makes it a tough tough tough thing to compete with good ol’ paper.

There’s a lot of talk about Digital Publishing… new form of newspaper. I just don’t buy it. If the browser wasn’t a good medium for newspapers, there’s really no basis to assume the iPad will be.

There’s a killer application in education for this. It’s actually functional enough to act as a digital library and a computing tool.

Apple iPad

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Jan 27
MOON is an extraordinary movie. A slim 90 or so minutes, 1 main actor, minimal sets and effects and one gut punch of a concept.

Duncan Jones and everyone who worked on this movie deserve a real high five for keeping this subtle and letting the eerie realizations of Sam Bell take center stage. SciFi/futurism/philosophical benders tend to go over the top and lose their power by setting everything in such a bizarre environment with over the top characters. MOON does not.

What’s really disturbing about MOON is that this is a plausible future of some sort. It’s not flying cars, light speed, terminators nor brains in vats powering a super computer. It’s a future of clunky cloning, functional energy technology, and AI that isn’t all powerful.

I don’t want to ruin the story for folks so I’m not going to go into much detail. If you at all wonder about what we all think it means to be alive, be a human, be self aware and be free, you will really enjoy this movie and probably be really unnerved by it.

No conclusions. more questions…

MOON review and thoughts

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Jan 16
What do we really mean by human rights? where do these rights come from? what is their source of power?

Russell’s (Son) position:

Though we have produced powerful rhetoric and documents through human history human rights are simply a concept. They values we create and we choose to live by. There is no such thing has some absolute, outside of us thing called a human right. The universe doesn’t have a conscience. Humankinds evolution from earlier species didn’t somehow magically produce some special rights for us that the rest of the universe can’t enjoy.

Agreeing to some basic rights seems to be a beneficial idea for humankind. Freedom in all its forms seems to be a pretty darn useful value to live by. That doesn’t make it some universal truth.

All men aren’t created equal – not in body, not in cognitive ability, not in environment. That doesn’t mean we shouldn’t treat everyone on equal ground. Not Equal doesn’t mean better or worse. I think that’s the confusion that makes people fall back to claiming some fundamental human rights.

Does the fact that human rights spring forth only from man and not the universe, not a god, or some other outside source devalue them? make them less powerful? No. In fact, in some sense I think it makes it more powerful. The fact that billions of people can agree on some basic principles is quite powerful and very empowering. It actually increases the burden of enforcing it because there’s no faceless being we can blame when these agreed upon rights are violated.

Donna’s (Mother) Position:

Hmmm. Human rights. We’ve assigned a lot of value to the words and far less to those issues we find critical enough to include under the label.

I’ve never operated under the illusion that God defined human rights. Some big thinkers have done that, and others have shunned the notion that there are any universal needs that might rise to the level of being rights we grant and protect.

It seems more important to me to try to answer if our basic needs have advanced as our knowledge as human beings has advanced. Do we add to the list of things we value and protect as rights or are we locked into what we could reasonably provide in the past? Food, clean water, education, shelter, healthcare, equal protection under the law … are these all just things we need and desire or are they rights we identify and extend to one another?

And that pesky little topic of equality becomes so muddy all on its own as we deny various individuals their abilities to become waht they could otherwise be by limiting their access to some basic human needs. We create inequality and then shrug our shoulders and call it inevitable. And we most definitely make decisions about less than equal meaning less than good — and less worthy.

So, if we do not define some of our basic human needs and desires as rights, we will doom millions of our fellow men and women to poverty, to pain, to illness, to cold and so on. If we have the ability to lift one another by sharing human values as human rights, I say we do so.

Human Rights – The Mother Son Debates

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Jan 15
Is this existence the only life we have? no after life… no heaven… no hell? is there karma? is there reincarnation? is there soul? Is there anything other than the 80 or so years most of us will “live”? What are the implications?

Russell’s (Son) position:

This is it. My 28,105 days are all that I have. People might remember some version of the things I said or did, others might have photos and videos of some slice of my life and some might carry my genes but I, capital I, will cease to exist when I die.

Based on that, best to live life to the fullest. That doesn’t mean become adrenaline junkie or find Buddha. To me it means just do and stop to smell the roses. Work hard, play hard… be at peace as much as is reasonable. Experience as much as possible.

I like what my grandfather said, “All you leave behind is how people remember you.” [In the response below, Mom corrects this… perhaps I remembered the quote the way I wanted to… hmmmm]

Donna’s (Mother) response:

So glad to see my father’s words recalled here. I remember them a bit differently, “When it’s all said and done, it’s only the people who will matter.” But that’s really an aside to the question here for me, since I think he was trying to tell me to live for the people and not the stuff after he had spent so many years working so hard to provide me with a good and comfortable life. He wasn’t commenting on his belief in God (which was also one of his deep values) but rather trying to guide me.

Is this life all we have? Is this it? I do not believe this physical life is it.

In fact, the last time I heard anyone say that “this is it” was when my brother and I stood at direct odds over the impending death of our dad — the man quoted by both mother and son herein.

My father was languishing on life support systems having had a very bad outcome from his surgery for pancreatic cancer. He lapsed into a coma shortly after the surgery and showed few — if any — signs that he could or would come out of the coma.

As the hours and days wore on, my brother was determined. If there was one sliver of a chance that our dad would come out of his coma, my brother wanted the life support to continue. I argued that my dad never wanted to be kept alive on life support systems when his quality of life was not likely to be outcome. I wanted his wishes honored. I wanted the machines turned off.

My brother was livid and terrified. He said things like, “Don’t get the flu around Donna, she’ll blow your brains out,” and, “I don’t know about you, but I believe this life is all we get so we have to keep him alive if there is any chance at all for life.”

I was angry, hurt but determined. I answered him, “No, I do not believe this is it. But it really doesn’t matter what you or I believe, what matters is what he (our dad) believes, and he believed in something more. He did not fear death but living a life that was without meaning.”

A day or two later when my brother could be sufficiently convinced that there was no hope for life for my dad and after my dad had then suffered mini-strokes and lots of end-of-life traumas, we finally turned off the machines.

We stood at his beside. A shell of a body that had not shown any tangible signs of life for eight days — my dad was finally to die. In the midst of those sad moments, he turned his head, opened his eyes and fixed them on mine. I reassured him that everything would be all right, just as he had reassured me so many times when I was a little girl. I told him I loved him (as we all did). And he died. The sun was visable for a few moments before the cloud covered filled in the gray skies, and it was over.

My dad was my main teacher in areas of the greater themes of my life, my value system and my overall beliefs, but he was by no means my only teacher.

It is my experience is that the deeper threads of life hold more than I can comprehend or explain without my faith. The wind, a crashing wave on the Pacific shore, a grandchild’s voice, a phrase well-written… or a the love of my father who gave up so much of what he desired to share the fruits of his work with me and to better my life.

I have so much faith in something outside of self.

This Life is All There Is – The Mother-Son Debates

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Jan 11
“It has, however, presented some issues for our affiliates. Both Jay and the show are committed to working closely with them to find ways to improve the performance.”

from NBC statement.

I kinda figured that was going to be the issue.

How hard was it really to see that moving Leno before affiliate news and late night programming was going to hurt the network? Sad to say but people have been falling asleep to Leno for decades. A move back to 11:30pm might not work now that people are getting an extra hour of sleep… 😉

Seriously, pretty shortsighted or naive or….

Jay Leno Show Shake Up – Called that one right!

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Jan 7
The first of the newly created Mother-Son Debates focuses on Health Care Reform.

Russell’s (Son) Position:

The US will have universal health care (some form of it) within 15 years. As the only industrialized nation without it there’s not much precedent against it. The United States does not yet feel the necessity for covering everyone and was very much lagging behind other countries in the discussion of health care reform. Most industrialized nations started the debate early in 20th century and were well on their way/done with the basics by the end of WWII – many countries out of necessity due to the high costs of WWII. The continued superpower status and relatively rich population keep reform at bay. A prolonged high unemployment rate and lengthy war deployments may push things along further faster. Major reforms do not come about because of consideration of specific/individual trials and tribulations – a country needs a statistically significant number of citizens experiencing general difficulties. Health care reform doesn’t differ drastically from education, transportation nor the military. These are things we all want/need but don’t see the immediate value in. We simply had several more centuries to figure out that a more educated, mobile and protected society is going to be more productive (no other justification is required for reform). Furthermore, health care didn’t need to be figured out before early1900s because most people didn’t live long enough (lifespans in industrialized countries were still around 50 years or lower) for end of life medicine to be such a burden on society. With the end of major world wars, improvement in nutrition, widespread clean water and germ theory people lived longer to be exposed to more complicated illnesses. Medical technology progressed enough in the 1900s to give people hope they could cheat death long enough to make death something we didn’t handle culturally very well. So here we are today: still wealthy enough to think we can pay for all this health care out of pocket, still avoiding conversations about death and still about two decades behind the rest of the industrial world on social issues. We’ll have universal health care, but it won’t be activism that brings it about. Activism might move it along a year or two sooner and help us integrate the inevitable reform.

Donna’s (Mother) Position:

Healthcare is a basic human right, and as such, to be protected as a public good. All of a civilized society benefits from providing a progressively financed, single standard of high-quality healthcare to all of its citizens.

In the United States, a healthcare system centered on employer-based health insurance benefits developed and expanded in the mid-to-late 20th century. But this system leaves large segments of the U.S. population with either no coverage for even basic healthcare needs or inadequate coverage.

Costs are exploding for individuals, companies and public entities, and though more than 16 percent of the U.S. gross domestic product is now consumed by healthcare, more than 45,000 Americans die every year simply due to lack of access to care.

The U.S. is the only industrialized nation not to provide universalized access to healthcare to its citizens, and the World Health Organization reports that in several of the major measures of health outcomes, the U.S. lags well behind (life expectancy, infant mortality — to name just two). We spend more than twice as much per capita on healthcare and yet our outcomes do not reflect it.
I’ve heard it said that if we had this level of spending on our Olympic team and our results were as poor, we’d have a society up in arms about making fundamental change. It’s like paying for the Yankees and getting a minor league team or less.

The Mother-Son Debates: Health Care Reform

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Jan 2
I don’t do hardcore predictions as most interesting things are fundamentally unpredictable. That Black Swan thing and all that.

However, I do think it worthwhile to lay down some context and shifts in the business, social and other environments that will shape our lives going forward.

Microsoft and Facebook Merge

Facebook is what Microsoft likely wanted Passport and then Windows Live to be – the single sign on for the planet. Owning the sign-on and digital trail people leave behind is the single most valuable (to a business) asset any media/software business can own (well, really any business). Not even search engine advertising is as valueable. Search is just one of the hundreds of things we all do online and it isn’t nearly as revealing as the comments we post, the products we buy, the addresses we ship to, the people we connect and the jobs we take.

Facebook brings together efficiently so much of what Microsoft makes billions on: messaging, apps development, gaming, mobile…

If you look at how tight Microsoft has been with Facebook from Television ads to deep integration into XBox live it seems that a deepening relationship is inevitable.

Beyond that it would be quite a trojan horse into Apple and Google to have MSFT-FB, as Facebook is a major factor in the continued success of iPhone and Facebook is the only viable-still growing by leaps and bounds advertising platform.

Now, is it Facebook that has the commanding position over Microsoft?   Perhaps a strong Facebook IPO (a very likely event in 2010) will give Facebook enough power to make several very bold moves. Maybe it starts smaller where Facebook absorbs Yahoo…. Again, these things are complex, but I very much think it’s Facebook=Microsoft that mounts the serious competition to the growing Google empire.

For fun, a prediction: As a specific thing I can see happening – you will be able to login to your windows OS based device via Facebook connect.    And that could get very interesting for all things cloud computing, social gaming and so forth!

Print Focused Companies (retailers, publishers, distributors included) to Be Very Aggressive and Then Flame Out

Again, hard to be too specific here but it’s clear after the massive holidays for digital assets that there’s not much hope (hope=transactions!) for the mega bookstores, the mostly print based publishers and daily newspapers.

Borders and Barnes and Noble simply failed on ebooks and their stores are a wreck. I visit at least 2 bookstores a week. Week over week I see a decline in inventory, more and more Twilight displays and a growing impulse buy check out line. All of those things mean that consumers are browsing the shelves and buying inventory. Local borders seem much more like a Hallmark store than a book store. Endless BS gadgets and gifts and a truly horribly vanilla book selection. Sadly the mega bookstores stopped focusing on what made them so attractive – the experience of buying a book. This was their last defensible asset. And now they are probably the WORST way to buy a book – price, fidelity, distractions, over selling, etc.

(If they had the balls they could save themselves. Give away ereaders, give discounts to buying ebooks instore, install print-on-demand binding machines, expand the cafes, hire actual booklovers/experts.   It would take 2 years of investment but in the end these would be beautiful places to socialize, read, explore… and the margins would go way up because they wouldn’t have shitty inventory, confusing displays and everything else that comes with a bad bookstore.)

Print publishers won’t see the return of the ad dollars. And fewer and fewer people will subscribe.   Once the grocery stores dump the lame magazine and newspaper displays (they don’t make us much money as the energy drink displays) print will really suffer.   Print publishers still have tons of great content in them they just can’t get off the crack of the gross margins of the past print monopolies.   No, new emagazine readers aren’t going to save this stuff.   There’s a business is feature content, but it’s not at all like the business of old and the near future will reveal who’s going to adjust to a tighter business model with no investment in print.

Print on Demand, Self Publishing services (iuniverse and the others), ebook stores will continue to erode the distribution and agent infrastructure. I’m sure eventually we’ll have widespread “SEO/findability consultants” for authors. (I’ve advised a few authors and agents).    With megabookstores and other “stands” for print content going away there won’t be any need for restocking and all that. It’s going to be 90% digital very soon. (what does this mean for printers? paper makers?   many that i’ve looked up don’t look much like paper companies anymore!)

We will see a near term explosion of activity with these companies as they struggle against the tide. The tide is too great, though.

Network TV goes On Demand Only

The NBC – GE- Comcast deal earlier and now the Time Warner / Fox feud is the precursor to network TV going all on demand. There’s no long term business model for free-over the air-high cost network TV. The ad rates don’t support it, the consumers don’t watch it and content creators don’t need it any more.   Yeah, it will take years to unwind this business but it’s pretty clear you the network brand doesn’t mean much in the world today.

The recent reselling/movement of fairly popular (or what seem to be popular shows) while still popular is an interesting data point. Scrubs from NBC to ABC, Medium from NBC to CBS, ESPN and Disney brand all over ABC, Oprah from ABC to her own thing. MLB network, NFL network, NBA network….. all of these entities are far more on demand and digitally integrated than the networks.

Once the current crop of executives age out/move on the facade of network TV will be over.

Education becomes Wikified

Public schools simply can’t keep up and it’s not really their fault. Their main value (in most locations) is a social function.   Their content, methods, resources are simply not sufficient to deliver a functional modern education.   Very soon parents won’t worry about home schooling being something that weird/non-social people do… public schools will make sure home-school is the norm. The public schools will become community centers.

How can I say this? It’s already happening! I have a pre-K kid that goes to the pre-K program for a couple of hours a day. She has homework assignments. We have mandatory parenting meetings. Everything else is home or third party based.   I have a 1st grader. She has at least 1 hour of homework a day. The school is closed for 3 weeks in the holidays, has a good amount of short days, etc.   Parents now comprise the majority of in room help and supply almost all of the fundraising and community awareness. The community and each family is already contributing so much ON TOP of taxes that eventually parents en masse will decide that the ruse of public school as a valuable curriculum resources and effective learning environment is over.

I’m socially close to quite a few teachers (at all levels) and administrators.    Teaching isn’t nearly as rewarding as they’d hoped, the resources aren’t there and pay simply won’t keep them afloat.

So…. the community will just take it over directly. $300 netbooks, endless curriculum online, widespread social networking makes schooling from home something that is tangible, effective and affordable.

And, no, private schools and higher education are not immune to this. They have a slightly longer life span because of their deeper resources but even they won’t be able to compete long term in any of their current forms.

I think the initial tipping point came when schools no longer were the best place to get access to technology. That happened in the early 2000s.

Presidential Campaigns to Start Early Into Presidents First Term

Personally I think the next presidential campaign has already started.   From Sarah Palin’s actions to the still aggressive use of social media by the parties the next campaign is basically underway. I suspect the national parties will get revved up with formalities even sooner than the last presidential election.

The news outlets and late night shows and blogs will see to it. The rise of current media leaders rise coincided with the last election and it’s the only trick they know to keep that ever-needed growth going.   The media, if we let it, is going to start the next election in 2010.

Brandon Marshall Ends up on the Bears

Well, I hope! I don’t see how the Broncos and Marshall ever get along. Cutler and Marshall just worked. Make it happen.

I have more to flow out on the shape of things…. sadly The Little Mermaid II just ended on the old VCR so the girls need attention. 😉 Talk at ya later.

The Shape of Things in the Near Future – 2010 Edition

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Jan 2
Happy 2010. After several lengthy discussions over the holidays with my Mom I thought it might be interesting to generate an online Mother/Son debate to discuss the Big Issues in life. Note: This post is the first time my mom will have heard of this idea but I suspect she’ll embrace this and start producing her viewpoints within 24 hours 😉

The Mother Son Debates will illuminate the differences in values, ideas, hopes and approaches to life between my mom and I. Perhaps in putting these thoughts out there we might learn more about our respective generations, our social networks and the contexts of our own value formations. We might also change some of our own view points in the process. Oh, and yes, we’ll have a lot of fun!

Topics We’ll Debate:
- Health Care Reform – why reform? who should pay? what’s the end result we want?
- Free Will – do we have free will?
- God – current concept of God? is there a God?
- Education – what works? what doesn’t?
- Designer Genetics – should we design our children? redesign ourselves?
- Technology Enhanced Human Biology – cyborgs? intelligence enhancers?
- Determinism – is it all determined?
- Global Warming – is it real? does it matter?
- Human Rights – what are human rights?
- Universal Truth – are there any universal truths?
- Personal Responsibility – who’s responsible for everything?
- War and Peace – is there a positive to war? is war necessary? is there an acceptable cost of war?
- Generational Shifts – does every generation think the incoming generation has great challenges? eroding values? is not ready to take on the challenges? is the older generation a has been? old ideas? outdated? technophobic?
First topic will be Health Care Reform, as I know that will get my mom into the debate! 😉

The format is simple. We’ll start with a one paragraph statement of our positions in one blog post. The debate will happen via comments and follow on blog posts. Everyone is free to join in the discussion.

Quoting old dead white guys is allowed but is greatly frowned upon.

About Donna Smith, My Mom:

Donna Smith is a Phi Beta Kappa graduate of Colorado College with a degree in history. Her journalism career includes work as a stringer for NEWSWEEK magazine. She has been honored by the Associated Press Managing Editors with 15 regional awards from 2004-2006 and by the Inland Press Association’s top honor in 2006 for community-based journalism. Since 2007, she has co-chaired the Progressive Democrats of America’s national “Healthcare Not Warfare” campaign, and she has so far spoken in 41 states and the District of Columbia about single-payer healthcare reform.

Donna continues an active writing and speaking career, and now blogs and writes op-ed pieces about the health care crisis. She also is the founder of American Patients United, a non-profit group educating citizens about health care reform on the national level. She also works as a national single-payer health care advocate and community organizer for the California Nurses Association/National Nurses Organizing Committee. Donna and Larry now live in Washington, DC, and they have six children and 14 grandchildren.

About Me

You can ready the far-less-impressive-for-the purposes-of-intellectual-debate background in the About Russell tab of this blog.
Introducing the Mother-Son Debates

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Jan 2
In my early discussions and presentations regarding Wolfram|Alpha I often used Computational Journalism as the initial non-engineering use case. Most folks weren’t quite sure what I meant initially by Computational Journalism until I explained how, as a toe in the water step, one could easily and automatically enhance articles and features with generated knowledge and visuals. It seems I won’t need to explain in great depth the utility and inevitability of computational journalism because enough conference summaries, op-eds and journalists are starting to popularize the concept.

Here’s a great piece from PBS.

A new set of tools would help reporters find patterns in otherwise unstructured or unsearchable information. For instance, the Obama administration posted letters from dozens of interest groups providing advice on issues, but the letters were not searchable. A text-extraction tool would allow reporters to feed PDF documents into a Web service and return a version that could be indexed and searched. The software might also make it easy to tag documents with metadata such as people’s names, places and dates. Another idea is to improve automatic transcription software for audio and video files, often available (but not transcribed) for government meetings and many court hearings.

Wired UK goes a bit deeper into some specific companies and projects.

And here’s a nice presentation by Kurt Cagle that gives a good overview of some of the computational foundational technology out there.

I don’t think it’s unreasonable to think that the vast majority of daily news will be completely machine generated and machine broadcast. Journalists will be increasingly involved in bigger, deeper features and defining the computational logic to generate the news stream.

Computational Journalism – Already Here but Not Obviously So

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Dec 30