Tag Archives: pre-Internet civilization

Arthur Luehrmann on “computer literacy” (1972)

Arthur Luehrmann:

If the computer is so powerful a resource that it can be programmed to simulate the instructional process, shouldn’t we be teaching our students mastery of this powerful intellectual tool? Is it enough that a student be the subject of computer administered instruction—the end-user of a new technology? Or should his education also include learning to use the computer (1) to get information in the social sciences from a large database inquiry system, or (2) to simulate an ecological system, or (3) to solve problems by using algorithms, or (4) to acquire laboratory data and analyze it, or (5) to represent textual information for editing and analysis, or (6) to represent musical information for analysis, or (7) to create and process graphical information? These uses of computers in education cause students to become masters of computing, not merely its subjects.

“Should the computer teach the student, or vice-versa?” Originally a 1972 talk. In The Computer in School: Tutor, Tool, Tutee New York: Teachers College Press, 1980. Repr. Contemporary Issues in Technology and Teacher Education, 2(3), 389-396. Posted online at http://www.citejournal.org/vol2/iss3/seminal/seminalarticle1.pdf, accessed 20120417.

A less painful way to install Adblock Plus filter-subscriptions in Firefox

Adblock Plus, an “add-on” for current versions of the Firefox browser, is a powerful tool for suppressing advertising. After installing Firefox, you have the choice of installing any number of add-ons, and this is normally the very first one I do.

Adblock Plus uses filters to determine what is an ad. Finding filters, unless you write them yourself (a most tedious procedure), requires you to subscribe to existing lists. I subscribe to eleven in all, and I almost never see an ad — either graphic or text-based — when I use Firefox. It makes the Internet a liveable place for me.

But subscribing to filters is unpleasant because it requires many repetitive mouse-actions. A faster way is to create a file called patterns.ini containing only the following:

[Subscription]

url=~wl~

title=Exception Rules

defaults=whitelist


[Subscription]

url=~fl~

title=Ad Blocking Rules

defaults=blocking


[Subscription]

url=https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Adversity.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=http://adblockrules.org/download.php?type=all

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=http://adblock-chinalist.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easyprivacy.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=https://easylist-downloads.adblockplus.org/easylist.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/fanboy-adblocklist-addon.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=https://adversity.googlecode.com/hg/Adversity-Tracking.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=http://fanboy-adblock-list.googlecode.com/hg/fanboy-adblocklist-current-expanded.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=http://fanboy-adblock-list.googlecode.com/hg/fanboy-adblocklist-stats.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=https://adblock-chinalist.googlecode.com/svn/trunk/adblock.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok


[Subscription]

url=https://secure.fanboy.co.nz/enhancedstats.txt

downloadStatus=synchronize_ok

(This is my own list, of course.) I save patterns.ini to the adblockplus directory, which is typically at a path something like this:

… Firefox/Profiles/<hash>.default/adblockplus/

where <hash> is a random-looking eight-digit alphanumeric sequence that identifies a given user profile to Firefox. (Each <hash>.default user profile needs its own set of Adblock Plus filters in the appropriate subdirectory.)

Then I go to Firefox and open the filter preference window for Adblock Plus. On OS X, that means Tools -> Adblock Plus -> Filter Preferences. In the bottom right corner of the window there is a checkbox marked “Allow some non-intrusive advertising”. If I click it, either to check or uncheck it, the filters in patterns.ini immediately repopulate from the URLs I have placed in the minimal file.

So it doesn’t seem to be necessary to go through the tedious manual installation method in order to get the filter subscriptions. I save a copy of the minimal patterns.ini file above in a normal directory for fast replacement if I need a new user profile for some reason.

The “Allow some non-intrusive advertising” option was introduced in v. 2 of Adblock Plus — in other words, it is recent. At the moment, only ads associated with two German sites, netzwelt.de and guruads.de, are involved, but surely this is the beginning of a much more pervasive trend, since advertising now funds most internet content, or so it appears to me. When I was a boy, all television was free as long as you had a TV set to receive it; apart from public broadcasting, it was paid for entirely with advertising. So I recognize the smell of this business model.

Jack Cheng on “the technology I grew up with” (2012)

The developer Jack Cheng says:

I have the original iPad, but have hardly touched it since I got my third-generation Kindle, which sits on my nightstand. I love my Kindle. It’s crude and ghosty and imperfect and the keys are like sandpaper and the whole thing has the responsiveness of a fax machine or someone with a Sunday morning hangover. It’s endearing in that way, reminds me of the technology I grew up with.

[Daniel Bogan], “An Interview with Jack Cheng”, The Setup, online at jack.cheng.usesthis.com/, posted 20120116, accessed 20120205.

Distribution of fonts: competing models are coexisting

The Dutch publishing house Brill has issued its own eponymous typeface, which it describes this way:

This indispensable tool for scholars will become freely available later this year for non-commercial use. You will be able to download the font package after agreeing to the End User License Agreement. (brill.nl/news/brill-typeface, accessed 20120205)

The document displaying the font, v. 1.0, is currently posted at brill.nl/files/brill.nl/brill_typeface_user_guide_1.00.pdf.

As it happens, Google also supplies fonts — a vast range of them — over 400 as of this morning. They are illustrated at google.com/webfonts and a showcase of some of them in plausibly familiar applications has appeared on the website of a designer, Chad Mazzola: hellohappy.org/beautiful-web-type/.

What most interests me is the different terms of licensing. Brill’s license is proprietary:

Commercial use of any kind, including the embedding of the fonts or part(s) of them in any Commercial Product not published by BRILL is prohibited unless prior written permission has been secured from BRILL; write to brill-typeface-commercial-license@brill.nl should you want to acquire such a permission. None of these fonts may be redistributed to others, nor may they be sold, without prior written consent from BRILL. (www.brill.nl/promotions/brill-fonts-end-user-license-agreement, accessed 20120205)

Google, however, has turned to the generous SIL Open Font License (OFL), established by the Summer Institute of Linguistics, an American organization of Christian missionary linguists. The OFL is modeled on familiar “free/libre” licences for other software products, and specifies at least two points worth reading about thinking about:

“the freedom to use font software for any purpose” (dpb: in other words, use in the commercial products kiboshed by Brill are explicitly permitted)

“We also hope that this new license will fill a need for lesser-known languages, complex scripts and typographic needs with low direct economic value and so empower language communities who were left out by proprietary vendors until now.” (scripts.sil.org/cms/scripts/page.php?id=OFL#43a3bb12, accessed 20120205)

To say it in a few words, Google offers a library of free fonts, supported by its immense targeted advertising business. Brill, noted for its expensive reference works, is operating more like a traditional type foundry in seeking to control the use of its (single) product.

Conventional wisdom, or anyway the opinion of many who are giving their opinion these days, is that Google’s model will soon replace Brill’s. Physical books and DVDs will disappear just as the typewriter did, I am told. But I’m inclined to think the models will coexist for the long term, and that proprietary works and tools will continue to survive among those freely distributed ones whose financial support is less transparent.

I think that technology has enabled the functions of different works and tools to become much more specialized than they once were, and that is a prescription for coexistence and coevolution. Think of the variety of mainstream vehicles that now exist for transmitting a performance: audio recording, radio, film, television, streaming, podcast — all very substantial industries that show no sign of disappearing. People still flock to live performances, too. It’s true that the oldest of these vehicles has not yet been around for 120 years, and in another 120 almost anything might happen.

To that I say: Google’s unrestricted free distribution of tools and services is supported by a business model that has changed considerably in the decade and a half since the company was incorporated, and by the sale of a service that many people feel qualms about even though they genuinely like the tools and services and are happy not to have to pay for them. It is hard to be sanguine about the long-term evolutionary fitness of that model. In particular, I can’t see it remaining completely unrestricted. I predict that Google will gradually impose more conditions on how users commit themselves to the company and make their personal information available. I also suspect that governments will be unable to resist the temptation to tax or regulate those services. I don’t see this game as anywhere near over.

There is no question, however, that Google’s model has fulfilled the traditional function of capitalist innovation, in decimating many businesses operating on a settled, proprietary model from an earlier time.

Kenneth S. Wherry on American influence in China (1940)

Senator Kenneth Wherry:

“With God’s help, we will lift Shanghai up and up, ever up, until it is just like Kansas City.”

Cited in John Franklin Campbell, The Foreign Affairs Fudge Factory (New York: Basic Books, 1971), p. 178.

Wherry was U.S. Senator (R) from Nebraska from 1943 to 1951. He made this remark while Mayor of Pawnee City and Chairman of the Republican Party of Nebraska.

Wherry’s senatorial papers are archived at the Nebraska State Historical Society (http://www.nebraskahistory.org/lib-arch/research/manuscripts/politics/wherry.htm, accessed 20120102), where the collection description includes this comment: “Little of the correspondence reflects Wherry’s political philosophy or his relations with other members of the Congress or of the government. Senator Wherry conducted much of his personal political business via the telephone and no record survives.”

I suspect it’s hard for people raised on the Internet to envision how much of what was said and done in the past is not recorded.

The era of lost words

A letter to my mother from an art publisher in the U.K. this morning mentions “the collapse of orders from the American academic market.” After 12 years in the making, our collection of my father’s early and little-known papers (on which my mother and a student of my father’s have been working interminably) is going to be looking for a new venue. My mother is still determined to issue it in physical form.

In a conversation in July with a major academic publisher, I was told that this year, for the first time, library orders of PDFs have outstripped orders of physical books.

Electronic publication is very convenient, but I’m sure I’m not the only person who has reservations about this development. Issues:

  • Persistence. One of my scholarly fields involves manuscripts a thousand and more years old. Over the years, I’ve bought a couple of dozen editions of reproductions of these things, some with copious commentary and corrigenda. I’m happy at the prospect of more people being able to access these things in electronic format. But it occurs to me that these manuscripts have only survived because they were in physical form. I can imagine much of the written creation of our present day — which is disseminated far more widely than ever in the past — disappearing without a trace because most of it exists only in a state that is transient and much less stable than print (or inscription on stone steles).

  • Preparation. Flat text and images are easy to prepare for electronic publication and can be printed into the form of a physical book with almost no trouble on the user’s part. Dictionaries, however, have to be organized as structured data in order to be useful, and that requires more complicated computational treatment.

Twice-a-day mail delivery

I mentioned to my mother that the Post Office is now talking seriously about stopping Saturday delivery. She said, “That would be bad, but not nearly as bad as we thought it was when they stopped delivering twice a day.”

Apparently twice-a-day delivery stopped during World War II as an economy measure and was permanently discontinued shortly thereafter.

When the service existed, it was possible to send a written message to someone in the same city and get an answer the same day. We take that for granted now with email, but for years after twice-a-day delivery was ended, round-trip communication seemed to take longer than it should.

My mother and me, at work on the Early China index, 20110526

This summer my mother and I finished indexing a book that Li Feng and I have been working on since 2005, Reading and Literacy in Early China. My mother worked on it continuously for six months; I helped her on and off but then worked on it continuously for the final six weeks.

Below is a picture of us in the heat of labor in late May.

I’ve also attached a pair of the 5000 index cards she produced for this project. These things are now rarely seen, I think, so they’re good to document here. Not so very long ago, the only way to find books in a library was though a “card catalogue” — a huge collection of these things, typed in recent decades and neatly handwritten before that, organized and cross-referenced by title, author, major topics, and other features. Cataloguing books — deciding how someone might want want to find them and creating cards accordingly — was a major subprofession among librarians, and my mother has a degree in it from Columbia’s defunct Library School.

As you can imagine, the contents of this pair of cards have been copied and recopied over and over again as the material has grown fuller and more complete. The “xx” notations at the bottom of each card are for tracking cross-references to “literacy” that appear in other entries.I used \LaTeX and other tools to produce camera-ready copy for the publisher. With heavy editing, the index shrank from an initial 100 pages to the final 44 that are appearing in the book. Alas, much useful information had to be deleted in the process.

Why even 212 phone numbers calling in-area have to dial 212 first

This began on 1 February, 2003, after several years’ delay because of a legal appeal by the New York Public Service Commission and the Consumer Federation of America. The Federal Communications Commission had ruled that when a new area code was made to “overlay” an old one, calls made from numbers in both areas would have to use area codes, even when those calls were in-area. The U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals found:

Even with New York’s advances in local telephone service competition …, concerns about maintaining competition remain. For instance, without 10-digit dialing, the dialing disparity between numbers in the old and new area codes remains. Second, … any implementation of any new area code … is initially confusing, not only to customers in the affected area, but also to those who call them from outside that area. (U.S. 2nd Circuit Court of Appeals Docket No. 99-4205,
PEOPLE OF THE STATE v FCC, http://caselaw.lp.findlaw.com/scripts/getcase.pl?navby=search&case=/data2/circs/2nd/994205.html)

The court did not agree that

Without mandatory 10-digit dialing … numbers from the new area code are less valuable than numbers from the old area code, placing the carrier with more old numbers … at an advantage over new carriers, an inequitable result.

The New York Times has two important stories about this issue, at