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Written by Administrator on Friday, 01 July 2011 07:12
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With the Fourth of July upon us, it won’t be long before we’re headed to the nearest beach for some much-needed decompression.
Most of us will bring a bit of page-turning light reading. But for those who want a little intellectual heft in their tote, Wired.com asked a few favorite scientists for their summer recommendations.
Feel free to add your own in the comments, and don’t forget the sunblock!
Frans de Waal, animal cognition expert at Emory University whose most recent work has expanded our understanding of elephant communication: The Price of Altruism by Oren Harman and Braintrust by Patricia Churchland.
Altruism tells the story of George Price, an American mathematician “who went overboard trying to be a pure altruist himself. He ended up destitute and committed suicide,” said de Waal. “But in this context, the book provides a wealth of information not gathered together before.”
Churchland is an American philosopher with a neuroscience background. In Braintrust, she “explains human morality as built upon a firm foundation of mammalian caring tendencies, which of course fits my thinking about empathy as an ancient characteristic,” said de Waal.
Mark Pagel, an evolutionary linguist at Reading University who has demonstrated that languages evolve like species: Being Wrong: Adventures in the Margin of Error by Kathryn Schulz.
“This book might say more about me than others but it is a favorite old topic of mine. Schulz reminds us of all the ways that error can creep into our daily observations and why that can matter to decision making and simply to forming opinions on things,” said Pagel. “A refreshing change from the avalanche of simplistic and shrill books that proclaim to be the solution to everything.”
Alexis Rockman, an artist whose depictions of postnatural ecology are so scientifically informed that he belongs in this company: Lab Coats in Hollywood: Science, Scientists and Cinema by David Kirby.
Kirby’s book “discusses the use and abuse of scientific information in film history,” said Rockman, and contains delightful tales of the trouble that ensues when scientists meet directors.
Luke Rendell, a whale intelligence specialist at St. Andrews University who has helped pioneer the translation of sperm whale communication, showing that the great cetaceans may even have names: The Wayfinders by Wade Davis.
Davis, a National Geographic explorer-in-residence, “takes us on a mind-blowing tour of the depth and breadth of wisdom to be found in the diversity of human cultures,” said Rendell. “With the rise of globalized mono-culture this book is a vital cry to remember the value of our inherited cultural diversity before it is lost forever.”
Andrew Adamatzky, a University of West England computer scientist who explores the mathematical sophistication of slime molds by having the social amoebae re-engineer European highway systems: Parallel Worlds by Michio Kaku and Mind-Altering and Poisonous Plants by Michael Wink
and Ben-Erik van Wyk.
Read a page of Plants every night and you’ll become a botanical expert, said Adamatzky. And Parallel Worlds “will keep you occupied on the plain or train, and make you think, ‘Why the hell am I here on Earth, which has no future?’”
Image: Anne Adrian/Flickr
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Written by Administrator on Thursday, 07 April 2011 11:30
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In a recent post on Mashable, author Rye Barcott talked about the experience of making a trailer for his book "It Happened on the Way to War: A Marine's Path to Peace." Though literary curmudgeons may cry "sacrilege!" at video promotions for books, Barcott said a book trailer can act as a bridge to new readers:
We live in an age where fewer people are reading, and more people are watching. That reality has driven the rise of book trailers. My skeptical friends argue that these trailers simply contribute to our increasingly short attention spans. Having just gone through the process, I have a different view. My hope is that book trailers like ours help bridge the divide and draw more people to the beauty, substance, and transformative power of books.
You can view Barcott's book trailer here.
For a more detailed look into the business behind the book trailer, I turned to Brett Cohen, vice president of Quirk Books. This is the company behind "Pride and Prejudice and Zombies" and a publisher that's produced a fair number of book trailers.
Our interview follows.
What is the target market of book trailers?
Brett Cohen: It varies depending on the book's audience. Certainly, it appeals to an online demographic. And, the viral nature of a YouTube video is working at its best when others share it with their friends via Facebook or Twitter, or post it on their blogs. Some of our viewers watch the trailers embedded onto other sites, like the Huffington Post, Techland and io9. That type of syndication expands the audience for the trailer and the book. Our most-viewed trailers have definitely appealed to a younger, pop-culture-driven audience.
What makes for a good book trailer?
Brett Cohen: For us, a good book trailer speaks "the language" of our target audience. Our Quirk Classics book trailers mimic the production value of big-budget movies, with exceptional special effects. We've created other trailers for humor books that are more irreverent. For non-fiction titles, we've taken a more author-driven, information-based approach. Overall, we feel that it's very important to be true to the book so that it can translate into sales.
What production companies are doing it really well?
Brett Cohen: We've worked with a few different production companies and have had great experiences with them all. Amazon named our "Sense and Sensibility and Sea Monsters" book trailer as the best book trailer of 2009 — and essentially launched the "big budget" movie-style book trailer trend. That video was created by Ransom Riggs and has been viewed more than 290,000 times. Our "Dawn of the Dreadfuls" trailer was created by Dirty Robber and has had more than 250,000 views. This past fall we worked with Epic Image Entertainment on our "Night of the Living Trekkies" book trailer, which has more than 160,000 views.
How do you measure the success of a book trailer?
Brett Cohen: Essentially, we are creating a marketing asset that we want others to enjoy and share on the web. So, the success of a book trailer can immediately be measured by views and channel subscribers. It can also be measured in how many times it was embedded on other sites and viewed there.
Ultimately, though, we want it to help sell books in the same way that a book review or advertisement can drive sales. While that is tougher to track, we have been able to see trends. We do see an early spike when the trailer launches, particularly in online sales. And the trailer stays on our channel forever, so, frequently, a new site will embed the trailer at a later date and we'll see another bump.
At the heart of this though, is the fact that publishers create content — in Quirk's case, it's entertaining content. And if we can entertain a viewer through the medium of video, ideally it will encourage them to check out our books.
Here's the book trailer for "Jane Austen Pride & Prejudice & Zombies: Dreadfully Ever After":
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Written by Administrator on Monday, 31 January 2011 07:00
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As we approach the iPad's first birthday, much has already been written about how the iPad is a game-changing device. But the iPad's success goes beyond the hardware — it's also opened the tablet market and ushered in new forms of applications and media. Pete Meyers (@petermeyers), author of "Best iPad Apps," discusses these shifts in the following interview.
Content consumption is a big part of the iPad, but are there options for people who want to create on the device?
 Pete Meyers: From what I've seen, those with creative urges have plenty of ways to express themselves. Top of my list includes pottery making (Let's Create Pottery HD), drawing (SketchBook Pro, Drawing Pad), music making (ThumbJam, Music Studio), roller coaster design (AirCoaster), 3D sculpting (iDough), and all kinds of photo futzing (Photogene, Strip Designer).
Fact is, the iPad encourages creativity and experimentation in ways that are sometimes even better than paper. Think about, for example, the "undo" button that's found in almost every drawing app. Especially for young kids, this frees them from worrying about making mistakes. It's been fun to also read about artist David Hockney's fondness for Brushes, one of the most popular painting apps.
The most serious death-of-creativity concerns seem to revolve around fears that "Generation iPad" will never learn how to program, given the closed nature of the device. First off, I think this presumes kids will use the iPad as their sole computing platform. And while that may be the case among some people, I find it tough to imagine that a kid, intrigued by the complex magic of writing code, won't somehow find his or her way to a "real" computer. Another promising development is found in apps that let you do some elementary coding right on the iPad. Basic! for example is a perfectly good canvas for junior code slingers. Will they develop a Python-powered, e-commerce backend? No. But neither do most mortals when they first start programming.
Have you come across any examples where the app version of an entertainment product does something you wouldn't have seen prior to the iPad?
Pete Meyers: I think we're at the very early stages. Much of what's out there resembles TV in its early days, where content meant for radio was dragged onto the television (e.g. a bunch of people standing in front of the camera reading a radio play). Similarly, in the App Store's early days you see comic books and graphic novels that are more or less digitized versions of print, magazines that maintain the page-based sequence of print, and so on.
A few reference and how-to books are doing obvious things like adding video explanations of cooking techniques (Weber's On the Grill) or including recorded audio of bird calls (iBird Pro HD).
"Motion comics" are another area where the creative product is starting to change. Apps like Superare and Operation Ajax add motion to artwork that was previously still, letting the action play out inside of and across multiple panels.
But keep in mind that all these examples are mainly print products that have been repurposed as iPad apps. The real interesting stuff will come when artists, writers, and publishers build apps that don't have a print-edition correlate. In these efforts we'll see creativity that really takes advantage of the touchscreen medium.
Best iPad Apps guides you to the hidden treasures in the App Store's crowded aisles. Author Peter Meyers stress-tested thousands of options to put together this extensive catalog.
How useful do you think App Store ratings and reviews are? Are there any tricks you've picked up for making sense of this mass of feedback?
Pete Meyers: Let me take a crack at rephrasing that first question:
How level-headed and thoughtful are most people nowadays when they get to comment anonymously online?
App Store customers haven't proven themselves unique in that respect. My particular gripe: iPadders who attack developers with stark pronouncements for leaving off one particular feature. Reading these types of comments is like watching the pundits on cable TV — there's lots of noise and not much information.
What I have found useful are a couple of telltale shapes in the ratings. Those are the 1- to 5-star horizontal bar graphs that aggregate user ratings.
A common sight is what I call the "C"-spread: lots of 5 stars, lots of 1 stars, and not much in between. I often see these on game apps, where a certain percentage of users have played the game on consoles and are bitterly disappointed when the app doesn't replicate the console experience. The five-star ratings, on the other hand, are coming from the people who are thrilled to be able to play something like Madden NFL 11 on the iPad. I think the takeaway here is to approach these kinds of "it was the worst of apps, it was the best of apps" spreads with a good understanding of where your own interests and expectations lie.
Another common shape is the "L"-spread, which is marked by lots of 1-star ratings. This is one time when mass opinion is usually right. Just make sure the number of ratings is sufficient to judge against.
The most interesting shape — and the one that gets me downloading most often — is "the claw." This is a jagged mishmash of bar lengths for each of the five possible ratings. Wild disagreement among the ratings usually means there's something interesting going on, and at that point I may dive into the comments to see if I can discern some common themes.
Speaking of comments, I like to sort them by "most recent." That way, I can quickly skim the reviews most relevant to the app's current state, and not judge an app that may have started off on a rocky note in a previous version.
Finally, I also factor in the app description that starts off each listing. If it's riddled with typos or offers an incoherent description of what the app does, my thinking is the developer probably offers the same kind of quality in the app itself.
When the iPad launched, some wondered where it would fit amidst smartphones, laptops, and desktops. What niche does the iPad fill in your gadget-using life?
Pete Meyers: I'm a bit of a fringe case, given the amount of time I just devoted to stuffing my two iPads with apps for my book and then playing with them in every conceivable niche of time and space I could carve out.
But in the weeks since I stopped working on the project full-time, I've seen my usage settle into a pattern that I suspect will last for a while: I use it at the breakfast table instead of cracking open my laptop; on the subway, I'll use the iPad if I can get a seat (otherwise, I'm on my iPhone); on the couch after work, I'll steal looks at Twitter, Flipboard, and some websites, as various toddlers scream at me to return to the mosh pit on the living room floor; and later at night, I'm incapable of watching TV without simultaneously surfing the web. In fact, I'm hoping TiVo or IMDb soon adds a new category: "Movies for Multitaskers."
This interview was edited and condensed.
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Written by Administrator on Monday, 10 January 2011 13:32
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Ion Audio is probably best known for creating those nifty turntables that help those of us who own vinyl records to conveniently convert them into a digital file format. Now, the company has used its digital conversion know-how to create a device that can scan a 200-page paper book and convert it into e-Reader format in 15 minutes. The Book Saver Book Scanner will allow you to quickly digitize your huge library of printed books or magazines for archiving on computer or to take on the road without weighing down your backpack or suitcase... Continue Reading $150 Book Saver turns a 200 page book into eReader format in 15 minutes
Tags: CES 2011, Conversion, E-reader, EBook, ION AUDIO, Scanner
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Written by Administrator on Thursday, 16 December 2010 15:11
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Google’s massive trove of scanned books could be useful for researchers studying the evolution of culture.
In a paper published December 16 in Science, researchers turned part of that vast textual corpus into a 500 billion-word database in which the frequency of words can be measured over time and space.
Their initial subjects of analysis, including cultural trajectories of popular modern thinkers and the conjugation of irregular verbs, hint at what might be done.
“There are many more questions, that we could never think of, that this data makes possible,” said Harvard University evolutionary dynamicist Jean-Michel Baptiste. “What we present in the paper is our first explorations of what becomes possible when you have this dataset.”
The new research is part of an emerging approach to applying rigorous statistical analyses, traditionally known from the study of biological evolution, to cultural evolution.
Unlike biological evolution, however, which can be studied through the fossil record and in genomic comparisons, cultural evolution has proved difficult to study.
Researchers have used archaeological documentation of Polynesian canoe shapes and records painstakingly assembled by comparative linguists, but rich and rigorously compiled datasets are rare.
One potential source is Google, which has scanned some 15 million books, or roughly 12 percent of every book ever published. Michel-Baptiste and his colleagues turned one-third of these, selected for legibility and fully documented origins, into a massive word database.
Patterns that can be queried from its cloud are not necessarily answers unto themselves, they say, but a way of illuminating subjects of further investigation.
“It’s not just an answer machine. It’s a question machine,” said study co-author Erez Lieberman-Aiden, a computational biologist at Harvard University. “Think of this as a hypothesis-generating machine.”
In the new study, the researchers restricted their queries to single words and names, as more sophisticated querying raised the potential of copyright violation. (Google and book publishers are currently negotiating terms of access to copyright material, putting scientific accessibility and legal restrictions at odds.)
 Even with these limitations, they were able to show how verbs with irregular endings — dwelt instead of dwelled, burnt instead of burned — have been regularized in different fashion in the United States and United Kingdom.
They also traced the prominence of 20th century thinkers — at least numerically, Freud overtook Darwin shortly after World War II — and quantified the public effects of censorship on intellectuals in China and Nazi Germany.
Another analysis found that modern fame both accrues and fades faster now than a century ago, giving quantitative form to an intuitively held sentiment. That example is particularly instructive, as the database identified a trend, but the implied social dynamics need to be studied through non-quantitative approaches.
Cultural evolution researchers greeted the database with qualified enthusiasm.
“There’s a shortage of datasets. This might add another important database. But how valuable it’s going to be is going to require a lot of thought about various biases in how the data is gathered,” said Stanford University biologist Paul Ehrlich, whose investigations of Polynesian canoe design were among the first of the new cultural evolution studies.
Ehrlich cited the frequency of obscenity or the treatment of women as two off-the-cuff examples of topics for which a database of published books may not be a simple indicator of cultural trends.
“How the books reflect society is a major issue that depends a lot on what particular research you’re interested in,” he said.
Mark Pagel, a University of Reading evolutionary biologist who has studied the evolution of language, called the database “thrilling.”
But like Ehrlich, he said the usefulness of the database would only become evident with time, and will require more sophisticated use.
To describe the database’s potential for studying cultural evolution, the study authors coined the term “culturomics,” a term that resonates with the modern field of genomics.
“There was great promise to genomics, and enormous hype surrounding the completion of the Human Genome Project. It was a few years before people realized that having a list of genes wasn’t very useful at all. We now appreciate that it’s not genes that matter, but how genes are expressed in bodies,” said Pagel.
“I’m not saying the data isn’t useful. It’s just that the database is not going to cough up simple answers,” he said.
The database is freely available for online queries and complete download.
Images: 1) Textual frequencies of influential western thinkers during the 20th century./Science. 2) Contrasting evolution of “burned” and “burnt” in the United States and United Kingdom./Science. 3) Culinary trends./Science.
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Citation: “Quantitative Analysis of Culture Using Millions of Digitized Books.” By Jean-Baptiste Michel, Yuan Kui Shen, Aviva Presser Aiden, Adrian Veres, Matthew K. Gray, The Google Books Team, Joseph P. Pickett, Dale Hoiberg, Dan Clancy, Peter Norvig, Jon Orwant, Steven Pinker, Martin A. Nowak, Erez Lieberman Aiden. Science, Vol. 330 Issue 6011, December 17, 2010.
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Written by Administrator on Friday, 29 October 2010 06:15
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O’Reilly Media, the publishers of many popular technology and programming related books, recently launched a book review program specifically for bloggers worldwide.
The idea is that they’ll send you an eBook of your choice from the list of available titles. After you are done reading the book, you’ll be required to post a 200-word review of that book on your blog as well as on a consumer retail website like Amazon.com, oreilly.com, barnesandnoble.com, or borders.com.
You may then request another O’Reilly title for review.
More details on the O’Reilly program can be had from oreilly.com/bloggers. Book publisher Thomas Nelson too has a very similar book review program for bloggers.
  
This article, titled O’Reilly’s Book Review Program for Bloggers, was originally published at Digital Inspiration under Blogging, Books, Oreilly, Internet.
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