The book is dead. Long live the book. I have nothing against books. But the book is an outmoded means of communicating information. And efforts to update it are hampered because, cuturally, we give undue reverence to the form for the form’s sake. The problems with books are many: They are frozen in time without the means of being updated and corrected. The book industry is meeting in Washington now and there are lots of stories about how depressed publishers are. Publishing database Web site Bowker reported that there were more new book titles sold in Great Britain last year – 206,000 new titles, an increase of 28 percent – than in the United States -172,000 new titles, a decrease of 18 percent. Variety reports: The print media need iTunes, too. Well, yeah. But we still worship the book as the book — even though we sometimes want to listen to and watch and search and annotate books, when we can, instead… and even though a lot of books, even if they are books, are utter crap. We need to get over the book.
- StumbleUpon A real-world demonstration of a thought experiment conducted at the University of Vienna, has produced a result that is somewhat befuddling to people with what the lead researcher calls a "naïve classical world view." Two pairs of particles are either quantum-entangled or not. One person makes the decision as to whether to entangle them or not, and another pair of people measure the particles to see whether they're entangled or not. The head-scratcher is: the measurement is made before the decision is made, and it is accurate. "Classical correlations can be decided after they are measured," says Xiao-song Ma, the writer of the study. The finding can be integrated into potential quantum computers, one hopes. [Nature]
The Challenge Dividend: Facebook Ads Don't Rock (If you like this post, come check out my new blog, Marketing With Meaning, where I am trying to literally "write the book" on a new way to do business by creating marketing that people choose to engage with, marketing that itself improves people's lives) Elvis Presley once sang, “Before you abuse, criticize and accuse…walk a mile in my shoes.” Last week I walked a mile in the shoes of a Facebook advertiser and can now officially criticize Facebook as an option for marketers who seek the Holy Grail of digital marketing. The purpose of this blog is to drive improvement through challenge; and I hope that by challenging the hype I can help improve the future of digital marketing. Facebook is definitely on a roll. All of this money and attention is a gamble that the millions of daily page views will be populated by paying advertisers. In my day job as Chief Marketing Strategist at Bridge Worldwide, my role is to help clients navigate from traditional to digital marketing. My Experiment:
John Battelle's Searchblog Is the Paper Book Dead? | Gear Diary There’s been quite the firestorm of debate over the future of the printed word recently. With the new Kindles selling out and Apple selling iPads like crazy, everyone is tripping over each other predicting the end of the road for paper. But is it really time to say goodbye, or are predictions of paper book’s death greatly exaggerated? In my opinion, there are a few areas that need to hit a “tipping point” before ebooks truly overtake paper books in all areas. Digital Rights Management/Format Wars: This is a huge obstacle. Teleread reported recently on Cory Doctorow’s fight to sell DRM-free ebooks in B&N, Amazon, Kobo, Apple and Sony’s stores. I’ve said this before, but it’ a safer bet to go with Amazon or B&N over Apple for flexibility alone, and knowing that the former two are looser towards rights management is just another great reason. This needs to get straightened out before ebook adoption really hits high-speed. But hardcovers don’t drive the entire book market. Content:
Math, Physics, and Engineering Applets Oscillations and Waves Acoustics Signal Processing Electricity and Magnetism: Statics Electrodynamics Quantum Mechanics Linear Algebra Vector Calculus Thermodynamics Mechanics Miscellaneous Licensing info. Links to other educational sites with math/physics-related information or java applets useful for teaching: And when you get tired of learning, here is some fun stuff: Pong Simulation Circuit-level simulation of original 1972 Pong. Does your brain have a mind of its own? - Los Angeles Times How many times has this happened to you? You leave work, decide that you need to get groceries on the way home, take a cellphone call and forget all about your plan. Next thing you know, you’ve driven home and forgotten all about the groceries. Or this. Human beings are, to put it gently, in a unique position in the animal world. In a wonderful study conducted at Stanford University in the late 1960s, psychologist Walter Mischel offered preschoolers a choice: a marshmallow now, or two marshmallows if they could wait until he returned. A few of the kids ate the oh-so-tempting marshmallow the minute he left the room. Toddlers, of course, aren’t the only humans who melt in the face of temptation. What gives? The selfish-gene theory doesn’t, in itself, answer these questions, but there is another facet of evolution that can: The fact that evolution is entirely blind, unable to look forward, backward or to the side. In the mental machinery that governs our everyday decisions, kluges abound.
Peter Svarres Blog The basic premise of Joe Stump’s presentation was that content is no longer king. The new king in town is context. Basically meaning that the real business potential on the web now are applications that adds context to the users’ position in the time/space grid. The Book is Dead! Long Live the Book Did you hear that Barnes & Noble is up for sale? The sale, which will likely be accompanied by belt tightening and shuttering of many Barnes & Noble stores, is a watershed event. It foretells a future where the book of yesterday and today will look very different from the book of tomorrow. And I love it. My love affair with words started when I was still in junior high school. Books were my ships: my portals into new vistas. to dream about different things. While that day came a long time ago, that definition now includes buying any book anytime and anywhere. Considering how much time I spend on the go, I’m not surprised that I’ve started to buy more electronic versions of books. Books aren’t the first media undergoing a digital shift. The New York Times has been chronicling the trials and tribulations of Barnes & Noble, and in one of the pieces, the paper (which itself is on the receiving end of the digital whip) laments the loss of the traditional book-buying experience.
Twisting Radio Waves Could Give Us 100x More Wireless Bandwidth | Light As more people stream video to their mobile devices, wireless bandwidth is becoming an increasingly precious commodity. Data traffic increased 8,000 percent in the past four years on AT&T’s network alone. In trying to avoid what the Federal Communications Commission calls a “looming spectrum crisis,” telecommunications companies are lobbying the government to assign them more spectrum space in the 300- to 3,000-megahertz range, the sweet spot for wireless communication. But Italian astrophysicist Fabrizio Tamburini says a solution may lie in making better use of the frequencies already in use. In a recent paper, he demonstrated a potential way to squeeze 100 times more bandwidth out of existing frequencies. The idea is to twist radio waves like corkscrews and create multiple subfrequencies, distinguished by their degree of twistedness. The next step is to design small, cheap smartphone antennas that can transmit and receive the warped signals.
Acquisition 2.0: Driving revenue with social, experiential marke Will you survive the logged-in user revolution? If you don’t think identity plays a significant role in user experience, think again. Case in point: I was recently browsing my favorite footwear site on my smartphone for the perfect pair of shoes, but when I returned to purchase my pair of choice via desktop, I had to spend upwards of 10 minutes trying to find it again. How much better would my experience have been if I had instead been greeted with a personalized product showcase featuring my 'most recently browsed' items? Read more... Crocs shows in-store technology and assisted selling works There's a healthy scepticism around in-store technology. The challenge is to find technology that can add value for the retailer, without disupting the magic of in-store shopping and customer service that the consumer already loves. Apple and Audi are perhaps the best examples. Endless aisle, via a store associate's tablet or a fixed hub in store, is something many are dubious about. Read more...