Later On

This little collection of ideas might include some helpful to Liberal Arts majors who are just entering the world of work.

Libraries—free, well-stocked, well-run public libraries—are, I think, essential for a free people. And libraries are under siege: things change. This NPR article by Lynn Neary discusses the trends:

A lot of attention has been focused on the way bookstores and publishing companies are managing the e-book revolution. The role of libraries has often been overlooked. But when HarperCollins Publishing Co. recently announced a new policy that would limit the number of times its e-books can be borrowed, it sparked a larger conversation about the future of libraries in the digital age.

These days, you don’t have to go anywhere near a library to check out an e-book. You can download one to your digital device in a matter of seconds. And there’s no more pesky overdue notices — the e-book simply disappears from your device when your time is up.

“The fact is that with a digital item, if you give it to somebody you still have it. It doesn’t have to come back,” says Eli Neiburger, the director for IT and production at the Ann Arbor District library in Michigan.

E-books, says Neiburger, are really digital files, but libraries and publishers are still trying to deal with them as if they are just like print books. In other words, they’re trying to do business the way they have always done business

“Part of the models we’ve seen so far are still trying to force 20th century business models onto digital content,” Neiburger says. “And any digital native says, ‘You mean I have to wait to download an e-book? What sense does that make?’ And they’re off to the Kindle store to spend $3.99 or $4.99 or $9.99 to get that same book.”

In the current climate, libraries worry they’ll become obsolete. Publishers are afraid they won’t be able to make any money. That’s why HarperCollins came up with a new e-book policy that says an e-book can be checked out 26 times, after which it has to be repurchased. Leslie Hulse, a senior vice president at HarperCollins, says publishers have to place some limitations on the way libraries lend e-books.

Chicago Public Library patron Anna Sykes talks with a librarian about the book Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland, a title available on one of nine new Rocket e-books. Providing e-books is just one of many services that libraries are trying out in an attempt to stay relevant in the Kindle age.

“I think the tension is, at the extreme, we could be making a book available to one national library on a simultaneous access model in perpetuity,” says Hulse. “And what that would mean is everyone in the country could check out that book for free at any time, and that’s not a commercially viable solution.”

HarperCollins may have raised the ire of librarians around the country with their new e-book policy, but Christopher Platt, director of collections and circulation at the New York Public Library, says the move has also stimulated a more public discussion about the future of libraries and e-books.

“The HarperCollins limit isn’t going to stick,” he argues.”It’s going to develop into something new. And Harper, to its credit, is engaged with libraries to see what would work.” . . .

Continue reading.

Very interesting. Take a look:

The video is from an NPR article by John Kalish that delves further into hacking e-book readers, which begins:

What if you could buy a tablet with a slightly smaller screen than the iPad for half the price or even less? Hackers have been turning e-book readers into tablets for cheap Internet on the go.

In fact, San Francisco hacker Mitch Altman doesn’t read e-books on his Kindle at all. He only uses its Web browser to access maps and restaurant listings when he’s traveling.

The Amazon Kindle has 3G data connectivity so that readers can download e-books anywhere there is cell service. As many Kindle owners know, the device can connect to Google and Wikipedia to look up things mentioned in e-books, too. That connectivity is all the opportunity hackers need to turn an e-book reader into a tablet.

“This is something that is starting to get around in geek and hacker circles, and it’s a relatively cheap way to have Internet anywhere you go,” Altman says.When Altman says it’s cheap, he’s referring to the fact that the 3G Kindle costs a mere $190 and there is no charge for the 3G Internet. Of course, there’s a trade-off here: the Kindle doesn’t have a touch screen, so you have to use scrolling buttons to navigate around the screen, which Altman has found cumbersome. But for $60 more, he could’ve gotten the Nook Color. . .

Continue reading.

This is a good idea. I’m starting today to save my vegetable trimmings…

Interesting post:

The Applied Research Center recently embarked on a broad survey of the food system, to map out the race, gender and class of workers along the supply chain. Our findings, detailed in the new report “The Color of Food,” were sadly not surprising. Download report here.

• People of color typically make less than whites working in the food chain. Half of white food workers earn $25,024 a year, while workers of color make $5,675 less than that. This wage gap plays out in all four sectors of the food system, with largest income divides occurring in the food processing and distribution sectors. Women working in the food chain draw further penalties in wages, especially women of color. For every dollar a white male worker earns, women of color earn almost half of that.
• Few people of color hold management positions in the food system. Whites dominate high-wage professional and management occupations; three out of every four managers in the food system are white. Almost half of white men working in the food chain were employed as managers, while less than 10 percent of workers of color held comparable positions.
• People of color are concentrated in low-wage jobs in the food chain. According to the 2008 Census, people of color make up 34.6 percent of the population (that percentage is expected to rise as 2010 Census data becomes available). But workers of color are represented at a level almost one and a half times that in sectors of the food chain. For instance, 50 percent of food production workers are people of color. This includes farm workers, 65 percent of whom are Latino.

Colorlines.com coommentary on “The Color of Food” report can be found here: “America’s Food Sweatshops.” Continuing coverage of food justice in “How We Eat ” Colorlines.com series.

The above is from an interesting article. Chronic pain is the pits—I had a friend whose back plagued him—and meditation is certainly worth a try: fewer side-effects than drugs. The article, by Adam Cole, begins:

Meditation has long been touted as a holistic approach to pain relief. And studies show that long-time meditators can tolerate quite a bit of pain.

Now researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have found you don’t have to be a lifelong Buddhist monk to pull it off. Novices were able to tame pain after just a few training sessions.

Sounds a bit mystical, we know, but researchers using a special type of brain imaging were also able to see changes in the brain activity of newbies. Their conclusion? “A little over an hour of meditation training can dramatically reduce both the experience of pain and pain-related brain activation,” Fadel Zeidan, a neuroscientist and the study’s lead author, tells Shots. That finding’s a first, Zeidan says.

In the study, a small group of healthy medical students attended four 20-minute training sessions on “mindfulness meditation” — a technique adapted from a Tibetan Buddhist form of meditation called samatha. It’s all about acknowledging and letting go of distraction.

“You are trying to sustain attention in the present moment — everything is momentary so you don’t need to react,” Zeidan explains. “What that does healthwise is it reduces the stress response. The feeling of pain is a very blatant distraction.”

So how did the researchers gauge the effect? They administered a very distracting bit of pain: A small, thermal stimulator heated to 120 degrees was applied to the back of each volunteer’s right calf. The subjects reported both the intensity and unpleasantness of the pain. If pain were music, intensity would be volume. Unpleasantness would have more of an emotional component, kind of like how much you love or hate a song.

After meditation training, the subjects reported . . .

Continue reading.

Thanks to Linda for this one:

Netflix’s offerings of Watch Instantly movies changes frequently, but Trent Hamm at The Simple Dollar has a list of 75 titles he recommends. His list begins:

Films – Animation
Ponyo: A wonderful coming-of-age story that my two older children absolutely love.
The Iron Giant: This is my all-around favorite animated movie of all time.
Up: If the first five minutes of this Pixar movie doesn’t tear you up, you haven’t experienced deep love yet.

Films – Comedy
Bill Hicks Live: Bill Hicks is my favorite stand-up comedian of all. This provides four vintage stand-up sets from him.
Chicago: A comedy-musical-drama that won the Best Picture Oscar several years ago.
Duck Soup: This is, in my opinion, the vintage black and white comedy.
Fargo: Extremely dark humor all throughout this film.
Groundhog Day: One classic debate I’ve had with my wife is figuring out how many years pass during this film. . .

Continue reading.

Interesting article, and if indeed being bilingual boosts “brain power” (whatever that is, it sounds good), then the logical approach is to learn the easiest possible second language: Esperanto. And learning Esperanto, as has been shown in multiple studies, facilitates learning additional languages. At any rate, the article (4-minute podcast at the link) by Gretchen Kuda-Kroen of NPR begins:

In an interconnected world, speaking more than one language is becoming increasingly common. Approximately one-fifth of Americans speak a non-English language at home, and globally, as many as two-thirds of children are brought up bilingual.

Research suggests that the growing numbers of bilingual speakers may have an advantage that goes beyond communication: It turns out that being bilingual is also good for your brain.

Judy and Paul Szentkiralyi both grew up bilingual in the U.S., speaking Hungarian with their families and English with their peers. When they first started dating, they spoke English with each other.

But they knew they wanted to raise their children speaking both languages, so when things turned serious they did something unusual — they decided to switch to Hungarian.

Today, Hungarian is the primary language the Szentkiralyis use at home. Their two daughters — Hannah, 14, and Julia, 8 — speak both languages fluently, and without any accent. But they both heard only Hungarian from mom and dad until the age of 3 or 4, when they started school.

“When she did go to preschool that accent was very thick – she counted like Vun, two, tree,” said Judy Szentkiralyi, recalling Hanna’s early experience with English. “And by the time four or five months went by, it was totally gone.”

The Szentkiralyis say that most people were supportive, but not everyone. Paul recounts an uncomfortable confrontation Judy once had in the local grocery store.”I remember one time you came home and you said this one lady was like, ‘When is she going to learn English?’ And it was like, ‘Well, when she goes to school she’ll learn English,’” he said.

“People would often say, ‘Well, won’t they get confused?” added Judy. “And I would have to explain, ‘Well, no, it wasn’t confusing for us.’”

The idea that children exposed to two languages from birth become confused or that they fall behind monolingual children is a common misconception, says Janet Werker, a psychologist at the University of British Columbia who studies language acquisition in bilingual babies.

“Growing up bilingual is just as natural as growing up monolingual,” said Werker, whose own research indicates babies of bilingual mothers can distinguish between languages even hours after birth. . .

Continue reading. I’ve read that, in raising a child in a bilingual household, it helps if one parent always speaks one language and the other always speaks the other—the child then naturally engages the one language or the other in speaking to the appropriate parent.

Years ago I read Foreign Languages in the Elementary School, by Theodore Andersson. Quite interesting. At the time, the foreign language most often taught in the elementary schools was Polish, due to strong Polish communities in some cities. He also mentioned some excellent elementary-school programs in German—Cleveland had one such, as I recall—that were discontinued because of anti-German feeling during WWI: “We’ll show them! We’ll become more ignorant, and that will teach them a lesson they’ll not forget!”

One suggestion he made was to start in kindergarten or pre-school, with an hour or so each day when someone would come to the classroom and interact with the children only in a foreign language—so far as the children knew, this person did not speak English. Kids would quickly learn how one talks to that person. And he suggested a different person for each day of the week, so the kids would grow up acquainted with (and able to hear and make the sounds of) several languages. As I recall, he included French, German, Spanish, Chinese (or Japanese), and Arabic, to provide a broad language bundle. I would, of course, suggest Esperanto, since the kids would quickly and easily pick that up.

And if you want to pick up Esperanto yourself, check out the 9-day summer course at UCSD (note that in the upper-right corner at the link, you can choose to view the page in English or in Esperanto). With a foundation of a little self-study, you can make enormous gains—San Francisco State used to run a summer Esperanto course (a week? 2 weeks? I don’t recall), which I took twice, and once with The Eldest.

UPDATE: An interesting response to the article.

Interesting article by William Hogeland in Salon:

Edmund Randolph of Virginia kicked off the meeting we now know as the United States constitutional convention by offering his fellow delegates a key inducement to forming a new U.S. government. America lacked “sufficient checks against the democracy,” Randolph said. A new government would provide those checks.

Randolph’s listeners in Philadelphia in the spring of 1787 knew what he meant by “the democracy.” And readers of this series probably will, too. He was talking about the 18th-century American popular finance movement, whose supporters agitated for policies to obstruct concentrated wealth and to give regular folks access to political power and economic equality. Amid depressions and foreclosures, ordinary people had long been rioting — they called it “regulating” — to pressure assemblies to restrain the merchant creditors, whose command of scarce gold and silver let them acquire immense wealth by lending at high, even predatory rates to the needier.

Then, with revolution against England, the popular finance movement turned its attention to changing the economic terms of American society. The 1776 Pennsylvania constitution, based in large part on ideas expressed by Thomas Paine in “Common Sense,” smashed the ancient property qualification for voting and holding office. In Pennsylvania, new political leaders like the preacher Herman Husband, the weaver William Findley, and the farmer Robert Whitehill entered the assembly and began passing laws shutting down elite banking and requiring government to operate, for the first meaningful time anywhere, on behalf of ordinary people.

Democracy in Pennsylvania sent chills through elites of every kind throughout the newly independent country. Rioting for popular finance was bad enough, but rioting was temporary, spasmodic, and traditional. Debtors wielding legitimate political power to equalize economic life — that was tantamount to a new kind of tyranny of the mob, hardly what Whig revolutionaries had fought England to gain. Neither Edmund Randolph nor other delegates of the Philadelphia convention, meeting in secret sessions in the Pennsylvania State House, felt any need for subtlety in seeking to suppress the political and economic equality burgeoning everywhere in America among “the democracy.”

Present at the Philadelphia convention was the fabulously wealthy Pennsylvania financier and speculator Robert Morris, America’s first central banker, no doubt licking his ample chops over the fulfillment, at long last, of his plan to wed nationhood to high finance. Yet it was the planter Randolph, not the financer Morris, who referred to “the plague of paper money,” and he meant just what Morris meant. State legislatures’ currency emissions and legal-tender laws depreciated the merchants’ income from their loans; paper, the people’s medium, built debt relief into money itself. Randolph also rued the country’s difficulty in paying the investing class its interest on federal bonds. With those bonds, Morris had made private creditors into public creditors as well, swelling the domestic U.S. debt to vast proportions in an effort to connect national purpose to high finance.

Hence the need, Randolph said, for . . .

Continue reading.

This interesting sentence appears in the Wikipedia article on Esperanto orthography in the Mac OS X section:

In OS X it is also possible to create your own keyboard layouts, so it is relatively easy to have more convenient mappings, like for example one based on typing an x after the letter.

If you click the link you are taken to downloadable files, two of which are for enabling the Mac keyboard to enter Esperanto symbols. One is a read-me, the other is some sort of character map that one copies into the appropriate spot in the fonts table, I presume. But this is way more into the Mac than I am likely to get. Anyone know of anything easier?

The “typing an x after the letter” refers to a convention sometimes used when diacritics are unavailable. For example, cx for ĉ, gx for ĝ, hx for ĥ, jx for ĵ, sx for ŝ, and ux for ŭ. You can see why one would want those “x”-characters converted to the regular character with the diacritic.

That conversion is, of course, what I thought I had solved with the “Character Substitution” semi-feature in the Mac—which, as noted, works only in some Apple programs and not at all in other programs (Firefox, for instance). I need to get at the keyboard mapping itself, somehow. I suppose that is what those files do.

I have tried various on-tap water filters that attach to the kitchen tap: the Brita ($30) and the Water-Pik ($40). I didn’t try the Pur ($33) because for a long time they marked the “u” in “Pur” as a long “u”, so the word would be pronounced “poor” (a bad marketing decision, it seems to me). However, this one does have 3-stage filtering.

Both the Brita and the Water-Pik attach the filter to the tap with a threaded fitting made of soft plastic piece. Unfortunately, after a week or two of use (or even less), the plastic deforms and unit leaks fiercely, with tiny sprays in all direction, and if you happen to bump it, it will fall off the faucet.

The Instapure filter ($15), mirabile dictu!, attaches with a threaded metal fitting. The filter itself is plastic, but the metal fitting makes all the difference: absolutely no sign of a leak. But then as I read the box more carefully, I realized that this filter works ONLY to remove chlorine taste and odor—no removal of lead or microorganisms. That’s not really enough.

So I continued, and I just got the Culligan on-tap filter ($18): another threaded metal fitting, another secure connection. And this filter is indeed a stage 3 filter, removing lead and a host of microorganisms.

Success at last. Pur claims that their mounting is easy and secure, but I think I’ll stop exploring. With the Culligan, water runs slowly through the filter, but that’s really not a problem: I rarely run more than a quart of water at a time, and more usually a cup or a pint, so speed is not the issue. The Culligan does automatically turn off the filter when the faucet is turned off, so when you turn the faucet on, you get unfiltered water until you engage the filter, a minor advantage.

Very nice shave, and Klar Seifen seems to me to be quite similar to Klar Kabinett, though obviously with superior packaging. The usual fine lather, then three smooth passes with the Gillette shown, a splash of Klassik, and we’re off for adventures.

This morning I went looking for how to enter Esperanto’s special characters, which are Ĉ, Ĝ, Ĥ, Ĵ, Ŝ, Ŭ, ĉ, ĝ, ĥ, ĵ, ŝ, ŭ. Note that the problem is not displaying the characters (they show up fine, eh? — I copied them from elsewhere), but in entering them from the keyboard.

Apple provides Option-key combinations for some special characters. For example, the sequence Option-N, n produces “ñ” — if you try it you’ll see that Option-N displays the “~” (at the appropriate height to leave room for the letter) and then typing “n” puts the “n” under “~”.

For the circumflex Option-Shift-i will produce a circumflex, but right now I find the letter following is typed beside, rather than under, the circumflex—not just the circumflexed Esperanto letters shown above, but even the French circumflexed letters are not working right now. (And moving Français higher in the langague list (see below) doesn’t work.)

I have found no Option-key combinations for any of the Esperanto special characters. OTOH, under System Preferences > Language & Text, you find two things that help some. First, under “Language” (the first tab), you see a list of languages. If you press “Edit” under that list, you can add Esperanto to the language list, and then drag it up the list to where you want it. What this does, I have absolutely no idea, but it sure doesn’t help whatsoever with entering special characters.

So go to the next tab, “Text” and you’ll see “Symbol and Text Substitution”. You’re not home free, but this can help. You can edit the list to add more text substitutions—for example, I’ve added “cx” as the entry, with “ĉ” as the substituted character, “ux” with “ŭ” as the substituted character. But it turns out that Bob is only distantly related to your mom, not her brother. First, you have to go into the individual programs and turn on Text Substitution to enable the operation to function:

(In some applications, such as iChat, iPhoto, Mail, Safari, and TextEdit, you can automatically replace text with other text or symbols. (In the application, Control-click and choose Substitutions > Text Replacement, or in some applications, you can also choose Edit > Substitutions > Text Replacement.) Select an item in this list to have it replaced with the symbol or alternate text to the right of it. For example, if you select the (c) checkbox and text substitution features are turned on in the application you’re using, when you type (c) it will automatically be replaced with ©.)

The tip-off is the word “some”: not even all Apple applications, and whether programs from third-party vendors work or not… who knows?

I bought Pages from the Apple app store, for example: an Apple program. Pages does not allow the automatic character substitution. Instead, they have (through extensive usability testing, I’m sure) devised this efficient procedure:

To insert special characters or symbols:
Place the insertion point where you want the special character or symbol to appear.

Choose Edit > Special Characters to open the Characters window (or choose Characters from the Action pop-up menu in the lower-left corner of the Fonts window).

Choose the type of characters you want to see from the View pop-up menu at the top of the Characters window. If you don’t see the View menu, click the button in the upper-right corner of the window to show the top portion of the window. Click this button again to hide the top portion of the window.

Click an item in the list on the left to see the characters that are available in each category.

Double-click the character or symbol on the right that you want to insert into your document, or select the character and click Insert.

If the character or symbol has variations, they appear at the bottom of the window when you click the Character Info triangle or Font Variation triangle at the bottom of the palette. Double-click one to insert it in your document.

If the character doesn’t appear in your document, Pages may not support that character.

Wonderful: Apple programs fail to support Apple OS functionality. And the laborious procedure to insert a special character: it does work, but it stinks.

Still, when I moved to Apple from Windows, I knew I would lose functionality. So I’ll continue to look for ways to accomplish this. At least I have an answer for Mail. That’s one program.

UPDATE: Aha. I just found this note. (And this is why I don’t understand people who bad-mouth Wikipedia because they found errors in some articles—the same thing happens in printed encyclopedias, which happen to fall far short of the range of Wikipedia.)

UPDATE 2: I also found this, which I’ll try later today. But now I need to get going. — Later: Guess not. The Wife says this is for OS 8.

Interesting list. How many have you read?

The Younger Grandson—no longer so young, now 8—wants to play chess with me via the Internet. I’m looking for an on-line chess server that presents a graphical interface that allows two people to play each other—the chess equivalent of the KGS Go Server, which allows you to download a Java-based client (runs on OS X and Windows and Linux) that connects to the server. You can then find your opponent by name or play a random person.

Anyone know of a chess equivalent? So far my Googling has not produced any such free services, though I’m willing to pay a modest subscription fee for TYG and myself. Some of the chess servers don’t have anything so fancy as a graphical interface: they’re still in command-line mode.

Take a look. Apparently it will be released as a poster.

Well worth watching: 5 simple rules that make a big difference—36 seconds a rule. Not bad.

This sounds scrumptious, and it is extremely easy to make. I will grate the beets using the food processor, but using the grater attachment rather than pulsing them—which would quickly turn them to pulp.

I’ve read that beets in particular have more nutritional value raw than cooked. Whether true, I don’t know.

Very interesting post by Scott Feldstein. Good ideas.