+Jason Stuart+

The New Luddites are back, and they’re packing heat. The mighty Economist writes of “the disturbing thought” that “America’s current employment woes stem from a precipitous and permanent change caused by not too little technological progress, but too much … A tipping point seems to have been reached, at which AI-based automation threatens to supplant the brain-power of large swathes of middle-income employees.” The New York Times chimes in: “technology is quickly taking over service jobs, following the waves of automation of farm and factory work.”

At which those of us lucky enough to be software engineers burst into derisive laughter, of course. We’ve heard all this before, more than a decade ago, when ‘outsourcing to India’ rather than ‘automation’ was the threat that would destroy our jobs. Obviously this is more of the same kind of nonsense. Right?

…Although, now that you mention it, there is something odd going on. America, Europe, and Japan all seem to be lurching from crisis to crisis without respite; most of the developed world is struggling with debilitating levels of unemployment; but at the same time, the tech world is booming like it’s 1999. Doesn’t that seem kind of weird?

Maybe I should respond: a recent Hacker News thread analyzes, and ultimately (mostly) validates, a claim that a good 30-year-old Google software engineer now takes home close to $250,000/year in total compensation. Another reports that newly minted Stanford CS/EE graduates are offered an average of $88,000 for their first post-university jobs. Well, hey, let the good times roll! Luddites of all stripes are morons! We just happen to be in the midst of a thrilling boom/bubble while the entire rest of the rich world happens to be in a crippling recession/stagnation. Pure coincidence. Right?

Unless.

Unless Martin Ford and/or Arnold Kling are right. Ford essentially argues that we have hit an inflection point at which technology destroys jobs faster than it creates them. Kling writes (at length, but it’s worth reading): “The new jobs that emerge may not produce a middle class … gains in well-being that come from productivity improvements [may] accrue to an economic elite … we could be headed into an era of highly unequal economic classes. People at the bottom will have access to food, healthcare, and electronic entertainment, but the rich will live in an exclusive world of exotic homes and extravagant personal services.”

Which sounds eerily like what we would get if we extrapolated from today, no? While millions of long-term unemployed fight desperately to tread water, technology’s handmaidens — software engineers — are minting money like bailed-out bankers. That Stanford survey mentioned above seems to undercut Peter Thiel’s take that “We’re in a bubble and it’s not the Internet. It’s higher education” — but guess again:

It’s beginning to look like we might have entered a two-track economy, in which a small minority reaps most of the benefits of technology that destroys more jobs than it creates. As my friend Simon Law says, “First we automated menial jobs, now we’re automating middle-class jobs. Unfortunately, we still demand that people have a job soon after becoming adults. This trend is going to be a big problem…”

It’s even been suggested that inequality may cause unrest and violence in the Western world. Don’t bet on it. True, inequality has provoked the Occupy movement, and to a lesser extent the Tea Party; but I’ve been around the block a few times, and take it from me, the world is full of nations with a tiny minority of the very rich, a slightly larger well-off elite, a small middle class, and a great majority who are various degrees of poor and struggling. Brazil, China, India and Russia, for instance, to name a famous foursome. There’s nothing unusual or inherently unstable about that kind of inequality. In fact, in most of the world, it’s the norm.

I still believe technology will be the great equalizer that brings comparable economic opportunities to all regions of the world. But I’m beginning to wonder if that same technology will also ultimately make the rich world as fragmented and unequal as the poor, and turn the majority middle class into a thing of the past.

Image credit: “born1945″, Flickr

In school, I hated math. It was a dire, dry and boring thing with stuffy old books and very theoretical problems. Even worse, a lot of the tasks were repetitive, with a simple logical change in every iteration (dividing numbers by hand, differentials, etc.). It was exactly the reason why we invented computers. Suffice it to say, a lot of my math homework was actually done by my trusty Commodore 64 and some lines of Basic, with me just copying the results later on.

These tools and the few geometry lessons I had gave me the time and inspiration to make math interesting for myself. I did this first and foremost by creating visual effects that followed mathematical rules in demos, intros and other seemingly pointless things.

There is a lot of math in the visual things we do, even if we don’t realize it. If you want to make something look natural and move naturally, you need to add a bit of physics and rounding to it. Nature doesn’t work in right angles or linear acceleration. This is why zombies in movies are so creepy. This was covered here before in relation to CSS animation, but today let’s go a bit deeper and look at the simple math behind the smooth looks.

Going From 0 To 1 Without Being Boring

If you’ve just started programming and are asked to go from 0 to 1 with a few steps in between, you would probably go for a for loop:

for ( i = 0; i <= 1; i += 0.1 ) {
  x = i;
  y = i;
…
}

This would result in a line on a graph that is 45 degrees. Nothing in nature moves with this precision:

A simple way to make this movement a bit more natural would be to simply multiply the value by itself:

for ( i = 0; i <= 1; i += 0.1 ) {
  x = i;
  y = i * i;
}

This means that 0.1 is 0.01, 0.2 is 0.04, 0.3 is 0.09, 0.4 is 0.16, 0.5 is 0.25 and so on. The result is a curve that starts flat and then gets steeper towards the end:

You can make this even more pronounced by continuing to multiply or by using the “to the power of” Math.pow() function:

for ( i = 0; i <= 1; i += 0.1 ) {
  x = i;
  y = Math.pow( i, 4 );
}

This is one of the tricks of the easing functions used in libraries such as jQuery and YUI, as well as in CSS transitions and animations in modern browsers.

You can use this the same way, but there is an even simpler option for getting a value between 0 and 1 that follows a natural motion.

Not A Sin, Just A Natural Motion

Sine waves are probably the best thing ever for smooth animation. They happen in nature: witness a spring with a weight on it, ocean waves, sound and light.
In our case, we want to move from 0 to 1 smoothly.

To create a movement that goes from 0 to 1 and back to 0 smoothly, we can use a sine wave that goes from 0 to π in a few steps. The full sine wave going from 0 to π × 2 (i.e. a whole circle) would result in values from -1 to 1, and we don’t want that (yet).

var counter = 0;

// 100 iterations
var increase = Math.PI / 100;

for ( i = 0; i <= 1; i += 0.01 ) {
  x = i;
  y = Math.sin(counter);
  counter += increase;
}

A quick aside on numbers for sine and cosine: Both Math.sin() and Math.cos() take as the parameter an angle that should be in radians. As humans, however, degrees ranging from 0 to 360 are much easier to read. That’s why you can and should convert between them with this simple formula:

var toRadian = Math.PI / 180;
var toDegree = 180 / Math.PI;

var angle = 30;

var angleInRadians = angle * toRadian;
var angleInDegrees = angleInRadians * toDegree;

Back to our sine waves. You can play with this a lot. For example, you could use the absolute value of a full 2 × π loop:

var counter = 0;
// 100 iterations
var increase = Math.PI * 2 / 100;

for ( i = 0; i <= 1; i += 0.01 ) {
  x = i;
  y = Math.abs( Math.sin( counter ) );
  counter += increase;
}

But again, this looks dirty. If you want the full up and down, without a break in the middle, then you need to shift the values. You have to half the sine and then add 0.5 to it:

var counter = 0;
// 100 iterations
var increase = Math.PI * 2 / 100;

for ( i = 0; i <= 1; i += 0.01 ) {
  x = i;
  y = Math.sin( counter ) / 2 + 0.5;
  counter += increase;
}

So, how can you use this? Having a function that returns -1 to 1 to whatever you feed it can be very cool. All you need to do is multiply it by the values that you want and add an offset to avoid negative numbers.

For example, check out this sine movement demo:

Looks neat, doesn’t it? A lot of the trickery is already in the CSS:

.stage {
  width:200px;
  height:200px;
  margin:2em;
  position:relative;
  background:#6cf;
  overflow:hidden;
}

.stage div {
  line-height:40px;
  width:100%;
  text-align:center;
  background:#369;
  color:#fff;
  font-weight:bold;
  position:absolute;
}

The stage element has a fixed dimension and is positioned relative. This means that everything that is positioned absolutely inside it will be relative to the element itself.

The div inside the stage is 40 pixels high and positioned absolutely. Now, all we need to do is move the div with JavaScript in a sine wave:

var banner = document.querySelector( '.stage div' ),
    start = 0;
function sine(){
  banner.style.top = 50 * Math.sin( start ) + 80 + 'px';
  start += 0.05;
}
window.setInterval( sine, 1000/30 );

The start value changes constantly, and with Math.sin() we get a nice wave movement. We multiply this by 50 to get a wider wave, and we add 80 pixels to center it in the stage element. Yes, the element is 200 pixels high and 100 is half of that, but because the banner is 40 pixels high, we need to subtract half of that to center it.

Right now, this is a simple up-and-down movement. Nothing stops you, though, from making it more interesting. The multiplying factor of 50, for example, could be a sine wave itself with a different value:

var banner = document.querySelector( '.stage div' ),
    start = 0,
    multiplier = 0;
function sine(){
  multiplier = 50 * Math.sin( start * 2 );
  banner.style.top = multiplier * Math.sin( start ) + 80 + 'px';
  start += 0.05;
}
window.setInterval( sine, 1000/30 );

The result of this is a banner that seems to tentatively move up and down. Back in the day and on the very slow Commodore 64, calculating the sine wave live was too slow. Instead, we had tools to generate sine tables (arrays, if you will), and we plotted those directly. One of the tools for creating great sine waves so that you could have bouncing scroll texts was the Wix Bouncer:

Circles In The Sand, Round And Round…

Circular motion is a thing of beauty. It pleases the eye, reminds us of spinning wheels and the earth we stand on, and in general has a “this is not computer stuff” feel to it. The math of plotting something on a circle is not hard.

It goes back to Pythagoras, who, as rumor has it, drew a lot of circles in the sand until he found his famous theorem. If you want to use all the good stuff that comes from this theorem, then try to find a triangle with a right angle. If this triangle’s hypothenuse is 1, then you can easily calculate the horizontal leg as the cosine of the angle and the vertical leg as the sine of the angle:

How is this relevant to a circle? Well, it is pretty simple to find a right-angle triangle in a circle to every point of it:

This means that if you want to plot something on a circle (or draw one), you can do it with a loop and sine and cosine. A full circle is 360°, or 2 × π in radians. We could have a go at it — but first, some plotting code needs to be done.

A Quick DOM Plotting Routine

Normally, my weapon of choice here would be canvas, but in order to play nice with older browsers, let’s do it in plain DOM. The following helper function adds div elements to a stage element and allows us to position them, change their dimensions, set their color, change their content and rotate them without having to go through the annoying style settings on DOM elements.

Plot = function ( stage ) {

  this.setDimensions = function( x, y ) {
    this.elm.style.width = x + 'px';
    this.elm.style.height = y + 'px';
    this.width = x;
    this.height = y;
  }
  this.position = function( x, y ) {
    var xoffset = arguments[2] ? 0 : this.width / 2;
    var yoffset = arguments[2] ? 0 : this.height / 2;
    this.elm.style.left = (x - xoffset) + 'px';
    this.elm.style.top = (y - yoffset) + 'px';
    this.x = x;
    this.y = y;
  };
  this.setbackground = function( col ) {
    this.elm.style.background = col;
  }
  this.kill = function() {
    stage.removeChild( this.elm );
  }
  this.rotate = function( str ) {
    this.elm.style.webkitTransform = this.elm.style.MozTransform =
    this.elm.style.OTransform = this.elm.style.transform =
    'rotate('+str+')';
  }
  this.content = function( content ) {
    this.elm.innerHTML = content;
  }
  this.round = function( round ) {
    this.elm.style.borderRadius = round ? '50%/50%' : '';
  }
  this.elm = document.createElement( 'div' );
  this.elm.style.position = 'absolute';
  stage.appendChild( this.elm );

};

The only things that might be new here are the transformation with different browser prefixes and the positioning. People often make the mistake of creating a div with the dimensions w and h and then set it to x and y on the screen. This means you will always have to deal with the offset of the height and width. By subtracting half the width and height before positioning the div, you really set it where you want it — regardless of the dimensions. Here’s a proof:

Now, let’s use that to plot 10 rectangles in a circle, shall we?

var stage = document.querySelector('.stage'),
    plots = 10;
    increase = Math.PI * 2 / plots,
    angle = 0,
    x = 0,
    y = 0;

for( var i = 0; i < plots; i++ ) {
  var p = new Plot( stage );
  p.setBackground( 'green' );
  p.setDimensions( 40, 40 );
  x = 100 * Math.cos( angle ) + 200;
  y = 100 * Math.sin( angle ) + 200;
  p.position( x, y );
  angle += increase;
}

We want 10 things in a circle, so we need to find the angle that we want to put them at. A full circle is two times Math.PI, so all we need to do is divide this. The x and y position of our rectangles can be calculated by the angle we want them at. The x is the cosine, and the y is the sine, as explained earlier in the bit on Pythagoras. All we need to do, then, is center the circle that we’re painting in the stage (200,200 is the center of the stage), and we are done. We’ve painted a circle with a radius of 100 pixels on the canvas in 10 steps.

The problem is that this looks terrible. If we really want to plot things on a circle, then their angles should also point to the center, right? For this, we need to calculate the tangent of the right-angle square, as explained in this charming “Math is fun” page. In JavaScript, we can use Math.atan2() as a shortcut. The result looks much better:

var stage = document.querySelector('.stage'),
    plots = 10;
    increase = Math.PI * 2 / plots,
    angle = 0,
    x = 0,
    y = 0;

for( var i = 0; i < plots; i++ ) {
  var p = new Plot( stage );
  p.setBackground( 'green' );
  p.setDimensions( 40, 40 );
  x = 100 * Math.cos( angle ) + 200;
  y = 100 * Math.sin( angle ) + 200;
  p.rotate( Math.atan2( y - 200, x - 200 ) + 'rad' );
  p.position( x, y );
  angle += increase;
}

Notice that the rotate transformation in CSS helps us heaps in this case. Otherwise, the math to rotate our rectangles would be much less fun. CSS transformations also take radians and degrees as their value. In this case, we use rad; if you want to rotate with degrees, simply use deg as the value.

How about animating the circle now? Well, the first thing to do is change the script a bit, because we don’t want to have to keep creating new plots. Other than that, all we need to do to rotate the circle is to keep increasing the start angle:

var stage = document.querySelector('.stage'),
    plots = 10;
    increase = Math.PI * 2 / plots,
    angle = 0,
    x = 0,
    y = 0,
    plotcache = [];

for( var i = 0; i < plots; i++ ) {
  var p = new Plot( stage );
  p.setBackground( 'green' );
  p.setDimensions( 40, 40 );
  plotcache.push( p );
}

function rotate(){
  for( var i = 0; i < plots; i++ ) {
    x = 100 * Math.cos( angle ) + 200;
    y = 100 * Math.sin( angle ) + 200;
    plotcache[ i ].rotate( Math.atan2( y - 200, x - 200 ) + 'rad' );
    plotcache[ i ].position( x, y );
    angle += increase;
  }
  angle += 0.06;
}

setInterval( rotate, 1000/30 );

Want more? How about a rotating text message based on this? The tricky thing about this is that we also need to turn the characters 90° on each iteration:

var stage = document.querySelector('.stage'),
    message = 'Smashing Magazine '.toUpperCase(),
    plots = message.length;
    increase = Math.PI * 2 / plots,
    angle = -Math.PI,
    turnangle = 0,
    x = 0,
    y = 0,
    plotcache = [];

for( var i = 0; i < plots; i++ ) {
  var p = new Plot( stage );
  p.content( message.substr(i,1) );
  p.setDimensions( 40, 40 );
  plotcache.push( p );
}
function rotate(){
  for( var i = 0; i < plots; i++ ) {
    x = 100 * Math.cos( angle ) + 200;
    y = 100 * Math.sin( angle ) + 200;
    // rotation and rotating the text 90 degrees
    turnangle = Math.atan2( y - 200, x - 200 ) * 180 / Math.PI + 90 + 'deg';
    plotcache[ i ].rotate( turnangle );
    plotcache[ i ].position( x, y );
    angle += increase;
  }
  angle += 0.06;
}

setInterval( rotate, 1000/40 );

Again, nothing here is fixed. You can make the radius of the circle change constantly, as we did with the bouncing banner message earlier (below is only an excerpt):

multiplier = 80 * Math.sin( angle );
for( var i = 0; i < plots; i++ ) {
  x = multiplier * Math.cos( angle ) + 200;
  y = multiplier * Math.sin( angle ) + 200;
  turnangle = Math.atan2( y - 200, x - 200 ) * 180 / Math.PI + 90 + 'deg';
  plotcache[ i ].rotate( turnangle );
  plotcache[ i ].position( x, y );
  angle += increase;
}
angle += 0.06;

And, of course, you can move the center of the circle, too:

rx = 50 * Math.cos( angle ) + 200;
ry = 50 * Math.sin( angle ) + 200;
for( var i = 0; i < plots; i++ ) {
  x = 100 * Math.cos( angle ) + rx;
  y = 100 * Math.sin( angle ) + ry;
  turnangle = Math.atan2( y - ry, x - rx ) * 180 / Math.PI + 90 + 'deg';
  plotcache[ i ].rotate( turnangle );
  plotcache[ i ].position( x, y );
  angle += increase;
}
angle += 0.06;

For a final tip, how about allowing only a certain range of coordinates?

function rotate() {
  rx = 70 * Math.cos( angle ) + 200;
  ry = 70 * Math.sin( angle ) + 200;
  for( var i = 0; i < plots; i++ ) {
    x = 100 * Math.cos( angle ) + rx;
    y = 100 * Math.sin( angle ) + ry;
    x = contain( 70, 320, x );
    y = contain( 70, 320, y );
    turnangle = Math.atan2( y - ry, x - rx ) * 180 / Math.PI + 90 + 'deg';
    plotcache[ i ].rotate( turnangle );
    plotcache[ i ].position( x, y );
    angle += increase;
  }
  angle += 0.06;
}
function contain( min, max, value ) {
  return Math.min( max, Math.max( min, value ) );
}

Summary

This was just a quick introduction to using exponentials and sine waves and to plotting things on a circle. Have a go with the code, and play with the numbers. It is amazing how many cool effects you can create with a few changes to the radius or by multiplying the angles. To make it easier for you to do this, below are the examples on JSFiddle to play with:

• Sine bouncing message
• Double sine bouncing message
• Offset issue with plotting
• Distributing elements on a circle
• Distributing elements on a circle with correct angles
• Rotating a circle of boxes
• Oscillating rotating message
• Rotating message in a circle movement
• Boxed rotated message scroller

(il) (al)

© Christian Heilmann for Smashing Magazine, 2011.

Kairos: A Journal of Rhetoric, Technology, and Pedagogy is seeking webtexts for a planned special issue: Multimodal Research Within/Across/Without Borders, guest edited by Karen Lunsford. 

With publication in the spring of 2013, proposals for webtexts are due November 1, 2011.

The full CFW and general submission guidelines are available at Kairos.

Rick Falkvinge has a nice column pointing out how disruptive innovation works: obsolete middlemen are innovated away. He uses the example of ice men: the folks who would deliver ice to be used in "ice boxes" prior to electricity and the refrigerator becoming common. But, of course, technology made such people obsolete:

There were many personal tragedies in this era as the icemen lost their breadwinning capacity and needed to retrain to get new jobs in a completely new field. The iceman profession had often been tough to begin with, and seeing your industry disintegrate in real-time didn’t make it any easier.

But here are a few things that didn’t happen as the ice distribution industry became obsolete:

No refrigerator owner was sued for making their own cold and ignoring the existing corporate cold distribution chains.

No laws were proposed that would make electricity companies liable in court if the electricity they provided was used in a way that destroyed icemen’s jobs.

Nobody demanded a monthly refrigerator fee from refrigerator owners that would go to the Icemen’s Union.

No lavishly expensive expert panels were held in total consensus about how necessary icemen were for the entire economy.

Rather, the distribution monopoly became obsolete, was ignored, and the economy as a whole benefited by the resulting decentralization.

If it's true that Aaron Swartz's foray into an MIT computer wiring closet was as part of a project to copy JSTOR research and upload it to file sharing sites for open access, then I imagine part of the government's rationale for going after him would be the hope that it would act as a deterrent against anyone else doing the same thing. Of course, as I've pointed out with the feds' attempt to arrest members of Anonymous, it seems likely that this move will backfire in a big bad way. All it does is draw much more attention to the original goal. Indeed, Adam points us to the news that a guy by the name of Greg Maxwell just released 33GB of JSTOR scientific papers via The Pirate Bay because of the indictment against Aaron. In this case, believe it or not, it's all public domain research, which JSTOR is trying to charge hundreds of thousands of dollars to access. Since I have no idea if the content will remain where it is, I'm publishing the entire note explaining what's in the documents and why they're being published. It's very much worth reading and redistributing his message. The bold emphasis is from me, highlighting what I believe are the important points:

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE-----
Hash: SHA1

This archive contains 18,592 scientific publications totaling 33GiB, all from Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society and which should be available to everyone at no cost, but most have previously only been made available at high prices through paywall gatekeepers like JSTOR.

Limited access to the documents here is typically sold for $19 USD per article, though some of the older ones are available as cheaplyas $8. Purchasing access to this collection one article at a time would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars.

Also included is the basic factual metadata allowing you to locate works by title, author, or publication date, and a checksum file to allow you to check for corruption.

ef8c02959e947d7f4e4699f399ade838431692d972661f145b782c2fa3ebcc6a sha256sum.txt

I've had these files for a long time, but I've been afraid that if I published them I would be subject to unjust legal harassment by those who profit from controlling access to these works.

I now feel that I've been making the wrong decision.

On July 19th 2011, Aaron Swartz was criminally charged by the US Attorney General's office for, effectively, downloading too many academic papers from JSTOR.

Academic publishing is an odd system -- the authors are not paid for their writing, nor are the peer reviewers (they're just more unpaid academics), and in some fields even the journal editors are unpaid. Sometimes the authors must even pay the publishers.

And yet scientific publications are some of the most outrageously expensive pieces of literature you can buy. In the past, the high access fees supported the costly mechanical reproduction of niche paper journals, but online distribution has mostly made this function obsolete.

As far as I can tell, the money paid for access today serves little significant purpose except to perpetuate dead business models. The "publish or perish" pressure in academia gives the authors an impossibly weak negotiating position, and the existing system has enormous inertia.

Those with the most power to change the system--the long-tenured luminary scholars whose works give legitimacy and prestige to the journals, rather than the other way around--are the least impacted by its failures. They are supported by institutions who invisibly provide access to all of the resources they need. And as the journals depend on them, they may ask for alterations to the standard contract without risking their career on the loss of a publication offer. Many don't even realize the extent to which academic work is inaccessible to the general public, nor do they realize what sort of work is being done outside universities that would benefit by it.

Large publishers are now able to purchase the political clout needed to abuse the narrow commercial scope of copyright protection, extending it to completely inapplicable areas: slavish reproductions of historic documents and art, for example, and exploiting the labors of unpaid scientists. They're even able to make the taxpayers pay for their attacks on free society by pursuing criminal prosecution (copyright has classically been a civil matter) and by burdening public institutions with outrageous subscription fees.

Copyright is a legal fiction representing a narrow compromise: we give up some of our natural right to exchange information in exchange for creating an economic incentive to author, so that we may all enjoy more works. When publishers abuse the system to prop up their existence, when they misrepresent the extent of copyright coverage, when they use threats of frivolous litigation to suppress the dissemination of publicly owned works, they are stealing from everyone else.

Several years ago I came into possession, through rather boring and lawful means, of a large collection of JSTOR documents.

These particular documents are the historic back archives of the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society--a prestigious scientific journal with a history extending back to the 1600s.

The portion of the collection included in this archive, ones published prior to 1923 and therefore obviously in the public domain, total some 18,592 papers and 33 gigabytes of data.

The documents are part of the shared heritage of all mankind, and are rightfully in the public domain, but they are not available freely. Instead the articles are available at $19 each--for one month's viewing, by one person, on one computer. It's a steal. From you.

When I received these documents I had grand plans of uploading them to Wikipedia's sister site for reference works, Wikisource--where they could be tightly interlinked with Wikipedia, providing interesting historical context to the encyclopedia articles. For example, Uranus was discovered in 1781 by William Herschel; why not take a look at the paper where he originally disclosed his discovery? (Or one of the several follow on publications about its satellites, or the dozens of other papers he authored?)

But I soon found the reality of the situation to be less than appealing: publishing the documents freely was likely to bring frivolous litigation from the publishers.

As in many other cases, I could expect them to claim that their slavish reproduction--scanning the documents--created a new copyright interest. Or that distributing the documents complete with the trivial watermarks they added constituted unlawful copying of that mark. They might even pursue strawman criminal charges claiming that whoever obtained the files must have violated some kind of anti-hacking laws.

In my discreet inquiry, I was unable to find anyone willing to cover the potentially unbounded legal costs I risked, even though the only unlawful action here is the fraudulent misuse of copyright by JSTOR and the Royal Society to withhold access from the public to that which is legally and morally everyone's property.

In the meantime, and to great fanfare as part of their 350th anniversary, the RSOL opened up "free" access to their historic archives--but "free" only meant "with many odious terms", and access was limited to about 100 articles.

All too often journals, galleries, and museums are becoming not disseminators of knowledge--as their lofty mission statements suggest--but censors of knowledge, because censoring is the one thing they do better than the Internet does. Stewardship and curation are valuable functions, but their value is negative when there is only one steward and one curator, whose judgment reigns supreme as the final word on what everyone else sees and knows. If their recommendations have value they can be heeded without the coercive abuse of copyright to silence competition.

The liberal dissemination of knowledge is essential to scientific inquiry. More than in any other area, the application of restrictive copyright is inappropriate for academic works: there is no sticky question of how to pay authors or reviewers, as the publishers are already not paying them. And unlike 'mere' works of entertainment, liberal access to scientific work impacts the well-being of all mankind. Our continued survival may even depend on it.

If I can remove even one dollar of ill-gained income from a poisonous industry which acts to suppress scientific and historic understanding, then whatever personal cost I suffer will be justified--it will be one less dollar spent in the war against knowledge. One less dollar spent lobbying for laws that make downloading too many scientific papers a crime.

I had considered releasing this collection anonymously, but others pointed out that the obviously overzealous prosecutors of Aaron Swartz would probably accuse him of it and add it to their growing list of ridiculous charges. This didn't sit well with my conscience, and I generally believe that anything worth doing is worth attaching your name to.

I'm interested in hearing about any enjoyable discoveries or even useful applications which come of this archive.

- ----
Greg Maxwell - July 20th 2011
gmaxwell@gmail.com Bitcoin: 14csFEJHk3SYbkBmajyJ3ktpsd2TmwDEBb

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Whenever the village embraces a new “serious” idea to help Liberals and Democrats you can be sure that it will end up with roots in the manure generated by the concerned trolling of some denizen of Wingnutopia.

You can see how this is done with a reality-free bit of drivel from a typing monkey on Tucker Carlson’s parasitic Daily Caller. In his “How the Tea Party can win the left”, James Poulos posits that hate of government can and should be the glue that binds liberals and the Tea Party together. He further argues that only by embracing the Glibertarian unicorn can both the left and right be saved from the horror that is Barack Obama. In his regurgitation of very tired wingnut talking points, Poulas claims that Liberals are angrier at Obama than they were at LBJ back in the day—of course, no evidence or facts are offered to support this regularly debunked claim that massive swarms of Liberals hate Obama. Poulos also explains that Liberals are hopeless and will be forced to vote for Obama because they have no place to go. Then he offers up the Tea Party as the last great progressive hope in the Nation. It is complete nonsense that only a Firebagger could love. And yet, it is nonsense that Conor Friedersdorf finds “provocative”.

Now, I know that taking a whack at the Conor’s dribble is usually the sport of others, but his fluffing of Daily Caller wankery is a classic example of how even the stupidest ideas move up the media chain to become “serious”.

Conor takes Poulos’ call for Liberals to embrace the Tea Party as the core proof of his Case for a Primary Challenge Against Obama and the Daily Caller Teabagger nonsense becomes the foundation of Connor’s advice for Liberals and America. To build his “case”, he invents several fantasies to serve as pillars of sand for his argument. According to Conor, the Tea Party is a real Grass Roots movement and it was around during the Bush years. Not only that, they were very angry at W as far back as 2003. Evidence of any of this is—of course—absent. Conor then repeats regularly debunked assertions like the majority of Liberals are angry at Obama or that President-Obama-has-broken-every-important-promise-he-ever-made. To “support” these claims, Conor links to himself and even more of his selective hodgepodge of out-of-context statements, myths, deceptive rhetoric, “some say” non-quotations, spin, wingnut frames and other nonsense to obscure the weakness of his thinking. Actual proof of any “fact” he offers up is missing, misleading or incomplete. This is not a surprise as the point of his work is to move wingnut memes/frames into the mainstream and it is a task he does with gusto.

Conor takes a poorly thought out bit of wingnut drivel—the notion that the Tea Party and glibertarian magical thinking are the only hope for Liberals and America—and turns it into call for the Left to embrace a Primary challenge for President Obama. I suspect that this Obama has betrayed the Left and must face a Primary challenge meme will get more such fluff pieces from Conor and other “serious” people in the coming weeks. Regardless of who tries to fluff this latest helpful suggestion from Wingnutopia, you can be certain that they—like Conor—will use wingnut sources, talking points, memes and frames to make their “case” that defeating Obama should be a Liberal priority. It is known.

It might be possible that there is a progressive case for a primary challenger to President Obama, but I’ve yet to hear anybody make that case without using wingnut nonsense. As for Conor’s notion that a Teabagger/Progressive alliance through glibertarianism will save the Nation… well, that just burns with stupidity. It is an argument that can’t be made without a full embrace of wingnut crazy.

That said, there are issues where progressive should pressure President Obama to change a priority, a policy and/or take an action. This is especially true with policies controlled by the White House like many issues surrounding civil liberties and the fall out of the GWOT. There are other issues from Education to Immigration to financial oversight where a fully progressive critique of the Obama Administration could be made and have been made. When considering events, policies and actions from the frame of this or that single issue a strong case to pressure the Obama Administration is a good idea. There are folks do this regularly and they have proven that it is possible to make very strong critiques without an embrace of wingnut bile, spin, frames and talking points. It can be done, but not if you’re lazy.

Our political reality is diverse and multi-dimensional. The endless issues with their unique binary frames are the collection of data points making up our political landscape. It is my holistic view of issues and this political landscape that makes me a liberal. I know that no person, party,opportunity or period of time will be perfect or even good on some (or many) of these issues. And yet, when it comes to social justice and progress rigid dedication to a single issue frame over a holistic approach has always failed. Always. Problems are interlocking and so are solutions. I tend to get off the bus when I’m told that there is only one way to understand all events and/or that any single issue frame is the most important and/or the only way to view things. Embracing any single issue as your only filter for political action is a well worn path to madness, violence and destruction. As I read and hear the arguments of the single issue folks from left to right, I find that it is an inability to view politics beyond the frame of their favorite issue that produces the anger and hate driving their rhetoric and politics. And to justify their narrower and narrower view of reality through the lens of their chosen issue, their thinking and rhetoric tends to get lazier and lazier as they embrace anything from any source to make their case. This inflexibility of thought has led many keyboard progressives to willingly serve as the left flank of wingnutopia and parrot wingnut attacks on Obama and other Democrats as some odd example of a “progressive” virtue.

Over at GOS one frequently recommended single issue keyboard progressive decided that a racist Free Republic video from 2008 would help convince progressives that Obama must get a Primary challenger. And over at FDL this type of thing continues 24/7. Guppies like Conor will pick up these memes and move them up the media food chain until every outlet has done their version of the Obama has betrayed the Left and must face a Primary challenge meme. And all of these efforts from the small-time GOS poster to Halprin’s Gang of 500 Villagers will share an inability to write the story without an embrace of the hate, bile, lies and frames from the wingnuts.

Judging from their prose, a clear hatred of Obama seems to be inspiring many of these progressive keyboard commandos to jump into bed with the worst ideas and people of Wingnutopia. Alliances have already been made and some have been working on the dream of a Firebagger/Teabagger mashup for a long time. And the result of it all is a pile of bile rooted in magical thinking.

And yet, wankers like Conor Friedersdorf will do their part to present this weak tea as “serious” and “provocative” and “important”. They will use it to promote Democrats in Disarray memes and efforts to suppress turnout in 2012 just as it was done in 2010. I suppose that within a few more days many other Beltway villagers will pick up Conor’s twin lament that the only hope for Liberals is to find a primary challenger for President Obama and to embrace the glibertarian gibberish of the AstroTurf Tea Party movement. And many fools of the so-called progressive blog-o-sphere will only be too happy to help.

This is how the game of politics is played in America and why we cannot have nice things.

Cheers

But today all kids are told: To succeed, you must go to college.

Hillary Clinton tells students: "Graduates from four-year colleges earn nearly twice as much as high school graduates, an estimated $1 million more."

We hear that from people who run colleges. And it's true. But it leaves out some important facts

That's why I say: For many people, college is a scam.

"People that go to college are different kind of people ... (more) disciplined ... smarter. They did better in high school."

They would have made more money even if they never went to college.

What puzzles is me is why the market doesn't punish colleges that don't serve their customers well.

But that’s not the way things work in Liberaland, a cargo cult that firmly believes in the totemic value of parchment — preferably, parchment with an Ivy League patrimony. That’s why self-made people like Sarah Palin, with her crummy journalism degree from Dogtooth State Teachers College, drive them crazy: Their only definition of “smart” has to do with school and GPA.

By their lights, someone like Andrew Lloyd Webber, who dropped out of Oxford after one term in order to become a composer, is a complete failure.

In a savvy sashay of marketing brilliance, Twitter was able to attract more journalists' eyeballs to its platform than anything short of an overwhelming disaster could garner. And it was able to do so in a matter of minutes with absolutely no news at all.

While much of tech media trumpeted the introduction of Twitter for Newsrooms (#TfN) as if the guidelines for journalists presented some new technology or service, Twitter and its partners made off like bandits with the sustained and focused attention of the most influential group of people on the planet: journalists and bloggers.

Sponsor

For the ability to stop journalists in their tracks and make them stare at the product as one, I tip my hat. Well done, Twitter, well done.

Despite the free publicity ride that is bound to boost the brand and attract app developers in droves, the TfN guidelines are indeed helpful to journalists.

Search options are covered in detail -- from basic to advanced -- for journalists new to using search to parse tweets. Directions are also provided in how to negate search rate limits so that a journalist or team of researchers can search endlessly. Ditching the rate limits, I must say, is a welcomed change.

The publish guidelines are instructional and helpful in everything from embedding Tweets and publishing them on air to displaying tweets on the news media's respective websites. Wow! More free promotion for Twitter! Somebody hand those boys an advertising rate card. After all, as we wrote about last week,Twitter is busy selling promoted Tweets.

The Extra section of the guidelines offers links to support and safety teams, Twitter's many internal blogs, foreign language tools, and an intro to its ecosystem partners. The Media Ecosystem Directory link at the bottom of that page is a bit misleading as it leads to a directory of partners who can help media do various tasks and analytics, but are not media-specific tools per se. The buttons at the top of the directory claim to allow a search of partners in the ecosystem by subject or task but appear to be dead. The journalist is left with a simple list of 20 partners all briefly described and with a link to the partner's website. In other words, it's a list of partners, a billboard, and a far cry from an app store. However, I wouldn't be surprised if an app store is exactly what Twitter is aiming for and what better way to attract a critical mass of developers in a big, fat hurry than to attract so many journalists first?

No doubt editors, community developers, new media specialists, and social media gurus in newsrooms worldwide quickly thrust the Twitter for Newsrooms URL in the email inboxes of every journalist in the office or in the field. Equally without doubt, journalists with no to massive amounts of experience with Twitter searched its pages with keen interest. Each and every one of them was searching for secrets and shortcuts they hoped would ease the pressures associated with news production and news promotion at Internet speeds.

Many would make the guidelines themselves news and never catch the slightest whiff of Twitter's sublime "news media needs us" play.

It's not that journalists are the befuddled baboons that many inside and outside of media like to portray them to be, it's that journalists have yet to discover social media's limits in news production and therefore are slow to question whether there are any limits.

Case in point: the plethora of references to Twitter as the newsroom in tech and media reporting. That claim is pure baloney.

Twitter is not a newsroom. It's more a smoky bar, shadowy garage, corporate breakroom, and boisterous mob gathering -- places reporters traditionally went to tease out news leads -- all rolled into one. Twitter is a place where people talk, often while inebriated or delusional (believing a public forum is somehow private). It's a gathering of intelligent and average people with smart thoughts and dumb thoughts. It's peppered with marketing people with PR ploys and social media pros with marketing plays. It's a collection of friends and enemies, strangers and acquaintances, rebels and tea partiers and traditionally scandalous politicians. In other words, it's a reflection of the real world with a bounty of tidbit pickin's and tantalizing leads, but it isn't a newsroom.

Twitter is just one of many places journalists go to meet sources and troll for news.

But there's not one damn tweet found in a random Twitter search that any reporter worth his or her salt is going to trust. Not even if that Tweet came from his own mama's smartphone. The info in the tweet, as well as the identity of the Tweeter, will be checked and rechecked. That's what journalists do. They don't trust, they ask questions.

Yet most journalists trusted every word of the Twitter for Newsrooms guidelines and immediately took the words to heart. Almost to a man, journalists wrapped themselves tightly in Twitter's "how-to" as though it were a lifeline in a rough sea. And perhaps it is.

Well done, Twitter. Well done.

Shared by jstuart
Can't think of a sillier, more bland conception of 'innovation' than this.

THERE is a lot of fuss in Britain about plans to create a new private university:

A new private university in London staffed by some of the world's most famous academics is to offer degrees in the humanities, economics and law from 2012 at a cost of £18,000 a year, double the normal rate.

The Oxbridge-style university college aims to educate a new British elite with compulsory teaching in science literacy, critical thinking, ethics and professional skills on top of degree subjects taught in one-to-one tutorials.

Its first master will be the philosopher AC Grayling, and top teachers from Harvard, Princeton, Oxford and Cambridge will include Richard Dawkins teaching evolutionary biology and science literacy, Niall Ferguson teaching economics and economic history and Steven Pinker teaching philosophy and psychology.

New College of the Humanities, based in Bloomsbury, is being backed by private funding and will aim to make a profit. It will offer some scholarships, with assisted places being granted to one in five of the first 200 students.

This is arguably the biggest innovation in British higher education since the launch of The Open University in the early 1970s, and as such has immediately been denounced by stick-in-the-muds. The critics argue that the famous names won't be leaving their existing jobs, so most of the teaching will be done by hired helps; that the fees will exclude the underprivileged; and that the new university will be nothing more than a playground for Oxbridge rejects. But the university will add to the total stock of university places (and a proportion of its slots will be heavily subsidised). The famous names will be in charge of recruiting staff and dictating the flavour of the institition. Even if it is true that they are essentially lending their names to the new school, rather than teaching twelve hours a day, that is often what they do in elite American universities as well.

I have two rather different worries about the new school: (1) that it is a variant of a high-cost American model of university education that is running into trouble in its home country; and (2) that it is not scalable, so it will only have a marginal impact on British higher education. I suspect that there is much more mileage in the previous innovation, The Open University, which delivered education through a combination of distance learning and short, intense spells on borrowed campuses. Universities should begin to regard themselves as platforms, which can be plugged into from anywhere, rather than as ivory towers, public or private. And academic literature needs to be put online, rather than hidden away in high-priced journals and books. The academic-publishing industry is a rent-seeking racket, which extracts rents from both the government and would-be scholars, and which slows down the dissemination of new knowledge in the process. The sooner it is subjected to a bit of creative destruction, the better.

But my attitude toward JavaScript has changed completely in the past few years. JavaScript has "grown up." I'm sure there are many JavaScript developers who would take issue with that judgement, and argue that JavaScript has been a capable, mature, and under-appreciated language all along. They may be right, though you can write any program in any complete programming language, including awful things like BASIC. What makes a language useful is some combination of the language's expressiveness and the libraries and tools available. JavaScript clearly passed the expressiveness barrier a long time ago, even if the ceremony required for creating objects is distasteful. But recently, we've seen some extremely important game-changers: jQuery, JSON, Node.js, and HTML5. JavaScript may have been a perfectly adequate language in the past, but these changes (and a few others that I'll point out) have made JavaScript a language that is essential for every developer to know. If there's one language you need to learn in the next year, it's JavaScript.

The potential of Node.js

Node.js has the potential to revolutionize web development. It is a framework for building high performance web applications: applications that can respond very quickly and efficiently to a high volume of incoming requests. Although Node is a low-level framework that can build any kind of application, it's particularly useful for building web servers. Its asynchronous event-driven paradigm is arguably more effective for web applications than the more familiar request-response paradigm.

Two things make Node particularly valuable, though. First, Google has started a revolution in JavaScript performance. This isn't to say that at any given moment they have the best JavaScript engine available (though that's a fairly good bet). But what's certain is that Google took JavaScript performance seriously when other players didn't, and in doing so drove Mozilla, Apple, Microsoft, Opera, and other vendors into a performance race. The result is that the JavaScript engines we have now are much, much faster than they were a few years ago, and are capable of running a serious web application.

Second, Node has benefitted from an enormous pool of JavaScript developers. Whatever language they use for the back end "server," few developers don't use JavaScript in the client. It may only be for bits and pieces of glue; it may be for sophisticated Ajaxian effects; it may even be to write full-fledged applications, such as Twitter or Gmail. But whatever the case, the number of JavaScript developers is huge. And authors like Doug Crockford have been pushing the idea that JavaScript, despite many warts, can and should be treated like a serious programming language.

At this point, writing Node applications is relatively crude: it's a low-level library, about as close to the metal as you can get with JavaScript. It is not a full-fledged web framework, like Rails or Django. But that is certain to change. Lightweight frameworks like Express are starting to appear, and I have no doubt that we'll see more full-featured frameworks built on top of Node.

I've mentioned the appearance of sophisticated web applications that
run almost entirely in the browser. Those are hardly new — how old is
Gmail? How old is Google Maps? But writing the client side of an
application in JavaScript and running it on the browser is
increasingly attractive. HTML5 takes this trend a step further.

HTML5 is about JavaScript

I've said many times that HTML5 isn't really about HTML; it's about JavaScript. What changes in HTML itself? There are a few new tags, which in and of themselves aren't that difficult to understand. The power of HTML5 lies in what these tags allow you to create in JavaScript. A drawing canvas isn't very useful without the code that lies behind it and creates an animation, a game, or a visualization tool. As soon as browsers supporting Canvas appeared, we saw hundreds of implementations of Asteroids as developers started playing with the new features. Some were crude, some were surprisingly rich. That work is entirely in JavaScript.

HTML5, then, isn't really a major advance in angle-bracket-based tagging; it's about enabling JavaScript to do more powerful things. The WebGL library (which is still bleeding edge) allows real-time 3D graphics inside an HTML5 canvas. HTML5 geolocation allows you to write location-aware applications in the browser (a basic capability for mobile phones). Persistent storage and offline functionality have enabled developers to write full-fledged applications, with the same functionality you'd expect on a desktop, that run in the browser. There have also been experimental libraries for adding multitouch capabilities. These are all really features of JavaScript. HTML5 just provides a structure for giving them meaning.

Furthermore, there have been significant advances in browser libraries that don't require HTML5. JavaScript has long been the workhorse for implementing dynamic features in HTML. But there have always been two problems: browser incompatibilities, and the awkwardness of working directly with the DOM. The JQuery library has elegantly solved both problems, and is the basis for modern client-side browser development. But it's not just JQuery. The Protovis and D3 libraries allow you to create complex interactive visualizations that run directly in the browser — for the first time, making the browser an important tool for data exploration.

JavaScript and databases, compilers and languages

The use of JavaScript has also exploded in databases. Three of the leading databases in the NoSQL movement, CouchDB, MongoDB, and Riak, are "document databases." Rather than storing tables, they store documents. And for all three databases, a "document" means a JSON document, not a Word or Excel file. (Riak also supports XML documents and plain text.) While JSON has been widely adopted as a data exchange format (there are libraries for parsing JSON in almost all modern programming languages), it's important to realize that JSON is really just a format for serializing JavaScript objects. So while you can use JSON with any language, it's a natural fit for JavaScript development; and the fact that JSON has become a cross-language standard, rather than some Python, Ruby, or Java serialization format, says a lot about JavaScript's readiness to take a role on a larger stage. But even more than that, all three of these databases have facilities for executing JavaScript as part of queries. In the coming years, I would not be the least surprised to see JavaScript and JSON embedded within other kinds of applications.

We've only seen the beginning of JavaScript development. At this year's JSConf, javascript-to-javascript compilers were a big theme, and seen as a major trend for the future. Google has been the hotbed of compiled JavaScript. GWT is the first framework I'm aware of that used compiled JavaScript (compiled from Java). I have never taken GWT that seriously; a framework that exists just to save Java developers from having to use JavaScript just doesn't seem worthwhile. However, GWT does some amazing JavaScript optimization in the process. Closure is a JavaScript-to-JavaScript compiler that does the same kinds of optimization. Traceur, which first appeared a few weeks ago, was designed to allow experimentation with the language itself: it compiles JavaScript with experimental language features into JavaScript that can run on any modern platform.

Finally, we're starting to see some languages compile to JavaScript, much as we're seeing JVM languages in the Java space. Some of the more interesting languages, such as Coffeescript and Kaffeine, are similar to JavaScript in style, but focus on smoothing out JavaScript's rough edges. Do you find the JavaScript object model interesting, but awkward, and are you put off by the ritual you need to go through to create a working object from a prototype? You may find Coffeescript a significant improvement. In addition to smoothing out the object model, Coffeescript adds features like list comprehensions, and does away with most of the curly braces. As in Python, indentation serves to delimit blocks.

Web servers, rich web client libraries, HTML5, databases, even JavaScript-based languages: I see JavaScript everywhere. If you have avoided JavaScript, this is the year to learn it. There's no excuse — and if you don't, you risk being left behind.

Related:

• JavaScript: The Good Parts (Book)


• What is Node.js and what does it do? (Video)


• Tom Hughes-Croucher on Node (Video)


• Node: Up and Running (Book)


• New directions in web architecture. Again.

We closed our month of mobile with expert advice on why mobility is central to Enterprise CMS and how mobile apps will transform business in the future. Meanwhile, unrelated nuggets from our generous professionals addressed the looming face of three-dot-oh. 

I like to keep things simple and prefer to use content management system (CMS) as the term used to describe the information system we use to manage all content. However, I will acknowledge that it is sometimes good to categorize a CMS by purpose. This differentiation of a CMS by purpose has given us subcategories of the CMS which include the enterprise content management system (ECM), the web content management system (WCM), and the social publishing system (social business system). In a press release this week, Alfresco introduced me to social content management, another new marketing term to describe a CMS with the purpose of managing social media.

Alfresco is tying to evolve the social content management system higher than the social publshing system within the information system food chain. If you ask them, a social content management system would do something much more than a social publishing system. I'm not convinced of that, but they do make a good arguement.

Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is purpose-built for managing content in a social world. Enterprises are increasingly deploying social business systems like Jive, Salesforce.com’s Chatter, Lotus Quickr, Drupal and Liferay, among others, in the hopes of making employees more effective. According to Alfresco, these social business systems are creating volumes of unmanaged content if left un-checked. Using open standards like CMIS & JSR-168, Alfresco Enterprise 3.4 is a content platform with a goal to co-exist with social business systems to help manage and retain the content created by social business systems.

The marketing team over at Alfresco are pure geniuses. In this case Alfresco is using the social business systems as another catch phrase to describe what I know to be social publishing systems. Alfresco on the other hand identifies their product as as a social content management system that co-exist to manage the social content created by all these other systems. A CMS that is needed to clean up after the mess created by all these other social publishing systems.  I'm not sure I buy the argument that there is much difference between a social content management system and a social publishing system. But I will bite that social content management has a much better ring to it than social publishing system or any other term we use to describe the management of social content.

From now on when I describe a CMS for the purpose of managing social content, I'll likely use the term social content management instead of social publishing system. It seems to be a more fitting term for describing the direction the CMS is currently evolving toward. So hats off to Alfresco for pushing this term in their marketing. In a CMS world where ECM and WCM can exist, I see no reason why there can't be a SCM. On face value, there is nothing wrong with this logic. Except, of course, I like to keep things simple and prefer to simply call all these information systems a content management system. However, who am I to argue with progress.

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At the very least checking that your site looks and works ok in a mobile browser is becoming part of the job for most web professionals. Tweaking things a bit for mobile by using Media Queries or even making a separate, “optimised”, site is also more common now than a year or two ago.

The problem is checking your work in mobile browsers. It seems like “everybody” has an iPhone and/or an iPad these days (except me), so Safari for iOS is pretty easy for most developers to check in. But what about other mobile browsers?

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Posted in Browsers, Mobile Web.