*michael parekh on IT*

ON A COOL KINDLE FEATURE

ONE SMALL STEP

I've been an avid user and fan of Amazon's Kindle book reader since the original launch, having now bought and read hundreds of books on the Kindle and the excellent Kindle for iPhone (free) software App. 
One of the big differences between reading a book on the Kindle (either generation) and the iPhone App has been the ability to highlight the content of the book and write notes in the margin as it were (can't do all that on the Kindle App...yet).
But once the notes are in the Kindle, attached to a specific book, they're kind of trapped in there.  The opportunity around making this stuff available on the web is of course a no-brainer.  Today Amazon took a baby step in this regard, as this TechCrunch piece explains:

"Amazon opened up a new feature on the Kindle: the ability to read your notes and highlights on the Web. Readers have always been able to make notes and highlight text on the Kindle itself. Now those annotations appear on your account at http://kindle.amazon.com. Once you sign in, you can see all your notes.

While this opens up all sorts of possibilities, Amazon is taking a very conservative approach. You can’t share your notes with others. You can’t even edit them in your browser.

All you can do is read them. That makes the feature little more than a Web archive of your notes and highlighted text snippets. It is a convenient feature, but why not enable sharing?

Why can’t I share an excerpt with my friends on Facebook or Twitter (with the beginning of a quote and a short link)?

Amazon needs to connect the Kindle to the rest of the Web.  Hopefully, this is the first step in that direction."

Couldn't agree more.  Hope Amazon's listening.

ON GOD MAKING A COMEBACK

BIGGER THAN EVER

"God is Back" has got to be one of the best titles ever for a new book.  The review of the book by the New York Times promises more between the covers as well:

"Not all that long ago, the great minds of Europe predicted a future with little or no religion. Science would make us highly skeptical of miracles. Psychiatry would direct all of our awe and wonder inward. Changing roles for women would weaken the patriarchal structure that props up clerics. Whatever script for modernity one followed, it had God playing a bit role.

As we all know, it didn’t happen that way. Modernity arrived and improvised new starring roles for God. The Americans led the way by becoming both “the quintessentially modern country” and a very devout one, John Micklethwait and Adrian Wooldridge write in their new book, “God Is Back,” and most of the world has followed that model.

In rich countries and poorer ones, democratic and undemocratic, primarily Islamic and primarily Christian — everywhere, basically, except Europe — devotion to God has remained surprisingly robust.

“The very things that were supposed to destroy religion — democracy and markets, technology and reason — are combining to make it stronger,” write Mickle­thwait, editor in chief of The Economist, and Wooldridge, the magazine’s Washington bureau chief, who together have written previous books about globalization and American conservatism, two ­similarly sweeping topics."

Here's the bit that surprised me from the review:

"While fundamentalists of all kinds get most of the attention, the authors zero in on another phenomenon: the growth and global spread of the American megachurch. With no state-sanctioned religion, American churches began to operate like multinational corporations; pastors became “pastorpreneurs,” endlessly branding and expanding, treating the flock like customers and seeding franchises all over the world. The surge of religion was “driven by the same forces driving the success of market capitalism: competition and choice.”

Definitely a side of religious expansion that's not been in the mainstream view.  Just added "God is Back" to my Kindle reading list.

ON A SOLAR ADVENTURE

GOOD FUN IN THE SUN

Like millions of kids before me, I was enthralled by Jules Vernes' Around the World in Eighty Days.  So of course this modern-day version of sorts caught my eye.  Wired.com explains in this piece titled "Around the World in a Solar Boat":

"A seafaring band of scientists, engineers and yachtsmen with an obsession for Jules Verne and clean energy are building what they call the largest solar boat in the world, a $13 million catamaran they hope will take them around the world next year.

Construction is well underway on the 98-foot-long vessel, which will feature 5,059 square feet of photovoltaic cells. The project is being funded by Rivendell Holding AG, a Swiss firm that invests in renewable energy, simply to prove it can be done and the shipping industry can reduce its dependence on fossil fuel.

The team plans to circumnavigate the globe at the equator in 120 days at an average speed of 10 knots. Should they succeed, Planet Solar will set a maritime milestone. Solar electric pleasure boats have been tooling around lakes for awhile now, solar electric ferries are increasingly common and a solar electric catamaran called Sun 21 crossed the Atlantic in 29 days. But so far no one's made it around the world in a solar electric boat..."

"Solar boats are a viable form of transportation for the future,"  Delia Collardi, a spokeswoman for the project, told Wired.com. "Our society is too dependent on fossil fuels, which are in limited supply and which are causing measurable negative effects on the earth's atmosphere. It's now time to demonstrate the potential that renewable energies have to offer in the area of mobility."

The piece goes on to add:

"Collardi says the vessel will have enough power to carry skipper Raphael Domjan, the 37-year-old founder of Planet Solar, and navigator Gerard d'Aboville. Both men are accomplished sailors and adventurers who, according to a press release, "want to be the Phileas Fogg" of the 21st Century.

Fogg, of course, was the adventurous main character Around the World in Eighty Days, Jules Verne's novel about a man who travels by train, balloon, steamer and even elephants to circle the globe in record time and win a bet."

The project goes on to add a grand historical gesture:

"Verne's great-grandson Jean Verne has signed on to the project, which organizers say represents "humanity's hope for a better future."

The route for the trip is still being finalized, but it's supposed to come through New York.  Can't wait.

ON THE BEARINGS OF A BOOK

BEYOND THE COVER

Here's something I ran into today that should be of interest to any fan of books, either reading them, and/or buying them to fill up one's bookshelves.  Author Peter Sacks wrote this piece in the Huffington Post a while ago**:

"I received an interesting invitation the other day. It was from Marshal Zeringue. Marshal runs a wonderful website called the Campaign for the American Reader, and he has a blog that he calls the Page 99 Test, which is based on this Ford Madox Ford quote: "Open the book to page ninety-nine and read, and the quality of the whole will be revealed to you." Marshal's challenge, if I cared to accept it, was to respond to the Ford quote regarding page 99 of my new book, which he had just learned about in a magazine.

At first, when Marshal asked me to do this, I read page 99 and thought, "Oops, it's not very sexy." There were a lot of other pages of interesting writing and storytelling that I would have picked to reveal my book's whole. But I discovered that Ford Madox Ford was right in a sense. I looked more closely at 99, and there it was, the genetic code of my book. In fact, I could pick any page at random, and I would be able to find the same strands of DNA that held my book together."

The blog he refers to is interesting to peruse, offering at the very least a quick way to get impression of a book mostly by the author applying the page 99 test to his/her book.

It's not unlike how most of us decide on a book in a book-shop, or how in recent years, we've been able to see sample pages of books digitally on Amazon for a while with it's "Search Inside" feature.

Incidentally, a minor problem comes up trying to apply this test to books on e-readers like the Amazon Kindle.  Since the Kindle's software translates all the "pages" in a book into a location code, so that readers can change the size of the type up or down at will, there are no hard and fast page numbers, and thus no easy way for the reader of a book in one Kindle to cite a "page" number to another.

For that matter, there's no easy way to cite a reference from a Kindle book, a topic that will surely become more important for researchers over time, as this discussion in the Amazon forums indicates*.

But picking on one specific page to judge a book by more than it's cover, is an interesting idea.

P.S. *Suppose a possible solution for this might come with the way to highlight any page in a Kindle book, and have that translated into a page number in the hardware and/or the paperback version of that book, at the touch of a button, all done in software.  The action would be similar to getting definitions for a word in a Kindle book today, but would just give the page numbers in a "real" book, to use in citations.

** Image source.

ON THE EFFICACY OF AFRICA AID

AID ADDICTION

One of the best things I've read in recent days is this piece by author and economist Dambisa Moyo in the Wall Street Journal this weekend, titled "Why Foreign Aid is hurting Africa".  Whether one agrees or disagrees with the premise of her piece (and her book, Dead Aid), she makes some arresting points:

"Giving alms to Africa remains one of the biggest ideas of our time -- millions march for it, governments are judged by it, celebrities proselytize the need for it. Calls for more aid to Africa are growing louder, with advocates pushing for doubling the roughly $50 billion of international assistance that already goes to Africa each year.

Yet evidence overwhelmingly demonstrates that aid to Africa has made the poor poorer, and the growth slower.

The insidious aid culture has left African countries more debt-laden, more inflation-prone, more vulnerable to the vagaries of the currency markets and more unattractive to higher-quality investment. It's increased the risk of civil conflict and unrest (the fact that over 60% of sub-Saharan Africa's population is under the age of 24 with few economic prospects is a cause for worry). Aid is an unmitigated political, economic and humanitarian disaster."

She doesn't stop there:

"Over the past 60 years at least $1 trillion of development-related aid has been transferred from rich countries to Africa. Yet real per-capita income today is lower than it was in the 1970s, and more than 50% of the population -- over 350 million people -- live on less than a dollar a day, a figure that has nearly doubled in two decades.

Even after the very aggressive debt-relief campaigns in the 1990s, African countries still pay close to $20 billion in debt repayments per annum, a stark reminder that aid is not free. In order to keep the system going, debt is repaid at the expense of African education and health care. Well-meaning calls to cancel debt mean little when the cancellation is met with the fresh infusion of aid, and the vicious cycle starts up once again."

The whole piece is worth reading, again, regardless of whether one agrees with her views on this or not.  I just ordered her book, and look forward to adding it to my reading list.

ON A MUST-HAVE iPHONE APP

THRILLING READ

The single best third-party App on the iPhone (or the iPod Touch) showed up today, at least in the view of this avowed book geek.  As a long-time fan and user of Amazon's Kindle (and now Kindle 2), and now an eager user of the new free Kindle iPhone app from Amazon, I heartily recommend people try this new App out, whether they own a Kindle or not. 
Walter Mossberg describes all of this well in detail in this review today:

"As I predicted in my review of Amazon.com’s Kindle 2 e-book reader last week, the giant bookseller has moved quickly to make the 240,000 book Kindle catalog available on other devices. On Tuesday night, the first Kindle software reader appeared, and it’s a free iPhone app.
Called Kindle for iPhone, the app replicates the basic book-reading functions of the hardware Kindle device, and can be thought of as a complement to that device, which has more features. However, you don’t have to own a hardware Kindle to use this app. You can now choose instead to use your iPhone or iPod Touch as the reader for books from Kindle’s catalog."

He goes on to add:

"...it is a solid basic app for reading books, and is especially valuable if you already own a hardware Kindle, as I do. In my brief tests, the iPhone app synchronized rapidly and perfectly with my purchased library of Kindle books on Amazon’s servers, and allowed me to retrieve a previously purchased e-book, without paying again, just as my hardware Kindle does.
It also synchronized to the furthest page I had read in that book on my Kindle. After reading for awhile on the iPhone, I performed that process in reverse, and my Kindle took me to the same spot where I had quit reading on the iPhone."

CNET has another review of the software worth reading with some additional details.

I'd add that Kindle books, at least for now, are generally less expensive to buy than their physical counterparts, partly due to Amazon subsidizing many titles.  Most of them are available for $9.99, with many paperbacks available for far less.
In addition, since the iPhone is generally with me at all times, it's very convenient for a quick access to any book in my library I'd like to peruse at will.
With free samples of many books available for download on to an iPhone/iTouch, I'd recommend giving the free Kindle App a try.

ON GOOD AND BAD FINANCE

PERSPECTIVE

The Economist makes an excellent point before starting out on a review of a new book on global finance:

"FINANCIAL history has been sliced in two: there is BC and AD—Before Crisis and After Disaster."

An excellent point indeed to keep in mind, especially as we contemplate the world past November of 2008.  The Economist goes on with it's review*:

"Any financial book conceived in far-off BC times would seem unlikely to be relevant in the AD era. But Martin Wolf’s “Fixing Global Finance” is an exception.
If Mr Wolf were to rewrite his book—a new edition is promised at some point—he would no doubt shift his emphasis. But his first run at the subject, which grew out of a series of lectures delivered in early 2006 and comes out in Britain later this month after being published in America last September, holds up remarkably well despite all that has happened.

Mr Wolf, chief economics commentator for the Financial Times, begins with a truth that is easy to forget: sophisticated finance does bring benefits. Finance allows the creation of vast enterprises out of the combined capital, supplied at modest cost, of millions of people.

It permits upstarts to launch companies, challenging the power of incumbents. It allows people to smooth their spending over a lifetime. It facilitates risk sharing and insurance. Empirical studies confirm that these advantages are real. Countries that had large financial sectors in 1960 grew faster over the next three decades than those that did not.

A doubling in the size of private credit in a developing country has been shown to boost the growth rate by an average of 2 percentage points a year. Developing countries that open their stock markets to foreign investors reap big benefits: output per worker grows by 2.3 percentage points faster than it would have done otherwise.

So financial sophistication is a boon. But it is also dangerous."

We now all to well how dangerous, and that story has not yet fully unfolded unfortunately.  But it is precisely at this time A.D. (after disaster), we need to keep in mind the benefits of "sophisticated finance".  May we see those benefits again some day, with of course the necessary precautions and oversights.

* Image source.

ON THE DISCOVERER OF ANTIMATTER

PURE GENIUS

This review of a new biography of theoretical physicist Paul Dirac by the Economist caught my attention, primarily by this line:

"He was quite probably the best British theoretical physicist since Isaac Newton."

And it gets better from there*:

"GENIUS is said to have two forms. There are ordinary geniuses, whose achievements one can imagine others might have emulated, so long as they worked extremely hard and had a dollop of luck.

Then there are extraordinary geniuses (Mark Kac, a mathematician, called them “magicians”) whose insights are so astonishing and run so counter to received wisdom that it is hard to imagine anyone else devising them.

Einstein was one such genius. Paul Dirac, whose equations predicted the existence of antimatter and who died in 1984, was another."

Paul Dirac won the Physics Nobel prize in 1933 for discovering antimatter. 

Which of course gave us the warp drive in Star Trek in 1966.  This biography goes on my reading list for February.

* Image source.

ON SEARCHING FOR XANADU

ABOUT TIME
As a fan of Ted Nelson for decades, I'm glad to see he's self-publishing a book that claims some credit where a lot is due.  The New York Times explains:

"BEFORE the personal computer, and before the Web, there was Theodor Holm Nelson, who almost half a century ago understood how computers would transform the printed page.

Mr. Nelson anticipated and inspired the World Wide Web, and he coined the term “hypertext,” which embodies the idea of linking a web of objects including text, audio and video.

In his self-published new book, “Geeks Bearing Gifts: How the Computer World Got This Way” (available on lulu.com), Mr. Nelson, 71, takes stock of the computing world. The look back by this forward-thinking man is not without its bitterness. The Web, after all, can be seen as a bastardization of his original notion that hyperlinks should point both forward and backward.

Tim Berners-Lee, the inventor of the World Wide Web, organized all the world’s content through a one-way mechanism of uniform source locators, or URLs. Lost in the process was Mr. Nelson’s two-way link concept that simultaneously pointed to the content in any two connected documents, protecting, he has argued in vain, the original intellectual lineage of any object."

Like many computer geeks, if I've been excited about online services in the eighties and the emerging world of the commercial internet in the early nineties, it was due to my exposure to Ted's ideas, especially around his Project Xanadu, which built ferociously on the ideas put forward by Vannevar Bush in the 1940s around the Memex.  As this Wikipedia entry explains:

"In Bush's 1945 paper, he describes a memex as an electromechanical device that an individual could use to read a large self-contained research library, and add or follow associative trails of links and notes created by that individual, or recorded by other researchers.

The technology used would have been a combination of electromechanical controls and microfilm cameras and readers, all integrated into a large desk. Most of the microfilm library would have been contained within the desk, but the user could add or remove microfilm reels at will.

The vision of the memex predates, but is credited as the inspiration for the first practical hypertext systems of the 1960s."

Whether Ted Nelson gets sufficient credit for his contributions to what we now know as the internet, it's good to see a contribution to the record from one of the original folks who was there before the beginning.  I look forward to my copy of "Geeks Bearing Gifts".

ON A WHOLE NEW TYPE OF LAPTOP

DOUBLING UP

Listphobia has brought together 10 futuristic concept laptop designs in one place.  The one that most catches my attention is the first one, a design for a dual-screen laptop of sorts, by Canova.  Here's how they describe it:

Canova Dual Screen Laptop possesses two screens, a multi sensitive touch screen and is very easy to use.

Not only can it be used to handle your daily computing tasks but it also lets you read articles on your laptop in the old-school newspaper fashion.

Who knows, something like this, hopefully a bit thinner, and presumably at affordable mainstream prices, with inexpensive and ubiquitous wireless broadband, might even give the newspaper, book, magazine, and TV businesses a fighting chance in the future.