May 24, 2009 :: staff :: No Comment Yet
Publishing models determine which texts are made available to a wide audience, and by what means. New media, like this social network, are providing new opportunities, but the crossover between print and digital media will provide bold new opportunities for making the best new ideas available to the people who can do the most with them.
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May 6, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
Amazon.com’s Kindle and Kindle 2 devices have revolutionized the market for electronic books. Wireless devices allowing download of new books in just minutes, for reading on a high-resolution e-paper screen, which reads much like real paper, they have made the experience of hosting and paging through e-books much more user-friendly. Now, Amazon has introduced the Amazon Kindle DX, which will ship this summer, with a screen 2.5 times larger, to make it possible to read magazines or PDF documents as designed.
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April 16, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 4 Comments
Electronic medical records (EMR), like health insurance, benefit from being spread over the widest pool possible. A system that aggregates and cross-references data from hundreds of millions of patients can find statistical evidence far more efficiently than today’s statistical modeling for health problems and solution improvement.
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March 3, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: 5 Comments
The Amazon Kindle is a nice device, and it handles its job well, but it is just a very clumsy start to what will be a technological convergence few in mainstream media (and publishing) are anticipating, though it may not be far off. The page-perfect, for lack of a better term, e-reading device will make portable electronic reading easier and more comfortable than ever, packing huge amounts of data, as well as wireless downloading and even browsing capability, into an ultrathin tablet touchscreen.
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February 13, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Brevity is the soul of wit. True enough. But, information that brings us to a more enlightened approach to understanding the world often needs to “play out” in a substantial interaction of ideas, a “testing” of logical thought-processes as relating to concept and interpretation, an essay. There has long been a presumption that online writing must be brief, due to the “above the fold” bias of attention-span deficient online readers, but I would argue that the medium is actually ideally suited to something very different.
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January 6, 2009 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
Each information transaction, sometimes as exemplary, sometimes as single element added to a sweeping aggregate of historical sway, is a precedent, which can motivate, influence or redirect the push of future happenstance. And, we must take note, every transaction involving matter or energy contains information, traces of a history of its coming into being, and generates a “footprint”, a trace of its appearance and its transition into something beyond the transactional moment.
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July 18, 2008 :: admin :: 4 Comments
Ladies and gentlemen: There are times in the history of our nation when our very way of life depends upon dispelling illusions and awakening to the challenge of a present danger. In such moments, we are called upon to move quickly and boldly to shake off complacency, throw aside old habits and rise, clear-eyed and alert, to the necessity of big changes. Those who, for whatever reason, refuse to do their part must either be persuaded to join the effort or asked to step aside. This is such a moment.
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July 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
When Henry David Thoreau published Walden, a narrative of his experiences and meditations near Walden Pond, in the densely wooded hill country of Massachusetts, it was a breakthrough treatise on the role of human industry and individual will in terms of the natural environment. Thoreau infused an explanation of day to day existence with a transcendental consciousness of the value of the natural world around him, and explored the manner in which human civilization is both habitually divorced from and irrefutably dependent upon that environment.
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May 21, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 2 Comments
Albert Einstein has earned over the course of the last 103 years the reputation as the most revolutionary and visionary scientist in modern history, perhaps of all time. His discoveries fundamentally changed what science could claim as knowledge about the physical laws of the universe, and the revelations that stem from his work have affected —in some way or another— virtually every aspect of life in the human world. In the spirit of his ability to go beyond the known scientific tradition, we offer his complete original treatise on Special Relativity…
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May 18, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: One Comment
The complete notebooks of Leonardo da Vinci, as collected by the Project Gutenberg, are now available through Scribd iPaper, a unique new document format that allows for scrolling through book-length documents right on a static web page, without downloading. The service is a great complement to any project aimed at expanding knowledge, the free flow of information, and access to the great ideas of the past, present, and the future in progress.
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May 17, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: 3 Comments
We are living in a time of unprecedented global integration, where economies, security interests, legal systems, and languages and systems of learning have been dispersed and interwoven across the globe. There are obvious positive effects to this integration, along with certain overarching and seemingly intractable problems that cause real worry for even the most hopeful or studied observers. Languages and cultures intermingle, yet seek to remain distinct and continuous, and individuals seek to enhance their own possibilities (requiring freedom of information, and freedom of movement), while seeking to prevent the corrosion of already structured social fabrics.
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May 8, 2008 :: J.E. Robertson :: No Comment Yet
The open-source movement has been a revolutionary phenomenon of startling proportions. It has changed the way software works for us in our daily experience, by bringing costs down far enough that now anyone with an internet connection can launch a web-based publication in literally seconds. Its efficiency, its appeal, its human element, make it a standard to watch as other sectors of economics and public life evolve to integrate the latest communications technologies, and aim for optimum end-user freedom and flexibility.
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May 2, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
As the world acclimates to digital technology, and its usefulness in everyday life becomes increasingly relevant to how we achieve a higher quality of life, higher quality of education, and more efficient means of deploying solutions to complex problems, the standard for securing data and ideas may shift from closed environments behind firewalls to a new open standard, where the commons guarantees provenance, and thereby, rights, when warranted.
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April 23, 2008 :: admin :: No Comment Yet
The digital age has brought the most potent test for the security of intellectual property, and thanks to the open source movement, has also shown that intellectual property is not always most productive or most valuable when kept under wraps. Increasing numbers of large firms and institutions are opting not only to use open source software —to avoid licensing fees—, but are also building their own products and services with open source code, meaning they cannot keep the contents safely secret.
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