Books

Arrogant, Daring & Right

Found a new voice of wisdom (to call it vox populi would probably be wrong) today. Alf Rehn writes an excellent rant about the research article in the context of the UK RAE (Research Assessment Exercise) system:

Now, what I find absolutely horrendous and directly unethical is that all this denigrates the scholarly book, the research monograph. The way I was raised into academia, this was what you meant by research, and now a bunch of foreign bureaucrats with language problems are saying that this does not count? Well, fuck you and the horse you rode in on. Writing a journal article, to me, is mainly an exercise in typing. There are rote formulas to get a journal article done (well known such, looking at the shite that gets published), and it frankly bores me a lot of the time. A book, however, is another matter. A book takes time to craft, and the sheer length thereof forces one to work in an altogether different manner. I was taught by my Doktorvater the following: If you haven’t written a serious monograph, you shouldn’t be made a PhD. If you haven’t written two, you’re not a serious scholar. “—And never let one who hasn’t written three serious books become a professor! It cheapens the title.” And damn good advice it was too.

It’s provocative, it’s daring, maybe it could be a bit reactionary, it’s definitely bold, ballsy and forward. It also happens to be correct. Go Alf!

(via Imaginary Magnitude)

Posted on by mklang

Handbook of Applied Cryptography

The Handbook of Applied Cryptography by Alfred J. Menezes, Paul C. van Oorschot and Scott A. Vanstone is available free online for download. This is an important book – in my discussions with online activists I try to explain the importance of them doing all they can to protect themselves. This is certainly a step in the right direction.

  • Chapter 1 – Overview of Cryptography ps pdf
  • Chapter 2 – Mathematics Background ps pdf
  • Chapter 3 – Number-Theoretic Reference Problems ps pdf
  • Chapter 4 – Public-Key Parameters ps pdf
  • Chapter 5 – Pseudorandom Bits and Sequences ps pdf
  • Chapter 6 – Stream Ciphers ps pdf
  • Chapter 7 – Block Ciphers ps pdf
  • Chapter 8 – Public-Key Encryption ps pdf
  • Chapter 9 – Hash Functions and Data Integrity ps pdf
  • Chapter 10 – Identification and Entity Authentication ps pdf
  • Chapter 11 – Digital Signatures ps pdf
  • Chapter 12 – Key Establishment Protocols ps pdf
  • Chapter 13 – Key Management Techniques ps pdf
  • Chapter 14 – Efficient Implementation ps pdf
  • Chapter 15 – Patents and Standards ps pdf
  • Appendix – Bibliography of Papers from Selected Cryptographic Forums ps pdf
  • References ps pdf
  • Index ps pdf

The book is not under a particularly generous license but it is available. Make sure you read the copyright notice.

Posted on by mklang

Doris Lessing on the power of books

Last night Doris Lessing was awarded the Nobel Prize for literature. Read her Nobel lecture online, it was delivered on Friday 7 December at the Swedish Academy by Nicholas Pearson, Doris Lessing’s publisher in the UK. In her speech she points to the importance of books and reading for the creation of literature and she also takes a swipe at the banality of the Internet compared with the depth of literature. But the part I enjoyed the best came towards the end…

The storyteller is deep inside everyone of us. The story-maker is always with us. Let us suppose our world is attacked by war, by the horrors that we all of us easily imagine. Let us suppose floods wash through our cities, the seas rise … but the storyteller will be there, for it is our imaginations which shape us, keep us, create us – for good and for ill. It is our stories, the storyteller, that will recreate us, when we are torn, hurt, even destroyed. It is the storyteller, the dream-maker, the myth-maker, that is our phoenix, what we are at our best, when we are our most creative.

Posted on by mklang

Utility of Force

The University of Bath has a podcast with General Sir Rupert Smith. Sir Rupert is the author of the insightful book The Utility of Force: The art of war in the modern world (amazon). His main thesis is that war is changing from the tradition industrial war into a war amongst the people.

The essential difference is that the use of force is no longer used to win a battle but to create a condition  in which the strategic result is achieved in other means. The strategic object is to alter the opponents intentions as opposed to win over him or to remove him.

Posted on by mklang

Book, bug crusher & hat or why ebooks fail

Ok, so I have already written about my lack of enthusiasm in the newest ebook reader. That’s putting it mildly. But when I read Steven Poole’s 14 point list about what the ebook  of the future must be able to do in order to beat the book I laughed out loud – so since it is Friday I thought that we all needed a laugh at Amazon’s expense…

So the ebook of the future:

1 It will have an inexhaustible source of energy and never need recharging.

2 It will have resolution as good as print. (No, Amazon, really as good as print.)

3 It will be able to survive coffee and wine spills, days of intense sunlight, dropping in the ocean, light charring, and falling completely into two or more pieces, while still remaining perfectly readable afterwards.

4 It will allow me to scribble notes and/or doodles in the margins, with my choice of mechanical pencil or fine Muji fibre-tip pen (black). (Note, typing in the margins with a crappy thumb keyboard is not an acceptable alternative.)

5 It will allow me to riffle through it and thus get a quick, intuitive look at the book’s argumentative or narrative structure.

6 It will allow me to tear off the corner of a page to write down my phone number (or someone else’s).

7 It will display to other people in coffee shops and on public transport the title of what I am reading, so as to advertise my erudition or quirky sense of humour.

8 It will be physically handsome, not drop-dead fugly. (Note to Amazon: for pity’s sake, next time, head-hunt people from Sony or Apple.)

9 Indeed, the books on it will still be designed, by typesetters and graphic artists, so as to feed our aesthetic pleasure.

10 I will still be able to lend or give books to friends, or swap books in and out of the honour library of much-read novels in a Mediterranean seaside bar.

11 I will be able to use the ebook as a reliable flat surface for rolling cigarettes or other leaf-based refreshments, without worrying about debris shorting the motherboard.

12 When I receive the updated edition of the Oxford Companion to Philosophy, I will be able to press the previous edition into service as a stand for the left-hand music speaker on my desk.

13 The ebook will function, morever, as both bug-crusher and discretionary hat. Placed on my face, it will make a soft roof against the sun on the beach.

14 I will still be able to hurl a fatuous tome such as Jeff Gomez’s Print Is Dead across the room without thereby destroying my ability to read any other books.

Posted on by mklang

Trigge Happy Free

Steven Poole’s book Trigger Happy is a pioneering work in the history and aesthetics of computer games. As an experiment (triggered by Amazon Kindle & DRM discussions) Steven is giving away his book for free, with no DRM attached under a Creative Commons BY-NC-ND license.

Trigger Happy is a book about the aesthetics of videogames — what they share with cinema, the history of painting, or literature; and what makes them different, in terms of form, psychology and semiotics. It was first published in 2000; this is the revised edition with the Afterword written in 2004 2001. (Update: as requested in comments, the 2004 Afterword can now be read here.)

The book will be available online for “a limited period only” and therefore his (and my) advice is to grab it while its hot!

Hopefully we shall also be able to find out more about the results of the experiment. Whether or not it increases or decreases sales, generates interest or has any interesting unexpected consequences. Stay tuned to Steven’s blog.

Posted on by mklang

Vanity Publishing, not only a vanity

Victor Keegan discusses self-publishing in an article on Guardian Online. His main thesis is that “If the invention of the printing press liberated books from the monopoly of the monasteries in the 15th century, then self-publishing is freeing us today from the power of publishers.”

The term vanity publishing is misleading. Today there are several viable options for either bypassing publishers or collaborating with them on completely new terms. These create opportunities for small obscure titles to be printed and sold in addition to creating original and personalised gifts.

Everything depends upon the level of service you desire. Handling everything from content, layout and marketing creates very cheap books but these books may be difficult for general readers to find but will provide a viable and important option for alternative publishing.

Posted on by mklang

Addicted to dead trees

Once again the demise of the book is being announced as immanent. The main problem is that the book has been around for too long, it contains no lights, soundcards or batteries and therefore must be a thing of the past. With the coming launch of the new ebook reader the Amazon Kindle battle lines have been drawn around the future of the book.

For me it doesn’t matter how fancy schmancy the details are – and Kindle has some impressive details. The dead tree with ink stains still remains my clear favorite. For many reasons, some pure nostalgia, but as Steven Levy writes in Newsweek online: The book

…is a more reliable storage device than a hard disk drive, and it sports a killer user interface. (No instruction manual or “For Dummies” guide needed.) And, it is instant-on and requires no batteries. Many people think it is so perfect an invention that it can’t be improved upon, and react with indignation at any implication to the contrary.

the flexibility and durability of the book is one of it’s most endearing factors. Also thus far most technical solutions have been lacking in some form. Not to mention the fact that the book seldom requires cables and is a very difficult product to break (relatively speaking).

Posted on by mklang

Bad Internet, Good Internet

Andres over at Technollama is reading “The Cult of the Amateur”, by Andrew Keen, the Internet critic. I have been avoiding commenting on this book and on the author. Lots of other have been there already. Actually I will probably eventually get around to reading the book. Anyway, Andres notes that Keen has a bone to pick with the web and provides this Keen quotation which I could help but comment upon:

“When I look at today’s Internet, I mostly see cultural and ethical chaos. I see the eruption of rampant intellectual property theft, extreme pornography, sexual promiscuity, plagiarism, gambling, contempt for order, intellectual inanity, crime, a culture of anonymity, hatred toward authority, incessant spam, and a trash heap of user-generated-content. I see a chaotic humans arrangement with few, if any, formal social pacts.”

Well of course. I agree totally with Keen. Thats the beauty of the Internet – you get what you look for. Keen went looking for garbage and appears shocked when he found it. Big deal. I can do the same in any city in the world from Bombay to Boston from Seoul to Stockholm. What he then does is attempts to explain the world from the empirical garbage he picks up. This is not a reflection of the Internet but only an expression of Keen’s Internet related interests.

Posted on by mklang

Scientific Impact and Scientific Books

Maybe it’s the approach of the first winter snows or maybe it’s just the most recent PhD cartoon (probably a combination of factors). But I began to think about my scientific impact.

phd111207s.gif

Jorge Cham PhD Comics

It’s been a year since I defended my thesis so I guess a little thought on the topic may not be entirely out of place. Since 1999 I have written over 40 academic texts (journal and conference articles, book chapters, reports and more). Besides my PhD I have also acted as editor to a book, taught an endless amount of classes and given countless guest lectures.

Despite all this “scientific” or “academic” production my impact on the scientific community is negligible. Ok so I realize that my field is not high profile. But I have the sneaking suspicion that the impact of my work is not what it should be or could be.

If we choose to set aside arguments that my impact is low because I am unreadable – since they provide no help – then there may be another reason.

The focus of scientific/academic work has become the journal article. We are not measured in research but in publication. The problem with this system is that it creates a desire (intentional or unintentional) to manipulate the system. What we have seen over the last thirty years is the explosion of the number of journals and the publication hungry academic is always in the market for yet another place to deliver an article to.

The purpose of the journal was to provide an avenue where scientific work could be published quickly and in a focused manner. Well while some journals have longer time-to-print than books this is no longer an advantage. And the dance between authors, editors and reviewers has become so stylized that it resembles a kabuki theater (complex, ornate & beautiful but incomprehensible).

So where am I going with this? Not very far. The process of academic work entails journal publication – we are locked into this system. But to achieve true recognition and impact, in my field, I think your either need to be a cartoonist – or to write books.

Posted on by mklang