Wednesday, 28 March 2012
Harry Potter breaks e-book lockdown
New York: When the Harry Potter books finally went on sale in electronic form on Tuesday, it was as if Harry himself had cast the "Alohomora" spell on them - the one that unlocks doors.
In a break with industry practices, the books aren't locked down by encryption, which means consumers can move them between devices and read them anywhere they like.
If "Pottermore," J.K. Rowling's new Web store, proves a success, it could provide a model for other authors and publishers and undermine the clout of Amazon.com Inc., which dominates e-book sales.
"I think it's a very large crack in a dam that's going to collapse in the next nine to twelve months," says Matteo Berlucchi, the CEO of an independent British-based online bookstore, aNobii.
E-books from major publishers are sold in encrypted form today. The text of a book is scrambled so that only authorized devices and software can read it. For instance, a book bought from Amazon can be read only on the company's Kindle e-readers and on its Kindle applications for smartphones, tablets and PCs. It can't be read on Barnes & Noble's Nook e-readers.
Conversely, a book for the Nook can't be read on a Kindle. A book purchased from Apple Inc. can only be read on iPhones, iPod touches and iPads.
Publishers insist on encryption in the form of "Digital Rights Management," or DRM because they believe it stops piracy. It also helps e-book retailers like Amazon defend their business models, keeping non-Amazon books off Kindle e-readers.
But when Rowling fans buy a book from Pottermore, they can download it in a variety of formats, including one that is not protected by DRM. They can be read by a wide variety of applications and devices.
These books can be purchased once and then passed around to friends or shared with children. Wider sharing is dissuaded by visible and invisible "watermarks" inserted by Pottermore before the download, which identify the buyer.
Charles Redmayne, CEO of Pottermore, says that "Harry Potter" books are probably the most pirated in the world already, even though - or rather because- there have been no legal electronic versions until now. Fans have scanned or even re-typed the printed books to make them available in electronic form.
"We believe that people should have the right, once they've bought the book, to read it on any device that they chose to," says Redmayne.
Of course, there's another reason Pottermore is going DRM-free. It wants to "own" the relationship with the customers - the Potter fans - rather than have them go to other retailers. And the only way to get onto all reading devices without dealing with the other retailers is to sell books without DRM.
"It's a very valuable thing to us to own that customer relationship. It gives us a tremendous opportunity to create new products that we can sell to those consumers around the Harry Potter brand," Redmayne says.
Shatzkin thinks other authors are unlikely to copy Rowling and set up their own stores -Rowling is "The Beatles" of the literary world and an industry unto herself. But he believes publishers who can aggregate the works of many authors on their sites are going to figure out that they can bypass Amazon as long as they're willing to give up DRM.
"If you don't have DRM, it opens up strategies that aren't available to you if you insist on DRM," says publishing consultant Michael Shatzkin. "The question is: is the fear of piracy greater than the fear of Amazon?"
Amazon is thought to account for about 60 per cent of the e-books sold in the U.S. Barnes & Noble Inc. is the second-largest seller with around 25 per cent.
Berlucchi likens the state of the e-book industry to the one in the music industry before 2008. Music publishers insisted on protecting legally sold songs with DRM, but all they did was allow Apple to corner the market, he says, since tracks bought from other stores wouldn't work on iPods.
"It took five years from the launch of the iPod for the music industry to realize that they weren't achieving anything with DRM," Berlucchi says.
Early in 2008, music publishers allowed Amazon to launch a music store with DRM-free songs. Apple's iTunes store went completely DRM-free the next year.
Andi Sporkin, a spokeswoman for the Association of American Publishers, says DRM "has value," enabling things like library lending of e-books (without DRM, there's no way to "return" an e-book). Going the route of the music industry and going DRM-free hasn't really been discussed in the publishing industry yet, she says.
In the case of Pottermore, Amazon is collaborating, sending shoppers from its site to Pottermore if they search for "Harry Potter" books. Shatzkin believes this is because Amazon, faced with getting nothing from sales of Harry Potter books, likely decided it should be in on the game to at least get referral fees.
Amazon didn't comment on its reasons for sending shoppers to Pottermore, nor would it confirm it gets referral fees.
Water Park of Celine Dion to the house, airport Travolta: outlandish mansions of the famous
They say money can not buy good taste or common sense. But when you're filthy rich, you can ignore all kinds of sayings and warnings and to indulge his whims.Among them, build our dream house, with all the nonsense and horteradas you want.We are rich, we have to answer to anyone! Even before the mother.
Here are some examples of celebrities who have embodied in their homes some ideas as far-fetched. Since people installing a bar in each room, like BritneySpears, the possibility to park your private plane in the front door, like JohnTravolta. Not to mention the obsession with Celine Dion to create their private water parks threaten the sustainability of the region .. "Do not even let us have fun,"think it, but that theirs is a crime. Literally, the fines will accrue.
The house-Airport John Travolta
There are two classes of users of private jets: the losers who go to the airport to catch the plane and that the aircraft parked on the porch of the house. JohnTravolta is the latter. The star of "Saturday Night Fever 'in Florida built a houseinspired by the airports in the early 50's. Travolva is a pilot and owner of not onebut four aircraft, a Gulfstream II, a Dakota DC3, a Lockheed Constellation andBoeing 707 - each with a corresponding porch on his home-airport Jumbolair, a "community aeronautics "in Florida (USA).
The famous "never-never land" Jackson was a place to continue to appeal to the child in all of us (some more than others). It had everything a private amusement park: Ferris wheels, carousels, bumper cars, roller coasters and even a private zooShare with your friends. His fate is still in the air: the Jackson children want to buy,and the state, making it a theme park that anyone can visit
We love the (ex)-home of Christina Aguilera: It is difficult to find a home for famous or not, decorated with taste worse. On the one hand, there are different roomsabsolutely crammed with junk. Furthermore, we have things like putting a kitchen in the master bedroom or arcade next to the fireplace. All rooms are overloaded withjunk and filled with bright colors and tacky. ¿Reflection of the music artist?
The home of one of the world's leading billionaires have expected: 126 rooms, a huge dance floor ... And also something unexpected: Three anti-atomic shelters.Given that it has two guest houses, it is clear he wanted to ensure the safety of theirguests to a hypothetical pre-emptive strike from the USSR. Or have one anywherenear the plot.
IBM team on a new High Performance Computing Center.
Rutgers and IBM team on a new High Performance Computing Center.
Soon to be armed with a new IBMBlue Gene/P high performance computing center, Rutgers University will crunch big data from the life sciences to finance, and even do some climate modeling.
Partnering for analytics
RDI2 will be one of only eight of the nation’s 62 scientific computation centers with an industrial partnership programs.
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The advisory committee for the center – Rutgers Discovery Informatics Institute (RDI2) – is already looking into providing higher fidelity climate modeling for the state.
Another example of the center’s potential use is the molecular modeling and data analysis of the influenza virus for better vaccine development. With the H5N1 avian flu and H1N1 swine flu co-circulating, health officials worldwide are concerned of a potential pandemic. RDI2 will provide scientists from Rutgers University, pharmaceutical companies in New Jersey, and IBM a way to model the influenza evolution pathways; predict the antigen-antibody bindings; and analyze the big data from both virus’ sequence databases and their structural conformations, from atomic level modeling.
High(est) Performance Computing in New Jersey
The Blue Gene system will deliver tens of Teraflops of compute power when completed. Rutgers expects RDI2 will house one of the most powerful academic supercomputers available for commercial use when fully built out – providing HPC resources via the cloud to Rutgers faculty members and regional organizations in need of better ways to analyze extremely large data sets.
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Tuesday, 27 March 2012
Emotions direct our attention
Carretié, professor of neuroscience at the Autonomous University of Madrid, offers a graphic example of how emotions may influence our perception "in the field when we confuse a branch with a snake our reaction is to jump. It is more important than the accuracy rate: fast and wrong better avoid potential danger it right too late. " The excitement of the example is fear: the most primitive part of our brain identifies the serpent in milliseconds (or branch that you think) as a threat and, in milliseconds, the nervous system sends the order to escape.
The individual can quickly detect a hazard is more likely to survive and transmit to their offspring, for example, peripheral vision, where vision is more blurred and fuzzy. As a result, makes evolutionary sense that a primary emotion-in this case, the fear, but love or hunger-conditional perception.
In essence, there are two types of care-as-Carretié: endogenous (when, for example, read a book) and exogenous, which is conditioned by an external stimulus. Potentially distracting stimuli are countless but our brain has a "relevance detector" which detects whether the external stimulus deserves attention or not (we can ignore an ant but surely react if it is a spider). If they exceed a certain "threshold of attention" is "blind to the distractions," says Carretié. Therefore, we read the book, focused on endogenous attention.
Sunday, 25 March 2012
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