- gutvol-d - lists.pglaf.org

Wall Street Journal Online Interview with Michael Hart
by Jon Noring 11 Dec '05

11 Dec '05

[Not sure if this was mentioned on gutvol-d. If so, forgive the duplication.] The Wall Street Journal Online has an interview with Michael Hart: http://online.wsj.com/public/article/SB113415403113218620-U_OqLOmApoaSvNpy5… Jon Noring

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Re: [gutvol-d] broadband penetration
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 11 Dec '05

11 Dec '05

In a message dated 12/8/2005 3:38:17 P.M. Mountain Standard Time, jeroen.mailinglist(a)bohol.ph writes: > > Sory, I must have missed something, couldn't you use computers just from > the light from the monitors? > Ever tried to find the on switch in pitch dark? I love my wife's village in the middle of nowhere, as there is no light whatsoever to veil the stars. Are we talking about running on replaceable batteries, or about solar power recharging the batteries? Does anybody have any idea whether solar-powered computer or ebook batteries are on the horizon? I also must have missed something. Is someone saying that the light from the monitor could somehow power the entire computer? That sounds like perpetual motion machines to me, and so far nobody has had any luck inventing one. Anne

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Re: [gutvol-d] Donations to Project Gutenberg
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 11 Dec '05

11 Dec '05

In a message dated 12/7/2005 12:26:46 A.M. Mountain Standard Time, sly(a)victoria.tc.ca writes: > Also, the more prominent placing of the DONATE link *has* resulted > in noticably more donations via PayPal. Most donations are smallish > ($5-10), but sprinkled with $50 and $100 donations. This really helps > to support our DVD/CD giveaways, book-buying, and other programs. That is very good news. Thanks for sharing. That's what we're seeing here--small checks (one woman sent $4 in cash) sprinkled with larger donations--one a few weeks ago for $1000. We're also receiving letters containing both a donation and a request that we not sell their name to mailing lists or send the donors endless donation requests. We assure people that we do not do this. It might be a very good idea to make that promise again in the write-up, because we might be missing donations from people who would donate if they knew they would not be put in anybody's sucker list. We do keep careful records, because "how much from which state" is required in some states and occasionally by the IRS, but we definitely do not share names and addresses with ANYBODY. Anne

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Re: site design additions (Re: [gutvol-d] Free Beer !)
by Gutenberg9443＠aol.com 11 Dec '05

11 Dec '05

In a message dated 12/8/2005 10:24:38 P.M. Mountain Standard Time, JBuck814366460(a)aol.com writes: Marcello Perathoner wrote on 07/12/2005, 10:21 AM: > What about a small writeup for the donations page that tells people what > we do with their money? That's not a bad idea, Marcello. People do like to know where their donations go to, and for what purpose. It's great that more people are donating, even if they only donate a small amount. T has mentioned this several times. He's asleep right now (Nyquil), so I've emailed him this in case he didn't spot it himself. He can probably turn it out tmrw. Anne

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re: [gutvol-d] broadband penetration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 09 Dec '05

09 Dec '05

joey said: > According to a study [1] published by the Pew Internet & American Life Project, > "[f]ully 48 million adult Americans have broadband connections at home", which > they peg at 39% of adult Internet users. These numbers are for March 1, 2004. thanks joey. i'd guess that in the last 21 months, even that number has increased significantly, to the point where it might now be 50%... and it's been quite a ride for those of us who were baptized online at 300 baud... -bowerbird

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re: [gutvol-d] broadband penetration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 09 Dec '05

09 Dec '05

walter said: > Last time I checked there weren't any > available through Gutenberg at the > pretty basic level they are needed. open-source textbooks are an idea whose time has come. there are now various entities gearing up to pursue them. i'd suggest that you take a good look around cyberspace. even if they aren't here yet -- and i don't think they are -- they will be soon, perhaps very soon. best of luck to you! -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] broadband penetration
by Joshua Hutchinson 09 Dec '05

09 Dec '05

----- Original Message ----- From: "Walter van Holst" <walter.van.holst(a)xs4all.nl> > Oh, and by the way, she is in need of affordable science and math textbooks > for teaching purposes. Having Shakespeare is all nice and dandy, but > literature is not the foremost education priority over there. Last time I > checked there weren't any available through Gutenberg at the pretty basic > level they are needed. > The problem is that these textbooks need to be fairly recent. Science has changed too much since 1922 for any science textbook to be worth the effort to use in a classroom. Honestly, I'd point your sister to Wikibooks (http://en.wikibooks.org/wiki/Main_Page) I don't know that any of the textbooks there would cover what she's looking for, but it has a better chance than anything we'd be able to do in PG. Josh

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developments over at distributed proofreaders
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 09 Dec '05

09 Dec '05

i'm seeing some encouraging developments over at d.p., the most notable being an admission that the system has not always used the time and energy of volunteers wisely. i also see that the false veneer of "we're all one happy family" has a few cracks in it now, which i take as a very healthy sign, because it always struck me scarily as a little bit too cult-like. but there's enough truth in it that volunteers will emerge from the currently choppy seas with commitment intact, i believe... even though there are several suggestions that i could make, vis a vis volunteer energy, the big issue these days seems to be the number of rounds, and how those rounds are construed... rather than go over and post on the forums there, because hey, you guys don't really want _me_ over there right now, do you?, i'll just post a couple quick thoughts here instead... the p1.5 experiment and garweyne's diff tool are interesting, but um, you're really complicating the process unnecessarily. and there is a very simple solution. i've suggested it before, and another person has suggested a variant of it just recently... (sorry, can't remember exactly who, i think it was jhellingman.) garweyne's research on the diff tool in part seeks to determine whether a change that is made was a "significant" one. he has made some remarkable progress on capturing that information, really remarkable, but rock bottom, it's still a difficult judgment. more to the point, it's an unnecessary one. as long as _changes_ are still being made to a page, any changes, even "insignificant" ones, the page should be considered "in flux". it is only when a number of people (that number unspecified here) have looked at a page and determined "there's nothing here that needs to be changed" that we can really consider that page "done". (even then, it might still have errors. but that'll always be the case.) so, the question does _not_ boil down to "what changes were made, and are they significant?", a question that will be difficult to answer, it boils down to "were any changes made to the page by this person?". and _that_ question is dirt-simple to answer. if the text is the same, then no changes were made. no complex analysis is required at all. as long as changes are being made, not done. no changes, done. sure, sometimes you might temporarily cycle through a loop where one person does something, the next undoes it, the next re-does it, the next undoes it, but sooner or later, that pattern will be broken. (and you could jump out of it sooner, too, just by checking to see if the current version of the page matches the one that is _two_ back.) the beauty of this system is its simplicity. no complex analyses and no "rating" of the proofers (since that seems to be damping morale). just a simple method, with a foundation that is extremely intuitive... this has direct relevance to the "backlog" problems d.p. is facing too. that's because, if you keep sending the page back through p1 until two (let us say) proofers both view it without making any changes, and only _then_ is it sent to p2 (which is considered the "thin line". because responsibility is charged for any errors that survive _it_), then the _quantity_ of output from p1 will be curtailed somewhat, but the _quality_ of that p1 output will be considerably improved, to a point where you actually have great confidence in its accuracy. with less quantity, and better quality, pages will breeze through p2. for some pages -- easy ones, where the first proofer caught all -- that would mean only 3 p1 proofers would have to view the page. for difficult pages, it might take 6 or 10 proofers before it's solid. but so what? if that's what it takes, that's what it takes, and you'll feel when it finally gets out that you did exactly how much it took to get it _right_, no more, no less. and that's what you really want. all pages are not equally difficult; you need a variable methodology. any fixed-number-of-rounds system will result in too few rounds for the difficult pages, and too many rounds for the simple pages... and as far as i can tell from comments made, this type of system would _not_ be hard to implement in the actual code of the site... there are all kinds of things you could add to this that would make it even more useful -- like automated diff feedback as learning guide for proofers whenever their page was subjected to a further change, or ranking of proofers based on the percentage of pages they did that were touched/untouched by later proofers -- but since the important point here is _simplicity_, i'll not bother to discuss those in any detail. try it! you will quickly see that it works, and works well! anyway, as always, that's my advice, take it or leave it, as you see fit. but i get the impression that y'all really want to fix things now, and that you are getting bogged in the difficulty of a certain approach, when -- from my removed perspective -- i can see that a way that is much simpler will actually _better_ solve your various problems... best of luck. thanks for proofing! -bowerbird

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Re: [gutvol-d] broadband penetration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Dec '05

08 Dec '05

michael said: > Think of what? this thread, right here, right now. :+) -bowerbird p.s. i expected you to say "people never _did_ listen to me."

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re: [gutvol-d] broadband penetration
by Bowerbird＠aol.com 08 Dec '05

08 Dec '05

well, if you get the feeling that people aren't listening to you as closely as they once did, maybe you'll think of this. otherwise, suit yourself... meanwhile, i will be busy trying to figure out how to quickly and easily convert 10,000 scanned books into zen markup language text, so everyone has lemonade... -bowerbird

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