Weekly_November_02.txt *The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter For Wednesday, November 02, 2005 PT1* *******eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since July 4, 1971******** PT1A Editor's comments appear in [brackets]. Newsletter editors needed! Please email hart@pobox.com or gbnewby@pglaf.org Anyone who would care to get advance editions: please email hart@pobox.com * HOT REQUESTS AND ANNOUNCEMENTS We Have Added Another Language Kamilaroi, the 47th language at http://www.gutenberg.org [Kamilaroi is a language of New South Wales, Australia.] For those interested in more languages, there are 104 at http://www.gutenberg.cc STATISTICAL CHANGES Due to various changes in our statistical reporting and coverage, the accuracy of the weekly count of the number of eBooks will not be as redundantly checked by a human count, and we will rely more on the automated system. ***If you notice any inconsistencies, please send email to: hart AT pglaf DOT org * WANTED!
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* Wanted: People who are involved in conversations on Slashdot, Salon, etc. * TABLE OF CONTENTS [Search for "*eBook" or "*Intro". . .to jump to that section, etc.] *eBook Milestones *Introduction *Hot Requests, New Sites and Announcements *Continuing Requests and Announcements *Progress Report *Distributed Proofreaders Collection Report *Project Gutenberg Consortia Center Report *Permanent Requests For Assistance: *Donation Information *Access To The Project Gutenberg Collections *Mirror Site Information *Instant Access To Our Latest eBooks *Have We Given Away A Trillion Yet? *Flashback *Weekly eBook update: This is now in PT2 of the Weekly Newsletter Also collected in the Monthly Newsletter Corrections in separate section 33 New Public Domain eBooks Under US Copyright *Headline News from Edupage, etc. *Information About the Project Gutenberg Mailing Lists *** *eBook Milestones* ***500+ eBooks Averaged Per Year Since July 4, 1971*** 17,438 eBooks As Of Today!!! [Includes Australian eBooks] We Are ~87% of the Way to 20,000!!! 14,376 New eBooks Since The Start Of 2001 That's 250+ eBooks per Month for ~56 Months We Have Produced 2482 eBooks in 2005!!! 2,542 to go to 20,000!!! 7,613 from Distributed Proofreaders Since October, 2000 [Details in PT1B] We Averaged ~339 eBooks Per Month In 2004 We Are Averaging ~250 books Per Month This Year [This change is due to the opening of Project Gutenberg sites other than the original one at www.gutenberg.org] This Site Is Averaging ~58 eBooks Per Week This Year 33 This Week It took ~32 years, from 1971 to 2003 to do our 1st 10,000 eBooks It took ~32 months, from 2002 to 2005 for our last 10,000 eBooks It took ~10 years from 1993 to 2003 to grow from 100 eBooks to 10,100 It took ~2.00 years from Oct. 2003 to Oct. 2005 from 10,000 to 17,400 * ***Introduction [The Newsletter is now being sent in two sections, so you can directly go to the portions you find most interesting: 1. Founder's Comments, News, Notes & Queries, and 2. Weekly eBook Update Listing. Note bene that PT1 is now being sent as PT1A and PT1B. [Since we are between Newsletter editors, these 2 parts may undergo a few changes while we are finding a new Newsletter editor. Email us: hart@pobox.com and gbnewby@pglaf.org if you would like to volunteer.] This is Michael Hart's "Founder's Comments" section of the Newsletter *Headline News from Edupage [PG Editor's Comments In Brackets] CRIB NOTES FIND THEIR WAY TO IPODS The latest offering for the vastly popular iPod are crib notes for books commonly included in college and university curricula. A company called SparkNotes, which competes with market leader CliffsNotes, provides the content, which is sold by a firm called iPREPpress. Students who pay $4.95 each for a set of notes have access to the usual set of study aids--plot summaries, major themes and motifs, study questions, biographical sketches of the characters. The iPod notes, however, also include several minutes of audio content for each title. Kurt Goszyk, the founder of iPREPpress, said that students can listen to music stored on their iPods while reading the SparkNotes for an assigned text. "You can listen to your favorite rap song in the background," he said, "as you're reading about 'The Great Gatsby.'" The notes will work with most versions of the iPod, including the very small iPod Nano, raising concerns about the possibility students will see a new opportunity to cheat. Chronicle of Higher Education, 27 October 2005 http://chronicle.com/free/2005/10/2005102702t.htm ANTI-SPYWARE COALITION RELEASES GUIDELINES The Anti-Spyware Coalition has released a definition of what constitutes spyware, as well as guidelines for dealing with spyware. The group's definition says that spyware is an application installed without sufficient consent of the user and that interferes with the user's ability to exert control over such things as security, privacy and personal information, and system resources. Critics had cautioned that a definition of spyware would allow developers of unwanted software to simply sidestep the characteristics included in the definition, thereby legitimizing their applications. The Anti-Spyware Coalition said it understands that concern and drafted a definition with enough latitude to avoid that problem. The group also identified good practices for how organizations should identify and prevent spyware. Included in the resources is guidance on how to rate the severity of particular spyware applications. The group will accept public comments on the newly released documents until November 27 and will release final versions in early 2006. CNET, 27 October 2005 http://news.com.com/2100-7348_3-5918113.html ICANN AND VERISIGN SETTLE SITE FINDER DISPUTE VeriSign and the Internet Corporation for Assigned Names and Numbers (ICANN) have reached a tentative settlement in their dispute over VeriSign's Site Finder service. The service, which VeriSign introduced two years ago, directs users who mistype URLs to suggested target pages rather than providing error messages. ICANN objected, saying that the service interfered with some functionality of the Internet and--because VeriSign was paid by some of the sites it directed users to--was an abuse of VeriSign's power. The service was suspended, and each organization filed suit against the other. Under the proposed settlement, which must still be approved by the boards of both companies and by the Commerce Department, VeriSign would receive an extension until 2012 in its oversight of the .com domain. In return, any introduction of services such as Site Finder would have to be cleared in advance by ICANN. Wired News, 25 October 2005 http://www.wired.com/news/technology/0,1282,69346,00.html MICROSOFT JOINS YAHOO BOOK PROJECT Microsoft has said it will participate in a recently announced book-scanning project led by Yahoo and the Internet Archive. Unlike Google's much-maligned project, the Yahoo initiative, called the Open Content Alliance, will only scan books that are in the public domain or for which explicit permission has been granted by the copyright holder. In contrast, Google will scan copyrighted books unless copyright holders specifically request that their books be excluded, though only small portions of copyrighted books will be available online. For its part, Microsoft will finance the scanning of about 150,000 books, while Yahoo will pay for about 18,000 books to be digitized. The Open Content Alliance also differs from Google's project in that all of the content from the alliance will be available from a database to any search engine; Google will be the only means to access the content of its project. Microsoft will create an MSN Book Search service next year, though the business model for particular services and fees has not been set, according to Danielle Tiedt, general manager of search content acquisition at MSN. ZDNet, 25 October 2005 http://news.zdnet.com/2100-9588_22-5913711.html You have been reading excerpts from Edupage: If you have questions or comments about Edupage, send e-mail to: edupage@educause.edu To SUBSCRIBE to Edupage, send a message to LISTSERV@LISTSERV.EDUCAUSE.EDU and in the body of the message type: SUBSCRIBE Edupage YourFirstName YourLastName or To subscribe, unsubscribe, change your settings, or access the Edupage archive, visit http://www.educause.edu/Edupage/639 *** News from other sources: Some people have been pointing out how the news media showed us Terry Schaivo for days and weeks on end, but won't show a single casualty of the Iraq war.
From a local paper:
"Dog gets more ink than dead soldiers" "Two thousand of our soldiers have died with no foreseeable end to this war in sight. All I ask is, where is the outrage over that?" South Bend Tribune, IN - Oct 30, 2005 [Note: this page vanished shortly after publication] [I tried linking to it from multiple locations.] *HEADLINE NEWS AVOIDED BY MOST OF THE MAJOR U.S. MEDIA [As requested adding sources, etc., when possible. Remember, the subject is not the article's subject, the subject is the manipulation of the world news.] QWEST DODGES MULTIBILLION DOLLAR BULLET FOR $.5B A tentative settlement for $400 million by Qwest, in addition to other smaller settlements, may get Qwest out of the business of defending lawsuits & back into the communications business. An "accounting scandal" of billions of dollars is still being settled, and stockholders who bought under false or misleading statements by Qwest from May 24, 1999 to July 28, 2002 are now being reimbursed. The Seattle Times: Business & Technology: Shareholder settlement, 11/02/05 *DOUBLESPEAK OF THE WEEK The current "official" Pakistani report of the Kashmiri earthquake is 73,000 as of today, though local officials say it is 79,000. The offical government toll has been much lower than the local offical tolls for some time, but is finally being corrected. In addition, the number of severely injured is about 70,000. These figures are for Pakistan only. If you add the Indian death toll, the official figures are over 80,000, but no one in the media seems to like reporting the entire total figure, just as they refused to report the total tolls from Katrina, but rather sub-divided the death toll by state, and rarely, if ever, gave all the figures at once. Scotsman.com News Scottish news direct from Scotland Wednesday, 2nd November 2005 * President Ronald Reagan: "We did not, repeat, did not, trade weapons or anything else for hostages nor will we." re: Iran-Contra Affair Meet the Press, Oct. 30, 2005 * [I deleted Ambassador Wilson's comments on the yellowcake uranium, Valerie Plame [his wife] and Judith Miller. 6/9] *PREDICTIONS OF THE WEEK As I predicted before, Pluto will NOT be eliminated from the list of our planets. My previous prediction was based on the fact the planet had a moon, Charon, but with two more now discovered, this should be becoming more and more obvious. National Geographic News, 11/01/05 *STRANGE QUOTES OF THE WEEK "About 10 minutes ago or so, the United States Senate has been hijacked by the Democratic leadership!" [Epithets deleted] "They have no conviction. They have no principles. They have no ideas. This is a pure stunt." Most are telling you that operating under Standing Rule XXI is never done, but the truth is that it does get used every once in a while, the last time in the Reagan election year. Concord Monitor Online - Concord, NH *ODD STATISTICS OF THE WEEK The first "Tropical Storm Beta" of recorded history occured this week. The 23rd tropical storm of the season, and the 13th hurricane, also a new record, plowed into Nicaragua on Halloween, dropping 15" of rain, but didn't get much major media coverage. * Still hoping for more statistical updates and additional entries. "If we could shrink the earth's population to a village of precisely 100 people, with all the existing human ratios remaining the same, it would look something like the following. There would be: 57 Asians 21 Europeans 14 from the Western Hemisphere, both North and South America 8 Africans 52 would be female 48 would be male 70 would be non-white 30 would be white 70 would be non-Christian 30 would be Christian 6 people would possess 59% of the entire world's wealth and all 6 would be from the United States 80 would live in substandard housing 70 would be unable to read 50 would suffer from malnutrition 1 would be near death; 1 would be near birth 1 (yes, only 1) would have a college education 1 would own a computer [I think this is now much greater] 1 would be 79 years old or more. Of those born today, the life expectancy is only 63 years, but no country any longer issues copyrights that are sure to expire within that 63 year period. I would like to bring some of these figures more up to date, as obviously if only 1% of 6 billion people owned a computer then there would be only 60 million people in the world who owned a computer, yet we hear that 3/4 + of the United States households have computers, out of over 100 million households. Thus obviously that is over 1% of the world population, just in the United States. I just called our local reference librarian and got the number of US households from the 2004-5 U.S. Statistical Abstract at: 111,278,000 as per data from 2003 U.S Census Bureau reports. If we presume the saturation level of U.S. computer households is now around 6/7, or 86%, that is a total of 95.4 million, and that's counting just one computer per household, and not counting households with more than one, schools, businesses, etc. I also found some figures that might challenge the literacy rate given above, and would like some help researching these and other such figures, if anyone is interested. BTW, while I was doing this research, I came across a statistic that said only 10% of the world's population is 60+ years old. This means that basically 90% of the world's population would never benefit from Social Security, even if the wealthy nations offered it to them free of charge. Then I realized that the US population has the same kind of age disparity, in which the rich live so much longer than the poor, the whites live so much longer than the non-whites. Thus Social Security is paid by all, but is distributed more to the upper class whites, not just because they can receive more per year, but because they will live more years to receive Social Security. The average poor non-white may never receive a dime of Social Security, no matter how much they pay in. * POEM OF THE WEEK Negativity Negativity grows on one's soul like ivy on the barren wall Making the windows of the eyes shadowy and cold Copyright 2005 by Simona Sumanaru and Michael S. Hart Please send comments to: simona_s75 AT yahoo.com & hart AT pobox.com *** *Information About the Project Gutenberg Mailing Lists For more information about the Project Gutenberg's mailing lists, including the Project Gutenberg Weekly and Monthly Newsletters: and the other Project Gutenberg Mailing Lists: The weekly is sent on Wednesdays, and the monthly is sent on the first Wednesday of the month. To subscribe to any (or to unsubscribe or adjust your subscription preferences), visit the Project Gutenberg mailing list server: http://lists.pglaf.org If you are having trouble with your subscription, please email the list's human administrators at: help@pglaf.org