[gweekly] PT1a Weekly Project Gutenberg Newsletter
Michael Hart
hart at pglaf.org
Wed Dec 14 09:37:06 PST 2005
pt1a1.d05
pt1b1.d05
Weekly_December_14.txt
*The Project Gutenberg Weekly Newsletter For Wednesday, December 14, 2005 PT1*
*******eBooks Readable By Both Humans And Computers Since July 4, 1971********
PT1A
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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
3 New From PG Australia [Australian, Canadian Copyright Etc.]
58 New Public Domain eBooks Under US Copyright
*Headline News from Edupage, etc.
*Information About the Project Gutenberg Mailing Lists
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*eBook Milestones*
***516 eBooks Averaged Per Year Since July 4, 1971***
17,775 eBooks As Of Today!!!
[Includes Australian eBooks]
We Are ~88% of the Way to 20,000!!!
14,713 New eBooks Since The Start Of 2001
That's ~250 eBooks per Month for ~59 Months
We Have Produced 2819 eBooks in 2005!!!
2,225 to go to 20,000!!!
7,806 from Distributed Proofreaders
Since October, 2000 [Details in PT1B]
514 from Project Gutenberg of Australia
131 from Project Gutenberg of Europe
[We will start including these in 2006]
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
61 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 Nov. 2005 from 10,000 to 17,500
*
***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 at pobox.com and gbnewby at 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]
HARPERCOLLINS TO DIGITIZE BOOKS
HarperCollins has announced plans to digitize its own books and make
those files available through search services, marking the latest
development in the rapidly changing landscape of electronic access to
books. Google is working on its hotly contested service to scan vast
numbers of texts and make them available online, while other companies
have begun their own programs to digitize books. The move by
HarperCollins is that company's attempt to be a part of new
technologies while retaining control over its content. The company will
pay to have an estimated 20,000 backlisted books digitized, as well as
about 3,500 new titles each year. Those electronic files will be open
to search engines to make indexes but not to download images of the
pages. According to Brian Murray, group president of HarperCollins,
"We'll own the file, and we'll control the terms of any sale." Jane
Friedman, chief executive of the publisher, said, "We want to be the
best collaborator, but we also want to take charge of our future." The
company said the effort would also allow it to keep certain titles
available long after they are out of print.
Wall Street Journal, 12 December 2005 (sub. req'd)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113435527609919890.html
GEORGE MASON DEVELOPS ACADEMIC BROWSER ADD-ON
Researchers at George Mason University are developing a plug-in for the
Firefox browser that will help academics organize sources and properly
cite them. The tool is designed to harvest bibliographic information
from online sources and organize it for someone doing research on the
Web. Assuming the bibliographic elements are formatted in a way the
software can recognize, the application will parse title, author, and
other information and correlate it with the source. Daniel J. Cohen,
assistant professor of history and one of the developers, said it can
be thought of as "incredibly smart bookmarking.... You're not just
bookmarking the page, but you're automatically [capturing]...all that
info that scholars want to save." Unlike commercial products that
organize sources, the new application will tie directly into the
browser, eliminating the step of manually collecting citation details.
The open source application is expected to be completed next year and
will be available for no charge from George Mason's Web site. Cohen
said he believes the application will make unintentional plagiarism
less likely than if a researcher were keeping sources organized manually.
Chronicle of Higher Education, 6 December 2005 (sub. req'd)
http://chronicle.com/daily/2005/12/2005120602t.htm
EU DOMAIN OPENS FOR BUSINESS
A new domain has been launched that supporters believe will help create
a sense of identity and strength among the nations of the European
Union (EU). The .eu domain is initially open to organizations that hold
trademarks or have offices in any of the 25 nations in the EU. The
domain will later be opened to other groups and eventually to
individuals. More than 400 registrars have been approved to handle
applications for the domain. Jean Pire, a senior partner in a Belgian
intellectual property law firm, said he expects the .eu domain to grow
to be second only to .com in the number of Web sites that use it.
Currently, .com is the domain for more than half of the world's Web
sites; Pire predicts .eu eventually to represent about 25 percent of
Web sites. The .eu extension will not replace existing country-specific
extensions, such as .de for Germany and .fr for France.
Wall Street Journal, 7 December 2005 (sub. req'd)
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB113391801658415733.html
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*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,
credibility gaps, ploys, mis- and dis-information.]
[Didn't believe the previous reports here? Try these.
And start getting used to the idea that China and India
are going to be driving the world's economy for decades]
China Is Now World's #1 Information Technology Producer
Laptops, cellphones, digital cameras, etc.
Not only is China the largest, but it is growing by nearly
50% per year in techno-sales, nearly 4 times faster than
US sales are growing, so the gap widens faster and faster.
Source:
Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
See:
China overtakes US as biggest supplier of tech goods
Indian Express
China Overtakes US as Supplier of Information Technology Goods New
York Times
China overtakes the United States as the world's biggest supplier ...
FinFacts Ireland
*
EU Parliament to Investigate CIA Prisoner Transport
The European Parliament is meeting today to question
the actions of the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency,
the CIA, in secretly removing 400 prisoners from U.S.
soil to former Iron Curtain countries Poland, Romania
and possibly others.
Following several more reports, including those of the
Council of Europe, that have created "credible reports"
concerning "inquiry into alleged American secret detention
centres and clandestine prison transport."
Franco Frattini, EU vice-commissioner, has requested
satellite images and flight logs from Eurocontrol to
confirm these reports, and has advised EU Parliament
of these proceedings.
The newly popularlized terms for such prisoner transfer
are "rendition", "black sites," and "torture flights."
Here follows the concluding paragraph of:
Times Online December 14, 2005 article
by Sam Knight and Philip Webster
"Growing unease about the CIA's rendition programme,
which is believed to have transported 3,000 terrorist
suspects for interrogation around the world since 2001,
has prompted investigations in Finland, Hungary, Iceland,
Italy, Norway, Poland, Portugal, Romania, Spain and Sweden."
Sources:
Times Online, UK
EUobserver.com
CNN International
NPR
*DOUBLESPEAK OF THE WEEK
"This careful research has been unable to identify any occasion since
September 11, 2001. . .or earlier in the Bush Administration when we
received a request for permission by the United States for a rendition
through United Kingdom territory or airspace."
As per "very detailed searches of all our records"
by the UK Home Office and Foreign and Commonwealth Office.
However, this was followed by:
full circumstances of CIA flights in and out of the country.
"Military flights by other countries are not subject to
checking local authorities."
Quotes from Jack Straw
Britich Secretary of State for Foreign and Commonwealth Affairs
*PREDICTIONS OF THE WEEK
There will be a million eBooks online in two years, with or
without efforts by Google, Yahoo, Amazon, Library of Congress,
and now HarperCollins has thrown their hat into the ring.
[Story above in Edupage section]
*
By this time Chinese will be the most popular Internet language,
but, given the Chinese government's opinions on free information,
free as in free speech, I don't think they will be a major force
in building the world eBook libraries until/unless a significant
social or political change has taken place.
*
*STRANGE QUOTES OF THE WEEK
[Referring to investigating the CIA rendition flights]
"We don't know yet if this has become an EU issue,
but we cannot be the last ones to discover if
something serious happened. We are here to seek the
truth and not to wait for someone to provide it for us."
Jean-Marie Cavada
Chair of European Parliament's Civil Liberties Committee
*
"Legal proceedings in progress in certain countries seemed to indicate
that individuals had been abducted and transferred to other countries
without respect for any legal standards."
Dick Marty
Swiss Senator
In a written summary of his investigation on "extraordinary rendition"
*ODD STATISTICS OF THE WEEK
A Full Time Minimum Wage Worker Cannot Afford One Bedroom
According to the current Low Income Housing Coalition report
there is not a single county in the United States today where
full time minimum wage workers can afford one bedroom apartments.
This is the final straw, down from their report of December 20
of last year when only 4 of the 3066 U.S. counties could afford
the average one bedroom apartment.
The figures cannot fall any further, they have reached zero.
Source: CBS News, NPR News, Low Income Housing Coalition
*
[Commentary]
[Remember the recently publicized events in which Social Security
recipients were told:
"Social Security was never intended to meet all retirement needs."
"Social Security was never intended to do the whole job."
"Social Security was never intended or designed to be an
investment vehicle."
"Social Security was never intended to be a person's sole source
of income during retirement."
Now that there isn't a single county in the United States where
a full time minimum wage worker can rent a one bedroom apartment,
I wonder how long it is going to be before the official line is:
"Minimum wage was never intended to support a full time worker."
*
$2.4 million will buy you a 30 second ad in the Super Bowl.
*
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
[REprint. . .apparently this one got a bit mangled
in the process of getting it prepared, my apologies.]
a moment with you
laid back time's a blue octopus
embracing my ankles, my feet like birds
cut through airy waves of memory
polyphonic castles erected in the realm of newspeak
sounds upon sounds describe majestic towers
sweet melody of understanding playing over and over again
the abyssal voice: lonesome mariners befriending oysters
their old secrets revealed through long voyages initiation
a dialogue of alikeness opening up door after or after door
above a seagull: caresses came to resemble its dance
touch of feathers spreading wide in horizons of color
ethereal sensations, hear mermaids singing beloved songs
the rhythm of utter belonging
joyfully
contained in
a moment with you
Copyright 2005 by Simona Sumanaru and Michael S. Hart
Please send comments to: simona_s75 AT yahoo.com & hart AT pobox.com
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