[Hat Tip: John Dennehy, who leans toward the "useful" point of view.]
Believe it or not, there are supposedly intelligent people out there who think the internet will replace universities.1 It didn't take Sean Caroll very long to come up with some excelent reasons why this ain't gonna happen [Will the Internet Replace Universities?]. 1. Back in 1970 their parents were convinced that television would mean the end of universities as we know them.
There's an article in this week's issue of Nature on The textbook of the future.Another drawback of current e-readers is that they have small black-and-white displays, just a little larger than 9 by 12 centimetres. This makes them unsuited to most science textbooks, which typically have large pages and colourful graphics. "The market is not likely to expand until the e-readers improve," says Hegarty.Publishers are experimenting with ways of delivering their textbooks electronically (e.g. CourseSmart) but there are still problems to be solved.
For now these free textbooks remain a cottage industry, says Esposito. Wikipedia-like volunteer efforts are much better suited to self-contained modules that are small enough for an individual to see through from A to Z. But a textbook demands a coherent overall structure and coordination between sections. That is why creating one has always been a major undertaking, demanding long-term commitments by publishers — who need to make a profit — and by authors who usually want to be paid for their effort.I think there's going to be a way to make cheaper electronic versions of textbooks and still compensate the people who do all the work. I'm not sure how it's going to work but I'd love to put my book on a website where I can make changes quickly and get instant feedback from the users.
Still, perhaps 'free' and 'profitable' need not be a contradiction in terms. One group of veteran textbook publishing executives is trying to put open textbooks on a solid commercial footing. In 2007 they created Flat World Knowledge, based in Nyack, New York, and in January 2009 rolled out the first of the 21 textbooks they have in development so far. The texts are written by some 40 domain experts who will be paid 20% of royalties. The company also plans to make its content available via Kindle and other e-readers. All its content will be free to reuse for non-commercial purposes under a creative commons licence.
Eric Frank, Flat World's co-founder, says that the strategy is to attract greater use by giving the e-textbooks away — the initial targets are the high-volume texts for first-year students — and then look for profit from students' purchase of print-on-demand versions at $29.95 for black and white, and $59.95 for colour. Students can copy and use the electronic content in any way they wish, says Frank. "Cheap prices are the most effective digital-rights management," he says. "We want to avoid a digital-rights war with students." The company also hopes to make money by licensing its content to commercial companies, such as distance-learning outfits and course-management software firms.
Meet Dr. James Lunney a chiropractor and a Conservative Party Member of Parliament for Nanaimo-Alberni in British Columbia.Mr. Speaker, recently we saw an attempt to ridicule the presumed beliefs of a member of this House and the belief of millions of Canadians in a creator. Certain individuals in the media and the scientific community have exposed their own arrogance and intolerance of beliefs contrary to their own. Any scientist who declares that the theory of evolution is a fact has already abandoned the foundations of science. For science establishes fact through the study of things observable and reproducible. Since origins can neither be reproduced nor observed, they remain the realm of hypothesis.PZ Myers is making fun of Canada by posting Lunney's remarks on Pharyngula. He's right. We deserve it. Lunney is a genuine kook who quite obviously wouldn't know real science if it bit him on the backbone.
In science, it is perfectly acceptable to make assumptions when we do not have all the facts, but it is never acceptable to forget our assumptions. Given the modern evidence unavailable to Darwin, advanced models of plate techtonics, polonium radiohalos, polystratic fossils, I am prepared to believe that Darwin would be willing to re-examine his assumptions.
The evolutionists may disagree, but neither can produce Darwin as a witness to prove his point. The evolutionists may genuinely see his ancestor in a monkey, but many modern scientists interpret the same evidence in favour of creation and a creator.
The month began with an account of my streetcar ride and the atheist sign campaign in Toronto [The Streetcar We Desire]. I also celebrated the 35th anniversary of my thesis defense.[Hat Tip: Bora Zivkovic: A Blog Around the Clock]
There may have been a time in the past when scientists imagined a static genome that only changed slowly over millions of years. However, beginning in the 1960's we began to see the genome as a much more dynamic entity. The first evidence of this kind of genome came with the discovery of huge amounts of variation between individuals in a species. 
One year Ms. Sandwalk took the entire family to see a full performance of Handel's Messiah. It was agony, except for one brief part of the performance where we all got to stand up. Ms. Sandwalk thought it was wonderful but, remember, she also likes some country music.
UPDATE: The molecule is indigotin or indigo dye [2,2’-Bis(2,3-dihydro-3- oxoindolyliden)]. The Nobel Laureate is Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer.
Identify this molecule and explain why it is useful. You must supply the common name and the formal IUPAC name. 
Johann Friedrich Wilhelm Adolf von Baeyer (1835 - 1917) won the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for his work on the preparation of organic dyes from coal tar. The complex and unique composition of indigo, however, made this also one of the hardest of tasks. Here there could be no question of one of those casual discoveries, which by happy accident seem to achieve half the work. Years of work were required for even von Baeyer's acumen and experimental skill to achieve the necessary insight into the pigment's chemical composition and to be able to manufacture it from simpler constituents. Even after the purely scientific part of the work had been completed it still took a number of years to make the results obtained from research applicable to technology.
Von Baeyer succeeded in producing indigo synthetically in three principal ways, namely from ortho-nitrophenylacetic acid, from ortho-nitrocinnamic acid and from ortho-nitrobenzaldehyde and acetone. This paved the way for the reproduction of indigo from raw material obtainable without much difficulty from coal tar. And if the problem of producing indigo industrially has now been solved from the technical as well as the economic point of view, this is entirely due to von Baeyer's basic work in the fields in question.
The images of the Nobel Prize medals are registered trademarks of the Nobel Foundation (© The Nobel Foundation). They are used here, with permission, for educational purposes only.
It's April 1st and PZ Myers tells us that Pharyngula had 2,296,911 visits last month [What are all you people doing here?]. Sandwalk had 107,747 visits or less than 5% of the number that visited Pharyngula.
Michael Behe (1952 - ) wins the Nobel Prize in Biochemistry for his amazing work on complex biological systems, especially the concept of irreducible complexity. 
The presentation speech highlights the importance of this work.The development of protein features, such as protein-protein binding sites, that require the participation of multiple amino acid residues is a profound, fundamental problem that has stumped the evolutionary biology community until the present day (and continues to do so, as I explain below). It is a fundamental problem because all proteins exert their effects by physically binding to something else, such as a small metabolite or DNA or other protein, and require multiple residues to do so. The problem is especially acute for protein-protein interactions, since most proteins in the cell are now known to act as teams of a half-dozen or more, rather than individually. Yet if one can’t explain how specific protein-protein interactions developed, then it is delusional to claim that we can explain how anything that depends on them developed, such as the molecular machinery of the cell. It’s like saying “we understand perfectly well how a car could evolve; we just don’t know how the pieces could get fit together.” If such a basic requirement for putting together complex systems is not understood, nothing is understood. Keep this in mind the next time you hear a blithe Darwinian tale about the undirected evolution of the cilium or bacterial flagellum.
Posted on April 1st, 2009.
The images of the Nobel Prize medals are registered trademarks of the Nobel Foundation (© The Nobel Foundation). They are used here, with permission, for educational purposes only.
I've been thinking a lot lately about how to get my textbook online without asking everyone involved to work for free. It's not an easy problem.So, while I like storming the establishment with pitchforks and torches as much as anyone, when I picked up Opening Up Education (or rather, when I downloaded the PDF to my Kindle), I was looking for pragmatism, not utopianism. After 500 pages of “the silos we all know about in higher education are under assault in the new world,” the “hated textbook publishers,” the “epistemological hegemony of higher education,” and the “noble philosophy” of making everything free—“traitors” and “patriots” and “communists,” oh my!—my hopes were beaten down. Many of the 30 essays in this collection are more manifesto than explanation, and many of the 38 authors are writing more for their fellow revolutionary comrades than for us.Life is never as simple as the Web 2.0 fans make out. Somebody is going to have to do a lot of work before the quality of a website matches what's in the best introductory textbooks. And it's extremely naive to think that all that work is just going to be given away for free.
Sean does an excellent job of bursting the bubble.“Remix,” “collective wisdom,” “Web 2.0”—many of these essays ride a bubble of popular digital punditry enthusiastically but too uncritically. Many technologists today are infected with an idea that “community is king,” that high-quality content will rain down freely merely because we connect digital communities openly. This confuses ways of sharing ideas with ways of creating ideas. It is a kind of magical thinking that has much in common with the cargo cults that cut landing strips in the jungle and carved radios from sticks in hope that more sophisticated beings would parachute technological artifacts down upon them. With all respect to the passionate and pioneering initiatives described in this collection, building landing strips to receive open educational content will not be enough. More attention must be paid to the fact that someone still needs to spend time painstakingly developing artful ways to make difficult concepts understandable—to teach!—and that it will take even more time (thus money) to render these hard-won ideas using multimedia web technology compared with writing textbooks. Success hinges on the adoption of open licensing by the professionals who make digital educational resources, and on finding ways to finance their work.I have some ideas. I'd like to put my book on the web so that everyone can read it but nobody can download it or print out the figures and text. If you need a printed version you can sign on to the server and print out a chapter for $3. The pages would come with your name and email address printed in the header and footer—or perhaps as a watermark. The idea is to make the material available at minimal cost to an individual user while inhibiting the distribution of photocopies.
[Photo Credit: Nature]
[Hat Tip: Jonathan Eisen at The Tree of Life]
I don't think that religious indoctrination is always an example of child abuse. However, there are other ways that count as clear examples of abuse [Taliban blocks UN polio treatment in Pakistan].Militants had reportedly agreed to allow the [polio] vaccination program to take place as part of the peace agreements.
However, the militants had reneged on their word and despite assiduous efforts made by the increasingly irrelevant local administration, no vaccinations have taken place.
“It’s a US tool to cut the population of the Muslims. It is against Islam that you take a medicine before the disease”, said, Muslim Khan, Swat’s Taliban spokesman, speaking by telephone.
[Photo Credit: daylife/Reuters: "A man holds his twins as he waits for them to receive polio vaccines in the southern province of Kandahar September 21, 2007. Afghan health officials said on Friday they had brokered a deal with Taliban leaders to allow the immunization of children against polio in rebel-held areas in a rare sign of cooperation between the warring sides."]
[Hat Tip: RichardDawkins.net]
