Another Word For It Patrick Durusau on Topic Maps and Semantic Diversity

September 26, 2015

Free Data Science Books (Update, + 53 books, 117 total)

Filed under: Books,Data Science — Patrick Durusau @ 8:34 pm

Free Data Science Books (Update).

From the post:

Pulled from the web, here is a great collection of eBooks (most of which have a physical version that you can purchase on Amazon) written on the topics of Data Science, Business Analytics, Data Mining, Big Data, Machine Learning, Algorithms, Data Science Tools, and Programming Languages for Data Science.

While every single book in this list is provided for free, if you find any particularly helpful consider purchasing the printed version. The authors spent a great deal of time putting these resources together and I’m sure they would all appreciate the support!

Note: Updated books as of 9/21/15 are post-fixed with an asterisk (*). Scroll to updates

Great news but also more content.

Unlike big data, you have to read this content in detail to obtain any benefit from it.

And books in the same area are going to have overlapping content as well as some unique content.

Imagine how useful it would be to compose a free standing work with the “best” parts from several works.

Copyright laws would be a larger barrier but no more than if you cut-n-pasted your own version for personal use.

If such an approach could be made easy enough, the resulting value would drown out dissenting voices.

I think PDF is the principal practical barrier.

Do you suspect others?

I first saw this in a tweet by Kirk Borne.

September 4, 2015

The Enemies of Books

Filed under: Books,Censorship — Patrick Durusau @ 8:11 pm

The Enemies of Books by William Blades.

Published in 1888, The Enemies of Books reflects the biases and prejudices of its time, much as our literature transparently carries forward our biases and prejudices.

A valuable reminder in these censorship happy times that knowledge has long be deemed dangerous.

See in particular Chapter 5 Ignorance and Bigotry.

The suppression of “terrorist” literature, from tweets to websites, certainly falls under bigotry and possibly ignorance as well.

Extremist literature of all kinds is heavily repetitive and while it may be exciting to look at what has been forbidden, the thrill wears off fairly quickly. Al Goldstein, the publisher of Screw, once admitted in an interview that after about a year of Screw, if you were paying attention, you would notice the same story lines starting to circle back around.

If that’s a problem with sex, it isn’t hard to imagine that political issues discussed with no nuance, no depth of analysis, no sense of history, but simply “I’m right and X must die!” gets old pretty quickly.

If you believe U.S. reports on Osama bin Lauden, even bin Laden wasn’t on a steady diet of hate literature but had Western materials as well as soft porn.

If the would-be-censors would stop wasting funds on trying to censor social media and the Internet, perhaps they could find the time for historical, nuanced and deep analysis of current issues to publish in an attractive manner.

Censors don’t think and they don’t want you to either.

Let’s disappoint them together!

August 31, 2015

unglue.it

Filed under: Books,Publishing — Patrick Durusau @ 8:04 pm

unglue.it

From the webpage:

unglue (v. t.) 2. To make a digital book free to read and use, worldwide.

New to me, possibly old to you.

I “discovered” this site while looking at Intermediate Python.

From the general FAQ:

Basics

How It Works

What is Unglue.it?

Unglue.it is a a place for individuals and institutions to join together to make ebooks free to the world. We work together with authors, publishers, or other rights holders who want their ebooks to be free but also want to be able to earn a living doing so. We use Creative Commons licensing as an enabling tool to “unglue” the ebooks.

What are Ungluing Campaigns?

We have three types of Ungluing Campaigns: Pledge Campaigns, Buy-to-Unglue Campaigns and Thanks-for-Ungluing campaigns.

  • In a Pledge Campaign, book lovers pledge their support for ungluing a book. If enough support is found to reach the goal (and only then), the supporter’s credit cards are charged, and an unglued ebook is released.
  • In a Buy-to-Unglue Campaign, every ebook copy sold moves the book’s ungluing date closer to the present. And you can donate ebooks to your local library- that’s something you can’t do in the Kindle or Apple Stores!
  • In a Thanks-for-Ungluing Campaign, the ebook is already released with a Creative Commons license. Supporters can express their thanks by paying what they wish for the license and the ebook.

What is Crowdfunding?

Crowdfunding is collectively pooling contributions (or pledges) to support some cause. Using the internet for coordination means that complete strangers can work together, drawn by a common cause. This also means the number of supporters can be vast, so individual contributions can be as large or as small as people are comfortable with, and still add up to enough to do something amazing.

Want to see some examples? Kickstarter lets artists and inventors solicit funds to make their projects a reality. For instance, webcomic artist Rich Burlew sought $57,750 to reprint his comics in paper form — and raised close to a million.

In other words, crowdfunding is working together to support something you love. By pooling resources, big and small, from all over the world, we can make huge things happen.
…

What will supplement and then replace contemporary publishing models remains to be seen.

In terms of experiments, this one looks quite promising.

If you use unglue.it, please ping me with your experience. Thanks!

August 20, 2015

Free Packtpub Books (Legitimate Ones)

Filed under: Books,Computer Science — Patrick Durusau @ 2:52 pm

Packtpub Books is running a “free book per day” event. Most of you know Packtpub already so I won’t belabor the quality of their publications, etc.

The important news is that for 24 hours each day in August, Packtpub Books is offering a different book for free download! The current free book offer appears to expire at the end of August, 2015.

Packtpub Books – Free Learning

This is a great way to introduce non-Packtpub customers to Packtpub publications.

Please share this news widely (and with other publishers). 😉

February 25, 2015

PACKT Publishing – FREE LEARNING – HELP YOURSELF

Filed under: Books — Patrick Durusau @ 7:45 pm

PACKT Publishing – FREE LEARNING – HELP YOURSELF

I’m not sure when this started but according to the webpage, there will be one free book per day until March 5, 2015.

I will be checking back tomorrow to see if the selection changes day to day.

Worth a trip just to see if there is anything of interest.

Enjoy!

February 1, 2015

Harry Potter eBooks

Filed under: Books,Literature,Publishing — Patrick Durusau @ 1:26 pm

All the Harry Potter ebooks are now on subscription site Oyster by Laura Hazard Owen.

Laura reports the Harry Potter books are available on Oyster and Amazon. She says that Oyster has the spin-off titles from the original series where Amazon does not.

Both offer $9.95 per month subscription rates, where Oyster claims “over a million” books and Amazon over 700,000. After reading David Mason’s How many books will you read in your lifetime?, I am not sure the difference in raw numbers will make much difference.

Access to electronic texts will certainly make creating topic maps for popular literature a good deal easier.

Enjoy!

January 2, 2015

Early English Books Online – Good News and Bad News

Filed under: Books,Library,Public Data,Publishing,Text Encoding Initiative (TEI),Text Mining,Texts,XML — Patrick Durusau @ 2:34 pm

Early English Books Online

The very good news is that 25,000 volumes from the Early English Books Online collection have been made available to the public!

From the webpage:

The EEBO corpus consists of the works represented in the English Short Title Catalogue I and II (based on the Pollard & Redgrave and Wing short title catalogs), as well as the Thomason Tracts and the Early English Books Tract Supplement. Together these trace the history of English thought from the first book printed in English in 1475 through to 1700. The content covers literature, philosophy, politics, religion, geography, science and all other areas of human endeavor. The assembled collection of more than 125,000 volumes is a mainstay for understanding the development of Western culture in general and the Anglo-American world in particular. The STC collections have perhaps been most widely used by scholars of English, linguistics, and history, but these resources also include core texts in religious studies, art, women’s studies, history of science, law, and music.

Even better news from Sebastian Rahtz Sebastian Rahtz (Chief Data Architect, IT Services, University of Oxford):

The University of Oxford is now making this collection, together with Gale Cengage’s Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO), and Readex’s Evans Early American Imprints, available in various formats (TEI P5 XML, HTML and ePub) initially via the University of Oxford Text Archive at http://www.ota.ox.ac.uk/tcp/, and offering the source XML for community collaborative editing via Github. For the convenience of UK universities who subscribe to JISC Historic Books, a link to page images is also provided. We hope that the XML will serve as the base for enhancements and corrections.

This catalogue also lists EEBO Phase 2 texts, but the HTML and ePub versions of these can only be accessed by members of the University of Oxford.

[Technical note]
Those interested in working on the TEI P5 XML versions of the texts can check them out of Github, via https://github.com/textcreationpartnership/, where each of the texts is in its own repository (eg https://github.com/textcreationpartnership/A00021). There is a CSV file listing all the texts at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/textcreationpartnership/Texts/master/TCP.csv, and a simple Linux/OSX shell script to clone all 32853 unrestricted repositories at https://raw.githubusercontent.com/textcreationpartnership/Texts/master/cloneall.sh

Now for the BAD NEWS:

An additional 45,000 books:

Currently, EEBO-TCP Phase II texts are available to authorized users at partner libraries. Once the project is done, the corpus will be available for sale exclusively through ProQuest for five years. Then, the texts will be released freely to the public.

Can you guess why the public is barred from what are obviously public domain texts?

Because our funding is limited, we aim to key as many different works as possible, in the language in which our staff has the most expertise.

Academic projects are supposed to fund themselves and be self-sustaining. When anyone asks about sustainability of an academic project, ask them when the last time your countries military was “self sustaining?” The U.S. has spent $2.6 trillion on a “war on terrorism” and has nothing to show for it other than dead and injured military personnel, perversion of budgetary policies, and loss of privacy on a world wide scale.

It is hard to imagine what sort of life-time access for everyone on Earth could be secured for less than $1 trillion. No more special pricing and contracts if you are in countries A to Zed. Eliminate all that paperwork for publishers and to access all you need is a connection to the Internet. The publishers would have a guaranteed income stream, less overhead from sales personnel, administrative staff, etc. And people would have access (whether used or not) to educate themselves, to make new discoveries, etc.

My proposal does not involve payments to large military contractors or subversion of legitimate governments or imposition of American values on other cultures. Leaving those drawbacks to one side, what do you think about it otherwise?

July 26, 2014

Digital Commonplace Book?

Filed under: Books,Indexing — Patrick Durusau @ 8:11 pm

Rick Minerich reviews a precursor to a digital commonplace book in Sony Digital Paper DPT-S1 at Lambda Jam 2014.

Limited to PDF files which you can highlight text, attach annotations (which can be exported), and you can use the DPT-S1 as a notepad.

To take the DTP-S1 a step further towards creating a commonplace book, it should:

  1. Export highlighted text with a reference to the text of origin
  2. Export annotated text with a reference to the text of origin
  3. Enable export target of note pages in the DPT-S1
  4. Enable pages that “roll” off the display (larger page sizes)
  5. Enable support of more formats

The first application (software or hardware) with reference preserving cut-n-paste from a variety of formats to the user’s note-taking format, will be a killer app.

And one step closer to being a digital commonplace book.

BTW, one authorized re-seller for the DPT-S1 has this notice on their website:

PLEASE NOTE: As of now we are only authorized to sell the Sony DPT-S1 within the Entertainment Industry. This is a pilot program and we are NO LONGER selling to the general public.

We understand that this is frustrating to many as this is a VERY popular product, however at this time we can provide NO INFORMATION regarding sales to the general public. This is a non-negotiable aspect of our agreement with Sony and regrettably, any inquiries by the general public will not be answered. Thank you for your understanding.
(Text color as it appears on the website.)

I can think of other words than “frustrating.”

Hopefully the popularity of the current version will encourage Sony to cure some of its limitations and make it more widely available.

The Sony Digital Paper site.

Resellers for legal and financial, law library, entertainment, and “all other professions.”

Or perhaps someone else will overcome the current limitations of the DPT-S1 and Sony will regret its overly restrictive marketing policies.

I first saw this in a tweet by Adam Foltzer.

July 24, 2014

How to Make a Complete Map…

Filed under: Books,Mapping,Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 6:57 pm

How to Make a Complete Map of Every Thought You Think by Lion Kimbro.

From the introduction:

This book is about how to make a complete map of everything you think for as long as you like.

Whether that’s good or not, I don’t know- keeping a map of all your thoughts has a “freezing” effect on the mind. It takes a lot of (albeit pleasurable) work, but produces nothing but SIGHT.

If you do the things described in this book, you will be IMMOBILIZED for the duration of your commitment.The immobilization will come on gradually, but steadily. In the end, you will be incapable of going somewhere without your cache of notes, and will always want a pen and paper w/ you. When you do not have pen and paper, you will rely on complex memory pegging devices, described in “The Memory Book”. You will NEVER BE WITHOUT RECORD, and you will ALWAYS RECORD.

YOU MAY ALSO ARTICULATE. Your thoughts will be clearer to you than they have ever been before. You will see things you have never seen before. When someone shows you one corner, you’ll have the other 3 in mind. This is both good and bad. It means you will have the right information at the right time in the right place. It also means you may have trouble shutting up. Your mileage may vary.

You will not only be immobilized in the arena of action, but you will also be immobilized in the arena of thought. This appears to be contradictory, but it’s not really. When you are writing down your thoughts, you are making them clear to yourself, but when you revise your thoughts, it requires a lot of work- you have to update old ideas to point to new ideas. This discourages a lot of new thinking. There is also a “structural integrity” to your old thoughts that will resist change. You may actively not-think certain things, because it would demand a lot of note keeping work. (Thus the notion that notebooks are best applied to things that are not changing.)
….

Sounds bizarre. Yes?

Here is how the BBC’s Giles Turnbull summarized the system:

The system breaks down into simple jottings made during the day – what he calls “speeds”. These can be made on sheets of paper set aside for multiple subjects, or added directly to sheets dedicated to a specific subject. Speeds are made on the fly, as they happen, and it’s up to the writer to transcribe these into another section of the notebook system later on.

Lion suggests using large binders full of loose sheets of paper so that individual sheets can be added, removed and moved from one place to another. Notes can be given subjects and context hints as they are made, to help the writer file them into larger, archived binders when the time comes to organise their thoughts.

Even so, the writer is expected to carry one binder around with them at all times, and add new notes as often as possible, augmented with diagrams, arrows and maps.

With that summary description, it becomes apparent that Lion has reinvented the commonplace book, this one limited to your own thoughts.

Have you thought any more about how to create a digital commonbook interface?

July 22, 2014

Commonplace Books at Harvard

Filed under: Books,Critical Reading,Knowledge Networks — Patrick Durusau @ 8:03 pm

Commonplace Books

From the webpage:

In the most general sense, a commonplace book contains a collection of significant or well-known passages that have been copied and organized in some way, often under topical or thematic headings, in order to serve as a memory aid or reference for the compiler. Commonplace books serve as a means of storing information, so that it may be retrieved and used by the compiler, often in his or her own work.

The commonplace book has its origins in antiquity in the idea of loci communes, or “common places,” under which ideas or arguments could be located in order to be used in different situations. The florilegium, or “gathering of flowers,” of the Middle Ages and early modern era, collected excerpts primarily on religious and theological themes. Commonplace books flourished during the Renaissance and early modern period: students and scholars were encouraged to keep commonplace books for study, and printed commonplace books offered models for organizing and arranging excerpts. In the 17th, 18th, and 19th centuries printed commonplace books, such as John Locke’s A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books (1706), continued to offer new models of arrangement. The practice of commonplacing continued to thrive in the modern era, as writers appropriated the form for compiling passages on various topics, including the law, science, alchemy, ballads, and theology. The manuscript commonplace books in this collection demonstrate varying degrees and diverse methods of organization, reflecting the idiosyncratic interests and practices of individual readers.

A great collection of selections from commonplace books!

I am rather “lite” on posts for the day because I tried to chase down John Locke’s publication of A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books in French, circa 1686/87.

Unfortunately, the scanned version of Bibliotheque Universelle et Historique I was using, listed “volumes” when they were actually four (4) issues per year and the issue containing Locke’s earlier publication is missing. A translation that appears in John Locke, The Works of John Locke in Nine Volumes, (London: Rivington, 1824 12th ed.). Vol. 2 gives this reference:

Translated out of the French from the second volume of Bibliotheque Universelle.

You can view an image of the work at: http://lf-oll.s3.amazonaws.com/titles/762/0128-02df_Bk.pdf on page 441.

Someone who could not read Roman numerals gave varying dates for the “volumes” of Bibliotheque Universelle et Historique which didn’t improve my humor. I will try to find a complete scanned set tomorrow and try to chase down the earlier version of A New Method of Making Common-Place-Books. My concern is the graphic that appears in the translation and what appears to be examples at the end. I wanted to confirm that both appear in the original French version.

Enjoy!

PS: I know, this isn’t as “practical” as functional programming, writing Pig or Cuda code, but on the other hand, understanding where you are going is at least as important as getting there quickly. Yes?

July 21, 2014

Commonplace Books

Filed under: Books,Critical Reading,Knowledge Networks — Patrick Durusau @ 6:52 pm

Commonplace Books as a Source for Networked Knowledge and Combinatorial Creativity by Shane Parrish.

From the post:

“You know that I voluntarily communicated this method to you, as I have done to many others, to whom I believed it would not be unacceptable.”

There is an old saying that the truest form of poverty is “when if you have occasion for any thing, you can’t use it, because you know not where it is laid.”

The flood of information is nothing new.

“In fact,” the Harvard historian Ann Blair writes in her book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age, “many of our current ways of thinking about and handling information descend from patterns of thought and practices that extent back for centuries.” Her book explores “the history of one of the longest-running traditions of information management— the collection and arrangement of textual excerpts designed for consultation.” She calls them reference books.

Large collections of textual material, consisting typically of quotations, examples, or bibliographical references, were used in many times and places as a way of facilitating access to a mass of texts considered authoritative. Reference books have sometimes been mined for evidence about commonly held views on specific topics or the meanings of words, and some (encyclopedias especially) have been studied for the genre they formed.

[…]

No doubt we have access to and must cope with a much greater quantity of information than earlier generations on almost every issue, and we use technologies that are subject to frequent change and hence often new. Nonetheless, the basic methods we deploy are largely similar to those devised centuries ago in early reference books. Early compilations involved various combinations of four crucial operations: storing, sorting, selecting, and summarizing, which I think of as the four S’s of text management. We too store, sort, select, and summarize information, but now we rely not only on human memory, manuscript, and print, as in earlier centuries, but also on computer chips, search functions, data mining, and Wikipedia, along with other electronic techniques.

Knowing some of the background on the commonplace book will be helpful:

Commonplace books (or commonplaces) were a way to compile knowledge, usually by writing information into books. Such books were essentially scrapbooks filled with items of every kind: medical recipes, quotes, letters, poems, tables of weights and measures, proverbs, prayers, legal formulas. Commonplaces were used by readers, writers, students, and scholars as an aid for remembering useful concepts or facts they had learned. Each commonplace book was unique to its creator’s particular interests. They became significant in Early Modern Europe.

“Commonplace” is a translation of the Latin term locus communis (from Greek tópos koinós, see literary topos) which means “a theme or argument of general application”, such as a statement of proverbial wisdom. In this original sense, commonplace books were collections of such sayings, such as John Milton‘s commonplace book. Scholars have expanded this usage to include any manuscript that collects material along a common theme by an individual.

Commonplace books are not diaries nor travelogues, with which they can be contrasted: English Enlightenment philosopher John Locke wrote the 1706 book A New Method of Making a Common Place Book, “in which techniques for entering proverbs, quotations, ideas, speeches were formulated. Locke gave specific advice on how to arrange material by subject and category, using such key topics as love, politics, or religion. Commonplace books, it must be stressed, are not journals, which are chronological and introspective.” By the early eighteenth century they had become an information management device in which a note-taker stored quotations, observations and definitions. They were even used by influential scientists. Carl Linnaeus, for instance, used commonplacing techniques to invent and arrange the nomenclature of his Systema Naturae (which is still used by scientists today).

[footnote links omitted]

Have you ever had a commonplace book?

Impressed enough by Shane’s post to think about keeping one. In hard copy.

Curious how you would replicate a commonplace book in software?

Or perhaps better, what aspects of a commonplace book can you capture in software and what aspects can’t be captured.

I first saw this in a tweet by Aaron Kirschenfeld.

June 3, 2014

GitBook:…

Filed under: Books,Publishing,Typography — Patrick Durusau @ 4:39 pm

GitBook: Write Books using Markdown on OpenShift by Marek Jelen.

From the post:

GitBook is a tool for using Markdown to write books, which are converted to dynamic websites or exported to static formats like PDF. GitBook also integrates with Git and GitHub, adding a social element to the book creation process.

If you are exporting your book into an HTML page, interactive aspects are also embedable. At the time of this writing, the system provides support for quizzes and JavaScript exercises. However, the tool is fully open source and written using Node.js, so you are free to extend the functionality to meet your needs.

…

The Gitbook Learn Javascript is used as an example of production with GitBook.

It’s readable but in terms of the publishing craft, the Mikraot Gedolot or The Art of Computer Programming (TAOCP), it’s not.

Still, it may be useful for one-off exports from topic maps and other data sources.

May 4, 2014

Thanks for Unguling

Filed under: Books,eBooks,Publishing — Patrick Durusau @ 6:59 pm

Thanks-for-Ungluing launches!

From the post:

Great books deserve to be read by all of us, and we ought to be supporting the people who create these books. “Thanks for Ungluing” gives readers, authors, libraries and publishers a new way to build, sustain, and nourish the books we love.

“Thanks for Ungluing” books are Creative Commons licensed and free to download. You don’t need to register or anything. But when you download, the creators can ask for your support. You can pay what you want. You can just scroll down and download the book. But when that book has become your friend, your advisor, your confidante, you’ll probably want to show your support and tell all your friends.

We have some amazing creators participating in this launch.
…

An attempt to address the problem of open access to published materials while at the same time compensating authors for their efforts.

There is some recent material and old standbys like The Communist Manifesto by Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels. Which is good but having more recent works such as A Theology of Liberation by Gustavo Gutiérrez would be better.

If you are thinking about writing a book on CS topics, please think about “Thanks for Ungluing” as an option.

I first saw this in a tweet by Tim O’Reilly.

April 1, 2014

Functional programming books overview

Filed under: Books,Functional Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 4:20 pm

Functional programming books overview by Alex Ott.

From the webpage:

The first variant of this article was published in the first issue of Russian magazine "Practice of functional programming", but I decided to continue to maintain it, as more books were released (Russian version of this article also includes description of books published in Russian). You can leave comments and suggestions in the comment widget on this page, or send them to me via e-mail (Updates to this page usually happening not so often — every 2-3 months).

Descriptions for the books are relatively short — just to give an overview of the book’s topics, otherwise this article will become too big. For some of books there are more detailed reviews published in my blog. You can also follow my reviews on Goodreads.

If you will order some of these books, please (if possible), use links from this page — this allows me to buy new books and add them to review.

If your bookshelf isn’t already bulging with functional programming books or if you want to test its limits, this is a very good site to visit and to recommend others visit.

The listing here is more than enough for holidays and birthdays into the foreseeable future.

March 2, 2014

Theoretical CS Books Online

Filed under: Books,Computer Science — Patrick Durusau @ 9:25 pm

Theoretical CS Books Online

An awesome list of theoretical CS books at Stack Exchange, Theoretical Computer Science.

If you like the online version, be sure to acquire or recommend to your library to acquire a hard copy.

Good behavior on our part may encourage good behavior on the part of publishers.

Enjoy!

I first saw this in a tweet by Computer Science.

February 28, 2014

OCW Bookshelf

Filed under: Books,Computer Science — Patrick Durusau @ 6:59 pm

OCW Bookshelf

From the post:

MIT OpenCourseWare shares the course materials from classes taught on the MIT campus. In most cases, this takes the form of course documents such as syllabi, lecture notes, assignments and exams.

Occasionally, however, we come across textbooks we can share openly. This page provides an index of textbooks (and textbook-like course notes) that can be found throughout the OCW site. (Note that in most cases, resources are listed below by the course they are associated with.)

Covers a wide range of courses from computer science and engineering to languages and math.

I expect this resource will keep growing so remember to check back from time to time.

February 18, 2014

Functional Programming Day! – Book Sale!

Filed under: Books,Functional Programming — Patrick Durusau @ 3:58 pm

Functional Programming Day! at Manning – Until 12 PM EST – February 18, 2014.

How was I supposed to know Manning was going to use my birthday for “Functional Programming Day?”

I didn’t read my email after lunch and now I see the email blast.

Enter: dotd021814cc in the Promo box when you check out.

Applies to:

  • Java 8 in Action: Lambdas, Streams, and functional-style programming
  • Elixir in Action
  • Erlang and OTP in Action
  • Functional Programming in Scala
  • Scala in Action
  • Scala in Depth
  • Akka in Action
  • F# Deep Dives
  • Real-World Functional Programming
  • Clojure in Action, Second Edition
  • Joy of Clojure, Second Edition

I will ask Manning to coordinate with me next year if they want to use my birthday for functional programming day. Not that I mind but a little advance notice would be courteous. 😉

Enjoy and retweet this!

February 9, 2014

OTexts.org Update!

Filed under: Books,Open Access — Patrick Durusau @ 3:59 pm

OTexts.org has added three new books since my post on the launch of OTexts.

New titles:

Applied biostatistical analysis using R by Stephen B. Cox.

Introduction to Computing : Explorations in Language, Logic, and Machines by David Evans.

Modal logic of strict necessity and possibility by Evgeni Latinov.

The STEM fields have put the humanities to shame in terms of open access to high quality materials.

Don’t you think it was about time the humanities started using open access technologies?

January 25, 2014

12 Free eBooks on Scala

Filed under: Books,Programming,Scala,Scalability — Patrick Durusau @ 8:27 pm

12 Free eBooks on Scala by Atithya Amaresh.

If you are missing any of these, now is the time to grab a copy:

  1. Functional Programming in Scala
  2. Play for Scala
  3. Scala Cookbook
  4. Lift Cookbook
  5. Scala in Action
  6. Testing in Scala
  7. Programming Scala by Venkat Subramaniam
  8. Programming Scala by Dean Wampler, Alex Payne
  9. Software Performance and Scalability
  10. Scalability Rules
  11. Lift in Action
  12. Scala in Depth

Enjoy!

January 23, 2014

…Textbooks for $0 [Digital Illiterates?]

Filed under: Books,Education,Publishing — Patrick Durusau @ 3:15 pm

OpenStax College Textbooks for $0

From the about page:

OpenStax College is a nonprofit organization committed to improving student access to quality learning materials. Our free textbooks are developed and peer-reviewed by educators to ensure they are readable, accurate, and meet the scope and sequence requirements of your course. Through our partnerships with companies and foundations committed to reducing costs for students, OpenStax College is working to improve access to higher education for all.

OpenStax College is an initiative of Rice University and is made possible through the generous support of several philanthropic foundations. …

Available now:

  • Anatomy and Physiology
  • Biology
  • College Physics
  • Concepts of Biology
  • Introduction to Sociology
  • Introductory Statistics

Coming soon:

  • Chemistry
  • Precalculus
  • Principles of Economics
  • Principles of Macroeconomics
  • Principles of Microeconomics
  • Psychology
  • U.S. History

Check to see if I missed any present or forthcoming texts on data science. No, I didn’t see any either.

I looked at the Introduction to Sociology, which has a chapter on research methods, but no opportunity for students to experience data methods. Such as Statwing’s coverage of the General Social Survey (GSS), which I covered in Social Science Dataset Prize!

Data science should not be an aside or extra course any more than language literacy is a requirement for an education.

Consider writing or suggesting edits to subject textbooks to incorporate data science. Solely data science books will be necessary as well, just like there are advanced courses in English Literature.

Let’s not graduate digital illiterates. For their sake and ours.

I first saw this in a tweet by Michael Peter Edson.

December 28, 2013

free-programming-books (878 books)

Filed under: Books,Computer Science — Patrick Durusau @ 5:09 pm

free-programming-books

A much larger collection of free books than I pointed to at Free Programming Books in October of 2011.

I count eight hundred and seventy-eight (878 entries) along with twenty-two (22) pointers to other lists of free programming books.

If you were disappointed by the computer books you got for Christmas and/or didn’t get any computer books at all, you can find solace here. 😉

December 25, 2013

E-Books Directory

Filed under: Books,eBooks — Patrick Durusau @ 3:24 pm

E-Books Directory

From the webpage:

Welcome! We have exactly 8631 free e-books in 649 categories.

E-Books Directory is a daily growing list of freely downloadable ebooks, documents and lecture notes found all over the internet. You can submit and promote your own ebooks, add comments on already posted books or just browse through the directory below and download anything you need.

Welcome additions to your reader device!

An arm saver as well: A New Kind of Science by Stephen (EN) Wolfram. (EN = Editor Needed)

Curious, do you think eBooks are going to lead to longer (read poorly edited) books in general?

October 10, 2013

Government Shutdown = Free Oxford Content!

Filed under: Books,Interface Research/Design,Reference — Patrick Durusau @ 1:03 pm

Free access to Oxford content during the government shutdown

From the post:

The current shutdown in Washington is limiting the access that scholars and researchers have to vital materials. To that end, we have opened up access for the next two weeks to three of our online resources: Oxford Reference, American National Biography Online, and the US Census demographics website, Social Explorer.

  • Oxford Reference is the home of Oxford’s quality reference publishing, bringing together over 2 million entries from subject reference, language, and quotations dictionaries, many of which are illustrated, into a single cross-searchable resource. Start your journey by logging in using username: tryoxfordreference and password: govshutdown
  • American National Biography Online provides articles that trace a person’s life through the sequence of significant events as they occurred from birth to death offering portraits of more than 18,700 men and women— from all eras and walks of life—whose lives have shaped the nation. To explore, simply log in using username: tryanb and password: govshutdown
  • Social Explorer provides quick and easy access to current and historical census data and demographic information. It lets users create maps and reports to illustrate, analyze, and understand demography and social change. In addition to its comprehensive data resources, Social Explorer offers features and tools to meet the needs of demography experts and novices alike. For access to Social Explorer, email online reference@oup.com for a username and password.

An example of:

It’s an ill wind that blows nobody good

Whatever your political persuasion, a great opportunity to experience first class reference materials.

It’s only for two weeks so pass this onto your friends and colleagues!

PS: From a purely topic map standpoint, the site is also instructive as a general UI.

September 30, 2013

OTexts​.org is launched

Filed under: Books,Forecasting,Logic,Machine Learning — Patrick Durusau @ 6:46 pm

OTexts​.org is launched by Rob J Hyn­d­man.

From the post:

The pub­lish­ing plat­form I set up for my fore­cast­ing book has now been extended to cover more books and greater func­tion­al­ity. Check it out at www​.otexts​.org.

otexts.org

So far, we have three com­plete books:

  1. Fore­cast­ing: prin­ci­ples and prac­tice, by Rob J Hyn­d­man and George Athana­sopou­los
  2. Sta­tis­ti­cal foun­da­tions of machine learn­ing, by Gian­luca Bon­tempi and Souhaib Ben Taieb
  3. Modal logic of strict neces­sity and poss­bibil­ity, by Evgeni Lati­nov

OTexts.org is looking for readers, authors and donors.

Saying you support open access is one thing.

Supporting open access by contributing content or funding is another.

July 25, 2013

The LibraryThing – Update

Filed under: Books,Library — Patrick Durusau @ 12:47 pm

The New Home Page

LibraryThing has a new homepage!

I should have asked if you like to read books first. 😉

What is LibraryThing?

LibraryThing is a cataloging and social networking site for book lovers.

LibraryThing helps you create a library-quality catalog of books: books you own, books you’ve read, books you’d like to read, books you’ve lent out … whatever grouping you’d like.

Since everyone catalogs online, they also catalog together. You can contribute tags, ratings and reviews for a book, and Common Knowledge (facts about a book or author, like character names and awards), as well as participate in member forums or join the Early Reviewers program. Everyone gets the benefit of everyone else’s work. LibraryThing connects people based on the books they share.

New modules, new features and of course, books!

Social networking opportunity for book lovers.

You may find other people who own a copy of Sowa’s “Knowledge Representation,” Eco’s “A Theory of Semiotics,” and the “Anarchist Cookbook.” 😉

April 9, 2013

Springer Book Archives [Proposal for Access]

Filed under: Archives,Books — Patrick Durusau @ 11:16 am

The Springer Book Archives now contain 72,000 titles

From the post:

Today at the British UKSG Conference in Bournemouth, Springer announced that the Springer Book Archives (SBA) now contain 72,000 eBooks. This news represents the latest developments in a project that seeks to digitize nearly every Springer book ever published, dating back to 1842 when the publishing company was founded. The titles are being digitized and made available again for the scientific community through SpringerLink (link.springer.com), Springer’s online platform.

By the end of 2013 an unprecedented collection of around 100,000 historic, scholarly eBooks, in both English and German, will be available through the SBA. Researchers, students and librarians will be able to access the full text of these books free of any digital rights management. Springer also offers a print-on-demand option for most of the books.

Notable authors whose works Springer has published include high-level researchers and Nobel laureates, such as Werner von Siemens, Rudolf Diesel, Emil Fischer and Marie Curie.Their publications will be a valuable addition to this historic online archive.

SBA section at Springer: http://www.springer.com/bookarchives

A truly remarkable achievement but access will remain problematic for a number of potential users.

I would like to see the United States government purchase (as in pay an annual fee) unlimited access to SpringerLink for any U.S. based IP address.

Springer gets more revenue than it does now from U.S. domains, reduces Springer’s licensing costs, benefits all colleges and universities, and provides everyone in the U.S. with access to first rate technical publications.

Not to mention that Springer gets the revenue from selling the print-on-demand paperback editions.

Seems like a no-brainer if you are looking to jump start a knowledge economy.

PS: Forward this to your Senator/Representative. Could be a viable model to satisfy the needs of publishers and readers.

I first saw this at: Springer Book Archives Now Contain 72,000 eBooks by Africa S. Hands.

April 8, 2013

Spring/Summer Reading – 2013

Filed under: Books,CS Lectures — Patrick Durusau @ 1:05 pm

The ACM has released:

Best Reviews (2012)

and,

Notable Computing Books and Articles of 2012

Before you hit the summer conference or vacation schedule, visit your local bookstore or load up your ebook reader!

I first saw this at Best Reviews & Notable Books and Articles of 2012 by Shar Steed.

February 17, 2013

REMOTE: Office Not Required

Filed under: Books,Business Intelligence — Patrick Durusau @ 8:18 pm

REMOTE: Office Not Required

From the post:

As an employer, restricting your hiring to a small geographic region means you’re not getting the best people you can. As an employee, restricting your job search to companies within a reasonable commute means you’re not working for the best company you can. REMOTE, the new book by 37signals, shows both employers and employees how they can work together, remotely, from any desk, in any space, in any place, anytime, anywhere.

REMOTE will be published in the fall of 2013 by Crown (Random House).

I was so impressed by Rework (see: Emulate Drug Dealers [Marketing Topic Maps]) that I am recommending REMOTE ahead of its publication.

Whether the lessons in REMOTE will be heard by most employers or shall we say their managers, remains to be seen.

Perhaps performance in revenue and the stock market will be important clues. 😉

December 6, 2012

History of the Book [Course resources]

Filed under: Books,History,Interface Research/Design — Patrick Durusau @ 11:45 am

History of the Book by Kate Martinson.

From the webpage:

This website consists of information relating to Art 43 – The History of the Book. Participants should consider this site as a learning tool for the class. It will contain updated documents, images for reference, necessary links, class announcements and other information necessary for participation in the course. It will be constantly modified throughout the semester. Questions or problems should be directed to Kate Martinson, or in the event of technical difficulties, to the Help Desk.

A large number of links to images and other materials on writing and book making around the world. From cuneiform tablets to electronic texts.

I encountered it while looking for material on book indexing.

Useful for studying the transmission of and access to information. Which may influence how you design your topic maps.

Grossly oversimplified but consider the labor involved in writing/accessing information on a cuneiform tablet, on a scroll, in a movable type codex or in electronic form.

At each stage the labor becomes less and the amount of recorded information (not the same as useful information) goes up.

Rather than presenting more information to a user, would it be better for topic maps to present less? And/or to make it difficult to add more information?

What if FaceBook offered a filter to exclude coffee, pictures not taken by the sender, etc.? Would that make it a more useful information stream?

October 11, 2012

IBM Redbooks

Filed under: Books,Data,Marketing,Topic Maps — Patrick Durusau @ 2:22 pm

IBM Redbooks

You can look at this resource one of two ways:

First, as a great source of technical information about mostly IBM products and related technologies.

Second, as a starting point of IBM content for mining and navigation using a topic map.

May not be of burning personal interest to you, but to IBM clients, consultants and customers?

Here’s one pitch:

How much time do you spend searching the WWW, IBM for answers to IBM software questions? In a week? In a month?

Try (TM4IBM-Product-Name) for a week or a month. Then you do the time math.

(I would host a little time keeping applet to “assist” with the record keeping.)

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