E-Books More Popular then Hardcover and Paperback!

Dear Commons Community,

A recent survey of major publishers indicates that E-books are now the most popular form of reading among adult fiction readers.  A summary of the survey results by the New York Times states:

“E-books continued their surge in popularity last year, surpassing hardcover books and paperbacks to become the dominant format for adult fiction in 2011, according to a survey of publishers released Wednesday.

For several years, consumers have been rapidly switching from print to digital for reading novels, a sign of the growing strength of the e-book for narrative, straightforward storytelling.

Over all, digital books kept up their explosive growth in 2011, the survey confirmed. Publishers’ net revenue from sales of e-books more than doubled last year, reaching $2.07 billion, up from $869 million in 2010. E-books accounted for 15.5 percent of publishers’ revenues.

But as digital revenue grew, print sales suffered, dropping to $11.1 billion in 2011 from $12.1 billion in 2010.

The annual survey, known as BookStats, includes data from nearly 2,000 publishers of all sizes. It was conducted by two trade groups, the Book Industry Study Group and the Association of American Publishers. The survey also revealed that revenue in the overall trade book business was relatively flat. Publishers’ net revenues in 2011 were $13.97 billion, up from $13.9 billion in 2010, an increase of 0.5 percent.”

I am happy to see the book business doing well and adapting to new media.

Tony

New York Knick Fans: You Can Throw Away Your Jeremy Lin T-Shirts!!

Dear Commons Community,

This post is for all of the New York Knick fans who are scratching their heads as to what happened with  the Jeremy Lin contract and his move to Houston.  The Knicks decided not to match the Houston Rockets contract offer by last night’s deadline.  The New York Times has a good analysis of the issues but I am still not sure how and why this all played out the way it did.  This will be discussed for many weeks on the sports news programs but the bottom line is that something is strange in Knickville.

Tony

 

 

Computer Scientist Leaves UCLA for the Fledgling CornellNYC Tech!

Dear Commons Community,

The Chronicle of Higher Education has a brief interview with the first faculty hire, Deborah Estrin, Distinguished Professor of Computer Science at UCLA,  for the new CornellNYC Tech to open later this year.  In terms of why she is leaving UCLA, Dr. Estrin indicated:

“From the start, I was intrigued by the notion of a tech campus in New York City. It appealed to me as a place for innovation on embedded networked sensing systems. But it’s like a Rorschach test. That’s what I’m interested in, so that’s what I read into the idea.

In April I was contacted by the folks at Cornell about my new job.

Cornell’s computer-science department is one of the absolute top in the world. So I, of course, know the folks there and have always had huge admiration and respect for them. The fact that the Weill Cornell Medical College is in New York City was also a draw. Working directly with clinical innovators is essential to pursuing the mobile-health work that I’ve been doing at UCLA and will do at CornellNYC Tech…

So much was right about this situation that it wasn’t a hard decision. The vision of the tech campus is simply irresistible for me. I was in transition, with the center that I developed at UCLA winding down as the funds run out, so the timing was right. And then, having the new campus in New York City—I mean it’s the city. It’s the city.

My parents were both at UCLA, but they were New Yorkers. My mother still has a lot of her Brighton Beach/Brooklyn accent intact. My father was from the Bronx, and they met at City College before the war.”

Welcome to New York, Dr. Estrin!

Tony

Twelve More Major Research Universities Plan to Offer MOOCs in the Fall!

Dear Commons Community,

The New York Times has an article  announcing that a dozen major research universities are joining Coursera, a year-old company founded by two Stanford University computer scientists, to offer MOOCs (massive open online courses).  The plan is for Coursera in the fall to offer 100 or more free MOOCs, that are expected to draw millions of students and adult learners globally.

In addition to its original partners, Michigan, Princeton, Stanford and the University of Pennsylvania, joining Coursera will be the California Institute of Technology; Duke University; the Georgia Institute of Technology; Johns Hopkins University; Rice University; the University of California, San Francisco; the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign; the University of Washington; and the University of Virginia, the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, the University of Toronto and EPF Lausanne, a technical university in Switzerland

“This is the tsunami,” said Richard A. DeMillo, the director of the Center for 21st Century Universities at Georgia Tech. “It’s all so new that everyone’s feeling their way around, but the potential upside for this experiment is so big that it’s hard for me to imagine any large research university that wouldn’t want to be involved.”

Because of technological advances — among them, the greatly improved quality of online delivery platforms, the ability to personalize material and the capacity to analyze huge numbers of student experiences to see which approach works best — MOOCs are likely to be a game-changer, opening higher education to hundreds of millions of people.

So far, MOOCs have offered no credit, just a “statement of accomplishment” and a grade. But the University of Washington said it planned to offer credit for its Coursera offerings this fall, and other online ventures are also moving in that direction. David P. Szatmary, the university’s vice provost, said that to earn credit, students would probably have to pay a fee, do extra assignments and work with an instructor.

Experts say it is too soon to predict how MOOCs will play out, or which venture will emerge as the leader. Coursera, with about $22 million in financing, including $3.7 million in equity investment from Caltech and Penn, may currently have the edge. But no one is counting out edX, a joint venture of Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, or Udacity, the company founded by Sebastian Thrun of Stanford, who taught the artificial intelligence course last year.

Coursera does not pay the universities, and the universities do not pay Coursera, but both incur substantial costs. Contracts provide that if a revenue stream emerges, the company and the universities will share it.

Although MOOCs will have to be self-sustaining some day — whether by charging students for credentials or premium services or by charging corporate recruiters for access to the best students — Ms. Koller and university officials said that was not a pressing concern.

About two-thirds of Coursera’s students are from overseas, and most courses attract tens of thousands of students, an irresistible draw for many professors. “Every academic has a little soapbox, and most of the time we have five people listening to us,” said Scott E. Page, a University of Michigan professor who taught Coursera’s model thinking course and was thrilled when 40,000 students downloaded his videos. “By most calculations, I had about 200 years’ worth of students in my class.

It will be some time before it is clear how the new MOOCs affect enrollment at other online institutions, and whether they will ultimately cannibalize enrollment at the very universities that produce them. Still, many professors dismiss that threat.

“There’s talk about how online education’s going to wipe out universities, but a lot of what we do on campus is help people transition from 18 to 22, and that is a complicated thing,” said one Dr. Page, adding that MOOCs would be most helpful to “people 22 to 102, international students and smart retired people.”

Any faculty at CUNY ready to take the plunge into a MOOC.

Tony

 

 

Income Tax Returns Becoming Romney’s Achilles’ Heel!

Dear Commons Community,

Mitt Romney’s failure to release his income tax returns is becoming his Achilles’ heel.  Over the past several days, prominent conservatives and members of the Republican Party have publicly commented that he needs to release these data.

Bill Kristol:  “He should release the tax returns tomorrow. It’s crazy,” Kristol said on “Fox News Sunday.” “You gotta release six, eight, 10 years of back tax returns. Take the hit for a day or two.”

George Will:  ““I do not know why, given that Mitt Romney knew the day that McCain lost in 2008 that he was going to run for president again that he didn’t get all of this out and tidy up some of his offshore accounts and all the rest…”He’s done nothing illegal, nothing unseemly, nothing improper, but lots that’s impolitic”

Alabama Gov. Robert Bentley: “I think he ought to release everything. I believe in total transparency,” Bentley told reporters.  “You know if you have things to hide, then you may be doing things wrong.”

With so much pressure, it is only a matter of time before Romney will release more of his income tax data.

Tony

We Can All Feel Secure About the Economy Now: George W. Bush Has a New Book on How to Fix it!!

Dear Commons Community,

Good economic advice has been hard to come by during the last four years as our country and the world has floated in and out of the Great Recession.  Many of our fellow citizens are without jobs, the stock market is up and down and cities are filing for bankruptcy.  Not to fear, George W. Bush has a new book, The 4% Solution: Unleashing the Economic Growth America Needs, providing advice on how to get the economy going again.  Essentially it is a push to unleash free enterprise according to one reviewer.   

“The ideas in the book include lowering corporate tax rates, shifting away from taxing income to taxing consumption and property, promoting innovation by letting professors keep gains from their research, expanding free-trade pacts with Japan and other countries, refocusing immigration policy to recruit more high-skill workers, and expanding the work force by lowering payroll taxes on employees with children.”

I am sorry but I have no idea who will buy this book authored by a president whose policies  and lack of oversight brought this country to its knees economically.  Chutzpah anyone!!!

Tony

 

New York City Parks and Green Spaces!

Dear Commons Community,

Frank Bruni gives New York City and Mayor Michael Bloomberg well-deserved kudos in his column for the  investments made in the past decade in expanding and improving our parks and green spaces.

“This city [New York] looks nothing — nothing — like it did just a decade and a half ago. It’s a place of newly gorgeous waterfront promenades, of trees, tall grasses and blooming flowers on patches of land and peninsulas of concrete and even stretches of rail tracks that were blighted or blank before. It’s a lush retort to the pessimism of this era, verdant proof that growth remains possible, at least with the requisite will and the right strategies.

The transformation of New York has happened incrementally enough — one year the High Line, another year Brooklyn Bridge Park — that it often escapes full, proper appreciation. But it’s a remarkable, hopeful stride.

It’s also emblematic of a coast-to-coast pattern of intensified dedication to urban parkland. While so much of American life right now is attended by the specter of decline, many cities are blossoming, with New York providing crucial inspiration.

“It represents a great example because it’s our largest urban area in America,” said Ken Salazar, the United States secretary of the interior, on the phone Friday, suggesting that if the Big Apple can carve out green amid its gray, any city can. Salazar plans to visit New York on Tuesday to address an international conference, already under way, called “Greater & Greener: Re-Imagining Parks for 21st Century Cities.”

The location of the conference in New York pays deliberate tribute to the progress this city has made, much of it under the Bloomberg administration, which followed through on plans it inherited, expanding some of them, and hatched many of its own.”

Congratulations New York, Mayor Bloomberg, and all who made this happen.

Tony

 

 

 

Budget Cuts in Public Education Are Hurting Our Children!

Dear Commons Community,

The Huffington Post has an article looking at the dire financial situation in public education.  Thirty-four states have slashed their K-12 education budgets since 2008, according to the Center on Budget and Policy Priorities.  When school budgets are cut, fewer teachers are hired , class size increases and other services curtailed.  The US Education Department’s most recent data show that class sizes averaged 20 students in elementary schools and 23.4 in secondary schools in 2008, before the recession took its toll.  National data are not available yet for the past three years.

The article opens with a story of Shania who attends P.S. 148 in Queens, New York.  Shania had 31 classmates this past school year, compared to 20 the year before. “Mommy, I want to change,” Shania said a week into the school year, according to her mother, Laynory Loaiza. “There are too many kids in my class, and when I try to talk to the teacher, she doesn’t pay attention to me.” Shania liked her veteran teacher, Joan Barnett, but with 32 eight-year-olds to teach, Barnett said she simply didn’t have time to slow things down and repeat lessons on multiplication and division more than twice.  Barnett also indicated that two years ago, she had 20 students. Last year, she had 21. This year, she had 32 — a 60 percent increase over two years.

“Next year, I might have 34 kids,” Barnett said. “We didn’t even have enough desks [this year].”

At the beginning of this school year, the United Federation of Teachers,  released a study of 900 schools showing that 61 percent of middle schools and 59 percent of high schools increased the size of their classes. Add in cutbacks in school supply budgets and textbooks, the study found, and 91 percent of New York City’s schoolchildren felt the pain of belt-tightening.

Likewise, teachers in McAllen, Texas, reported having 50 students in their classes this year, and a Las Vegas kindergarten teacher had 41 kids. According to the National Education Association, there are as many school jobs now as there were in April 2005 — but 300,000 more students.

Making sure class sizes don’t explode nationwide would cost $10 billion annually, according to a March report from the Southern Regional Educational Board.  Neither President Obama nor candidate Mitt Romney have been discussing education very much as part of their campaigning but the fact is that we are mortgaging both our children’s and our country’s future by allowing the budgets of our public education systems to wither.

Tony

 

Mitt Romney, Bain Capital, and Income Taxes!

Dear Commons Community,

Mitt Romney is not having the best of weeks on the presidential campaign trail.  President Barack Obama has been hammering away at him for outsourcing jobs while at Bain Capital.  Romney denies this and has indicated that he was not in the employ of Bain when jobs were supposedly outsourced.  Today two New York Times columnists (Gail Collins and Charles Blow) are trying to analyze these issues and both come up on the side that Romney is either hiding something or he is fudging the truth.

First, Collins on Bain Capital:

“Let’s see if we can get this straight. In 1999, Mitt Romney quit his hypersuccessful financial career at the private-equity firm in order to run the troubled Winter Olympics in Salt Lake City. “I would walk away from my leadership at Bain Capital at the height of its profitability and take a position without compensation,” he wrote in his book “Turnaround…”

Romney gave five network television interviews on the subject on Friday. While it was true that a bunch of Securities and Exchange Commission filings submitted into the new millennium described Romney as Bain Capital’s boss, that was a technicality, he told CNN.

Well, actually, he said, “I was the owner of an entity that is filing that information.” Also that there’s a difference between an owner and “a person who’s running an entity…”

In the period between 1999 and 2002, Bain Capital engaged in a certain amount of activity along the steel-mill-closing, toymaker-killing, job-exporting lines. But Romney says he wasn’t responsible because he had walked away.   Sort of. While he was in Utah getting the luge runs [working on the Olympics] in shape, Romney was also still getting a six-figure salary for being a Bain “executive.” Perhaps for Mitt, that was just the going-away equivalent of a monogrammed briefcase. Although it does sort of take the steam out of his principled refusal to accept any money from the Olympics until his turnaround was successfully completed.

So to summarize: Romney was at Bain after 1999, but not necessarily in the sense of occupying physical space. He was employed by folks in Utah, but not in the sense of the people who made out his paycheck.

If we ever manage to really get our heads around Higgs boson, perhaps we will also be able to understand the Mitt Romney Olympics period.”

Charles Blow after reviewing a bit more briefly the Bain connection focuses on the issue that all of this could be cleared up if Romney would just release his income tax returns to show the source of his earnings.  Blow does not hold back:

“Romney has only released a complete return for 2010 and an unfinished estimate for 2011. This is less than any other presidential candidate in recent history. As The Times put it in a scathing editorial this week, “what information he did release provides a fuzzy glimpse at a concerted effort to park much of his wealth in overseas tax shelters, suggesting a widespread pattern of tax avoidance unlike that of any previous candidate.”

Blind trusts, Swiss bank accounts and Bermuda accounts designed to shield your money from the taxing agency of the country you want to lead just doesn’t sound right. And Romney’s reluctance to reveal more suggests that there is more that’s distasteful… Romney’s tax return defense is that, “all the taxes are paid, as appropriate.” Propriety is a matter of perspective.

My [Charles Blow] mother used to say: “If you tell the truth, you don’t have to remember what you said.” The simple truth makes sense, stands on its own and can be proved. Nine times out of 10, things that require constant clarification and endless appending aren’t the simple truth.

That’s mother’s wit, and everyone has a mother.”

Romney, Bain Capital and his tax returns are not going away anytime soon.

Tony

 

 

Meritocracies, Elites, and Corruption!!

Dear Commons Community,

David Brooks in his New York Times column entitled, “Why our Elites Stink”, comments on the American meritocracy.  He posits that:

“… through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service.  Over the past half–century, a more diverse and meritocratic elite has replaced the Protestant Establishment. People are more likely to rise on the basis of grades, test scores, effort and performance.  Yet, as this meritocratic elite has taken over institutions, trust in them has plummeted. It’s not even clear that the brainy elite is doing a better job of running them than the old boys’ network. Would we say that Wall Street is working better now than it did 60 years ago? Or government? The system is more just, but the outcomes are mixed. The meritocracy has not fulfilled its promise.”

Brooks contrasts his views with those of Christopher Hayes, MSNBC commentator and writer for The Nation.  Hayes in his book, Twilight of the Elites, argues that meritocratic elites may rise on the basis of grades, effort and merit, but, to preserve their status, they become corrupt. They create wildly unequal societies, and then they rig things so that few can climb the ladders behind them. Meritocracy leads to oligarchy.

Brooks counters:

“It’s a challenging argument but wrong. I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

Phenomena like the test-prep industry are just the icing on the cake, giving some upper-middle-class applicants a slight edge over other upper-middle-class applicants. The real advantages are much deeper and more honest.

The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.”

My conclusion is that we have moved from one elite to another elite and both used their positions to maintaining their status in society above all else.  No one ever wants to move backwards.  An elite is an elite is an elite.

Tony