2012 to Present Timeline

In 2012 the Internet security company Imperva published "Imperva's Hacker Intelligence Summary Report. The Anatomy of an Anonymous Attack."

"During 2011, Imperva witnessed an assault by the hacktivist group ‘Anonymous’ that lasted 25 days. Our observations give insightful information on Anonymous, including a detailed analysis of hacking methods, as well as an examination of how social media provides a communications platform for recruitment and attack coordination. Hacktivism has grown dramatically in the past year and has become a priority for security organizations worldwide. Understanding Anonymous’ attack methods will help organizations prepare if they are ever a target.

"Our observation of an Anonymous campaign reveals:

"› The process used by Anonymous to pick victims as well as recruit and use needed hacking talent.

"› How Anonymous leverages social networks to recruit members and promotes hack campaigns.

"› The specific cyber reconnaissance and attack methods used by Anonymous’ hackers. We detail and sequence the steps Anonymous hackers deploy that cause data breaches and bring down websites.

"Finally, we recommend key mitigation steps that organizations need to help protect against attacks."

"During the Middle Ages, books of hours were more popular than any other text, even the Bible. These intricately illustrated devotional texts began to appear around 1250 and contained a series of psalms meant to be read at eight specific hours of the day, hence their name. Hymns, lessons, and biblical readings were rendered with varying degrees of color and ornamentation. The books were widely owned in Europe until their use was prohibited by the church in the 16th century. Today, says dealer Sam Fogg, of London, books of hours are 'almost the only way you can acquire medieval painting that looks like it was when it was new, with the colors still glowing and the gold still shines.'

“ 'People aren’t aware that you can just buy these things,' says Timothy Bolton, deputy director of Western medieval manuscripts at Sotheby’s London. Experts estimate that approximately 100 books of hours change hands every year at auction or through a dozen or so private dealers. 'Of all the types of manuscripts extant from the Middle Ages, books of hours are easiest to acquire, because so many remain in private hands' notes Sandra Hindman, owner of Les Enluminures, a gallery in Chicago, Paris, and, as of this month, New York, that specializes in the books" (http://artinfo.com/news/story/804319/illuminating-the-surprisingly-accessible-market-for-medieval-books-of-hours, accessed 05-15-2012).

In January 2012 The Watchtower announced that it was printing "42,182,000 copies in 194 languages."  This represented a substantial increase over the number of printed copies produced and the number of languages represented in 2007.

In March 2012 www.watchtower.org was available in 438 languages.

Research on Paper Though Time by a University of Iowa team led by Timothy Barrett, director of papermaking facilities at the UI Center for the Book, showed that the earliest paper tended to be the most durable over time because of high qualities of gelatin and calcium in its manufacture. Over three years the team analyzed 1,578 historical papers made between the 14th and the 19th centuries. Barrett and his colleagues devised methods to determine their chemical composition without requiring a sample to be destroyed in the process, which had limited past research.

“This is news to many of us in the fields of papermaking history and rare book and art conservation,” says Barrett. “The research results will impact the manufacture of modern paper intended for archival applications, and the care and conservation of historical works on paper.”  

Barrett says one possible explanation for the higher quality of the paper in the older samples is that papermakers at the time were attempting to compete with parchment, a tough enduring material normally made from animal skins. In doing so, they made their papers thick and white and dipped the finished sheets into a dilute warm gelatin solution to toughen it.  

“Calcium compounds were used in making parchment, and they were also used in making paper,” Barrett says. “Turns out they helped prevent the paper from becoming acidic, adding a lot to its longevity.”

"In 2011, manufacturers shipped about 30 million e-book readers over all, up 108 percent from 2010. . . .  

"Then in 2015, the reader market will shrink to 38 million, presumably because consumers will be attracted to tablets.  

"Sales of touch-screen tablets have continued to be strong. Apple’s iPad shipped upward of 40 million units in 2011 alone, according to estimates by Forrester, a research firm.  

"Amazon and Barnes & Noble are blurring the lines between e-readers and tablets with the Kindle Fire and the Nook Tablet. Forrester Research estimates that in the fourth quarter of 2011, Amazon shipped about five million units of the Kindle Fire and Barnes & Noble shipped about two million Tablets" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/06/technology/nook-from-barnes-noble-gains-more-e-book-readers.html?src=rechp, accessed 01-05-2012).

"We’re transforming Google into a search engine that understands not only content, but also people and relationships. We began this transformation with Social Search, and today we’re taking another big step in this direction by introducing three new features:  

"1. Personal Results, which enable you to find information just for you, such as Google+ photos and posts—both your own and those shared specifically with you, that only you will be able to see on your results page;  

"2. Profiles in Search, both in autocomplete and results, which enable you to immediately find people you’re close to or might be interested in following; and, 

"3. People and Pages, which help you find people profiles and Google+ pages related to a specific topic or area of interest, and enable you to follow them with just a few clicks. Because behind most every query is a community. 

"Together, these features combine to create Search plus Your World. Search is simply better with your world in it, and we’re just getting started" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/search-plus-your-world.html, accessed 01-11-2010).

Jonathan M. Rothberg, CEO of Guilford, Connecticut-based biotech company Ion Torrent, announced a new tabletop sequencer called the Ion Proton. The company introduced the device at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas on January 10, although the sequencer is only available to researchers at this point. At $149,000, the new machine is about three times the price of the Personal Genome Machine, the sequencer that the company debuted about a year ago. But the DNA-reading chip inside it is 1,000 times more powerful, according to Rothberg, allowing the device to sequence an entire human genome in a day for $1,000—a price the biotech industry has been working toward for years because it would bring the cost down to the level of a medical test.

'The technology got better faster than we ever imagined,'Rothberg says. 'We made a lot of progress on the chemistry and software, then developed a new series of chips from a new foundry.' The result is a technology progression that has moved faster than Moore's law, which predicts that microchips will double in power roughly every two years.

"Ion Torrent's semiconductor-based approach for sequencing DNA is unique. Currently, optics-based sequencers, primarily from Illumina, a San Diego-based company, dominate the human genomics field. But, while the optics-based sequencers are generally considered more accurate, these machines cost upwards of $500,000, putting them out of reach for most clinicians. Meanwhile, at Ion Torrent's price, "you can imagine one in every doctor's office," says Richard Gibbs, director of Baylor College of Medicine's human genome sequencing center in Houston, which will be among the first research centers to receive a Proton sequencer.  

"The new Ion Torrent sequencer will also allow researchers to buy a chip that sequences only exons, the regions of the genome that encode proteins. Exons only account for about 5 percent of the human genome, according to the National Human Genome Research Institute, but they are where most disease-causing mutations occur, making so-called exome sequencing a faster and potentially cheaper option for many researchers. Although it's the same price as the genome chip, the Ion Torrent exome chip can sequence two exomes at a time, bringing the per-sequence cost down to $500.  

" 'Some researchers want to sequence single genes, others want to do exomes, and others—for example, cancer researchers—will want to sequence whole genomes, so all three are going to coexist,' says Rothberg. 'It's about finding the right tool for the problem.'  

"Whether Ion Torrent's new technology will be enough to make it the dominant supplier of these tools remains to be seen. A day after the company debuted the Proton sequencer, Illumina also announced that it, too, had reached the $1,000 genome milestone" (http://www.technologyreview.com/biomedicine/39458/?nlid=nldly&nld=2012-01-13, accessed 01-13-2013).

Sebastian Loth, Susanne Baumann, Christopher P. Lutz, D. M. Eigler, Andreas J. Heinrich, all of whom are affiliated with IBM Research- Alamaden, San Jose, CA, and some of whom are afilliated with the Max Planck Research Group-Dynamics of Naonelectronic Systems, and the Department of Physics, University of Basel, published "Bistability in Atomic-Scale Antiferromagnets," Science, Vol. 335, no. 6065, 196-199. DOI: 10.1126/science.1214131

The authors built the world's smallest magnetic data storage unit, which uses just twelve atoms per bit, the basic unit of information, and squeezes a whole byte (8 bits) into as few as 96 atoms. For comparison, in 2012 a hard drive uses more than half a billion atoms per byte.

"The nanometre data storage unit was built atom by atom with the help of a scanning tunneling microscope (STM) at IBM's Almaden Research Center in San Jose, California. The researchers constructed regular patterns of iron atoms, aligning them in rows of six atoms each. Two rows are sufficient to store one bit. A byte correspondingly consists of eight pairs of atom rows. It uses only an area of 4 by 16 nanometres (a nanometre being a millionth of a millimetre). 'This corresponds to a storage density that is a hundred times higher compared to a modern hard drive,' explains Sebastian Loth of CFEL, lead author of the "Science" paper.  

"Data are written into and read out from the nano storage unit with the help of an STM. The pairs of atom rows have two possible magnetic states, representing the two values '0' and '1' of a classical bit. An electric pulse from the STM tip flips the magnetic configuration from one to the other. A weaker pulse allows to read out the configuration, although the nano magnets are currently only stable at a frosty temperature of minus 268 degrees Centigrade (5 Kelvin). 'Our work goes far beyond current data storage technology,' says Loth. The researchers expect arrays of some 200 atoms to be stable at room temperature. Still it will take some time before atomic magnets can be used in data storage.

First antiferromagnetic data storage  

"For the first time, the researchers have managed to employ a special form of magnetism for data storage purposes, called antiferromagnetism. Different from ferromagnetism, which is used in conventional hard drives, the spins of neighbouring atoms within antiferromagnetic material are oppositely aligned, rendering the material magnetically neutral on a bulk level. This means that antiferromagnetic atom rows can be spaced much more closely without magnetically interfering with each other. Thus, the scientist managed to pack bits only one nanometre apart" (http://www.desy.de/information__services/press/pressreleases/@@news-view?id=2141&lang=eng, accessed 01-12-2012)

British paleontologist Howard Falcon-Lang of the University of London rediscovered a "treasure trove" of microscopic slides of fossils, including some collected by Charles Darwin, in an old cabinet in the British Geological Survery. The fossils, which were lost, or perhaps more accurately, hidden and forgotten, for 165 years, were part of a slide collection assembled by British botanist and evolutionist Joseph Dalton Hooker, who was Darwin's best friend. The slides were photographed and made available through an online museum exhibit. This was among the most significant historical discoveries ever made of primary source material concerning Charles Darwin and the Voyage of the Beagle.

"Falcon-Lang's find was a collection of 314 slides of specimens collected by Darwin and other members of his inner circle, including John [sic] Hooker — a botanist and dear friend of Darwin — and the Rev. John Henslow, Darwin's mentor at Cambridge, whose daughter later married Hooker.  

"The first slide pulled out of the dusty corner at the British Geological Survey turned out to be one of the specimens collected by Darwin during his famous expedition on the HMS Beagle, which changed the young Cambridge graduate's career and laid the foundation for his subsequent work on evolution.  

"Falcon-Lang said the unearthed fossils — lost for 165 years — show there is more to learn from a period of history scientists thought they knew well.  

" 'To find a treasure trove of lost Darwin specimens from the Beagle voyage is just extraordinary,' Falcon-Lang added. 'We can see there's more to learn. There are a lot of very, very significant fossils in there that we didn't know existed.' He said one of the most 'bizarre' slides came from Hooker's collection — a specimen of prototaxites, a 400 million-year-old tree-sized fungus.  

"Hooker had assembled the collection of slides while briefly working for the British Geological Survey in 1846, according to Royal Holloway, University of London.  

"The slides — 'stunning works of art,' according to Falcon-Lang — contain bits of fossil wood and plants ground into thin sheets and affixed to glass in order to be studied under microscopes. Some of the slides are half a foot long (15 centimeters), 'great big chunks of glass,' Falcon-Lang said.  

" 'How these things got overlooked for so long is a bit of a mystery itself,' he mused, speculating that perhaps it was because Darwin was not widely known in 1846 so the collection might not have been given 'the proper curatorial care.'  

"Royal Holloway, University of London said the fossils were 'lost' because Hooker failed to number them in the formal 'specimen register' before setting out on an expedition to the Himalayas. In 1851, the 'unregistered' fossils were moved to the Museum of Practical Geology in Piccadilly before being transferred to the South Kensington's Geological Museum in 1935 and then to the British Geological Survey's headquarters near Nottingham 50 years later, the university said" (http://www.nytimes.com/aponline/2012/01/17/world/europe/AP-EU-Britain-Darwin-Fossils.html?scp=1&sq=darwin+slides&st=nyt, accessed 01-19-2012).

On January 17, 2012 Wikipedia went down and WordPress was dark to protest the potential passage of two bills under consideration by the U.S. Congress. The bills were known as the PROTECT IP Act (PIPA) in the Senate and the Stop Online Piracy Act (SOPA) in the House.

According to the Official Google Blog:

"♦ PIPA & SOPA will censor the web. These bills would grant new powers to law enforcement to filter the Internet and block access to tools to get around those filters. We know from experience that these powers are on the wish list of oppressive regimes throughout the world. SOPA and PIPA also eliminate due process. They provide incentives for American companies to shut down, block access to and stop servicing U.S. and foreign websites that copyright and trademark owners allege are illegal without any due process or ability of a wrongfully targeted website to seek restitution.

" ♦ PIPA & SOPA will risk our industry’s track record of innovation and job creation. These bills would make it easier to sue law-abiding U.S. companies. Law-abiding payment processors and Internet advertising services can be subject to these private rights of action. SOPA and PIPA would also create harmful (and uncertain) technology mandates on U.S. Internet companies, as federal judges second-guess technological measures used by these companies to stop bad actors, and potentially impose inconsistent injunctions on them.

" ♦ PIPA & SOPA will not stop piracy. These bills wouldn’t get rid of pirate sites. Pirate sites would just change their addresses in order to continue their criminal activities. There are better ways to address piracy than to ask U.S. companies to censor the Internet. The foreign rogue sites are in it for the money, and we believe the best way to shut them down is to cut off their sources of funding. As a result, Google supports alternative approaches like the OPEN Act" (http://googleblog.blogspot.com/2012/01/dont-censor-web.html, accessed 01-19-2012)

Apple released iBooks 2, a free app to support digital textbooks that could display interactive diagrams, audio and video. At a news conference at the Guggenheim Museum in New York the company demonstrated a biology textbook featuring 3-D models, searchable text, photo galleries and flash cards for studying. Apple said high school textbooks from its initial publishing partners, including Pearson, McGraw-Hill and Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, would cost $15 or less.  

"Apple also announced a free tool called iBooks Author, a piece of Macintosh software that allows people to make these interactive textbooks. The tool includes templates designed by Apple, which publishers and authors can customize to suit their content. It requires no programming knowledge and will be available Thursday. 

"The company also unveiled the iTunes U app for the iPad, which allows teachers to build an interactive syllabus for their coursework. Students can load the syllabus in iTunes U and, for example, tap to open an electronic textbook and go directly to the assigned chapter. Teachers can use iTunes U to create full online courses with podcasts, video, documents and books" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/01/19/apple-unveils-tools-for-digital-textbooks/?nl=technology&emc=cta4, accessed 01-19-2012). 

On January 23, 2012 Reuters reported from Kabul that a cache of ancient Jewish scrolls were discovered in Samangan Province of northern Afghanistan. Written in Hebrew, Aramaic, Judeo-Arabic and Judeo-Persian – the Persian and Afghan Jews' long lost equivalent of Yiddish, which was written in Hebrew letters, the manuscripts are the first physical evidence of a Jewish community in Afghanistan a millenium ago.

"The 150 or so documents, dated from the 11th century, were found in Afghanistan's Samangan province and most likely smuggled out -- a sorry but common fate for the impoverished and war-torn country's antiquities.  

"Israeli emeritus professor Shaul Shaked, who has examined some of the poems, commercial records and judicial agreements that make up the treasure, said while the existence of ancient Afghan Jewry is known, their culture was still a mystery.  'Here, for the first time, we see evidence and we can actually study the writings of this Jewish community. It's very exciting,' Shaked told Reuters by telephone from Israel, where he teaches at the Comparative Religion and Iranian Studies department at the Hebrew University of Jerusalem.  

"The hoard is currently being kept by private antique dealers in London, who have been producing a trickle of new documents over the past two years, which is when Shaked believes they were found and pirated out of Afghanistan in a clandestine operation.  

"It is likely they belonged to Jewish merchants on the Silk Road running across Central Asia, said T. Michael Law, a British Academy Postdoctoral Fellow at Oxford University's Center for Hebrew and Jewish Studies.  

"They might have been left there by merchants travelling along the way, but they could also come from another nearby area and deposited for a reason we do not yet understand,' Law said" (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/01/23/us-afghanistan-jewish-scrolls-idUSTRE80M18W20120123, accessed 01-03-2013).

In March 2012 it was reported that approximately 200 documents had been found from the Afghan Genizah (Geniza), the most significant find of Hebrew manuscripts since the Cairo Genizah, discovered late in the nineteenth century.

On January 3, 2013 The National Library of Israel in Jerusalem announced that after long negotiations with antiquities dealers it had purchased 29 manuscripts from the Afghan Geniza "out of the hundreds that are said to be available."

On January 23, 2012 Erik Brynjolfsson and Andrew McAfee of MIT issued Race Against the Machine: How the Digital Revolution is Accelerating Innovation, Driving Productivity, and Irreversibly Transforming Employment and the Economy. 

Drawing on research by their team at the Center for Digital Business at MIT, the authors show that digital technologies are rapidly encroaching on skills that used to belong to humans alone.

"This phenomenon is both broad and deep, and has profound economic implications. Many of these implications are positive; digital innovation increases productivity, reduces prices (sometimes to zero), and grows the overall economic pie.

"But digital innovation has also changed how the economic pie is distributed, and here the news is not good for the median worker. As technology races ahead, it can leave many people behind. Workers whose skills have been mastered by computers have less to offer the job market, and see their wages and prospects shrink. Entrepreneurial business models, new organizational structures and different institutions are needed to ensure that the average worker is not left behind by cutting-edge machines.

"In Race Against the Machine Brynjolfsson and McAfee bring together a range of statistics, examples, and arguments to show that technological progress is accelerating, and that this trend has deep consequences for skills, wages, and jobs. The book makes the case that employment prospects are grim for many today not because there's been technology has stagnated, but instead because we humans and our organizations aren't keeping up."

About a year later, on January 13, 2013, CBS television's 60 Minutes broadcast a report on automation in the workplace taking the viewpoint expressed in Brynjolfsson and McAfee's book entitled "Are robots hurting job growth?" (accessed 01-27-2013).

Following up on the issue, on January 23, 2013 John Markoff published an article in The New York Times entitled "Robot Makers Spread Global Gospel of Automation." Markoff reported that Henrik I. Christensen, the Kuka Chair of Robotics at Georgia Institue of Technology's College of Computing was highly critical of the 60 Minutes report.

"During his talk, Dr. Christensen said that the evidence indicated that the opposite was true. While automation may transform the work force and eliminate certain jobs, it also creates new kinds of jobs that are generally better paying and that require higher-skilled workers.

" 'We see today that the U.S. is still the biggest manufacturing country in terms of dollar value,' Dr. Christensen said. 'It’s also important to remember that manufacturing produces more jobs in associated areas than anything else.'

"An official of the International Federation of Robotics acknowledged that the automation debate had sprung back to life in the United States, but he said that America was alone in its anxiety over robots and automation.

 'This is not happening in either Europe or Japan,' said Andreas Bauer, chairman of the federation’s industrial robot suppliers group and an executive at Kuka Robotics, a German robot maker.

"To buttress its claim that automation is not a job killer but instead a way for the United States to compete against increasingly advanced foreign competitors, the industry group reported findings on Tuesday that it said it would publish in February. The federation said the industry would directly and indirectly create from 1.9 million to 3.5 million jobs globally by 2020.

"The federation held a news media event at which two chief executives of small American manufacturers described how they had been able to both increase employment and compete against foreign companies by relying heavily on automation and robots.

“ 'Automation has allowed us to compete on a global basis. It has absolutely created jobs in southwest Michigan,' said Matt Tyler, chief executive of Vickers Engineering, an auto parts supplier. 'Had it not been for automation, we would not have beat our Japanese competitor; we would not have beat our Chinese competitor; we would not have beat our Mexican competitor. It’s a fact.'

Also making the case was Drew Greenblatt, the widely quoted president and owner of Marlin Steel, a Baltimore manufacturer of steel products that has managed to expand and add jobs by deploying robots and other machines to increase worker productivity.

“ 'In December, we won a job from a Chicago company that for over a decade has bought from China,' he said. 'It’s a sheet-metal bracket; 160,000 sheet-metal brackets, year in, year out. They were made in China, now they’re made in Baltimore, using steel from a plant in Indiana and the robot was made in Connecticut.'

"A German robotics engineer argued that automation was essential to preserve jobs and also vital to make it possible for national economies to support social programs.

“ 'Countries that have high productivity can afford to have a good social system and a good health system,' said Alexander Verl, head of the Fraunhofer Institute for Manufacturing Engineering in Germany. “You see that to some extent in Germany or in Sweden. These are countries that are highly automated but at the same time they spend money on elderly care and the health system.'

"In the report presented Tuesday by the federation, the United States lags Germany, South Korea and Japan in the density of manufacturing robots employed (measured as the number of robots per 10,000 human workers). South Korea, in particular, sharply increased its robot-to-worker ratio in the last three years and Germany has twice the robot density as the United States, according to a presentation made by John Dulchinos, a board member of the Robot Industries Association and the chief executive of Adept Technology, a Pleasanton, Calif., maker of robots. 

"The report indicates that although China and Brazil are increasing the number of robots in their factories, they still trail the advanced manufacturing countries.  

"Mr. Dulchinos said that the United States had only itself to blame for the decline of its manufacturing sector in the last decade.

“ 'I can tell you that in the late 1990s my company’s biggest segment was the cellular phone market,' he said. 'Almost overnight that industry went away, in part because we didn’t do as good a job as was required to make that industry competitive.'

"He said that if American robots had been more advanced it would have been possible for those companies to maintain the lowest cost of production in the United States.  

“ 'They got all packed up and shipped to China,' Mr. Dulchinos said. 'And so you fast-forward to today and there are over a billion cellphones produced a year and not a single one is produced in the United States.'

"Yet, in the face of growing anxiety about the effects of automation on the economy, there were a number of bright spots. The industry is now generating $25 billion in annual revenue. The federation expects 1.6 million robots to be produced each year by 2015."

Facebook, headquartered in Menlo Park, California, filed for its IPO stating that it had 845,000,000 users. Revenue in 2011 surged 88% to $3.71 billion. About 85% of that revenue came from advertising. Net income rose by nearly two-thirds to $1 billion.

" 'If you want a picture of the future, imagine a boot stamping on a human face — forever,' George Orwell wrote in 'Nineteen Eighty-Four.' In 'Animal Farm,' he concluded that revolutions are inevitably betrayed by their leaders. His novel 'Burmese Days' ends with the hero killing himself because he is unfit to live in this sour world. He shoots his dog too.  

"As a rule, modern civilization disappointed Orwell when it did not actually sicken him. But in at least one respect he was way too optimistic. Bookselling, he wrote in Fortnightly in November 1936, 'is a humane trade which is not capable of being vulgarized beyond a certain point. The combines can never squeeze the small independent bookseller out of existence as they have squeezed the grocer and the milkman.'

"Jump forward three-quarters of a century, and a certain Seattle-based combine is being accused of exactly that. All sorts of merchants, but particularly booksellers, were infuriated by Amazon’s effort before the holidays to use shops on Main Street and in malls as showrooms for people to check out items before ordering them more cheaply online. The retailer’s refusal to collect sales tax is a persistent grievance. Independent booksellers have even been forced into the novel position of hoping that their one-time foe, Barnes & Noble, survives so that it can serve as a bulwark against Amazon. Publishers, if anything, are more fearful than booksellers.  

"Now take a look at the cover of Bloomberg Businessweek two weeks ago. It shows a book in flames with the headline, 'Amazon wants to burn the book business.' What was remarkable was not just the overt Nazi iconography but the fact that it did not cause any particular uproar. In the struggle over the future of intellectual commerce in the United States, apparently even evocations of Joseph Goebbels and the Brown Shirts are considered fair game.  

"From Amazon’s point of view, the cover is incorrect even if you disregard any Nazi connotations. What would be the use to Amazon of a charred hulk? It does not want to destroy the book business, but simply to reinvent it — or, as its opponents would have it, seize control of it. (Amazon declined to comment)" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/02/08/amazon-up-in-flames/?hp, accessed 02-08-2012).

The International League of Antiquarian Booksellers (ILAB) launched a mobil app for iPhone and Android.

"Google has been quietly slowing down its book-scanning work with partner libraries, according to librarians involved with the vast Google Books digitization project. But what that means for the company's long-term investment in the work remains unclear.  Google was not willing to say much about its plans. 'We've digitized more than 20 million books to date and continue to scan books with our library partners,' a Google spokeswoman told The Chronicle in an e-mailed statement.  

"Librarians at several of Google's partner institutions, including the University of Michigan and the University of Wisconsin systems, confirmed that the pace has slowed. 'They're still scanning. They're scanning at a lower rate than the peak,' said Paul N. Courant, Michigan's dean of libraries.  

"At Wisconsin, the scanning pace is 'something less than half of what it was' in 2006, the year the work started there, said Edward V. Van Gemert, the university's interim director of libraries.  

"Wisconsin's agreement with Google stipulated that the scanning would continue for at least six years or until half a million works had been digitized. 'We anticipated this slowdown,' he said (The Chronicle of Higher Education, March 9, 2012, accessed 01-27-2013).

Jorge Cauz, president of Encyclopaedia Britannica, Inc. in Chicago announced that after 244 years of print publication the 2010 edition of the Encyclopaedia Britannica, in 32 printed volumes, containing 44 million words, and weighing 129 pounds, would be the last printed edition. 

"The oldest continuously published encyclopedia in the English language, the Encyclopaedia Britannica has become a luxury item with a $1,395 price tag; it is typically purchased by embassies and well-educated, upscale consumers who feel an attachment to the set of bound volumes. Only 8,000 sets of the 2010 edition have been sold, and the remaining 4,000 have been stored in a warehouse until they can be purchased."

"Sales of Encyclopaedia Britannica peaked in 1990, when 120,000 sets were sold in the United States. But now print encyclopedias account for less than 1 percent of Encyclopaedia Britannica’s revenues. About 85 percent of revenues come from selling curriculum products in subjects like math, science and the English language; the remainder comes from subscriptions to the Web site, the company said.  

"About half a million households pay a $70 annual fee that includes access to the full database of articles, videos, original documents and access to mobile applications. A selection of articles is also available free on the Web site, said Peter Duckler, a spokesman for Britannica" (http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/03/13/after-244-years-encyclopaedia-britannica-stops-the-presses/?hp, accessed 03-13-2012).

According to a Nielsen report accessed on March 29, 2012, 49.7 percent of mobile subscribers owned smartphones as of February, 2012, an increase from 36 percent a year ago. Two-thirds of those who got a new phone in the last three months chose a smartphone over a feature phone.  Android-based phones led the U.S. smartphone market with a 48 percent share,  Apple's iPhone had 32 percent, and BlackBerry had 11.6 percent.

Source:

http://www.technolog.msnbc.msn.com/technology/technolog/half-us-cellular-subscribers-own-smartphones-nielsen-586757, accessed 03-29-2012.

“ 'Amazon must be unbelievably happy today,' said Michael Norris, a book publishing analyst with Simba Information. 'Had they been puppeteering this whole play, it could not have worked out better for them.'

"Amazon, which already controls about 60 percent of the e-book market, can take a loss on every book it sells to gain market share for its Kindle devices. When it has enough competitive advantage, it can dictate its own terms, something publishers say is beginning to happen.  

"The online retailer declined to comment Wednesday beyond its statement about lowering prices. Asked last month if Amazon had been talking to the Justice Department about the investigation — a matter of intense speculation in the publishing industry — a spokesman, Craig Berman, said, 'I can’t comment.'  

"Traditional bookstores, which have been under pressure from the Internet for years, fear that the price gap between the physical books they sell and e-books from Amazon will now grow so wide they will lose what is left of their market. Barnes & Noble stores, whose Nook is one of the few popular e-readers that is not built by Amazon, could suffer the same fate, analysts say.  

“ 'To stay healthy, this industry needs a lot of retailers that have a stake in the future of the product,' Mr. Norris said. 'The bookstore up the street from my office is not trying to gain market share. They’re trying to make money by selling one book at a time to one person at a time.'

"Electronic books have been around for more than a decade, but took off only when Amazon introduced the first Kindle e-reader in 2007. It immediately built a commanding lead. The antitrust case had its origins in the leading publishers’ struggle to control the power of Amazon, which had one point had 90 percent of the market.  

"Apple’s introduction of the iPad in early 2010 seemed to offer a way to combat Amazon" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/12/business/media/amazon-to-cut-e-book-prices-shaking-rivals.html?_r=1&hp, accessed 04-12-2012).

Columbia University announced that the 96th annual Pulitzer Prize "For a distinguished example of reporting on national affairs, using any available journalistic tool" was awarded to Huffington Post reporter David Wood "for his riveting exploration of the physical and emotional challenges facing American soldiers severely wounded in Iraq and Afghanistan during a decade of war."

Wood's series, Beyond the Battlefield, was characterized by the Huffington Post as "an exploration of the physical and emotional challenges, victories and setbacks that catastrophically wounded soldiers encounter after returning home."

"In recent years, the Pulitzer board has bestowed honors on newer outlets, such as ProPublica, a nonprofit newsroom that often teams up with established news organizations, and PolitiFact, a project of the Tampa Bay Times. Politico, a five-year-old newspaper and web site, took home its first Pulitzer prize Monday for Matt Wuerker's editorial cartoons. Still, a win in national reporting by an online-only news site is a departure from the typical list of legacy news outlets who clean up at the Pulitzers year after year" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/04/16/huffington-post-pulitzer-prize-2012_n_1429169.html, accessed 04-18-2012).

Mr Brian Geiger

Center for Bibliographical Studies & Research
University of California, Riverside
Highlander Hall, Building B, Room 114
Riverside, California 92507
USA

17 April 2012

Dear Mr Geiger

Improving the research potential of ESTC: consultation: A modest suggestion by William St Clair

I welcome the opportunity extended through SHARP L to offer suggestions for making ESTC more useful for researchers in the 21st century. Much of future research will, we can be confident, take the form of quantitative analysis, not necessarily just for checking of historical records, but for identifying trends, trying to recover the reading of the past, generating explanatory models and so on. The current suggestions for improving the interrogability of the present resource are to be welcomed.

However, I suggest, if we want to make the ESTC a research tool for the more ambitious questions, as is the stated aim, then in my view, the proposed changes will make only a limited contribution. Although in the English-speaking world, we have excellent catalogues and bibliographies, to my mind, the empirical factual basis on which those who attempt to address ambitious questions are reliant is seriously inadequate. Indeed, I suggest, the extent of the present inadequacy of data would not be tolerated by those familiar with the standards applicable and expected in the sciences and social sciences.

The biggest weakness for anyone attempting a history of books, or of the book industry, or of reading, is that 'titles' is a poor measure of book production. What we need, for a start, if we want to map the material extent of past production, are figures for print runs and sales, and also for price, as a good indicator of potential access, plus explanatory economic models for the various governing regimes [guild system, perpetual copyright, pirate and offshore, and so on]. We also need to develop formal ways of recognising and offsetting the inadequacies of the patchy archival record. Draft proposals for an ambitious project that would enable this kind of step change improvement in the data to be made have been prepared. If they are proceeded with, it will however take time before results become available and we see the benefits.

However, there is a notable weakness in the current situation that can be easily addressed and remedied, and that would be a helpful step in the right direction of making ESTC a more useful research tool. ESTC should, I suggest, consider the suggestion that I have made in print and in lectures on a number of occasions, most fully in my chapter in The Cambridge History of the Book in Britain, volume 6.

ESTC is, in a way, a victim of its own success. For the ready availability of lists of titles has fostered an illusion of completeness and that has led to users attempting to use it for purposes for which it is inadequate. Indeed the consultation document that has been circulated helps to prolong the illusion. I quote: 'The English Short Title Catalogue (ESTC) is a union catalog and bibliography of everything printed between 1473 and 1800 in England and its former colonies or in the English language elsewhere.' In fact, as I understand the situation, ESTC is a union catalogue of titles of which at least one copy is known to have survived somewhere in the world?

That is not a debating point. It has long been known that the survival rate of books and print from the early centuries is badly incomplete. And this is not just a general common sense understanding. We have good evidence of the large scale of the losses. D. F. McKenzie’s observation that the size of the English printing industry, as measured by the physical capital (presses) and personnel employed (apprentices and printers) scarcely changed between the mid sixteenth and late seventeenth century can only be squared with the sharp rise in surviving titles over the same period by postulating either that a high proportion of the industry was maintained in unemployment or that more output occurred than has survived, or some combination. [In CHBB, iv,17]. Since, until the early eighteenth century, the English state attempted to control the texts that were permitted to circulate within its jurisdiction not only by an array of direct textual controls but also by limiting the capacity of the industry, measured not by titles but by numbers of printed sheets, it is highly unlikely that a huge proportion of industrial capacity was kept in idleness or in reserve.

And we know the titles of many of these lost printed books. It has been known, at least since 1875, that the Stationers’ Company register included only a proportion of titles of which copies survive. [E Arber, A Transcript of the Registers of the Company of Stationers of London 1554-1640 volume 1]. The finding in my book The Reading Nation in the Romantic Period, 2006, 74-75, and 495-496, not challenged as far as I know, that large numbers of abridged ‘ballad versions’ of biblical stories were officially permitted until a sudden stop around 1600 depended upon my taking account of these lost, but registered, pieces of printed literature by scrutinising the registers myself. This result, and there are others, could not have emerged by interrogating ESTC nor would the current proposals to improve interrogability help. It is simply inadequate.

And it is not only in the early centuries of print that lists of titles known to survive are inadequate. For the eighteenth century, the survival rate of books known to have been produced, for example by being listed in advertisements, looks good for expensive books, patchy for some genres such as novels, and extremely poor for cheaper print. [Especially the two Dicey catalogues. Discussed in Reading Nation 340, and there appear to have been more cheap reprints of titles that entered the newly created public domain in the period after 1774 than are listed]. Soon after the 1800, the cut off date of ESTC, when we move to the age of stereotyping, 'titles' is such a poor indicator of production as to be of little value, and the survival rate for cheaper print known to have existed is even more poor.  ESTC cannot be held responsible if others misuse the information. But already it is used is to produce bogus statistics, even for titles, even for trends. Indeed, in some books and articles, the software that enables graphs, pie charts, bar charts and so on to be easily produced has given a spurious pseudo-scientific plausibility to results whose factual basis is simply not able to support them.  "There are no conceptual or methodological problems in my modest proposal for including lost books in ESTC. Provided the results can be aggregated with ESTC, they could be kept separate. The resources needed are largely clerical, potentially realisable by crowd sourcing. The potential improvement in the quality of research would, I suggest, be highly cost effective.

Yours sincerely
William St Clair

(source, accessed 04-23-2012).

"Publishers who want to stay in business are going to have to start selling books without digital rights management, says science fiction author Charlie Stross. DRM locks customers into individual ebookstores and devices, which is the primary way that Amazon perpetuates its stranglehold on this market.

"For AMZN, the big six insistence on DRM on ebooks was a windfall: it made the huge investment in the Kindle platform worthwhile, and by 2010 Amazon had come close to an 85% market share in the ebook sector (which was growing at a dizzying compound rate of 100-200% per annum, albeit from a small base). And now we get to 2012, and ebooks are likely to hit 40% of total publishing sales by the end of this year, and are on the way to 60% within five years (per Tim Hely Hutchinson, CEO of Hachette UK). In five years, we've gone from <1% to >40%. That's disruption for you!  

"As an author, it's theoretically in Stross's interest to maintain the DRM business as usual. But he argues, and I think recent history is on his side, that "the real driver for piracy is the lack of convenient access to desirable content at a competitive price."  

" As one of only two publishers who have decided not to settle with the DOJ in its case against them (the other is Penguin), Macmillan is now in a unique position: It's a large, profitable company that is willing to experiment, but also inherently conservative precisely because of its success.  

"I single out Macmillan because -- full disclosure -- I collaborated on new projects with the then-head of Macmillan US when I was an editor at Scientific American. It strikes me as exactly the sort of organization that is teetering on the edge of being the first do do the radical thing that's required to save itself -- namely, eliminate DRM from its ebooks and therefore destroy the Monopsony that Amazon will otherwise cement.

"When I wrote last week that I didn't think it particularly mattered whether or not Amazon became an e-book monopoly, because straight text is the most platform-independent kind of content in existence, I forgot that we still live in a world in which books purchased from Amazon can only be read on Amazon's devices and apps.  

"It's abundantly clear that publishers that survive in an Amazon world will be those who disrupt Amazon itself. If Amazon's aim is to "cut out the middleman" then the next logical step is for publishers to cut out the middleman that is Amazon.

"Stross lays it out in stark terms: And so [publishers] will deep-six their existing commitment to DRM and use the terms of the DoJ-imposed settlement to wiggle out of the most-favoured-nation terms imposed by Amazon, in order to sell their wares as widely as possible.  

"If they don't, they're doomed.  

"There is one other outcome that is possible, and unfortunately for existing publishers, I think it's the most likely: New publishing companies will spring up that are willing to publish books sans DRM. This will lead to (some) piracy but will also return to these companies the power to price their wares as they see fit. These companies will also, incidentally, not be saddled by the legacy costs of existing publishers. And in this way companies that have existed for centuries will be radically transformed -- or else cease to exist" (http://www.technologyreview.com/blog/mimssbits/27769/?nlid=nldly&nld=2012-04-18, accessed 04-18-2012).

On April 19, 2012 La Biblioteca de Girolamini (Biblioteca statale oratoriana del monumento nazionale dei Girolamini), the oldest library in Naples, and an Italian national treasure opened to the public in 1586, was impounded by the Italian police because of mismanagement and thefts.

"Girolamini Library’s Disappearing Books

"Two thousand intellectuals protest at director, a self-styled prince with no degree

"Would you entrust the contents of one of Italy’s – and the world’s – richest libraries to a self-styled “prince doctor” who is neither a prince nor a graduate? Yet that’s just what has happened. The “nobleman” in question is in charge, with ministerial approval, of Naples’ historic Girolamini library, where Giambattista Vico once ruminated. And when hundreds of academics raised the alarm in the press, said nobleman rushed to report the theft of a shedload of books.  

"It all started a couple of weeks ago. Florence-born Tomaso Montanari, who teaches history of modern art at Naples’ Federico II university and wrote a book called A che serve Michelangelo? [What’s the Point of Michelangelo?] advancing serious doubts on the attribution to the Renaissance genius of a crucifix purchased by the Berlusconi government for more than €3 million, wrote a piece for Il Fatto newspaper. Montanari said he had visited the Girolamini library, which holds over 150,000 ancient manuscripts and books, and found an appalling dust-layered mess with invaluable tomes lying on the floor and empty Coca-Cola cans on the ancient reading desks. Professor Montanari wrote: “The library is closed today because it has to be reorganised, says Fr Sandro Marsano, the enthusiastic, exquisitely polite Oratorian priest who welcomes visitors to the stupendous 17th-century complex. No, it’s closed because of the strange goings-on, say people who live nearby and mutter about heavily laden vehicles leaving the library courtyards late at night”.  

"The piece was a headline-grabber, not least because Montanari listed the question marks hanging over the new director, “Professor” Marino Massimo De Caro: “Whatever the case, it’s beyond belief that one of Italy’s great cultural shrines should be entrusted to a denizen of the ‘undergrowth’ described by Ferruccio Sansa and Claudio Gatti in their recently published book. De Caro is the middle man in the Venezuelan oil affair, ‘one of the most spectacular instances of convergence between Berlusconi supporters and D’Alema’s group’”. De Caro is also honorary consul for Congo, former assistant of Senator Carlo Corbinelli, former head of PR in north-eastern Italy for the public-sector pension fund INPDAP, executive vice-president from 2007 to 2010 of wind farm and solar energy firm Avelar Energia, owned by Russian oligarch Victor Vekselberg, former owner of an antiquarian bookshop in Verona, and former partner in the Buenos Aires antiquarian bookshop Imago Mundi owned by Daniel Guido Pastore, himself involved in Spain in inquiries into the theft of books from the national library in Madrid and the Zaragoza library.  

"De Caro entered ministry circles thanks to Giancarlo Galan, as a note from the ministry reveals: “Dr. Marino Massimo De Caro was invited to collaborate with the ministry by Minister Giancarlo Galan on 15 April 2011 as an expert consultant on issues concerning relations with the business system in the arts and publishing sectors, and on topics relating to the implementation of regulations concerning authorisation to build and operate facilities for the production of energy from renewable sources, and their appropriate insertion into the landscape. On 15 December 2011, Minister Lorenzo Ornaghi confirmed Dr. Marino Massimo De Caro’s appointment, along with those of other advisers to Minister Galan, as an expert consultant on issues concerning relations with the business system in the arts and publishing sectors”.  

"Here is a passage from Gatti and Sansa’s book Il sottobosco [The Undergrowth] referring to a phone tap: “On 27 December 2007, De Caro complained about a Carabinieri captain from the artistic heritage unit in Monza who was ‘bothering’ him about a book purchased at a public auction in Switzerland”. He is under investigation for handling stolen goods, he says, and this has hampered his appointment as honorary consul of Congo since the foreign ministry will not grant approval. (...) On 17 July 2009, De Caro was finally able to relax when Milan deputy public prosecutor Maria Letizia Mannella ‘established that the incunabulum has not been physically recovered, despite repeated searches’, and found there was no case to answer. In other words, since the allegedly stolen goods could not be traced and the three individuals involved were accusing each other, the prosecutor decided no further action need be taken”. No further action. But among all the candidates, were there none with an unblemished record to direct a library whose ancient books had already been ransacked in past decades?

"The day after Montanari’s protest, De Caro explained to the Corriere del Mezzogiorno that he his CV was kosher: “I graduated from Siena and I taught history and technology of publishing on the master’s course at the University of Verona”. He added: “I consulted for Cardinal Mejia, the Vatican librarian, I published a book on Galileo and I was director of the library at Orvieto cathedral”. De Caro went on to explain to Il Mattino newspaper: “My grandfather’s godfather was Benedetto Croce. My family, which passed down the title of Princes of Lampedusa, merged with the famous Tomasis thus becoming di Lampedusa, something we are proud of”.  

“Goodness gracious me!” might have been the reaction of comedian Totò, who himself claimed the title His Imperial Highness Antonio Porfirogenito, descended from Costantinople’s Focas dynasty, Angelo Flavio Ducas Comneno of Byzantium, prince of Cilicia, Macedonia, Dardania, Thessaly, Pontus, Moldava, Illyria and the Peloponnese, Duke of Cyprus and Epirus, Count and Duke of Drivasto and Durazzo. “Not true” came the reply the next day, again in Il Mattino, from the real Prince Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi: “The librarian’s assertions about his descent from the princes of Lampedusa are fabrications. The title of prince of Lampedusa was granted by Charles II of Spain to Ferdinando Tomasi in 1667. The Caros therefore have no claim whatsoever to the title of prince of Lampedusa. ... Our egregious librarian should have all this at his fingertips. And I would advise the prior of the Girolamini to keep a close eye on an archivist who prefers a shared surname to supporting documentation”.  

"OK, then, but he’s still a professor. That’s what it says in a press release from Il Buongoverno, a national association established in Milan and “chaired by Senator Riccardo Villari, with Marcello Dell’Utri as honorary national chair. The secretary is Senator Salvatore Piscitelli. (...) National organising secretary is Professor Marino Masimo De Caro”. Goodness gracious me again! It’s a pity that even though official ministerial notes and statements repeatedly refer to him as “doctor”, De Caro never actually graduated from the University of Siena, where he enrolled as a law student in 1992-93 and remained a student until 2002. Nor does the computer at the University of Verona have the least record of our hero’s having taught there. //But the funniest part of the story comes last. Even before all the tweaks were applied to his self-celebratory CV, hundreds of intellectuals were signing an appeal to the minister Lorenzo Ornaghi to ask him how a library as important as the Girolamini could be entrusted to “a man bereft of even the minimum academic qualifications or professional competence to honour the role”. By yesterday evening, this devastating denunciation had attracted just under two thousand signatures, including those of Marcello De Cecco, Ennio Di Nolfo, Dario Fo, Franca Rame, Carlo Ginzburg, Salvatore Settis, Tullio Gregory, Gustavo Zagrebelsky, Gioacchino Lanza Tomasi, Adriano La Regina, Gian Giacomo Migone, Alessandra Mottola Molfino (president of Italia Nostra), Lamberto Maffei (president of the Accademia dei Lincei), Dacia Maraini, Stefano Parise (president of the Italian library association), Stefano Rodotà and Rosario Villari among others.  

"Well, on the very morning when these intellectuals were making their reservations public, “Doctor” “Prince” “Professor” Marino Massimo De Caro turned up at the public prosecutor’s office to present formal notification of a crime. He had just realised that one thousand five hundred books were missing from the library" (http://www.corriere.it/International/english/artic(oli/2012/04/17/girolamini.shtml)

On May 9, 2012 the book auction house Zisska & Schauer in Munich, Germany, published the following statement on their website concerning their auction to be held that day: 

"Zisska & Schauer regrets to announce that the following lots registered under ownership numbers 4 and 132 of the present Auction Sale No. 59 have been withdrawn until recently expressed ownership concerns can be satisfactorily resolved: 79, 80, 81, 82, 83, 84, 85, 88, 89, 90, 93, 94, 95, 96, 97, 98, 99, 100, 101, 103, 105, 106, 107, 108, 110, 111, 112, 115, 116, 118, 119, 120, 121, 121, 122, 123, 124, 125, 126, 128, 129, 130, 131, 132, 133, 137, 138, 139, 140, 141, 143, 144, 145, 147, 149, 151, 156, 157, 164, 175, 176, 178, 179, 180, 184, 185, 189, 194, 195, 196, 198, 202, 207, 210, 212, 213, 216, 217, 218, 221, 222, 224, 225, 226, 227, 232, 235, 237, 243, 244, 245, 246, 247, 249, 250, 251, 253, 256, 258, 261, 264, 265, 266, 270, 271, 277, 282, 283, 289, 297, 307, 308, 309, 310, 311, 316, 317, 320, 322, 325, 328, 329, 333, 336, 340, 341, 342, 346, 348, 349, 350, 351, 352, 353, 354, 357, 355, 356, 358, 363, 364, 366, 367, 374, 380, 382, 383, 384, 388, 393, 400, 402, 404, 407, 409, 414, 415, 416, 419, 420, 421, 422, 423, 424, 425, 428, 429, 433, 442, 443, 444, 447, 448, 449, 450, 451, 452, 453, 456, 459, 460, 462, 466, 467, 470, 471, 473, 476, 477, 479, 480, 489, 506, 507, 508, 509, 512, 513, 514, 515, 518, 525, 529, 530, 532, 533, 534, 536, 537, 539, 541, 546, 547, 548, 549, 551a, 552, 553, 556, 558, 559, 560, 561, 563, 564, 565, 566, 567, 568, 571, 572, 573, 577, 579, 580, 582, 588, 589, 591, 598, 599, 600, 601, 605, 607, 608, 619, 620, 627, 630, 636, 643, 657, 659, 660, 661, 662, 666, 667, 668, 669, 670, 671, 672, 673, 674, 675, 678, 679, 680, 681, 682, 684, 685, 686, 687, 688, 689, 693, 695, 696, 697, 699, 700, 701, 702, 703, 704, 707, 709, 710, 712, 713, 715, 716, 717, 719, 720, 721, 722, 723, 724, 725, 726, 727, 728, 730, 735, 736, 738, 741, 754, 757, 763, 794, 795, 801, 815, 816, 840, 857, 858, 860, 864, 878, 891, 896, 906, 911, 918, 919, 920, 925, 926, 927, 950, 955, 957, 959, 960, 974, 975, 976, 977, 985, 988, 989, 994, 998, 999, 1040, 1753, 1973, 1980, 2001, 2020, 2038, 2049, 2051, 2055, 2063, 2065, 2068, 2069, 2070, 2076, 2081, 2088, 2098, 2099, 2101, 2103, 2105, 2108, 2118, 2120, 2121, 2124, 2135, 2248, 2255, 2304, 2306, 2312, 2320, 2324, 2370, 2373, 2376, 2378, 2379, 2384, 2386, 2390, 2398, 2401, 2575, 2586, 2589, 2591, 2593, 2594, 2595, 2597, 2603, 2642, 2663, 2666, 2676, 2682, 2686, 2688, 2704, 2707, 2709, 2711, 2713, 2719, 2721, 2723, 2735, 2748, 2775, 2776, 2780, 2782, 2787, 2796, 2797, 2804, 2818, 2820, 2831, 2846, 2847, 2850, 2854, 2855, 2856, 2860, 2861, 2863, 2864, 2866, 2867, 2869, 2870, 2880, 2887, 2888, 2892, 2893, 2897, 2898, 2899, 2900, 2902, 2904, 2914, 2919, 2921, 2944, 2945, 2947, 2950, 2952, 2956, 2957, 2958, 2960, 2963, 2965, 2968, 2969, 2970, 2974, 2977, 2981, 2987, 2988, 2989, 2994, 2999, 3002, 3003, 3032 and 3053."

Provenance information had been removed from roughly 500 books in this auction, clumsily and in haste, to the point of defacing some of the volumes; it was believed that they had been stolen from the Girolamini Library in Naples.

On April 23, 2012 the website of the University of St. Andrews in Scotland published an article entitled Dirty books reval secret lives of people living in mediaeval times. This article described a technique invented by Kathryn Rudy, lecturer in the School of Art History at St. Andrews, of using a densitometer to measure the dirt levels on pages of medieval books of hours, showing which pages were most read, leaving dirty residue. 

"Dr Rudy’s new technique with the machine, used on mediaeval prayer books, has shown people were as self-interested, and afraid of illness as today.  

"The ground-breaking research has even managed to pinpoint the moment that people fell asleep reading the same book.  

"For example one of the dirtiest pages in a selection of European religious books was a prayer to St Sebastian who was often prayed to because his arrow-wounds (the cause of his martyrdom) looked like the bubonic plague.

"This shows us that the reader of the book was terrified of the plague and repeated the prayer to ward off the disease.  

"Similarly pages which contained the prayers for the salvation of others were less dirty than those asking for salvation for oneself.  

"As well as demonstrating mediaeval people prayed for their own assistance, the analysis showed the pages of a prayer to be said in the small hours of the morning were only dirty for the first few pages.  

"Dr Rudy extrapolates that it shows most readers fell asleep at the same point.  

"She said: 'Although it is often difficult to study the habits, private rituals and emotional states of people, this new technique can let us into the minds of people from the past.  

“ 'Religion was inseparable from physical health, time management, and interpersonal relationships in mediaeval times. In the century before printing, people ordered tens of thousands of prayer books—sometimes quite beautifully illuminated ones—even thought they might cost as much as a house.  

“ 'As a result they were treasured, read several times a day at key prayer times, and through analysing how dirty the pages are we can identify the priorities and beliefs of their owners' " (http://www.st-andrews.ac.uk/news/archive/2012/Title,85210,en.html, accessed 06-23-2012).

"After a day of testimony at a British judicial inquiry over his ties, friendships and disputes with British politicians, Rupert Murdoch returned to the witness stand on Thursday, saying he apologized for failing to take measures to avert the hacking scandal that has convulsed his media outpost here [in Britain]."

"At times contrite and on a occasionally somewhat testy, Mr. Murdoch became more ruminative and discursive, when he was allowed to dwell at some length on the future of the printed word, pondering not only the destiny of his own newspapers but, as if addressing a seminar rather than an inquiry, also ranging over the broader issue of the future of the press in the digital era.

" 'The day would come, he said, when the news business would be 'purely electronic' in five, 10 or 20 years" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/04/27/world/europe/rupert-murdoch-testimony-leveson-inquiry-day-2.html?hp, accessed 04-26-2012).

On April 30, 2012 Microsoft announced  that it would invest $300 million in Barnes & Noble’s Nook division for a 17.6 percent stake. The deal valued Barnes & Noble's eBook reader business at $1.7 billion.  Notably that is nearly double what Barnes & Noble’s entire market capitalization was on Friday, April 27, and more than what Barnes & Noble was valued at any time since mid-2008.

Barnes & Noble, the largest bookselling chain in the United States, wagered heavily on the Nook, competing against Amazon’s Kindle and Apple's iPad.

"The Nook division’s growth has come at enormous financial cost, weighing down on Barnes & Noble’s bottom line and prompting the strategic review. The retailer added on Monday that it was still weighing other options for the business.

"Through the deal, the two companies will settle their patent disputes, and Barnes & Noble will produce a Nook e-reading application for the forthcoming Windows 8 operating system, which will run on traditional computers and tablets.  

"The new division, which has yet to be renamed, will also include Barnes & Noble’s college business. It is meant to help the business compete in what many expect to be a growth area for e-books: the education market, something that Apple has already set its sights on.  

" The new company and 'our relationship with Microsoft are important parts of our strategy to capitalize on the rapid growth of the Nook business, and to solidify our position as a leader in the exploding market for digital content in the consumer and education segments,' William J. Lynch Jr., Barnes & Noble’s chief executive, said in a statement (http://dealbook.nytimes.com/2012/04/30/microsoft-to-take-stake-in-barnes-nobles-nook-unit/?hp, accessed 04-30-2012).

Sentences that endure in the public mind are evolutionary success stories, comparing “the fitness of language and the fitness of organisms.” On April 30, 2012 Cristian Danescu-Niculescu-Mizil, Justin Cheng, Jon Kleinberg, and Lillian Lee of the Department of Computer Science at Cornell University published "You had me at hello: How phrasing affects memorability," arXiv: 1203.6360v2 [cs.CL] 30 Apr 2012, (accessed 01-27-2013). Using the "memorable quotes" selected from the Internet Movie Database or IMDb, and the number of times that a particular movie line appeared on the Internet, they compared the memorable lines to the complete scripts of the movies in which they appeared—about 1,000 movies

"To train their statistical algorithms on common sentence structure, word order and most widely used words, they fed their computers a huge archive of articles from news wires. The memorable lines consisted of surprising words embedded in sentences of ordinary structure. 'We can think of memorable quotes as consisting of unusual word choices built on a scaffolding of common part-of-speech patterns,' their study said.  

Consider the line 'You had me at hello,' from the movie 'Jerry McGuire.' It is, Mr. Kleinberg notes, basically the same sequence of parts of speech as the quotidian 'I met him in Boston.' Or consider this line from 'Apocalypse Now': 'I love the smell of napalm in the morning.'Only one word separates that utterance from this: 'I love the smell of coffee in the morning.'

"This kind of analysis can be used for all kinds of communications, including advertising. Indeed, Mr. Kleinberg’s group also looked at ad slogans. Statistically, the ones most similar to memorable movie quotes included 'Quality never goes out of style,' for Levi’s jeans, and 'Come to Marlboro Country,' for Marlboro cigarettes.  

"But the algorithmic methods aren’t a foolproof guide to real-world success. One ad slogan that didn’t fit well within the statistical parameters for memorable lines was the Energizer batteries catchphrase, 'It keeps going and going and going.'

"Quantitative tools in the humanities and the social sciences, as in other fields, are most powerful when they are controlled by an intelligent human. Experts with deep knowledge of a subject are needed to ask the right questions and to recognize the shortcomings of statistical models.  

“ 'You’ll always need both,' says Mr. [Matthew] Jockers, the literary quant. 'But we’re at a moment now when there is much greater acceptance of these methods than in the past. There will come a time when this kind of analysis is just part of the tool kit in the humanities, as in every other discipline' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/technology/literary-history-seen-through-big-datas-lens.html?pagewanted=2&_r=0&nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130127, accessed 01-27-2013).

"St. Catherine’s Monastery is going digital. The monastery that claims to be the oldest in the world ­— not destroyed, not abandoned in 17 centuries — has begun digitizing its ancient manuscripts for the use of scholars. A new library to facilitate the process is about five years away.  

"The librarian, Father Justin, says the monastery’s library will grow an internet database of first-millennium manuscripts, which up until now have been kept under lock and key. Should a scholar want a manuscript, they need only email Father Justin.  

“ 'And if I don’t have book but see a reference, I can email a friend in Oxford. They can scan and send it the next day,' he says.  

"Still, as natural and inevitable as it sounds, that’s quite the sea change. Just 10 years ago, bad phone lines made it hard to connect a call with the monastery. One hundred years ago, it took 10 days to travel from Suez with a caravan of camels. And when I arrive unheralded, having not even called ahead, a monk shades his eyes, shakes head and — at first — says he will not introduce me to Father Justin.  

“ 'What if we said 'yes' to every reporter and scholar that came here? Everyone wants our time. But what about our own work?' he asks.  

"Not many of the 25 monks cloistered at the Sacred and Imperial Monastery of the God-Trodden Mount of Sinai have email addresses, or operate Mac G5 computers, or know their megapixel from their leviathan. Father Justin Sinaites is a native of Texas. He wears a black habit and a beard to his chest, and ties his long hair back in a ponytail. He is over six feet tall. When he stands, he keeps his arms ramrod straight at his sides.

"Every morning he attends the 4:30 am service — which has not changed its liturgy since AD 550 — and then climbs six flights of stairs to his office in the east wing of the three-story administrative building forming the back wall of St. Catherine’s Monastery. He powers up the G5 and passes the morning making digital photographs of scripture written on papyrus, written on animal hide and written with ink made from oak tree galls.  

“ 'It’s amazing, the juxtaposition,' is how he puts it.  

"A page that may have taken a bent-backed monk weeks to illuminate is clamped under the bellows of the 48MP CCD camera. Snap. Next page. It takes three or four days to do a whole book. There are about 3,300 manuscripts. . . . "(http://www.egyptindependent.com/news/st-catherine-monastery-seeks-permanence-through-technology, accessed 05-29-2012).

On May 2, 2012 Harvard and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology announced a new nonprofit partnership, known as edX, to offer free online courses from both universities.

"Harvard’s involvement follows M.I.T.’s announcement in December that it was starting an open online learning project, MITx. Its first course, Circuits and Electronics, began in March, enrolling about 120,000 students, some 10,000 of whom made it through the recent midterm exam. Those who complete the course will get a certificate of mastery and a grade, but no official credit. Similarly, edX courses will offer a certificate but not credit.

"But Harvard and M.I.T. have a rival — they are not the only elite universities planning to offer free massively open online courses, or MOOCs, as they are known. This month, Stanford, Princeton, the University of Pennsylvania and the University of Michigan announced their partnership with a new commercial company, Coursera, with $16 million in venture capital.

"Meanwhile, Sebastian Thrun, the Stanford professor who made headlines last fall when 160,000 students signed up for his Artificial Intelligence course, has attracted more than 200,000 students to the six courses offered at his new company, Udacity.

"The technology for online education, with video lesson segments, embedded quizzes, immediate feedback and student-paced learning, is evolving so quickly that those in the new ventures say the offerings are still experimental.

“ 'My guess is that what we end up doing five years from now will look very different from what we do now,' said Provost Alan M. Garber of Harvard, who will be in charge of the university’s involvement" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/03/education/harvard-and-mit-team-up-to-offer-free-online-courses.html?_r=1, accessed 05-04-2012).

On May 7, 2012 the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art (SFMOMA) issued its report for its 2011 fiscal year as an iPad app.  Story of a Year was the first annual report issued by a museum in an eBook format.

"Covering the period from July 1, 2010, through June 30, 2011, Story of a Year lets users see the big picture or explore in depth with the touch of a finger complete details on all of the museum's exhibitions, programs, and acquisitions. Unlike a traditional paper or PDF annual report, the app takes full advantage of the iPad's intuitive interface to deliver an array of content that takes viewers behind the scenes at the museum—all without leaving the platform. Throughout, links within the app and to SFMOMA's website provide easy access to even more content and context" (http://www.sfmoma.org/about/press/press_news/releases/923, accessed 05-09-2012).

"For years, it was a schedule as predictable as a calendar: novelists who specialized in mysteries, thrillers and romance would write one book a year, output that was considered not only sufficient, but productive.

"But the e-book age has accelerated the metabolism of book publishing. Authors are now pulling the literary equivalent of a double shift, churning out short stories, novellas or even an extra full-length book each year.  

"They are trying to satisfy impatient readers who have become used to downloading any e-book they want at the touch of a button, and the publishers who are nudging them toward greater productivity in the belief that the more their authors’ names are out in public, the bigger stars they will become. . . .

"The push for more material comes as publishers and booksellers are desperately looking for ways to hold onto readers being lured by other forms of entertainment, much of it available nonstop and almost instantaneously. Television shows are rushed online only hours after they are originally broadcast, and some movies are offered on demand at home before they have left theaters. In this environment, publishers say, producing one a book a year, and nothing else, is just not enough.  

"At the same time, the Internet has allowed readers to enjoy a more intimate relationship with their favorite authors, whom they now expect to be accessible online via blogs, Q. and A.’s on Twitter and updates on Facebook. . . .

"Publishers say that a carefully released short story, timed six to eight weeks before a big hardcover comes out, can entice new readers who might be willing to pay 99 cents for a story but reluctant to spend $14 for a new e-book or $26 for a hardcover.  

"That can translate into higher preorder sales for the novel and even a lift in sales of older books by the author, which are easily accessible as e-book impulse purchases for consumers with Nooks or Kindles" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/13/business/in-e-reader-age-of-writers-cramp-a-book-a-year-is-slacking.html, accessed 05-14-2012)

On May 16, 2012 Leigh R. Hochberg, Daniel Bacher and team published "Reach and grasp by people with tetraplegia using a neurally controlled robotic arm," Nature 485 (17 May 2012) 372-75.  This was the first published demonstration that humans with severe brain injuries could effectively control a prosthetic arm, using tiny brain implants that transmitted neural signals to a computer.

"Paralysis following spinal cord injury, brainstem stroke, amyotrophic lateral sclerosis and other disorders can disconnect the brain from the body, eliminating the ability to perform volitional movements. A neural interface system could restore mobility and independence for people with paralysis by translating neuronal activity directly into control signals for assistive devices. We have previously shown that people with long-standing tetraplegia can use a neural interface system to move and click a computer cursor and to control physical devices Able-bodied monkeys have used a neural interface system to control a robotic arm, but it is unknown whether people with profound upper extremity paralysis or limb loss could use cortical neuronal ensemble signals to direct useful arm actions. Here we demonstrate the ability of two people with long-standing tetraplegia to use neural interface system-based control of a robotic arm to perform three-dimensional reach and grasp movements. Participants controlled the arm and hand over a broad space without explicit training, using signals decoded from a small, local population of motor cortex (MI) neurons recorded from a 96-channel microelectrode array. One of the study participants, implanted with the sensor 5 years earlier, also used a robotic arm to drink coffee from a bottle. Although robotic reach and grasp actions were not as fast or accurate as those of an able-bodied person, our results demonstrate the feasibility for people with tetraplegia, years after injury to the central nervous system, to recreate useful multidimensional control of complex devices directly from a small sample of neural signals" (http://www.nature.com/nature/journal/v485/n7398/full/nature11076.html#/ref

"The researchers still have many hurdles to clear before this technology becomes practical in the real world, experts said. The equipment used in the study is bulky, and the movements made with the robot are still crude. And the silicon implants generally break down over time (though the woman in the study has had hers for more than five years, and it is still effective).  

"No one has yet demonstrated an effective wireless system, nor perfected one that could bypass the robotics altogether — transmitting brain signals directly to muscles — in a way that allows for complex movements. 

"In an editorial accompanying the study, Andrew Jackson of the Institute of Neuroscience at Newcastle University wrote that economics might be the largest obstacle: 'It remains to be seen whether a neural-interface system that will be of practical use to patients with diverse clinical needs can become a commercially viable proposition' ' (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/05/17/science/bodies-inert-they-moved-a-robot-with-their-minds.html?hpw, accessed 05-17-2012)

"The Knowledge Graph enables you to search for things, people or places that Google knows about—landmarks, celebrities, cities, sports teams, buildings, geographical features, movies, celestial objects, works of art and more—and instantly get information that’s relevant to your query. This is a critical first step towards building the next generation of search, which taps into the collective intelligence of the web and understands the world a bit more like people do.

"Google’s Knowledge Graph isn’t just rooted in public sources such as Freebase, Wikipedia and the CIA World Factbook. It’s also augmented at a much larger scale—because we’re focused on comprehensive breadth and depth. It currently contains more than 500 million objects, as well as more than 3.5 billion facts about and relationships between these different objects. And it’s tuned based on what people search for, and what we find out on the web.

"The Knowledge Graph enhances Google Search in three main ways to start:  

"1. Find the right thing Language can be ambiguous—do you mean Taj Mahal the monument, or Taj Mahal the musician? Now Google understands the difference, and can narrow your search results just to the one you mean—just click on one of the links to see that particular slice of results:

"2. Get the best summary With the Knowledge Graph, Google can better understand your query, so we can summarize relevant content around that topic, including key facts you’re likely to need for that particular thing. For example, if you’re looking for Marie Curie, you’ll see when she was born and died, but you’ll also get details on her education and scientific discoveries:

"3. Go deeper and broader Finally, the part that’s the most fun of all—the Knowledge Graph can help you make some unexpected discoveries. You might learn a new fact or new connection that prompts a whole new line of inquiry. Do you know where Matt Groening, the creator of the Simpsons (one of my all-time favorite shows), got the idea for Homer, Marge and Lisa’s names? It’s a bit of a surprise:

"We’ve always believed that the perfect search engine should understand exactly what you mean and give you back exactly what you want. And we can now sometimes help answer your next question before you’ve asked it, because the facts we show are informed by what other people have searched for. For example, the information we show for Tom Cruise answers 37 percent of next queries that people ask about him. In fact, some of the most serendipitous discoveries I’ve made using the Knowledge Graph are through the magical “People also search for” feature. One of my favorite books is The White Tiger, the debut novel by Aravind Adiga, which won the prestigious Man Booker Prize. Using the Knowledge Graph, I discovered three other books that had won the same prize and one that won the Pulitzer. I can tell you, this suggestion was spot on!"

On May 28, 2012 the MAHER Center of the Iranian National Computer Emergency Response Team (CERT), Kaspersky Lab headquartered in Moscow, and Cry SyS Lab (Laboratory of Cryptography and National Security) of the Budapest University of Technology and Economics announced the discovery of Flame malware that attacked computers running the Microsoft Windows operating system.  A virus that collected information, it was arguably the most complex malware ever found.

"According to estimates by Kaspersky, Flame has infected approximately 1,000 machines, with victims including governmental organizations, educational institutions and private individuals. As of May 2012, the countries most affected are Iran, Israel, Sudan, Syria, Lebanon, Saudi Arabia, and Egypt. . . .

"According to Kaspersky, Flame has been operating in the wild since at least February 2010. CrySyS reports that the file name of the main component had been observed as early as December 2007. However, its creation date cannot be determined directly, as the creation dates for the malware's modules are falsely set to dates as early as 1994. Computer experts consider it the cause of an attack in April 2012 that caused Iranian officials to disconnect their oil terminals from the Internet. At the time the Iranian Students News Agency referred to the malware that caused the attack as "Wiper", a name given to it by the malware's creator. However, Kaspersky Lab believes that Flame may be 'a separate infection entirely' from the Wiper malware. Due to the size and complexity of the program—described as "twenty times" more complicated than Stuxnet—the Lab stated that a full analysis could require as long as ten years. On 28 May, Iran's CERT announced that it had developed a detection program and a removal tool for Flame, and had been distributing these to 'select organizations' for several weeks " (Wikipedia article on Flame (malware) accessed 05-30-2012).

"One thing, however, is certain, and about it publishers agree: e-book sales as a percentage of overall revenue are skyrocketing. Initially such sales were a tiny proportion of overall revenue; in 2008, for instance, they were under 1 percent. No more. The head of one major publisher told me that in 2010 e-book sales accounted for 11 percent of his house’s revenue. By the end of 2011 it had more than tripled to 36 percent for the year. As John Thompson reports in the revised 2012 edition of his authoritative Merchants of Culture, in 2011 e-book sales for most publishers were “between 18 and 22 percent (possibly even higher for some houses).” Hardcover sales, the foundation of the business, continue to decline, plunging 13 percent in 2008 and suffering similar declines in the years since. According to the Pew Research Center’s most recent e-reading survey, 21 percent of American adults report reading an e-book in the past year. Soon one out of every three sales of adult trade titles will be in the form of an e-book. Readers of e-books are especially drawn to escapist and overtly commercial genres (romance, mysteries and thrillers, science fiction), and in these categories e-book sales have bulked up to as large as 60 percent. E-book sales are making inroads even with so-called literary fiction. Thompson cites Jonathan Franzen’s Freedom, published in 2010 by Farrar, Straus & Giroux, one of America’s most distinguished houses and one of several American imprints now owned by the German conglomerate Holtzbrinck. Franzen’s novel sold three-quarters of a million hardcover copies and a quarter-million e-books in the first twelve months of publication. (Franzen, by the way, detests electronic books, and is also the guy who dissed Oprah when she had the gumption to pick his earlier novel, The Corrections, for her popular book club.) Did Franzen’s e-book sales depress his hardcover sales, or did the e-book iteration introduce new readers to his work? It’s hard to know, but it’s likely a bit of both" (http://www.thenation.com/article/168125/amazon-effect, accessed 06-03-2012).

American molecular geneticist George M. Church, director of the U.S. Department of Energy Center on Bioenergy at Harvard & MIT, and director of the National Institutes of Health (NHGRI) Center of Excellence in Genomic Science at Harvard,  Yuan Gao from the Wyss Institute for Biologically Inspired Engineering, and Sriram Kosuri from the Department of Biomedical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, encoded an entire book into the genetic molecules of DNA, the basic building blocks of life, and then accurately read back the text. Church's book, Regenesis: How Synthetic Biology Will Reinvent Nature and Ourselves, stored in a laboratory tube, contained 53,426 words, 11 illustrations and a JavaScript program, all of which totalled 5.27 megabits of data. Written with Ed Regis, it was scheduled to be published in printed and electronic editions in October 2012. Church's book was 600 times larger than the largest data set previously encoded in DNA.

"Digital data is traditionally stored as binary code: ones and zeros. Although DNA offers the ability to use four "numbers": A, C, G and T, to minimise errors Church's team decided to stick with binary encoding, with A and C both indicating zero, and G and T representing one.  

"The sequence of the artificial DNA was built up letter by letter using existing methods with the string of As, Cs, Ts and Gs coding for the letters of the book.  

"The team developed a system in which an inkjet printer embeds short fragments of that artificially synthesised DNA onto a glass chip. Each DNA fragment also contains a digital address code that denotes its location within the original file.  

"The fragments on the chip can later be "read" using standard techniques of the sort used to decipher the sequence of ancient DNA found in archeological material. A computer can then reassemble the original file in the right order using the address codes.  

"The book – an HTML draft of a volume co-authored by the team leader – was written to the DNA with images embedded to demonstrate the storage medium's versatility.  

"DNA is such a dense storage system because it is three-dimensional. Other advanced storage media, including experimental ones such as positioning individual atoms on a surface, are essentially confined to two dimensions" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/science/2012/aug/16/book-written-dna-code?INTCMP=SRCH, accessed 09-09-2012).

Church, Gao, Kosuri, "Next-Generation Digital Information Storage in DNA," Science, August 16, 2012: DOI: 10.1126/science.1226355

♦ When the physical book edition of the Church and Regis book was published by Basic Books in October 2012 I acquired a copy. On pp. 269-272 the printed book contained an unusual "afterward", apparently written by Church, entitled "Notes: On Encoding This Book into DNA."  This discussed "some of the legal, policy, biosafety, and other issues and opportunities" pertaining to the process.  The ideas discussed were so distinctive and original that I would have liked to quote it in its entirety but that would have been an infringement of copyright. The section ended with the following statement:

"For more information, and to explore the possibility of getting your own DNA copy of this book, please visit http://periodicplayground.com."  

When I visited the site on October 20, 2012 I viewed a message from networksolutions.com that the site was "under construction."

"As of 3 September [2012], the Koninklijke Bibliotheek has discontinued access to the data of Book History Online (BHO). At the end of 2012, Brill Publishers will make the data accessible (see http://www.brill.com/publications/online-resources/book-history-online). Brill is developing a new website through which the data of BHO combined with those of the Annual Bibliography for the History of the Printed Book and Libraries (ABHB) will be available. This will enable researchers to search for book historical data in one file of c. 80,000 titles. Moreover, Brill will take care of an update for BHO. If you are interested in participating in this service, please contact Matthew McLean. As soon as the new website is online, it will be posted on this page."

Fees for the privatized online database posted in November 2012 were:

Outright purchase: 5,200 Euros

Installment price: 280 Euros

Annual subscription price: 750 Euros

On September 6, 2012 ENCODE, the Encyclopedia Of DNA Elements, a project of The National Human Genome Research Institute (NHGRI) of the National Institutes of Health, involving 442 scientists from 32 laboratories around the world, published  six papers in the journal Nature and in 24 papers in Genome Research and Genome Biology.

Among the overall results of the project to date was the monumental conclusion that:

"The human genome is packed with at least four million gene switches that reside in bits of DNA that once were dismissed as “junk” but that turn out to play critical roles in controlling how cells, organs and other tissues behave. The discovery, considered a major medical and scientific breakthrough, has enormous implications for human health because many complex diseases appear to be caused by tiny changes in hundreds of gene switches" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/09/06/science/far-from-junk-dna-dark-matter-proves-crucial-to-health.html?pagewanted=all, accessed 09-09-2012).

On September 25, 2012 designboom.com reported that Vancouver-based artist Robert Chaplin, using a focused ion beam (FIB) and a scanning electron microscope (SEM) from the nano-processing facility at Simon Fraser University, had broken the Guinness record for the world's smallest book by burning the nano-typographic text from his illustrated story Teeny Ted from Turnip Town onto a microchip thinner than a strand of hair. Chaplin traced the story and type onto a single-crystalline silicon surface where the line weight resolution equated to 42 nanometers (42 millionths of a millimeter). Measuring 70 micrometers x 100 micrometers, the microchip version of the book cannot be seen with the naked eye or with a regular microscope, requring a scanning electron microscope to be viewed.

♦ To make a fine distinction between miniatures, Robert Chaplin's creation should technically be considered the smallest reproduction of a printed book as it is not technically a codex printed on paper. In 2013 the smallest printed codex was Shiki no Kusabana (Flowers of Seasons) printed by Toppan Printing of Tokyo.

In October 2012 the Münchener Digitalisierungs Zentrum of the Bayerische Staatsbibliothek, München (Munich Digitization Center of the Bavarian State Library in Munich) introduced the 3D-BSB Explorer, a gesture-controlled 3D Interactive Book Reader developed jointly by the center and the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute.

"For the first time ever, magnificent over one thousand year old books are also on view in a digital 3D format at the "Magnificent Manuscripts – Treasures of Book Illumination" exhibition at the Kunsthalle of the Hypo Cultural Foundation in Munich. The Interactive 3D BookReader forms part of the exhibition which opens on Friday, 19 October 2012 at the Kunsthalle of the Hypo Cultural Foundation in Munich.  

"Allowing visitors to leaf through volumes illuminated in gold and encrusted with precious stones is something that most museums simply cannot permit. Secure in their glass cases, these exhibits seem remote and untouchable. Yet with the Interactive 3D BookReader, developed by the Fraunhofer Heinrich Hertz Institute in partnership with the Bavarian State Library, visitors can now not only view digitalized books in 3D without any need for special glasses, but browse through them, enlarge them and rotate them as well. The Interactive 3D BookReader opens up virtual access to these magnificent treasures of the art of illumination. Visitors don’t even need to touch the screen as an infrared camera captures the movements of one or more of their fingers while image processing software identifies their position in space in real-time. This is how they can move, browse, rotate and scale the exhibits shown on the screen. Even the slightest of finger movements can be translated into movements of the cursor. The monitor screen of the Interactive 3D BookReader shows the user's right and left eye two slightly offset images which combine to give an in-depth impression. The two stereo views are adapted to correspond to the viewer's actual position. This means that visitors don't need special 3D glasses to view the books in three dimensions" (http://www.hhi.fraunhofer.de/media/press/experience-magnificent-books-in-digital-3d.html, accessed 02-23-2013).

In February 2013 a video demonstration of the 3D-BSB Explorer was available on YouTube at this link: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=LpSP2ojWtIs&feature=youtu.be

According to the October 2012 IAB Internet advertising revenue report by the Internet Advertising Bureau, a New York based international organization founded in 1996:

"In the first half of the year, U.S. Internet sites collected $17 billion in ad revenue, a 14 percent increase over the same period of 2011. . . . In the second half of last year, websites had $16.8 billion in ad revenue. So even if growth were to slow in the second half, digital media this year could exceed the $35.8 billion that U.S. print magazines and newspapers garnered in ad revenue in 2011.

"In fact, the digital marketing research firm eMarketer projects 2012 Internet ad spending in excess of $37 billion, while print advertising spending is projected to fall to $34.3 billion.

"Meanwhile, television ad spending—which Nielsen reports was nearly $75 billion in 2011—continues to dwarf both" (http://www.technologyreview.com/news/429638/online-advertising-poised-to-finally-surpass/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20121017, accessed 10-22-2012).

"rotterdam-based MVRDV has just completed the 'book mountain + library quarter' centrally located in the market square of spijkenisse, the netherlands. a mountain of bookshelves is contained by a glass-enclosed structure and pyramidal roof with an impressive total surface area of 9,300 square meters. corridors and platforms bordering the form are accessed by a network of stairs to allow visitors to browse the tiers of shelves. a continuous route of 480 meters culminates at the peak's reading room and cafe with panoramic views through the transparent roof. any possible damage caused to the books by direct sunlight is offset by the expected 4 year lifespan of borrowed materials.  

"additional functions including an environmental education center, meeting rooms, auditorium, offices and retail take place on site. taking the form of a traditional dutch farm to reference the agricultural roots of the village. the encompassing district integrates 42 social housing units, parking and public spaces to form a neighborhood. the masonry exterior of adjacent structures is introduced into the interior with brick pavers for the circulation spaces

"project info:

"total budget incl. parking: 30 million EUR

"start project: 2003

"start construction: may 2009

"opening: october 2012  

"public part library: 3500 m2

"environmental education centre: 112 m2

"chess club: 140 m2 "back office library: 370 m2  

"retail: 839 m2

"commercial offices: 510 m2

"length book shelves: 3205 m total (1565 m for lending, 1640 m archive)

"amount of books: currently 70.000 and space for another 80.000

"the cover is 26 m tall and spans 33,5 m x 47 m  

"parking: garage with grey water basin and 350 spaces //client: gemeente spijkenisse

"user: openbare bibliotheek spijkenisse, milieuhuis spijkenisse, schaaksportvereniging spijkenisse

"architect: MVRDV, rotterdam, nl" (http://www.designboom.com/architecture/mvrdv-book-mountain-library-quarter-spijkenisse/, accessed 01-14-2013).

"Today the data we have available to make predictions has grown almost unimaginably large: it represents 2.5 quintillion bytes of data each day, Mr. Silver tells us, enough zeros and ones to fill a billion books of 10 million pages each. Our ability to tease the signal from the noise has not grown nearly as fast. As a result, we have plenty of data but lack the ability to extract truth from it and to build models that accurately predict the future that data portends" ("Mining Truth From Data Babel. Nate Silver’s ‘Signal and the Noise’ Examines Predictions"  By Leonard Mlodinow, NYTimes.com 10-23-2012).

On October 26, 2012 Microsoft released the Windows 8 operating system to the general public. Development of Windows 8 started in 2009 before the release of its predecessor, Windows 7, the last iteration of Windows designed primarily for desktop computers. Windows 8 introduced very significant changes primarily focused toward mobile devices, tablets and cell phones which use touch screens, and:

"to rival other mobile operating systems like Android and iOS, taking advantage of new or emerging technologies like USB 3.0, UEFI firmware, near field communications, cloud computing and the low-power ARM architecture, new security features such as malware filtering, built-in antivirus capabilities, a new installation process optimized for digital distribution, and support for secure boot (a UEFI feature which allows operating systems to be digitally signed to prevent malware from altering the boot process), the ability to synchronize certain apps and settings between multiple devices, along with other changes and performance improvements. Windows 8 also introduces a new shell and user interface based on Microsoft's "Metro" design language, featuring a new Start screen with a grid of dynamically updating tiles to represent applications, a new app platform with an emphasis on touchscreen input, and the new Windows Store to obtain and/or purchase applications to run on the operating system" (Wikipedia article on Windows 8, accessed 12-14-2012).

On December 13, 2012 MIT's technologyreview.com published an interview with Julie Larson-Green, head of product development at Microsoft, in which Larson-Green explained why Microsoft decided it was necessary to rethink and redesign in a relatively radical manner the operating system used by 1.2 billion people:

Why was it necessary to make such broad changes in Windows 8?

"When Windows was first created 25 years ago, the assumptions about the world and what computing could do and how people were going to use it were completely different. It was at a desk, with a monitor. Before Windows 8 the goal was to launch into a window, and then you put that window away and you got another one. But with Windows 8, all the different things that you might want to do are there at a glance with the Live Tiles. Instead of having to find many little rocks to look underneath, you see a kind of dashboard of everything that’s going on and everything you care about all at once. It puts you closer to what you’re trying to get done. 

Windows 8 is clearly designed with touch in mind, and many new Windows 8 PCs have touch screens. Why is touch so important? 

"It’s a very natural way to interact. If you get a laptop with a touch screen, your brain clicks in and you just start touching what makes it faster for you. You’ll use the mouse and keyboard, but even on the regular desktop you’ll find yourself reaching up doing the things that are faster than moving the mouse and moving the mouse around. It’s not like using the mouse, which is more like puppeteering than direct manipulation. 

In the future, are all PCs going to have touch screens? 

"For cost considerations there might always be some computers without touch, but I believe that the vast majority will. We’re seeing that the computers with touch are the fastest-selling right now. I can’t imagine a computer without touch anymore. Once you’ve experienced it, it’s really hard to go back.

Did you take that approach in Windows 8 as a response to the popularity of mobile devices running iOS and Android? 

"We started planning Windows 8 in June of 2009, before we shipped Windows 7, and the iPad was only a rumor at that point. I only saw the iPad after we had this design ready to go. We were excited. A lot of things they were doing about mobile and touch were similar to what we’d been thinking. We [also] had differences. We wanted not just static icons on the desktop but Live Tiles to be a dashboard for your life; we wanted you to be able to do things in context and share across apps; we believed that multitasking is important and that people can do two things at one time. 

Can touch coexist with a keyboard and mouse interface? Some people have said it doesn’t feel right to have both the newer, touch-centric elements and the old-style desktop in Windows 8. /

"It was a very definite choice to have both environments. A finger’s never going to replace the precision of a mouse. It’s always going to be easier to type on a keyboard than it is on glass. We didn’t want you to have to make a choice. Some people have said that it’s jarring, but over time we don’t hear that. It’s just getting used to something that’s different. Nothing was homogenous to start with, when you were in the browser it looked different than when you were in Excel."

On October 29, 2012 Bertelsmann, based in Gütersloh, Germany and Pearson, based in London, announced that they planned to combine their book publishing divisions, Random House and Penguin.  This merger, which could put as much as 25% of the American new book production in the hands of one company, was seen as the result of the growing power in the eBook market of dominant technology companies including Amazon, Apple and Google which pressured publishers to adjust their eBook strategy during a period in which traditional brick and mortar bookstores were disappearing.

"Under the agreement, Bertelsmann, which owns Random House, would control 53 percent of the merged publishers. Bertelsmann and Pearson would share executive oversight, with Markus Dohle of Random House serving as chief executive and John Makinson of Penguin becoming the chairman.  

"The deal would consolidate Random House’s position as the largest consumer book publisher in the English-language world, giving the combined companies greater scale to deal with the challenges arising from the growth of e-books and the rise of Internet retailers like Amazon.  

“ 'Together, the two publishers will be able to share a large part of their costs, to invest more for their author and reader constituencies and to be more adventurous in trying new models in this exciting, fast-moving world of digital books and digital readers,' said Marjorie Scardino, chief executive of Pearson, which is based in London.  

"By taking control of the company, Bertelsmann . . . hopes to avoid the problems that plagued a 50-50 partnership with Sony of Japan, in which the two companies combined their music recording divisions. The venture, Sony BMG, was riven by management turmoil and differences over strategy, prompting Bertelsmann to sell its share to Sony eventually" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/30/business/global/random-house-and-penguin-to-be-combined.html, accessed 10-29-2012).

In a New York Times article published on October 29, 2012 Claire Cain Miller estimated that advertisers would spend $2.6 billion on ads on phones and tablets in 2012— less than 2 percent of the amount they would spend over all, but more than triple what they spent in 2010.

"Google earns 56 percent of all mobile ad dollars and 96 percent of mobile search ad dollars, according to eMarketer. The company said it is on track to earn $8 billion in the coming year from mobile sales, which includes ads as well as apps, music and movies it sells in its Google Play store. But the vast majority of that money comes from ads, it said."

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin

"Working Group: Historicizing Big Data  

"Elena Aronova, Christine von Oertzen, David Sepkoski  

"Since the late 20th century, huge databases have become a ubiquitous feature of science, and Big Data has become a buzzword for describing an ostensibly new and distinctive mode of knowledge production. Some observers have even suggested that Big Data has introduced a new epistemology of science: one in which data-gathering and knowledge production phases are more explicitly separate than they have been in the past. It is vitally important not only to reconstruct a history of “data” in the longue durée (extending from the early modern period to the present), but also to critically examine historical claims about the distinctiveness of modern data practices and epistemologies.  

"The central themes of this working group—the epistemology, practice, material culture, and political economy of data—are understood as overlapping, interrelated categories. Together they form the basic, necessary components for historicizing the emergence of modern data-driven science, but they are not meant to be explored in isolation. We take for granted, for example, that a history of data depends on an understanding of the material culture—the tools and technologies used to collect, store, and analyze data—that makes data-driven science possible. More than that, data is immanent to the practices and technologies that support it: not only are epistemologies of data embodied in tools and machines, but in a concrete sense data itself cannot exist apart from them. This precise relationship between technologies, practices, and epistemologies is complex. Big Data is often, for example, associated with the era of computer databases, but this association potentially overlooks important continuities with data practices stretching back to the 18th century and earlier. The very notion of size—of 'bigness'—is also contingent on historical factors that need to be contextualized and problematized. We are therefore interested in exploring the material cultures and practices of data in a broad historical context, including the development of information processing technologies (whether paper-based or mechanical), and also in historicizing the relationships between collections of physical objects and collections of data. Additionally, attention must be paid to visualizations and representations of data (graphs, images, printouts, etc.), both as working tools and also as means of communication.  

"In the era following the Second World War, new technologies have emerged that allow new kinds of data analysis and ever larger data production. In addition, a new cultural and political context has shaped and defined the meaning, significance, and politics of data-driven science in the Cold War and beyond. The term “Big Data” invokes the consequences of increasing economies of scale on many different levels. It ostensibly refers to the enormous amount of information collected, stored, and processed in fields as varied as genomics, climate science, paleontology, anthropology, and economics. But it also implicates a Cold War political economy, given that many of the precursors to 21st century data sciences began as national security or military projects in the Big Science era of the 1950s and 1960s. These political and cultural ramifications of data cannot be separated from the broader historical consideration of data-driven science.  

"Historicizing Big Data provides comparative breadth and historical depth to the on-going discussion of the revolutionary potential of data-intensive modes of knowledge production and the challenges the current “data deluge” poses to society." (Accessed 11-26-2012).

Max Planck Institute for the History of Science, Berlin 

"A Natural History of Data

"David Sepkoski

"A Natural History of Data examines the history of practices and rationalities surrounding data in the natural sciences between 1800 and the present. One feature of this transformation is the emergence of the modern digital database as the locus of scientific inquiry and practice, and the consensus that we are now living in an era of “data-driven” science. However, a major component of the project involves critically examining this development in order to historicize our modern fascination with data and databases. I do not take it for granted, for example, that digital databases are discontinuous with more traditional archival practices and technologies, nor do I assume that earlier eras of science were less “data driven” than the present. This project does seek, though, to develop a more nuanced appreciation for how data and databases have come to have such a central place in the modern scientific imagination.

"The central motivation behind this project is to historicize the development of data and database practices in the natural sciences, but it is also defined by a further set of questions, including: What is the relationship between data and the physical objects, phenomena, or experiences that they represent? How have tools and available technologies changed the epistemology and practice of data over the past 200 years? What are the consequences of the increasing economies of scale as ever more massive data collections are assembled? Have new technologies of data changed the very meaning and ontology of data itself? How have changes in scientific representations occurred in conjunction with the evolution of data practices (e.g. diagrams, graphs, photographs, atlases, compendia, etc.)? And, ultimately, is there something fundamentally new about the modern era of science in its relationship to and reliance on data and databases?" (Accessed 11-26-2012).

"Regulators in the United States and Europe are conducting sweeping inquiries of Google, the dominant Internet search and advertising company. Google rose by technological innovation and business acumen; in the United States, it has 67 percent of the search market and collects 75 percent of search ad dollars. Being big is no crime, but if a powerful company uses market muscle to stifle competition, that is an antitrust violation.  

"So the government is focusing on life in Google’s world for the sprawling economic ecosystem of Web sites that depend on their ranking in search results. What is it like to live this way, in a giant’s shadow? The experience of its inhabitants is nuanced and complex, a blend of admiration and fear.  

"The relationship between Google and Web sites, publishers and advertisers often seems lopsided, if not unfair. Yet Google has also provided and nurtured a landscape of opportunity. Its ecosystem generates $80 billion a year in revenue for 1.8 million businesses, Web sites and nonprofit organizations in the United States alone, it estimates.  

"The government’s scrutiny of Google is the most exhaustive investigation of a major corporation since the pursuit of Microsoft in the late 1990s" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/04/technology/google-casts-a-big-shadow-on-smaller-web-sites.html?hpw, accessed 11-04-2012).

"E-books accounted for 22% of all book spending in the second quarter of 2012, only a one percentage point gain from the first quarter of the year, but up from 14% in the comparable period in 2011, according to new figures from Bowker Market Research. In the year-to-year comparison, the hardcover and trade paperback segments both lost two percentage points each to e-books, while mass market paperbacks’ share fell from 15% in the second quarter of 2011 to 12% in this year’s second period. 

"With the fall of Borders and the growth of e-books, Amazon increased its market share of consumer book spending between the second quarter of 2011 and 2012, although its growth slowed between the first quarter of 2012 and the second period. Still, the e-tailer was easily the largest single channel for book purchases in the second quarter, with an 11 percentage-point lead over Barnes & Noble. B&N’s share of unit purchases fell by two percentage points between June 2011 and June 2012, most likely due to sluggish sales of print content through BN.com. Independent booksellers managed to hold their own in the period, maintaining a 6% share of units" (http://www.publishersweekly.com/pw/by-topic/digital/retailing/article/54609-e-books-market-share-at-22-amazon-has-27.html, accessed 11-05-2012).

Xiao-Hui Bao and colleagues at the University of Science and Technology of China in Hefei teleported quantum information from one ensemble of atoms to another 150 meters away, a demonstration seen as a significant milestone towards quantum routers and a quantum Internet.

"Quantum teleportation and quantum memory are two crucial elements for large-scale quantum networks. With the help of prior distributed entanglement as a “quantum channel,” quantum teleportation provides an intriguing means to faithfully transfer quantum states among distant locations without actual transmission of the physical carriers [Bennett CH, et al. (1993) Phys Rev Lett 70(13):1895–1899]. Quantum memory enables controlled storage and retrieval of fast-flying photonic quantum bits with stationary matter systems, which is essential to achieve the scalability required for large-scale quantum networks. Combining these two capabilities, here we realize quantum teleportation between two remote atomic-ensemble quantum memory nodes, each composed of ∼108 rubidium atoms and connected by a 150-m optical fiber. The spin wave state of one atomic ensemble is mapped to a propagating photon and subjected to Bell state measurements with another single photon that is entangled with the spin wave state of the other ensemble. Two-photon detection events herald the success of teleportation with an average fidelity of 88(7)%. Besides its fundamental interest as a teleportation between two remote macroscopic objects, our technique may be useful for quantum information transfer between different nodes in quantum networks and distributed quantum computing" (Xiao-Hui Bao Xiao-Fan Xuc, Che-Ming Lic, Zhen-Sheng Yuana, Chao-Yang Lua, and Jian-Wei Pana, "Quantum teleportation between remote atomic-ensemble quantum memories," Proc. Nat. Acad. Sci. America 10.1073/pnas.1207329109).

On November 19, 2012 Penguin Books, one of the world's largest publishers, announced a new ebook lending program.  Because of concerns about the security of digital rights management (DRM)- technospeak for worries about copyright infringement by illegal copying- roughly a year ago, in October 2011 Penguin pulled all of its ebooks from a larger library lending program powered by Overdrive. Those ebooks were also available on Amazon Kindles, and the withdrawal of Penguin's titles from that Overdrive program may also have reflected a growing friction between the publisher and Amazon.com which was competing with publishers not only in distribution but also in the production of new titles.  

"Under the new lending program, Penguin will work with Baker & Tayler [book wholesalers and distributors to libraries] to provide its ebooks to libraries in Los Angeles and Cleveland, Ohio. The program allows library members to check out an ebook, for a limited time, six months after a book becomes available in retail stores. Libraries can only checkout one ebook per person (unless they buy multiple copies, and the library also has to purchase a new license for each ebook every year" (http://venturebeat.com/2012/11/19/penguin-rolling-out-new-ebook-library-lending-program/, accessed 11-19-2012).

On November 19, 2012 physicists Massimiliano Di Ventra at the University of California, San Diego and Yuriy Pershin at the University of South Carolina, Columbia, outlined an emerging form of computation called memcomputing based on the discovery of nanoscale electronic components that simultaneously store and process information, much like the human brain.

At the heart of this new form of computing are nanodevices called the memristor, memcapacitor and meminductor, fundamental electronic components that store information while respectively operating as resistors, capacitors and inductors. These devices were predicted theoretically in the 1970s but first manufactured in 2008. Because these devices consume very little energy computers using them could approach the energy efficiency of natural systems such as the human brain for the first time.  

"In present day technology, storing and processing of information occur on physically distinct regions of space. Not only does this result in space limitations; it also translates into unwanted delays in retrieving and processing of relevant information. There is, however, a class of two-terminal passive circuit elements with memory, memristive, memcapacitive and meminductive systems – collectively called memelements – that perform both information processing and storing of the initial, intermediate and final computational data on the same physical platform. Importantly, the states of these memelements adjust to input signals and provide analog capabilities unavailable in standard circuit elements, resulting in adaptive circuitry, and providing analog massively-parallel computation. All these features are tantalizingly similar to those encountered in the biological realm, thus offering new opportunities for biologically-inspired computation. Of particular importance is the fact that these memelements emerge naturally in nanoscale systems, and are therefore a consequence and a natural by-product of the continued miniaturization of electronic devices. . . ." (Di Ventra & Pershin, "Memcomputing: a computing paradigm to store and process information on the same physical platform," http://arxiv.org/pdf/1211.4487v1.pdf, accessed 11-22-2012). 

On November 20, 2012 the online educational technology company Coursera, founded in Mountain View, California, by computer science professors Andrew Ng and Daphne Koller of Stanford University in April 2012, had enrolled about 1,900,000 students from at least 196 countries in at least one course. At this time Coursera was partnering with 33 universities in the United States and around the world to distribute courses over the Internet.

Because in 2012 Barnes & Noble was by far the largest chain of brick and mortar bookstores in the U.S. and probably also in the world, the statement by its CEO that he no longer read physical books—the mainstay of Barnes & Noble—was particularly significant in confirming the direction in which the format of the book was evolving: 

"It's not everyday that the CEO of a major American company say he doesn't use his company's most important product, at least in terms of how much money that product rakes in. Which is probably why it's worth two minutes of your time to listen to Barnes & Noble CEO William J. Lynch, Jr. tell Bloomberg News' Nicole Lapin precisely that in an interview on Friday.  

" 'I don't really read physical books anymore,' Lynch told Lapin while apparently standing in a Barnes & Noble lined with paper books. 'I like to read digitally. My wife is reading a lot of physical books.' 

"We get it: Barnes & Noble, the legacy book seller that introduced its line of NOOK ereaders in 2009, is and has been for some time a digital-first company. It knows that every year a growing portion of the public is reading books on tablets in lieu of physical copies. And for its survival, it wants those tablets to be NOOKs.  

"But it's still a curious thing for Lynch to say, since the majority of B&N's business is still selling pulp and ink. Last quarter, the company made $1.1 billion in revenue from selling books in stores and at BN.com. NOOKs didn't fare as well. The tablet, along with all accessories and content sold on it, only made B&N $192 million, comparable to the same quarter the previous year ($191 million), around the time Amazon's Kindle started winning the hearts and minds of small-tablet buyers.  

"Whether it likes it or not, brick and mortars are still Barnes & Noble's bread and butter. In August, the company attributed that success to 'the liquidation of Borders’ bookstores in fiscal 2012 and strong sales of the Fifty Shades of Grey series,' paidContent's Laura Hazard Owen noted" (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/11/20/william-j-lynch-jr-barnes-noble-ceo_n_2167662.html, accessed 11-22-2012).

"(Reuters) - Global hacking network Anonymous said it will shut down Syrian government websites around the world in response to a countrywide Internet blackout believed to be aimed at silencing the opposition to President Bashar al-Assad.  

"Syria was plunged into communication darkness on Thursday [November 29] when Internet connectivity stopped at midday. Land lines and mobile phones networks were also seriously disrupted.  

"The Syrian government said 'terrorists' had attacked Internet lines but the opposition and human rights groups suspect it to be the work of the authorities.  

"Opposition activists have used the Internet extensively to further their cause by publishing footage of aerial strikes and graphic images of civilian casualties. In the absence of a free press, they have used social media to disseminate information during the uprising and communicate with journalists abroad.  

"Anonymous, a loose affiliation of hacking groups that opposes Internet censorship, said it will remove from the Internet all web assets belonging to Assad's government that are outside Syria, starting with embassies.  

"By 1000 GMT on Friday, the website for Syria's embassy in Belgium was down but the embassy in China - which Anonymous said it would target first - was operating. Most government ministry websites were down although this could be due to the blackout.  

"Several networking experts said that it was highly unlikely that the lines had been sabotaged by anti-Assad forces.  

"CloudFlare, a firm that helps accelerate Internet traffic, said on its blog that saboteurs would have had to simultaneously sever three undersea cables into the port city of Tartous and also an overland cable through Turkey in order to cut off the entire country's Internet access.  

" 'That is unlikely to have happened,' CloudFlare said.  

" The government has been accused of cutting communications in previous assaults on rebel-held areas. Anonymous said Assad's government had physically 'pulled the plug out of the wall'.  

" 'As we discovered in Egypt, where the dictator (Hosni) Mubarak did something similar - this is not damage that can be easily or quickly repaired,'it added, referring to an Internet outage during the early days of the 2011 uprising in Egypt.  

" French foreign ministry spokesman Philippe Lalliot said the communications cut was of a matter of 'extreme concern'.  

" 'It is another demonstration of what the Damascus regime is doing to hold its people hostage. We call on the Damascus regime to reestablish communications without delay,' he said.  

"Rebels have seized a series of army bases across Syria this month, exposing Assad's loss of control in northern and eastern regions and on Thursday fighting on the outskirts of the capital blocked access to the international airport.  

"More than 40,000 people have been killed since the uprising began in March 2011, according to opposition groups.  

Human rights organizations, including Amnesty International, said the Internet cut could signal that Assad is seeking to hide the truth of what is happening in the country from the outside world.  

"Syrian authorities have severely restricted non-state media from working in the country.  

"The hacker collective has staged cyber attacks on the U.S. Central Intelligence Agency and Britain's Serious Organised Crime Agency. Earlier this month, The Israeli government said it logged more than 44 million hacking attempts in just a few days during its military assault on Gaza after Anonymous waged a similar campaign" (http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/11/30/us-syria-crisis-internet-idUSBRE8AT0PN20121130, accessed 11-30-2012).

♦ After two days of complete Internet blackout in Syria Cloudflare reported in its blog that Internet service partially resumed in Syria on December 1. Whether the service resumption was in response to political pressure from abroad, or threats from Anonymous, or caused by some other factor or factors was unclear.

"WASHINGTON. The Senate Judiciary Committee on Thursday approved a bill that would strengthen privacy protection for e-mails by requiring law enforcement officials to obtain a warrant from a judge in most cases before gaining access to messages in individual accounts stored electronically.

"The bill is not expected to make it through Congress this year and will be the subject of negotiations next year with the Republican-led House. But the Senate panel’s approval was a first step toward an overhaul of a 1986 law that governs e-mail access and that is widely seen as outdated.  

"Senator Patrick Leahy, the Vermont Democrat who is chairman of the committee, was an architect of the 1986 law and is leading the effort to remake it. He said at the meeting on Thursday that e-mails stored by third parties should receive the same protection as papers stored in a filing cabinet in an individual's house.  " 'Like many Americans, I am concerned about the growing and unwelcome intrusions into our private lives in cyberspace,' Mr. Leahy said. 'I also understand that we must update our digital privacy laws to keep pace with the rapid advances in technology' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/11/30/technology/senate-committee-approves-stricter-privacy-for-e-mail.html?src=un&feedurl=http%3A%2F%2Fjson8.nytimes.com%2Fpages%2Fbusiness%2Findex.jsonp

According in the Information Policy & Access Center at the University of Maryland College Park, 100% of U.S. Public Libraries now offer public access to the Internet.

On December 12, 2012, using the Twitter handle @Pontifex, Pope Benedict XVI, sent his first tweet from the Vatican. By this date he already had over 800,000 followers. The pope's first tweet read:

“Dear Friends, I am pleased to get in touch with you through Twitter. Thank you for your generous response. I bless all of you from my heart.” Soon thereafter he added “How can we celebrate the Year of Faith better in our daily lives? By speaking with Jesus in prayer, listening to what he tells you in the Gospel and looking for him in those in need.”

Use of Twitter continued the church's long-standing tradition of implementing the latest technology in communication and education, beginning with the church's sponsorship of printing at the monastery of Subiaco in 1465.

"The population of e-book readers is growing. In the past year, the number of those who read e-books increased from 16% of all Americans ages 16 and older to 23%. At the same time, the number of those who read printed books in the previous 12 months fell from 72% of the population ages 16 and older to 67%.  

"Overall, the number of book readers in late 2012 was 75% of the population ages 16 and older, a small and statistically insignificant decline from 78% in late 2011.  

"The move toward e-book reading coincides with an increase in ownership of electronic book reading devices. In all, the number of owners of either a tablet computer or e-book reading device such as a Kindle or Nook grew from 18% in late 2011 to 33% in late 2012. As of November 2012, some 25% of Americans ages 16 and older own tablet computers such as iPads or Kindle Fires, up from 10% who owned tablets in late 2011. And in late 2012 19% of Americans ages 16 and older own e-book reading devices such as Kindles and Nooks, compared with 10% who owned such devices at the same time last year" (Pew Internet and American Life Project, 12-27-2012).

From Wired.co.uk December 19, 2012:

By Chris Owen.

"Digital marketplaces such as Amazon have disrupted -- some might say ruined -- the traditional publishing industry. And following a flurry of launches in the last year, e-readers look set to appear in Christmas stockings everywhere. But what does all of this mean for the trade in antiquarian books?  

"Decades ago, the antiquarian book market was dominated by specialist sellers sitting in dusty shops stacked to the ceiling with first editions, signed copies, manuscripts, and rare folios. Then came the internet. With the advent of global access to information, (and stock), came the opportunity to reach out to a broader audience, and stores were battling with the new boys in the form of Abebooks (one of the very first sites on the web), and of course Amazon, which, lest we forget, started as an online book store.  

"Looking back, in 1997, there were around a million books available on the web -- at the time a seemingly huge number, but a fraction of the 140 million estimated books available online today. Books still form a massive volume of online retail trade; research has suggested that 41 percent of people who shop online have bought a book through the web.  

"Sam Missingham, co-founder of Future Book, agrees, "Amazon's second hand market has revolutionised the way people buy second hand books. There's almost no book I can't buy now if I want a copy -- 10 years ago I people could have taken a year scouting through second hand shops and still not have found what I want. Now one five-second search on Amazon and you can have it delivered to your door."

"However, this marketplace brought with it opportunity and also threats -- according to Julian Wilson, Books Specialist at Christie's in London, 'There's never been a better time for people to buy such a wide range of rare books at low prices. A culture of price under cutting is causing prices to fall dramatically in the low to mid end market. For instance, 17th-century county maps of England are selling at about 30-40 percent of their value 20 years ago.'

"Missingham agrees to an extent, but suggests the mid-market is perhaps just 'shrinking slightly'. She adds, 'the mid-market for ebooks on Kindle store is being overloaded with self-published books of varying quality -- indeed oft described as a tsunami of shit.'

"At the top end however, the market is booming. Antiquarian literature has seen consistent growth, and the likes EEBO (Early English Books Online) is allowing collectors to compare rare items and verify their credentials, while Abebooks and the records kept by resellers and auction houses has allows them to price items effectively. Indeed, the likes of EEBO and other collectables sites are proving invaluable in the battle against forgeries, and in clearing up subjective opinion on veracity of rare books.  

"Wilson cites a recent example where he was unconvinced that a Harry Potter first edition hardback, potentially worth £10,000, was bona fide. On examining the title page closely, he discovered it was taken from a paperback and had been almost perfectly inserted into a second edition hardback, itself worth only £200.  

"Similarly he remembers a faked frontispiece in a copy of Shakespeare's First Folio, an almost legendarily rare item in the antiquarian book market. Convinced there was something amiss, he and his colleagues spent hours at the British Library comparing it to verified copies of the First Folio, as well as other online resources, and ultimately were able to put their finger on the problem: the chain lines in the paper (a distinct book "fingerprint" as it were), were different to confirmed editions.  

"Ironically, the market was also affected by the dotcom boom itself and the boom of the modern digital age -- not through the surge of online retail, but by the entrepreneurs behind the multi-million dollar sites which emerged, who drove a spike in the antiquarian book market, one previously driven by 45-65-year-old collectors which have (and still do) dominate the scene.  

"These new collectors wanted the flagship books; the likes of Darwin's The Origin of the Species. What this meant for the market was that individual books shot up in price (and have remained high) -- a first edition of Darwin's 'Origin' was worth perhaps £20,000 in 1994, but by 1999 had shot up to around £80,000 and remains around there today, nudging toward £100,000 for very fine copies.  

"However, first editions of the rest of Darwin's leading work, such as The Descent of Man remain static at around £5,000, while his other lesser known works can be found still for prices in the hundreds of pounds. This skew is true for 'Origin…' as it is for many other seminal works -- Adam Smith's The Wealth of Nations being a prime example, which Christie's sold for a record-breaking £157,250 in 2010.

"Interestingly, it is around this time that the collectables market started to witness a change in marketing strategy. Previously auction house brochures detailed the items' condition and quality; from the mid-nineties, explanations of the importance started to emerge and dominate in order that potential buyers (who had no collectables history, nor academic insight into the literary world), could understand what they were buying.  

"It's natural to think that such a drive in the top end might push the collectable books market the same way as philately, where rare stamps are now holding their value better than anything aside from gold, and indeed are proving to be a highly lucrative investment strategy. However, a statute binding all members of the Antiquarian Book Sellers Association strictly forbids this: sellers cannot position rare books as investment opportunities. It's an intriguing polarity, and one that could be affected by an additional factor, the proliferation of the e-reader.

"The democracy that cheap, easily-downloadable books brings could be seen as a threat to the sector, and indeed there has been concern that it too will drive a race to the bottom and devalue the printed page. However, Wilson thinks this could in fact bring with it a great opportunity to put value back into the publishing sector, through initial discovery of books, and the subsequent creation of ultra-limited, beautifully-made original products.  

"While this may drive a collectables market, it may not drive the sales figures (and revenue) that investors will demand. However, it does open up the debate about whether publishers should also take a longer term market responsibility as well as the shorter term financial one. 

"Missingham suggests that there are other issues to heed, namely the community aspect of any web-based marketplace, 'the main issue is how to find and discover the quality books online. Talk in the industry is of reliable gatekeepers reducing in number, the surge of dubious, untrustworthy online reviews being the main issue'.

"There's much talk of similarities between the second hand book industry and that of the humble independent record shop. While the likes of Rough Trade, itself a British icon, are prospering, the number of small private stores across the country has plummeted in the last decade -- predominantly as a result of the digital music boom, and the devaluing of music amid the clamour for "free" content. Let's hope the books trade can learn from music's mistakes."

Once cell phone cameras with their very limited lenses and image processors became the most popular means of taking photographs, mainly because cell phone images could immediately be emailed, posted to websites, social media, etc., it was probably inevitable that camera companies would introduce regular more full-featured cameras incorporating computers that could be connected to the Internet through Internet "hot spots" or cellular connections. The first models offered at the end of 2012 were full-featured and overpriced, but the concept appeared to have great potential: 

"New models from Nikon and Samsung are obvious graduates of the 'if you can’t beat ’em, join ’em' school. The Nikon Coolpix S800C ($300) and Samsung’s Galaxy Camera ($500 from AT&T, $550 from Verizon) are fascinating hybrids. They merge elements of the cellphone and the camera into something entirely new and — if these flawed 1.0 versions are any indication — very promising.  

"From the back, you could mistake both of these cameras for Android phones. The big black multitouch screen is filled with app icons. Yes, app icons. These cameras can run Angry Birds, Flipboard, Instapaper, Pandora, Firefox, GPS navigation programs and so on. You download and run them exactly the same way. (That’s right, a GPS function. “What’s the address, honey? I’ll plug it into my camera.”) But the real reason you’d want an Android camera is wirelessness. Now you can take a real photo with a real camera — and post it or send it online instantly. You eliminate the whole 'get home and transfer it to the computer' step.  

"And as long as your camera can get online, why stop there? These cameras also do a fine job of handling Web surfing, e-mail, YouTube videos, Facebook feeds and other online tasks. Well, as fine a job as a phone could do, anyway.  

"You can even make Skype video calls, although you won’t be able to see your conversation partner; the lens has to be pointing toward you. Both cameras get online using Wi-Fi hot spots. The Samsung model can also get online over the cellular networks, just like a phone, so you can upload almost anywhere" (Pogue's Posts, NYTimes.com, 12-19-2012, accessed 12-21-2012).  

On December 22, 2012 my fiancée Trish Gilbert and I went to see the Life of Pi, an American adventure drama film based on Yann Martell's 2001 novel directed by Ang Lee and distributed by 20th Century Fox in Los Angeles.

There has, of course, been much written about this imaginative novel and the film. With respect to this database the story line, and the inspirational aspects of the novel and film are not strictly relevant. What was of particular interest to me was the revelation only after I had seen the film that most of the scenes with the tiger were done entirely by computer graphic animation. During the film every image—every scene in which the tiger appeared— appeared to be 100% real. No computer graphic animation in any previous film that I had seen had achieved this level of realism.

"Visual effects supervisor Bill Westenhofer was no stranger to animal-oriented projects when he came aboard Ang Lee's 'Life of Pi' to realize a digital photorealistic tiger. However, the film presented challenges beyond merely creating the beast. In 'Pi,' the tiger, oddly named Richard Parker, is one of the two main characters. He and Pi Patel, played by Suraj Sharma, are castaways who survive 227 days on a lifeboat in the Pacific Ocean. 

"Westenhofer began his work by bringing four real tigers to Taiwan, where the film was partly shot, in order to obtain very precise animation references with the goal of making the animal as real-looking as possible.  

"According to Westenhofer, even the most skilled animators in the world need visual references. 'A tiger is a solid mass of muscle with a loose bag of skin surrounding it, like a cloth that is draped over it,' he says. 'We really studied the tiny nuances such as the shoulder ripple that occurs when he shifts his weight. By having the reference clips, we kept true to how the animal would react.'

"After training and rehearsing with the tigers for five weeks, the production completed 23 shots of a real tiger around the lifeboat where most of the story takes place. The film's remaining 148 tiger shots would be realized with advanced computer graphics technology. In the film, the real tigers are indistinguishable from the digital ones.  

"The lead vfx shop on the tiger shots, Rhythm and Hues, spent full year on research and development, building upon its already vast knowledge of CG animation as it created the fearsome Richard Parker. 'Forty percent of our efforts were (born of) new technology,' which was used create 'the hair, the way it lights, the muscle and skin system,' Westenhofer says" (http://www.variety.com/article/VR1118063581/?refcatid=13, accessed 12-23-2012).  

“ 'A library has limited shelf space, so you almost have to think of it as a store, and stock it with the things that people want,' said Jason Kuhl, the executive director of the Arlington Heights Memorial Library. Renovations going on there now will turn a swath of the library’s first floor into an area resembling a bookshop, where patrons will be pampered with cozy seating, a vending cafe and, above all, an abundance of best sellers.  

"As librarians across the nation struggle with the task of redefining their roles and responsibilities in a digital age, many public libraries are seeing an opportunity to fill the void created by the loss of traditional bookstores. Indeed, today’s libraries are increasingly adapting their collections and services based on the demands of library patrons, whom they now call customers. Today’s libraries are reinventing themselves as vibrant town squares, showcasing the latest best sellers, lending Kindles loaded with e-books, and offering grassroots technology training centers. Faced with the need to compete for shrinking municipal finances, libraries are determined to prove they can respond as quickly to the needs of the taxpayers as the police and fire department can. “I think public libraries used to seem intimidating to many people, but today, they are becoming much more user-friendly, and are no longer these big, impersonal mausoleums,” said Jeannette Woodward, a former librarian and author of 'Creating the Customer-Driven Library: Building on the Bookstore Model.' 'Public libraries tread a fine line,' Ms. Woodward said. 'They want to make people happy, and get them in the habit of coming into the library for popular best sellers, even if some of it might be considered junk. But libraries also understand the need for providing good information, which often can only be found at the library.'

"Cheryl Hurley, the president of the Library of America, a nonprofit publisher in New York 'dedicated to preserving America’s best and most significant writing,' said the trend of libraries catering to the public’s demand for best sellers is not surprising, especially given the ravages of the recession on public budgets.  

Still, Ms. Hurley remains confident that libraries will never relinquish their responsibility to also provide patrons with the opportunity to discover literary works of merit, be it the classics, or more recent fiction from novelists like Philip Roth, whose work is both critically acclaimed and immensely popular.  

" 'The political ramifications for libraries today can result in driving the collection more and more from what the people want, rather than libraries shaping the tastes of the readers,' Ms. Hurley said. 'But one of the joys of visiting the public library is the serendipity of discovering another book, even though you were actually looking for that best seller that you thought you wanted.'  

“ 'It’s all about balancing the library’s mission and its marketing, and that is always a tricky dance,' she added.  

"While print books, both fiction and nonfiction, still make up the bulk of most library collections – e-books remain limited to less than 2 percent of many collections in part because some publishers limit their availability at libraries — building renovation plans these days rarely include expanding shelf space for print products. Instead, many libraries are culling their collections and adapting floor plans to accommodate technology training programs, as well as mini-conference rooms that offer private, quiet spaces frequently requested by self-employed consultants meeting with clients, as well as teenagers needing space to huddle over group projects" (http://www.nytimes.com/2012/12/28/us/libraries-try-to-update-the-bookstore-model.html?ref=global-home&_r=0, accessed 12-28-2012).

By GEOFFREY YORK, The Globe and Mail, Dec. 27 2012

"As rebels searched the bags of the truck passengers at a checkpoint near Timbuktu, one man was trying to hide his nervousness.

"Mohamed Diagayete, an owlish scholar with an eager smile, was silently praying that the rebels would not discover his laptop computer. Buried in his laptop bag was an external hard drive with a cache of thousands of valuable images and documents from Timbuktu’s greatest cultural treasure: its ancient scholarly manuscripts.  

"Radical Islamist rebels in northern Mali have repeatedly attacked the fabled city’s heritage, taking pickaxes to the tombs of local saints and smashing down a door in a 15th century mosque. They demolished several more mausoleums this week and vowed to destroy the rest, despite strong protests from UNESCO, the United Nations cultural agency.  

"With the tombs demolished, Timbuktu’s most priceless remaining legacy is its vast libraries of crumbling Arabic and African manuscripts, written in ornate calligraphy over the past eight centuries, proof of a historic African intellectual tradition. Some experts consider them as significant as the Dead Sea Scrolls – and an implicit rebuke to the harsh narrow views of the Islamist radicals.  

"But now the manuscripts, too, could be under threat. And so a covert operation is under way to save them.  

"That’s why Mr. Diagayete was so anxious to smuggle his hard drive out of Timbuktu. For years, he’s been helping preserve the manuscripts by digitizing them. But the project was halted when the Islamists seized Timbuktu in April. A few months later, Mr. Diagayete made an undercover visit to Timbuktu and brought back as many of the digital images as he could.  

"The quest to save the documents rarely leaves his thoughts. 'What will happen to the manuscripts?' he asks from the safety of Mali’s capital, Bamako, where he fled after the fall of Timbuktu.  

“ 'I’m always asking myself thousands of questions about the manuscripts,' he says. 'When we lose them, we have no other copy. It’s forever.'

Mr. Diagayete is a researcher at the Ahmed Baba Institute, which has been digitizing the manuscripts for nearly a decade with support from foreign governments. But because of technical delays, and the huge number of manuscripts in the city (up to 700,000 by some estimates), only a tiny fraction has been copied so far.  

"The manuscripts, dating back to the 13th century, are evidence of ancient African and Islamist written scholarship, contradicting the myth of a purely oral tradition on the continent.  

"Many of the manuscripts are religious documents, but others are intellectual treatises on medicine, astronomy, literature, mathematics, chemistry, judicial law and philosophy. Many were brought to Timbuktu in camel caravans by scholars from Cairo, Baghdad and Persia who trekked to the city when it was one of the world’s greatest centres of Islamic learning. In the Middle Ages, when Europe was stagnating, the African city had 180 religious schools and a university with 20,000 students.  

"Timbuktu fell into decline after Moroccan invasions and French colonization, but its ancient gold-lettered manuscripts were preserved by dozens of owners, mostly private citizens, who kept them in wooden trunks or in their own libraries.  

"Today, under the occupation of the radical jihadists, the manuscripts face a range of threats. Conservation experts have fled the city, so the documents could be damaged by insects, mice, sand, dust or extreme temperatures. Or the Islamist militants could decide to raise money by looting and selling the documents.  

"There’s also a risk that the militants could simply destroy the manuscripts, since some are written by African mystics or moderate Sufis, regarded by the Islamist rebels as ideological enemies. Another threat is the planned Western-backed military campaign against the rebels, which could lead to house-to-house fighting in Timbuktu, further endangering the manuscripts.  

"The government-run Ahmed Baba Institute holds nearly 40,000 manuscripts in two main buildings, including a headquarters built with South African assistance in 2009. But the Islamist rebels have seized the institute, looting its computers and using its new building as a sleeping quarters.  

“ 'It’s a big setback for the institute,' said Susana Molins Lliteras, a researcher at a South African-based project to protect the Timbuktu manuscripts.  

“ 'It’s very possible that things have been lost,' she said. 'We haven’t even had a chance to research the manuscripts – we haven’t scratched the surface. So if they are lost, we won’t even know what is lost.'

"Since the rebel takeover, the private owners have scrambled to protect the manuscripts. Nobody knows exactly what they have done, but it is believed that some owners have hidden the manuscripts, buried them in the sand, or smuggled them to villages.  

"This, too, is dangerous, since the ancient texts can easily be damaged when they are moved. 'They are very fragile,' Mr. Diagayete said. 'The choice is difficult: Either we lose them all or we lose part of them. Everyone is trying to find a way to protect their manuscripts.'

"Adama Diarra, a Malian journalist, saw three owners piling their manuscripts into 50-kilogram rice bags in April, shortly after the Islamists seized Timbuktu, apparently in an effort to move them to safer places. 'The pages were falling out,' he said.  

"Mohamed Galla Dicko, director of the Ahmed Baba Institute for 17 years before leaving the institute this year, says the threat to the manuscripts is serious. 'The old pages can be damaged just by touching them,' he said. 'And the people who are moving them are not specialists in handling them.'

"While the Timbuktu manuscripts are in trouble, there is better news from another ancient Malian town, Djenne, south of the rebel-controlled territory. With help from the British Library, researchers are digitizing thousands of Djenne’s historic manuscripts – some nearly 500 years old.  

"Even when fuel and electricity were rationed after the rebel advances, dedicated workers kept toiling on the project at Djenne’s manuscript library. 'We’ve saved a large number of the manuscripts,' said Sophie Sarin, a Swedish hotel owner in Djenne.  

"The project aims to collect 200,000 images by next July. After the rebels captured northern Mali this year, Ms. Sarin travelled to London with a hard drive containing 80,000 digital images of the Djenne manuscripts. She brought them to specialists at the British Library, who were very relieved to see them, she said."

"Contemporary libraries have shifted from warehouses of books and materials to become participatory sites of culture and learning that invite, ignite and sustain conversations.

"The media scholar Henry Jenkins has identified that such participatory sites of culture share five traits:  

"· Creating learning spaces through multiple participatory media;

"· Providing opportunities for creating and sharing original works and ideas;  

"· Crafting an environment in which novices’ and experts’ roles are fluid as people learn together;  

"· Positing the library as a place where members feel a sense of belonging, value and connectedness; and  

"· Helping people believe their contributions matter by incorporating their ideas and feedback.  

"Modern libraries of all kinds – public, school, academic and special – are using this lens of participatory culture to help their communities rethink the idea of a “library.” By putting relationships with people first, libraries can recast and expand the possibilities of what we can do for communities by embodying what Guy Kawasaki calls enchantment: trustworthiness, likability, and exceptional services and products.

"Libraries in various communities provide enchantment through traditional services, like story time, bookmobiles, classes and rich collections of books. However, libraries are also incorporating innovative new roles: librarians as instructional partners, libraries as “makerspaces,” libraries as centers of community publishing and digital learning labs.  

"While libraries face many challenges – budget cuts, an ever-shifting information landscape, stereotypes that sometimes hamper how people see libraries, and rapidly evolving technologies – our greatest resource is community participation. Relationships with the community build an organic library, that is of the people, by the people and for the people (Buffy J. Hamilton, http://www.nytimes.com/roomfordebate/2012/12/27/do-we-still-need-libraries/its-not-just-story-time-and-bookmobiles, accessed 12-29-2012). 

On December 30, 2012 The New York Times published 2012: The Year in Graphics. Graphics and interactives from a year that included an election, the Olympics and a devastating hurricane. A selection of the graphics presented here include information about how they were created.

The review covered a wide range of subjects and approaches.  One of the most unusual from my perspective was Connecting Music and Gesture, originally published on April 6, 2012:

"We wanted to visualize and explain the nuances of conducting. The N.Y.U. Movement Lab recorded Alan Gilbert, the music director of the New York Philharmonic, using motion-capture technology. With the motion-capture data, we created one visualization that tracked the lines that Mr. Gilbert’s fingers drew in the air in a way that looked similar to Picasso’s 'light drawings.' ”

As a school project for the Academy of Fine Arts in Łódź, Polish graphic designer Paul Marcinkowski / aka Kaplon of Warsaw created an infographic about tatooing which appears to have been inked on his own body. The graphic detailed several facts about tattoos, such as popular reasons why people regretted having them, and the most common number of tattoos a person might have.

In January 2013 archivists and curators at six institutions, including Michael Forstrom at the Beinecke Library, Yale; Susan Thomas at the Bodleian Library, Oxford; Jeremy Leighton John at the British Library; Megan Barnard at the Harry Ransom Center, The University of Texas at Austin; Kate Donovan at the Manuscript, Archives and Rare Book Library (MARBL), Emory University; and Will Hansen and Seth Shaw at the Rubenstein Library, Duke University, published through Media Commons Press Born Digital: Guidance for Donors, Dealers, and Archival Repositories.

On January 4, 2013 Gayle Osterberg, Director of Communications at the Library of Congress reported in the Library of Congress Blog: 

"An element of our mission at the Library of Congress is to collect the story of America and to acquire collections that will have research value. So when the Library had the opportunity to acquire an archive from the popular social media service Twitter, we decided this was a collection that should be here.  

"In April 2010, the Library and Twitter [based in San Francisco] signed an agreement providing the Library the public tweets from the company’s inception through the date of the agreement, an archive of tweets from 2006 through April 2010. Additionally, the Library and Twitter agreed that Twitter would provide all public tweets on an ongoing basis under the same terms.

"The Library’s first objectives were to acquire and preserve the 2006-10 archive; to establish a secure, sustainable process for receiving and preserving a daily, ongoing stream of tweets through the present day; and to create a structure for organizing the entire archive by date.

"This month, all those objectives will be completed. We now have an archive of approximately 170 billion tweets and growing. The volume of tweets the Library receives each day has grown from 140 million beginning in February 2011 to nearly half a billion tweets each day as of October 2012.  

"The Library’s focus now is on addressing the significant technology challenges to making the archive accessible to researchers in a comprehensive, useful way. These efforts are ongoing and a priority for the Library.  

"Twitter is a new kind of collection for the Library of Congress but an important one to its mission. As society turns to social media as a primary method of communication and creative expression, social media is supplementing, and in some cases supplanting, letters, journals, serial publications and other sources routinely collected by research libraries.  [Bold face is my addition, JN.]

"Although the Library has been building and stabilizing the archive and has not yet offered researchers access, we have nevertheless received approximately 400 inquiries from researchers all over the world. Some broad topics of interest expressed by researchers run from patterns in the rise of citizen journalism and elected officials’ communications to tracking vaccination rates and predicting stock market activity.

"Attached is a white paper [PDF] that summarizes the Library’s work to date and outlines present-day progress and challenges."

————

♦♦ To which James Gleick, author of The Information, responded in the New York Review of Books on January 16, 2013 in a blog entry titled Librarians of the Twitterverse, from which I quote this selection:

"For a brief time in the 1850s the telegraph companies of England and the United States thought that they could (and should) preserve every message that passed through their wires. Millions of telegrams—in fireproof safes. Imagine the possibilities for history!  

“ 'Fancy some future Macaulay rummaging among such a store, and painting therefrom the salient features of the social and commercial life of England in the nineteenth century,' wrote Andrew Wynter in 1854. (Wynter was what we would now call a popular-science writer; in his day job he practiced medicine, specializing in 'lunatics.') 'What might not be gathered some day in the twenty-first century from a record of the correspondence of an entire people?'

"Remind you of anything?  

"Here in the twenty-first century, the Library of Congress is now stockpiling the entire Twitterverse, or Tweetosphere, or whatever we’ll end up calling it—anyway, the corpus of all public tweets. There are a lot. The library embarked on this project in April 2010, when Jack Dorsey’s microblogging service was four years old, and four years of tweeting had produced 21 billion messages. Since then Twitter has grown, as these things do, and 21 billion tweets represents not much more than a month’s worth. As of December, the library had received 170 billion—each one a 140-character capsule garbed in metadata with the who-when-where. . . . "

On January 7, 2013 The Guardian newspaper reported that a portrait of the Renaissance physician Girolamo Fracastoro, stored in London's National Gallery since 1924, was attributed to Titian, adding to the National Gallery's great collection of the works of this painter:

"How was this painting misrecognised for so long? When a painting is regarded as not by anyone famous and put in a museum's dark corners, Penny suggests, a self-fulfilling process starts: curators are less likely to examine it, or clean it, or even properly frame it. But in this case fresh eyes, including those of the art historian Paul Joannides, were cast on a forgotten painting and it was taken to the lab to be restored. Discoveries there about the canvas and technique blaze the name Titian.  

"Fracastoro's portrait has been damaged over the centuries, although the new cleaning by the National Gallery has revealed a very characterful face. The background is more problematic and Penny admits its clumsy architecture remains a puzzle.  

"But Titian's genius flares in one fantastic detail that makes this painting – warts and all – truly captivating. "It's not the head that is so amazing in this picture", as Penny puts it, "but the fur."  

"We are feasting our eyes on a flecked mist of white, gold, brown and black, a virtuoso, nearly abstract performance that has all the magic of Titian. With joyous freedom and a casual command of fluffy gossamer colours, the master sensualist has recreated the richness of a lynx fur hung over Fracastoro's shoulders. "The great thing about the lynx is that it has got this brown smudge as well as black and white," enthuses Penny about the animal whose fur Titian so convincingly copied. /He shows me how lynx fur also features in Titian's nearby group portrait of the men of the Vendramin family – lynx was a favourite for rich Venetians.  "Fracostoro worked in Verona, in the empire of the Venetian republic. As well as naming syphilis, he came up with a modern theory of contagion, saying diseases were transmitted by tiny "spores". This was a big advance on the orthodoxy of the time that sicknesses such as plague were caused by bad air.  

"The lynx is an appropriate animal for such a man to sport on his shoulders, for this cat was famous for its eyesight. Italian scientific pioneers including Galileo belonged to the Academy of Lynxes, which associated the creature's eyesight with the pursuit of empirical truth" (http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2013/jan/07/titian-painting-rediscovered-national-gallery, accessed 01-09-2013).

A scholarly article on the rediscovery by Jill Dunkerton, Jennifer Fletcher and Paul Joannides entitled "A portrait of ‘Girolamo Fracastoro’ by Titian in the National Gallery" was published in the January 2013 issue of The Burlington Magazine.

"For what appears to be the first time ever, information technology companies in the Standard & Poor’s index of 500 stocks are paying more in dividends than companies in any other sector, S.&P. reported this week. Multimedia

"Off the Charts: High Tech, High Dividends S.&P. Dow Jones Indices reported that in 2012 the technology sector accounted for 14.7 percent of all dividends paid to investors in the 500 companies, up from 10.3 percent in 2011 and from a little over 5 percent back in 2004. It replaced the consumer staples sector, which had been the largest payer of dividends for the previous three years.  

"The change was largely because of the decision by Apple, now the most valuable company in the world, to begin paying dividends last year. The company had been public for more than three decades before it announced plans in March to begin making payouts. Four other technology companies in the index — all but one of which had been public for more than two decades without paying a dividend — later joined in making payments to shareholders.  

"With those changes, 60 percent — 42 — of the 70 technology stocks in the index are now dividend payers. The dividends from many technology companies are relatively small, however, and of the other sectors, only health care comes close to having as large a share of companies that do not pay dividends" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/12/business/information-technology-dividends-surge-past-consumer-staples-sector.html, accessed 01-12-2013).

"Sony is using nanoscale particles called quantum dots to significantly improve the color of some of its high-end Bravia televisions. It showed off the technology, which increases the range of colors that an LCD television can display by about 50 percent, at the Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas this week. This marks the first time that quantum dots—which for a long time have fascinated researchers because of their unusual electronic and optical properties—have been used in a mass-produced consumer electronics product."  

"The product that’s finally coming to market is far different. Sony’s new television is a modified LCD TV. In LCD televisions, each pixel is illuminated from behind by a white backlight, and different colors are created by changing the amount of light allowed to pass through three different filters—one red, one green, and one blue. LCDs originally used fluorescent bulbs as the backlight, but now most use LEDs (marketers call these products LED LCDs). QD Vision uses quantum dots to enhance the LED backlight."

"The new technology is a hit with some industry watchers (one publication named the new Sony KD-65X9000A, one of the TVs to feature the quantum dots, “Best in Show” at CES). Sony is pairing the quantum dot backlighting with other innovations, such as 3-D and and ultra-high 4K resolution, which it hopes will boost sales. Sales of TVs have been flagging.  

"Other quantum dot displays are in the works. For example, last year Nanosys announced it would have a quantum dot backlight product in a notebook in 2013, but it hasn’t disclosed the specific product (see “Quantum Dots Give Notebooks a New Glow”) (MIT TechnologyReview.com, accessed 01-14-2013).  

On January 14, 2013 Judge Nelson Wolff, inspired after having read Walter Isaacson's biography of Steve Jobs, announced that Bexar County, Texas will open in Autumn 2013 a public library entirely devoid of any physical books to be called the BiblioTech. 

"Not all classic library features will be lost among the modern décor: Bexar County promised study spaces, meeting rooms, and a designated interactive children's area inside of the 4,989-square-foot space.

" 'Students who live in this area of Precinct 1 […] have limited resources to complete research, use a computer or simply read a book outside of their school facilities,' Commissioner Sergio Rodriguez said in a statement. 'Once we open BiblioTech this summer, they will have a world of learning available to them all the time.'

"Located inside the Precinct 1 Satellite Offices on Pleasanton Road, the center will be open seven days a week; the county expects a summer launch. The commissioners' proposal includes 100 e-readers for circulation, 50 pre-loaded enhanced e-readers for children, 50 computer stations, 25 laptops, and 25 tablets to use on-site. The collection will include 10,000 current titles to start" (Pcmag.com, accessed 01-14-2013).

On January 17, 2013 the Philadelphia Tribune announced that Zora Ball, a seven year old first grader at the Harambee Institute of Science and Technology Charter School in Philadelphia, was the youngest person ever to create a full version of a mobile game app. Zora created the app using the Bootstrap programming language. She unveiled the app at the University of Pennsylvania’s “Bootstrap Expo.”

"Reviews on Amazon are becoming attack weapons, intended to sink new books as soon as they are published.

"In the biggest, most overt and most successful of these campaigns, a group of Michael Jackson fans used Facebook and Twitter to solicit negative reviews of a new biography of the singer. They bombarded Amazon with dozens of one-star takedowns, succeeded in getting several favorable notices erased and even took credit for Amazon’s briefly removing the book from sale.  

" 'Books used to die by being ignored, but now they can be killed — and perhaps unjustly killed,' said Trevor Pinch, a Cornell sociologist who has studied Amazon reviews. 'In theory, a very good book could be killed by a group of people for malicious reasons.'

"In 'Untouchable: The Strange Life and Tragic Death of Michael Jackson,' Randall Sullivan writes that Jackson’s overuse of plastic surgery reduced his nose to little more than a pair of nostrils and that he died a virgin despite being married twice. These points in particular seem to infuriate the fans.  

"Outside Amazon, the book had a mixed reception; in The New York Times, Michiko Kakutani called it 'thoroughly dispensable.' So it is difficult to pinpoint how effective the campaign was. Still, the book has been a resounding failure in the marketplace.  

"The fans, who call themselves Michael Jackson’s Rapid Response Team to Media Attacks, say they are exercising their free speech rights to protest a book they feel is exploitative and inaccurate. 'Sullivan does everything he can to dehumanize, dismantle and destroy, against all objective fact,' a spokesman for the group said.  

"But the book’s publisher, Grove Press, said the Amazon review system was being abused in an organized campaign. 'We’re very reluctant to interfere with the free flow of discourse, but there should be transparency about people’s motivations,' said Morgan Entrekin, president of Grove/Atlantic, Grove’s parent company" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/21/business/a-casualty-on-the-battlefield-of-amazons-partisan-book-reviews.html?hpw&_r=0, accessed 01-21-2013).

On January 21, 2013 The Cleveland Museum of Art opened Gallery One, an interactive gallery "that blends art, technology and interpretation to inspire visitors to explore the museum’s renowned collections. This revolutionary space features the largest multi-touch screen in the United States, which displays images of over 3,500 objects from the museum’s world-renowned permanent collection. This 40-foot Collection Wall allows visitors to shape their own tours of the museum and to discover the full breadth of the collections on view throughout the museum’s galleries. Throughout the space, original works of art and digital interactives engage visitors in new ways, putting curiosity, imagination and creativity at the heart of their museum experience. Innovative user-interface design and cutting-edge hardware developed exclusively for Gallery One break new ground in art museum interpetation, design and technology"

"Released: Janaury 22, 2013

"Patrons embrace new technologies – and would welcome more. But many still want printed books to hold their central place

"Summary of findings

"The internet has already had a major impact on how people find and access information, and now the rising popularity of e-books is helping transform Americans’ reading habits. In this changing landscape, public libraries are trying to adjust their services to these new realities while still serving the needs of patrons who rely on more traditional resources. In a new survey of Americans’ attitudes and expectations for public libraries, the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project finds that many library patrons are eager to see libraries’ digital services expand, yet also feel that print books remain important in the digital age.  

"The availability of free computers and internet access now rivals book lending and reference expertise as a vital service of libraries. In a national survey of Americans ages 16 and older:  

" • 80% of Americans say borrowing books is a “very important” service libraries provide.

" • 80% say reference librarians are a “very important” service of libraries.

" • 77% say free access to computers and the internet is a “very important” service of libraries.

"Moreover, a notable share of Americans say they would embrace even wider uses of technology at libraries such as:  

" • Online research services allowing patrons to pose questions and get answers from librarians: 37% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use an “ask a librarian” type of service, and another 36% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.

"• Apps-based access to library materials and programs: 35% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 28% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.

" • Access to technology “petting zoos” to try out new devices: 35% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 34% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.

" • GPS-navigation apps to help patrons locate material inside library buildings: 34% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 28% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.

" • “Redbox”-style lending machines or kiosks located throughout the community where people can check out books, movies or music without having to go to the library itself: 33% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 30% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so.

" • “Amazon”-style customized book/audio/video recommendation schemes that are based on patrons’ prior library behavior: 29% of Americans ages 16 and older would “very likely” use that service and another 35% say they would be “somewhat likely” to do so." (http://libraries.pewinternet.org/2013/01/22/library-services/, accessed 03-04-2013).

"ANY list of the leading novelists of the 19th century, writing in English, would almost surely include Charles Dickens, Thomas Hardy, Herman Melville, Nathaniel Hawthorne and Mark Twain.

"But they do not appear at the top of a list of the most influential writers of their time. Instead, a recent study has found, Jane Austen, author of 'Pride and Prejudice,' and Sir Walter Scott, the creator of 'Ivanhoe,' had the greatest effect on other authors, in terms of writing style and themes.

"These two were 'the literary equivalent of Homo erectus, or, if you prefer, Adam and Eve,' Matthew L. Jockers [of the University of Nebraska-Lincoln] wrote in research published last year. He based his conclusion on an analysis of 3,592 works published from 1780 to 1900. It was a lot of digging, and a computer did it.  

"The study, which involved statistical parsing and aggregation of thousands of novels, made other striking observations. For example, Austen’s works cluster tightly together in style and theme, while those of George Eliot (a k a Mary Ann Evans) range more broadly, and more closely resemble the patterns of male writers. Using similar criteria, Harriet Beecher Stowe was 20 years ahead of her time, said Mr. Jockers, whose research will soon be published in a book, 'Macroanalysis: Digital Methods and Literary History' (University of Illinois Press)" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/01/27/technology/literary-history-seen-through-big-datas-lens.html?nl=todaysheadlines&emc=edit_th_20130127&_r=0, accessed 01-27-2013).

"A robot that allows patients to communicate with doctors via a telemedicine system that can move around on its own has just received 510(k) clearance by the FDA (Food and Drug Administration).  

"The robot, called RP-VITA, was created by InTouch Health [Santa Barbara, California] and iRobot [Bedford, Massachusetts] and allows doctors from anywhere in the world to communicate with patients at their hospital bedside via a telemedicine solution through an iPad interface.  

"According to iRobot and InTouch Health, RP-VITA combines the latest from iRobot in autonomous navigation and mobility technology with state-of-the-art telemedicine, and InTouch Health developed telemedicine and electronic health record integration.  

"RP-VITA makes it possible for doctors to have "doctor-to-patient consults, ensuring that the physician is in the right place at the right time and has access to the necessary clinical information to take immediate action."  

The robot is used in ways that scientists have never before seen. In order to not get in the way of other people or objects, it outlines its own environment and utilizes a range of advanced sensors to autonomously move about a crowded space.  

"Irrespective of a doctor's location, using an intuitive iPad® interface allows them to visit patients and communicate with their co-workers with a single click.  

"A clearance from the FDA means that RP-VITA can be used for active patient monitoring in pre-operative, peri-operative, and post-surgical settings, such as prenatal, neurological, psychological, and critical care evaluations and examinations.  

"InTouch Health is selling RP-VITA into the healthcare market as its new top-of-the-line remote presence device." (http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/articles/255457.php, accessed 01-27-2013).

On January 28, 2013 it was widely reported that the Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Learning and Islamic Research (CEDRAB) in Timbuktu (Tombouctou), Mali, the repository of 30,000 historic manuscripts from the ancient Muslim world, was set aflame by Islamist fighters.

On the same day Vivienne Walt reported on Time.com that the loss from the fire was far less than total:

"In interviews with TIME on Monday, preservationists said that in a large-scale rescue operation early last year, shortly before the militants seized control of Timbuktu, thousands of manuscripts were hauled out of the Ahmed Baba Institute to a safe house elsewhere. Realizing that the documents might be prime targets for pillaging or vindictive attacks from Islamic extremists, staff left behind just a small portion of them, perhaps out of haste, but also to conceal the fact that the center had been deliberately emptied. “The documents which had been there are safe, they were not burned,” said Mahmoud Zouber, Mali’s presidential aide on Islamic affairs, a title he retains despite the overthrow of the former President, his boss, in a military coup a year ago; preserving Timbuktu’s manuscripts was a key project of his office. By phone from Bamako on Monday night, Zouber told TIME, “They were put in a very safe place. I can guarantee you. The manuscripts are in total security.”

"In a second interview from Bamako, a preservationist who did not want to be named confirmed that the center’s collection had been hidden out of reach from the militants. Neither of those interviewed wanted the location of the manuscripts named in print, for fear that remnants of the al-Qaeda occupiers might return to destroy them.

"That was confirmed too by Shamil Jeppie, director of the Timbuktu Manuscripts Project at the University of Cape Town, who told TIME on Monday night that “there were a few items in the Ahmed Baba library, but the rest were kept away.” The center, financed by the South African government as a favored project by then President Thabo Mbeki, who championed reviving Africa’s historical culture, housed state-of-the-art equipment to preserve and photograph hundreds of thousands of pages, some of which had gold illumination, astrological charts and sophisticated mathematical formulas. Jeppie said he had been enraged by the television footage on Monday of the building trashed, and blamed in part Mali’s government, which he said had done little to ensure the center’s security. “It is really sad and disturbing,” he said.

"When TIME reached Timbuktu’s Mayor Cissé in Bamako late Monday night, he tempered the remarks he had made to journalists earlier in the day, conceding in an interview that, indeed, residents had worked to rescue the center’s manuscripts before al-Qaeda occupied the city last March. Still, he said that while many of the manuscripts had been saved, “they did not move all the manuscripts.” He said he had fled earlier this month after living through months of the Islamists’ rule, a situation he described as a “true catastrophe” and “very, very hard.” He said he expects to fly back home by the weekend on a French military jet. By then, perhaps, the state of Timbuktu’s astonishing historic libraries might be clearer."

On January 30, 2013 an article in Liberation.fr stated that "more than 90%" of the manuscripts at the Ahmed Baba Institute in Timbuktu were saved from destruction.

On January 28, 2013 The European Commission announced funding for The Human Brain Project.

From the press release:

"The goal of the Human Brain Project is to pull together all our existing knowledge about the human brain and to reconstruct the brain, piece by piece, in supercomputer-based models and simulations. The models offer the prospect of a new understanding of the human brain and its diseases and of completely new computing and robotic technologies. On January 28, the European Commission supported this vision, announcing that it has selected the HBP as one of two projects to be funded through the new FET Flagship Program.

''Federating more than 80 European and international research institutions, the Human Brain Project is planned to last ten years (2013-2023). The cost is estimated at 1.19 billion euros. The project will also associate some important North American and Japanese partners. It will be coordinated at the Ecole Polytechnique Fédérale de Lausanne (EPFL) in Switzerland, by neuroscientist Henry Markram with co-directors Karlheinz Meier of Heidelberg University, Germany, and Richard Frackowiak of Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois (CHUV) and the University of Lausanne (UNIL).

The Swiss Contribution

"Switzerland plays a vital role in the Human Brain Project. Henry Markram and his team at EPFL will coordinate the project and will also be responsible for the development and operation of the project’s Brain Simulation Platform. Richard Frackowiak and his team will be in charge of the project’s medical informatics platform; the Swiss Supercomputing Centre in Lugano will provide essential supercomputing facilities. Many other Swiss groups are also contributing to the project. Through the ETH Board, the Swiss Federal Government has allocated 75 million CHF (approximately 60 million Euros) for the period 2013-2017, to support the efforts of both Henry Markram’s laboratory at EPFL and the Swiss Supercomputing Center in Lugano. The Canton of Vaud will give 35 million CHF (28 million Euros) to build a new facility called Neuropolis for in silico life science, and centered around the Human Brain Project. This building will also be supported by the Swiss Confederation, the Rolex Group and third-party sponsors.

"The selection of the Human Brain Project as a FET Flagship is the result of more than three years of preparation and a rigorous and severe evaluation by a large panel of independent, high profile scientists, chosen by the European Commission. In the coming months, the partners will negotiate a detailed agreement with the Community for the initial first two and a half year ramp-up phase (2013-mid 2016). The project will begin work in the closing months of 2013."

After cell phones cameras became the most popular way of taking pictures, it was probably inevitable that a way would be found to make them look and act like cameras:

"now available for the iPhone 5, the 'gizmon iCa' polycarbonate case transforms your smartphone into a working rangefinder camera. a working shutter button is built into the top of the case - making it easy to capture images without having to pre-load the camera interface app. incorporated with a viewfinder on top of the enclosure - the design helps eliminate glare in direct sunlight, as with an additional lens opening from the flash unit. the case also ships with a second interchangeable section that allows for the fitting of any of the accessory lenses" (http://www.designboom.com/technology/the-gizmon-ica-5-case-for-the-iphone-5/, accessed 02-07-2013).

Gizmon, a division of ADPLUS Co. Ltd, Kumamoto-city, Kumamoto, Japan, also produced a series of ad-one lenses and filters for the iPhone that could be used without the iCA polycarbonate case.

On February 21, 2013 at 7:10 AM PST the 3Doodler 3D printing pen project on Kickstarter.com had 12,743 backers who had pledged $1,129.404, drastically exceeding the original goal of raising $30,000, and there were 31 days to go on the fund-raising program. By the time I finished writing this database entry the totals had already increased to 12,801 backers who pledged $1,134,565. Photographs and videos on the websites described the remarkable features of the invention.

"A hand draws a square on a piece of paper–the standard first step for drawing a representation of a cube. But then, instead of drawing a second square on the paper, and connecting the edges with ink, the hand rises up. A plastic material emits from the pen, as the hand “draws,” or sculpts, really, the vertical edges of the cube. Then the hand caps off the cube with edges at the top. The whole structure stays sturdy.

"Drawing has entered the third dimension.

"3-D printing has always been about empowering smaller artisans, about taking what is traditionally the realm of major manufacturers, and bringing some of that power closer to the creators. The journey of 3-D printing, in many ways, has been bringing technology that’s traditionally been too expensive for individuals or even small businesses, and making that (or similar) technology available to the little guys. To wit: one company made a portable 3-D printer that, as of my writing about it in November, only cost a few hundred dollars (see: “3-D Printing on a Budget”).  

"The 3Doodler is far cheaper and easier to use, and though less capable in some ways, it has the curious effect of leapfrogging the technology that it’s descended from. 3-D printers are gaining in cultural mindshare, yet I still have to explain to some people what is meant by such a device (“printing” simply evokes an ironclad image of ink and paper, for many). Most people have never seen one; I’m a professional tech journalist, and I don’t think I’ve ever seen one in person. Yet I’m a click away from dropping $75 on my very own 3Doodler pen. It’s cheap, it’s novel, and I wouldn’t be surprised to see technology like this to have a crossover appeal with DIYers and upscale toy store owners alike.  

"As a result, many people may be introduced to a “3-D printing pen” before they even know what a 3-D printer is to begin with. Though the analogy is accurate–the 3Doodler heats and cools plastic in a controlled way, much like a 3-D printer–I wonder if the company might have more success by breaking with precedent and simply describing the thing as a “sculpture pen,” or something of the sort. I might even call it “the skywriter.”  

"Here is the ultimate democratization of 3-D printing. “If you can scribble, trace or wave a finger in the air you can use a 3Doodler,” explain Wobble Works on their Kickstarter page The clever people of Wobble Works have brought 3-D creation to masses of people who might otherwise not have had access to it. Kudos to them, and I look forward to seeing what kinds of creativity their invention unleashes" (http://www.technologyreview.com/view/511471/a-3-d-printing-pen-wows-kickstarter/?utm_campaign=newsletters&utm_source=newsletter-daily-all&utm_medium=email&utm_content=20130220, accessed 02-21-2013)

The 3Doodler was a project of Boston-based WoobleWorks LLC, an emerging toy and robotics company led by Peter Dilworth and Maxwell Bogue.

"How toxic have print assets become? This toxic: Media companies have begun to quarantine them.  

"On Wednesday, Time Inc., the largest magazine publisher in the country, found itself at the wrong end of a 10-foot pole. Its corporate parent, Time Warner, which has a broad and lucrative array of entertainment assets, was making plans to spin off much of the tattered print unit in a shotgun marriage with Meredith, a Midwest-based company that was trying to do much the same thing.  

"Under the plan, which is far from final, the two companies would contribute magazines to create a new, publicly held company that would be left to make its own way.  

"In shearing off its print division, Time Warner is following a path laid down by News Corporation, which announced last year that its entertainment assets and print assets would be split into two divisions. Its stock hit a five-year high when the plan was floated last June, and sometime early this summer there will be two companies – Fox Group and News Corporation – that will allow the fast-growing film and television assets to grow unencumbered by legacy print businesses.

"Print publishing may have lost significant currency with consumers and advertisers in a digital age, but investors have a far deeper animus. They see little possibility that the business as a whole will right itself, and they find its lack of growth wanting compared to the cable, television and film businesses that are now the epicenter of the media business.  

"Time Inc. may be baked into the name of Time Warner, but it long ago lost salience as a significant player in the company’s business. Time Inc. earnings dropped 5 percent last year, and the division now contributes less than 12 percent of overall sales at the company. The Time & Life building, an edifice standing tall in the middle of Midtown, was long a revered totem of the publishing business. To people in the industry who came of age back when things were good, Time Inc. was legend, having grown up not just on the force of its journalism but on tales of editors’ offices the size of racquetball courts and liquor carts rumbling through the hall spreading cheer and an aura of privilege.

"But the news of a possible sale of its magazine division came at a time when Time Inc. is laying off some 6 percent of its global work force, and many of those who remained wondered whether their jobs, if they continue to have them, might require them to move to Des Moines, the headquarters of Meredith.  

"It was a bit of a moment for the people at Time Inc. and for the publishing business as a whole. Even though Time Warner has said that it will hang on to Time, Fortune, Sports Illustrated and Money, the profits from those Olympian sounding titles are meager, less than 10 percent of the division. Time Warner is keeping them in part because they might bolt on to a reconceived CNN television network, and in part because, well, no one wanted them" (http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/14/time-inc-the-unwanted-party-guest-being-pushed-out-the-door/?hp, accessed 02-15-2013).

"Billboard and Nielsen announced today the addition of U.S. YouTube video streaming data to its platforms, which includes an update to the methodology for the Billboard Hot 100, the preeminent singles chart.

"The YouTube streaming data is now factored into the chart's ranking, enhancing a formula that includes Nielsen's digital download track sales and physical singles sales; as well as terrestrial radio airplay, on-demand audio streaming, and online radio streaming, also tracked by Nielsen.  

"Billboard is now incorporating all official videos on YouTube captured by Nielsen's streaming measurement, including Vevo on YouTube, and user-generated clips that utilize authorized audio into the Hot 100 and the Hot 100 formula-based genre charts – Hot Country Songs, Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs, R&B Songs, Rap Songs, Hot Latin Songs, Hot Rock Songs and Dance/Electronic Songs – to further reflect the divergent platforms for music consumption in today's world.

"The most notable YouTube-influenced title this week is viral sensation 'Harlem Shake' by producer Baauer, which debuts at No. 1 on both the Hot 100 and Streaming Songs charts and jumps 12-1 on Dance/Electronic Songs with 103 million views, according to YouTube. According to Nielsen, the "Harlem Shake" arrival also benefits from viral video-influenced sales of 262,000 downloads. That sales sum alone, good for a No. 3 ranking on Hot Digital Songs, would have placed the track within the top 15 on the Hot 100 without the inclusion of YouTube streams into the calculation" (http://www.billboard.com/articles/news/1549399/hot-100-news-billboard-and-nielsen-add-youtube-video-streaming-to-platforms, accessed 02-21-2013).

"For media executives, there may be nothing worse than a viewer or listener who is not counted.  

"On Thursday, in a move that might help ease those concerns, Nielsen said that it would start considering Americans who have spurned cable, but who have a television set hooked up to the Internet, as “television households,” potentially adding to the sample of homes that are rated by the company, the standard for television ratings. In front of skeptical network officials, the company pledged to measure TV viewership on iPads and other mobile devices in the future.  

"Those executives have a gnawing feeling that their consumers are being missed more and more often. As new pipelines open up for viewers and listeners through social media, mobile apps and game consoles, advertisers fret that they don’t know how many people are really seeing their ads, television networks fear they’re not getting credit for getting those people to tune in and record companies wonder how they can keep up with all the ways their customers consume music. 

"These problems will only worsen in the years to come as new technologies further erase the boundaries that once existed between television and Internet; newspaper and cable news network; video and article" (http://mediadecoder.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/02/21/tvs-connected-to-the-internet-to-be-counted-by-nielsen/?hp, accessed 02-21-2013).

"In the first study of its kind, researchers with the Defense Department have found that pilots of drone aircraft experience mental health problems like depression, anxiety and post-traumatic stress at the same rate as pilots of manned aircraft who are deployed to Iraq or Afghanistan.

"The study affirms a growing body of research finding health hazards even for those piloting machines from bases far from actual combat zones.  

“ 'Though it might be thousands of miles from the battlefield, this work still involves tough stressors and has tough consequences for those crews,' said Peter W. Singer, a scholar at the Brookings Institution who has written extensively about drones. He was not involved in the new research.  

"That study, by the Armed Forces Health Surveillance Center, which analyzes health trends among military personnel, did not try to explain the sources of mental health problems among drone pilots.  

"But Air Force officials and independent experts have suggested several potential causes, among them witnessing combat violence on live video feeds, working in isolation or under inflexible shift hours, juggling the simultaneous demands of home life with combat operations and dealing with intense stress because of crew shortages. 'Remotely piloted aircraft pilots may stare at the same piece of ground for days,' said Jean Lin Otto, an epidemiologist who was a co-author of the study. 'They witness the carnage. Manned aircraft pilots don’t do that. They get out of there as soon as possible.'  

"Dr. Otto said she had begun the study expecting that drone pilots would actually have a higher rate of mental health problems because of the unique pressures of their job.  

"Since 2008, the number of pilots of remotely piloted aircraft — the Air Force’s preferred term for drones — has grown fourfold, to nearly 1,300. The Air Force is now training more pilots for its drones than for its fighter jets and bombers combined. And by 2015, it expects to have more drone pilots than bomber pilots, although fighter pilots will remain a larger group.

"Those figures do not include drones operated by the C.I.A. in counterterrorism operations over Pakistan, Yemen and other countries" (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/02/23/us/drone-pilots-found-to-get-stress-disorders-much-as-those-in-combat-do.html?hpw&_r=0, accessed 02-23-2013).

A much-anticipated new smartphone by Samsung, the South Korean multinational conglomerate headquartered in Samsung Town, Seoul, purports to incorporate a radically new interactive reading device:

"Samsung’s next big smartphone, to be introduced this month, will have a strong focus on software. A person who has tried the phone, called the Galaxy S IV, described one feature as particularly new and exciting: Eye scrolling.

"The phone will track a user’s eyes to determine where to scroll, said a Samsung employee who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak to the news media. For example, when users read articles and their eyes reach the bottom of the page, the software will automatically scroll down to reveal the next paragraphs of text.

"The source would not explain what technology was being used to track eye movements, nor did he say whether the feature would be demonstrated at the Galaxy S IV press conference, which will be held in New York on March 14. The Samsung employee said that over all, the software features of the new phone outweighed the importance of the hardware.

"Samsung’s booth at this year’s Mobile World Congress. Indeed, Samsung in January filed for a trademark in Europe for the name “Eye Scroll” (No. 011510674). It filed for the “Samsung Eye Scroll” trademark in the United States in February, where it described the service as “Computer application software having a feature of sensing eye movements and scrolling displays of mobile devices, namely, mobile phones, smartphones and tablet computers according to eye movements; digital cameras; mobile telephones; smartphones; tablet computers" (http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/03/04/samsungs-new-smartphone-will-track-eyes-to-scroll-pages/?hp, accessed 03-05-2013).

When I wrote this entry in March 2013 the Wikipedia article on Samsung stated that Samsung Electronics was the "world's largest information technology company" measured by 2012 revenues. It had retained the number one position since 2009. It was also the world's largest producer of mobile phones, and the world's second largest semiconductor producer after Intel Corporation.

On March 7, 2013 EMC Corporation, headquartered in Hopkinton, MA, announced that it will support the Vatican Apostolic Library in digitizing its catalogue of 80,000 historic manuscripts and 8,900 incunabula as part of EMC’s Information Heritage Initiative. The project will result in 40 million pages of digital reproductions. "The first phase of the nine-year project will provision 2.8 petabytes of storage, utilizing a range of industry-leading solutions from EMC including Atmos®, Data Domain®, EMC Isilon®, NetWorker® and VNX®."

". . . Only days before, Time Warner announced that it was spinning off its struggling magazine division, after failing to reach a deal to sell many of Time Inc.’s magazines to the Meredith Corporation. And the high-wattage party, with Mr. Stengel as one of the hosts, seemed like just the kind of lavish expense that Time Inc. might have to leave behind as it confronts the steep financial challenges buffeting the magazine industry.  

"The new magazine company is expected to start with $500 million to $1 billion in debt, in contrast to the publishing company that the News Corporation will spin off this summer, which will have no debt. Circulation and advertising revenue at Time Inc. have suffered sharp declines. In the three months that ended Dec. 31, revenue fell 7 percent, to $967 million, while revenue at Time Warner’s cable channels has soared. After the split occurs, Time Inc. will no longer have the lucrative film and television assets to prop it up.  'It’s sort of put up or shut up time,' Mr. Stengel acknowledged. 'I think great, let’s really test that hypothesis that people will pay for great content and great journalism. We can now invest our own capital.'  

"Time Inc. executives hope that they can build a company that can pour its profits into helping its magazines transition into the digital age, rather than hand them back to the parent company. They also hope that their new independent structure will let them restore the journalistic vision created by the founder, Henry Luce.  

"Analysts tracking the magazine industry point out that even though Time Inc.’s profits have declined in recent years, the newly created company will remain by far the biggest player in the business. On its own, Time Inc. generates one-quarter of the revenue produced by the nation’s top 50 magazines, according to data tracked by John Harrington, a magazine industry consultant.  

"He said that Time owned four of the nation’s top 10 revenue-generating magazines — People, Sports Illustrated, Time and InStyle. Together they produce $3.1 billion of the $6.379 billion generated by the nation’s top 10 grossing magazines, he estimated. People alone brings in $1.4 billion.   'Time Inc. as a whole is still the biggest force in magazine publishing,' Mr. Harrington said.'“They’re an attractive group of magazines.'  

"The announcement of the spinoff last week at least provided some clarity to nervous Time Inc. employees. On Jan. 30, Time Inc. said it would lay off 6 percent of its global work force, about 500 employees. Two weeks later, Time Warner announced it was in talks with Meredith, leaving those who had kept their jobs to nervously await word of the fate of their magazine, and whether they might have to relocate to Meredith’s headquarters in Iowa.  

"Several current and former Time Inc. employees spoke about the unease at the magazines, requesting anonymity so they could publicly discuss private conversations. 'This is for the most part a really nice place to work and people are happy to know that it will stay intact,' said a current Time Inc. executive. 'The layoffs were really hard. The uncertainty on the heels of the layoffs made it particularly painful. Some people were really nervous about this Meredith idea'  

"A former company executive who is still in touch with many employees said, 'Morale dipped dramatically when the layoffs occurred just a couple of months ago. No merit increases were given. Bonuses were extremely low. Then rumors spread Meredith was going to purchase the magazines and morale dipped. Generally people are really pleased that Time Inc. is going to be given the opportunity to survive on its own' " (http://www.nytimes.com/2013/03/14/business/media/spinoff-of-time-inc-rattles-employees.html?hpw, accessed 03-13-2013).

According to the Association of American Publishers monthly StatShot issued on March 28, 2013, ebooks made up 22.55% of U.S. trade publishers' book sales in 2012—an increase from 17% in 2011 and just 3% of book sales in 2009. 

On April 11, 2013 ScientificAmerican.com, the online version of Scientific American magazine, published "The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens" by Ferris Jabr. From this I quote a portion:

"Before 1992 most studies concluded that people read slower, less accurately and less comprehensively on screens than on paper. Studies published since the early 1990s, however, have produced more inconsistent results: a slight majority has confirmed earlier conclusions, but almost as many have found few significant differences in reading speed or comprehension between paper and screens. And recent surveys suggest that although most people still prefer paper—especially when reading intensively—attitudes are changing as tablets and e-reading technology improve and reading digital books for facts and fun becomes more common. In the U.S., e-books currently make up between 15 and 20 percent of all trade book sales.

"Even so, evidence from laboratory experiments, polls and consumer reports indicates that modern screens and e-readers fail to adequately recreate certain tactile experiences of reading on paper that many people miss and, more importantly, prevent people from navigating long texts in an intuitive and satisfying way. In turn, such navigational difficulties may subtly inhibit reading comprehension. Compared with paper, screens may also drain more of our mental resources while we are reading and make it a little harder to remember what we read when we are done. A parallel line of research focuses on people's attitudes toward different kinds of media. Whether they realize it or not, many people approach computers and tablets with a state of mind less conducive to learning than the one they bring to paper.

" 'There is physicality in reading,' says developmental psychologist and cognitive scientist Maryanne Wolf of Tufts University, 'maybe even more than we want to think about as we lurch into digital reading—as we move forward perhaps with too little reflection. I would like to preserve the absolute best of older forms, but know when to use the new.' "

On April 2, 2013 the Digital Library of America (DPLA) announced that it would would be launched on April 18, 2013. The vehicle for the announcement was an article by cultural historian and director of Harvard University Libraries Robert Darnton entitled "The National Digital Public Library is Launched!" published in The New York Review of Books.

Darton's article is of interest not only for what it says about the Digital Library of America but also for its comments on other digital libraries in the U.S. I quote representative selections:

"The Digital Public Library of America, to be launched on April 18, is a project to make the holdings of America’s research libraries, archives, and museums available to all Americans—and eventually to everyone in the world—online and free of charge. How is that possible? In order to answer that question, I would like to describe the first steps and immediate future of the DPLA. But before going into detail, I think it important to stand back and take a broad view of how such an ambitious undertaking fits into the development of what we commonly call an information society.  

"Speaking broadly, the DPLA represents the confluence of two currents that have shaped American civilization: utopianism and pragmatism. The utopian tendency marked the Republic at its birth, for the United States was produced by a revolution, and revolutions release utopian energy—that is, the conviction that the way things are is not the way they have to be. When things fall apart, violently and by collective action, they create the possibility of putting them back together in a new manner, according to higher principles.  

"The American revolutionaries drew their inspiration from the Enlightenment—and from other sources, too, including unorthodox varieties of religious experience and bloody-minded convictions about their birthright as free-born Englishmen. Take these ingredients, mix well, and you get the Declaration of Independence and the Bill of Rights—radical assertions of principle that would never make it through Congress today.  

"Yet the revolutionaries were practical men who had a job to do. When the Articles of Confederation proved inadequate to get it done, they set out to build a more perfect union and began again with a Constitution designed to empower an effective state while at the same time keeping it in check. Checks and balances, the Federalist Papers, sharp elbows in a scramble for wealth and power, never mind about slavery and slave wages. The founders were tough and tough-minded.

"How do these two tendencies converge in the Digital Public Library of America? For all its futuristic technology, the DPLA harkens back to the eighteenth century. What could be more utopian than a project to make the cultural heritage of humanity available to all humans? What could be more pragmatic than the designing of a system to link up millions of megabytes and deliver them to readers in the form of easily accessible texts?  

"Above all, the DPLA expresses an Enlightenment faith in the power of communication. Jefferson and Franklin—the champion of the Library of Congress and the printer turned philosopher-statesman—shared a profound belief that the health of the Republic depended on the free flow of ideas. They knew that the diffusion of ideas depended on the printing press. Yet the technology of printing had hardly changed since the time of Gutenberg, and it was not powerful enough to spread the word throughout a society with a low rate of literacy and a high degree of poverty.  

"Thanks to the Internet and a pervasive if imperfect system of education, we now can realize the dream of Jefferson and Franklin. We have the technological and economic resources to make all the collections of all our libraries accessible to all our fellow citizens—and to everyone everywhere with access to the World Wide Web. That is the mission of the DPLA.

"Put so boldly, it sounds too grand. We can easily get carried away by utopian rhetoric about the library of libraries, the mother of all libraries, the modern Library of Alexandria. To build the DPLA, we must tap the can-do, hands-on, workaday pragmatism of the American tradition. Here I will describe what the DPLA is, what it will offer to the American public at the time of its launch, and what it will become in the near future.  

"How to think of it? Not as a great edifice topped with a dome and standing on a gigantic database. The DPLA will be a distributed system of electronic content that will make the holdings of public and research libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies available, effortlessly and free of charge, to readers located at every connecting point of the Web. To make it work, we must think big and begin small. At first, the DPLA’s offering will be limited to a rich variety of collections—books, manuscripts, and works of art—that have already been digitized in cultural institutions throughout the country. Around this core it will grow, gradually accumulating material of all kinds until it will function as a national digital library.  

"The trajectory of its development can be understood from the history of its origin—and it does have a history, although it is not yet three years old. It germinated from a conference held at Harvard on October 1, 2010, a small affair involving forty persons, most of them heads of foundations and libraries. In a letter of invitation, I included a one-page memo about the basic idea: “to make the bulk of world literature available to all citizens free of charge” by creating “a grand coalition of foundations and research libraries.” In retrospect, that sounds suspiciously utopian, but everyone at the meeting agreed that the job was worth doing and that we could get it done.  We also agreed on a short description of it, which by now has become a mission statement. The DPLA, we resolved, would be “an open, distributed network of comprehensive online resources that would draw on the nation’s living heritage from libraries, universities, archives, and museums in order to educate, inform, and empower everyone in the current and future generations.”  

"Sounds good, you might say, but wasn’t Google already providing this service? True, Google set out bravely to digitize all the books in the world, and it managed to create a gigantic database, which at last count includes 30 million volumes. But along the way it collided with copyright laws and a hostile suit by copyright holders. Google tried to win over the litigants by inviting them to become partners in an even larger project. They agreed on a settlement, which transformed Google’s original enterprise, a search service that would display only short snippets of the books, into a commercial library. By purchasing subscriptions, research libraries would gain access to Google’s database—that is, to digitized copies of the books that they had already provided to Google free of charge and that they now could make available to their readers at a price to be set by Google and its new partners. To some of us, Google Book Search looked like a new monopoly of access to knowledge. To the Southern Federal District Court of New York, it was riddled with so many unacceptable provisions that it could not stand up in law.  

"After the court’s decision on March 23, 2011, to reject the settlement,* Google’s digital library was effectively dead, although Google can continue to use its database for other purposes, such as agreements with publishers to provide digital copies of their books to customers. The DPLA was not designed to replace Google Book Search; in fact, the designing had begun long before the court’s decision. But the DPLA took inspiration from Google’s bold attempt to digitize entire libraries, and it still hopes to win Google over as an ally in working for the public good. Nonetheless, you might raise another objection: Who authorized this self-appointed group to undertake such an enterprise in the first place?  

"Answer: no one. We believed that it required private initiative and that it would never get off the ground if we waited for the government to act. Therefore, we appointed a steering committee, a secretariat located in the Berkman Center at Harvard, and six groups scattered around the country, which began to study and debate key issues: governance, finance, technological infrastructure, copyright, the scope and content of the collections, and the audience to be envisioned.  

"The groups grew and developed a momentum of their own, drawing on voluntary labor; crowdsourcing (the practice of appealing for contributions to an undefined group, usually an online community, as in the case of Wikipedia); and discussion through websites, listservs, open meetings, and highly focused workshops. Hundreds of people became actively involved, and thousands more participated through an endless, noisy debate conducted on the Internet. Plenary meetings in Washington, D.C., San Francisco, and Chicago drew large crowds and a much larger virtual audience, thanks to texting, tweeting, streaming, and other electronic connections. There gradually emerged a sense of community, twenty-first-century style—open, inchoate, virtual, yet real, because held together as a body by an electronic nervous system built into the Web.  

"This virtual and real discussion took place while groups got down to work. Forty volunteers submitted “betas”—prototypes of the software that the DPLA might use, which were then to be subjected to “beta testing,” a user-based form of review. After several rounds of testing and reworking, a platform was developed that will provide links to content from library collections throughout the country and that will aggregate their metadata—i.e., catalog-type information that identifies digital files and describes their content. The metadata will be aggregated in a repository located in what the designers call the “back end” of the platform, while an application programming interface (API) in the “front end” will make it possible for all kinds of software to transmit content in diverse ways to individual users.  

"The user-friendly interface will therefore enable any reader—say, a high school student in the Bronx—to consult works that used to be stored on inaccessible shelves or locked up in treasure rooms—say, pamphlets in the Huntington Library of Los Angeles about nullification and secession in the antebellum South. Readers will simply consult the DPLA through its URL, http://dp.la/. They will then be able to search records by entering a title or the name of an author, and they will be connected through the DPLA’s site to the book or other digital object at its home institution. The illustration on page 4 shows what will appear on the user’s screen, although it is just a trial mock-up. //Meanwhile, several of the country’s greatest libraries and museums—among them Harvard, the New York Public Library, and the Smithsonian—are prepared to make a selection of their collections available to the public through the DPLA. Those works will be accessible to everyone online at the launch on April 18, but they are only the beginning of aggregated offerings that will grow organically as far as the budget and copyright laws permit.  

"Of course, growth must be sustainable. But the greatest foundations in the country have expressed sympathy for the project. Several of them—the Sloan, Arcadia, Knight, and Soros foundations in addition to the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services—have financed the first three years of the DPLA’s existence. If a dozen foundations combined forces, allotting a set amount from each to an annual budget, they could create the digital equivalent of the Library of Congress within a decade. And the sponsors naturally hope that the Library of Congress also will participate in the DPLA. . . .

"Forty states have digital libraries, and the DPLA’s service hubs—seven are already being developed in different parts of the country—will contribute the data those digital libraries have already collected to the national network. Among other activities, these service hubs will help local libraries and historical societies to scan, curate, and preserve local materials—Civil War mementos, high school yearbooks, family correspondence, anything that they have in their collections or that their constituents want to fetch from trunks and attics. As it develops, digital empowerment at the grassroots level will reinforce the building of an integrated collection at the national level, and the national collection will be linked with those of other countries.  

"The DPLA has designed its infrastructure to be interoperable with that of Europeana, a super aggregator sponsored by the European Union, which coordinates linkages among the collections of twenty-seven European countries. Within a generation, there should be a worldwide network that will bring nearly all the holdings of all libraries and museums within the range of nearly everyone on the globe. To provide a glimpse into this future, Europeana and the DPLA have produced a joint digital exhibition about immigration from Europe to the US, which will be accessible online at the time of the April 18 launch.  

"Of course, expansion, at the local or global level, depends on the ability of libraries and other institutions to develop their own digital databases—a long-term, uneven process that requires infusions of money and energy. As it takes place, great stockpiles of digital riches will grow up in locations scattered across the map. Many already exist, because the largest research libraries have already digitized enormous sections of their collections, and they will become content hubs in themselves. . . .

"How will such material be put to use? I would like to end with a final example. About 14 million students are struggling to get an education in community colleges—at least as many as those enrolled in all the country’s four-year colleges and universities. But many of them—and many more students in high schools—do not have access to a decent library. The DPLA can provide them with a spectacular digital collection, and it can tailor its offering to their needs. Many primers and reference works on subjects such as mathematics and agronomy are still valuable, even though their copyrights have expired. With expert editing, they could be adapted to introductory courses and combined in a reference library for beginners."

On April 18 the founding Executive Director of the  DPLA, Dan Cohen, a history professor and formerly director of the Roy Rosenzweig Center for History and New Media at George Mason University, Fairfax, Virginia, posted a Welcome to the site.

On April 25, 2013 New Republic magazine published "The Brazen Bibliophiles of Timbuktu. How a team of sneaky librarians duped Al Qaeda" by Yochi Dreazen. This illustrated article combined issues of terrorism, political reporting, librarianship and preservation of information. From it I quote selections:

"One afternoon in March, I walked through Timbuktu’s Ahmed Baba Institute of Higher Studies and Islamic Research, stepping around shards of broken glass. Until last year, the modern concrete building with its Moorish-inspired screens and light-filled courtyard was a haven for scholars drawn by the city’s unparalleled collection of medieval manuscripts. Timbuktu was once the center of a vibrant trans-Saharan network, where traders swapped not only slaves, salt, gold, and silk, but also manuscripts—scientific, artistic, and religious masterworks written in striking calligraphy on crinkly linen-based paper. Passed down through generations of Timbuktu’s ancient families, they offer a tantalizing history of a moderate Islam, in which scholars argued for women’s rights and welcomed Christians and Jews. Ahmed Baba owned a number of Korans and prayer books decorated with intricate blue and gold-leaf geometric designs, but its collections also included secular works of astronomy, medicine, and poetry.

"This vision of a philosophical, scientific Islam means little to the Al Qaeda–linked Islamist group Ansar Dine, which for most of last year ruled Timbuktu through terror, cutting off the hands of thieves, flogging women judged to be dressed immodestly, and destroying centuries-old tombs of local saints. In the summer, the militants commandeered Ahmed Baba, using it as a headquarters and barracks. Then, in January, French forces closed in on Timbuktu. As the Islamists fled, they trashed the library, burning as many of the manuscripts as they could find. The mayor of Timbuktu, Hallé Ousmani Cissé, told The Guardian that all of Ahmed Baba’s texts had been lost. “It’s true,” he said. “They have burned the manuscripts. . . .

”Asking around about the manuscripts’ destruction, however, I heard different rumors. Find Abdel Kader Haidara, people told me. He could tell you more about what happened. So, in Bamako, Mali’s capital 400 miles to the south, I visited Haidara, an unassuming man with a shy smile, a neatly groomed mustache, and a healthy paunch under the flowing robes traditional to Malian men. Sitting cross-legged on the floor of the modest apartment where he now lives, Haidara told me the improbable story of what actually happened to Timbuktu’s manuscripts. 'It was only a matter of time before the Islamists found them,' he said matter-of-factly, passing dark worry beads between his fingers. 'I had to get them out.' . . .

"As the militias poured into his city, Haidara knew he had to do something to protect the approximately 300,000 manuscripts in different libraries and homes in and around Timbuktu. Haidara had spent years traveling around the country negotiating with Mali’s ancient families to assemble thousands of texts for the Ahmed Baba Institute, which was founded in 1973 as the city’s first official preservation organization. 'When I thought of something happening to the manuscripts, I couldn’t sleep,' he told me later.

"The initial wave of invaders were secular Tuareg, but quickly the Islamist militia Ansar Dine asserted control, imposing a harsh regime of sharia in Timbuktu and other northern cities. The Islamists didn’t know, at first, about the manuscripts. But their indiscriminate cruelty and their tight-fisted control over the city meant that the texts had to be hidden—and fast. Haidara thought the manuscripts would be most secure in the homes of Timbuktu’s old families, where, after all, they had been protected for centuries. He assembled a small army of custodians, archivists, tour guides, secretaries, and other library employees, as well as his own brothers and cousins and other men from the manuscript-holding families, and began organizing an evacuation plan.

"Starting in early May, every morning before sunrise, while the militants were still asleep, Haidara and his men would walk to the city’s libraries and lock themselves inside. Until the heat cleared the streets in the afternoon, the men would find their way through the darkened buildings and wrap the fragile manuscripts in soft cloths. They would then pack them into metal lockers roughly the size of large suitcases, as many as 300 in each. At night, they’d sneak back to the libraries, traveling by foot to avoid checkpoints on the road, pick up the lockers, and carry them, swathed in blankets, to the homes of dozens of the city’s old families. The entire operation took nearly two months, but by July, they had stowed 1,700 lockers in basements and hideaways around the city. And they did it just in time, because not long after, the militants moved into the Ahmed Baba Institute, using its elegant rooms to store canned vegetables and bags of white rice. Haidara fled to Bamako, hoping the Islamists’ ignorance about the texts would keep them safe. . . . "

On April 30, 1993 CERN, Geneva, Switzerland, published documents which released the World Wide Web software into the public domain.

"To mark the [twentieth] anniversary of the publication of the document that made web technology free for everyone to use, CERN is starting a project to restore the first website and to preserve the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. To learn more about the project and the first website, visit http://first-website.web.cern.ch"

"This project aims to preserve some of the digital assets that are associated with the birth of the web. For a start we would like to restore the first URL - put back the files that were there at their earliest possible iterations. Then we will look at the first web servers at CERN and see what assets from them we can preserve and share. We will also sift through documentation and try to restore machine names and IP addresses to their original state. Beyond this we want to make http://info.cern.ch - the first web address - a destination that reflects the story of the beginnings of the web for the benefit of future generations."