Showing posts with label fear itself. Show all posts
Showing posts with label fear itself. Show all posts

June 10, 2007

Tom Matrullo and the New Macros

Tom does the New Math with JSTOR.

Comment: Fourteen dollars for a superannuated scholarly article - or even a brand new one - seems excessive. The internet holds multitudes, and lends itself to micropayments. E.g.: Let's say a library pays $10,000 for a year's subscription to a substantial collection of old journals -- perhaps a few million pages worth. Let's say two million pages, though it could well be more. That comes to $.0005 per page. And that gives hundreds, or thousands, of students and professors unlimited access to the journals. So, why not offer a pay-per-view model that charges individuals $.0005 per page? Granted, single downloads would not add up to much, but over time, as people became aware of the quality, scope and depth of the scholarship, volume would build. I'm not aware that JSTOR would be risking anything here, since its current subscription model would still be intact - there would just be more revenue, to allocate however it might choose. A win-win. (Update: Micro is the new macro)

Smart people are worth listening to.

May 29, 2007

So far so good on the hamster front, what about ants

There's something peaceful and even funny about watching little animals -- their superfast miniature relationship building techniques not so different from ours. We still have an ant farm from Christmas that we haven't ordered ants for.

George and Jenna thought maybe we could collect ants from the yard, but the instructions tell a lot about different types of ants and how they behave and how getting the wrong kind of ant will either overpopulate the farm, or sometimes you get the very aggressive ants and then even the good ants you do want end up all fighting and killing each other and then you have no ants in the ant farm. Reminds me in some ways of the blogworld, and I'm not even sure how. But for $5 I guess it's worth ordering the right kind of ants that come with a queen so it's like a litte ant ecosystem in a box.

Fear is hard. I'm there too often. But things like hamsters and ants and writing about hamsters and ants seem to help. I suppose it's time to order some ants.

Going to not worry about writing for a while. Will be here as I can. Resting otherwise.

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