Comments on: CAL – Self-Serving and Useless

By: etbe

etbe — Tue, 29 Jun 2010 04:50:29 +0000

http://brendanscott.wordpress.com/2010/06/21/slattery-bradley-coker-and-cal/

Brendan Scott wrote the above post referencing this one. Among other things he points out that there are a large number of unfinished and unpaid works that are out there giving benefit to no-one.

By: john

john — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 03:26:04 +0000

Over all I agree, regarding traditional academic text areas and tax law.

The mapping of genome of life is a very large project, there are millions of beetle species alone, it could be a while before things settle down.

And university courses in things like homeopathy… well mushrooms.

This is not the essay but it is another piece By Gould on Swifts satire:
http://www.stephenjaygould.org/library/gould_science-wars.html
At the start of the tale there is a debate between a honey bee: representing old wisdom and a spider who has out of his own body( and a pile of dead flies) woven a impressive big new web, the spider represents ‘new Knowledge’.
The debate is judged by Aesop who awards the Bee the winners laurel , because the harms no one , she flits from flower to flower and brings us; “honey and wax” and what could be more useful this sometimes dark and bitter world than “sweetness and light”.

The phrase later acquired an recursive ironic usage. Thus when Yeats was writing in the time of dark bitter Civil war in Ireland could not use it . Instead he wrote this

We had fed the heart on fantasies,
The heart’s grown brutal on the fare;
More substance in our enmities
Than in our love; O honey-bees,
Come build your nests in the empty house of the stare

By: etbe

etbe — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 02:43:07 +0000

John: Regarding the classification of plants and animals, once we get the genetic tests done on them all the classification will stabilise. So this is just a phase of change in one area. Sure there are lots of disciplines with similar changes but I think most of them will have changes that are quite rare. In terms of the overall field of botany this is a small area and most texts won’t need to change much if at all. Also if you had a set of electronic text books that reference each other you could have automated alerts, so if a text on classification changes then the database entry for a botany text which has a foot note on classification could trigger an alert to the relevant person to rewrite the section in question.

Incremental changes are work, but don’t necessarily need to be paid for. Incremental changes in Wikipedia work quite well. Someone who was editing a botany text book would probably accept a change from a professor in a related field at a prestigious university with little need for review.

I don’t think that texts will change that often. When scientific discoveries are made (such as your example about genetic sequencing) changes MUST be made and any format that permits the texts to change with the science is a good thing!

I haven’t read that essay, can you provide a link?

Tax law needs to be reformed and made simple. If things change so rapidly that printing takes long enough to make the text outdated then a wiki is the only solution.

By: john

john — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:38:01 +0000

more examples
A lot of skills that were mostly learnt on the job (and at Tafe at night) are now academic subjects. Text books for things like Nursing, Aircraft engine maintenance and also Tax law can be out of date before they are even published. In the past ten years Tax law has gone from about 2-3 thou pages to about 9 thou and counting. Case-law book libraries were one of the first to go totally digital . There are a lot of placebo/certification courses( for example just about anything ending in ‘X’ + ‘studies’ )where the texts can change as often as funding permits.

By: john

john — Tue, 16 Mar 2010 01:05:05 +0000

Russel Im fairly conservative , have no desire to see the texts change every five min.
Have You read an Essay BY Steven J Gould about the prelude to Swifts ” battle of the Books” like Swift and Aesop I tend to favour the bringer of “honey and wax”.

By: john

john — Mon, 15 Mar 2010 23:48:21 +0000

Any text book on for an example, on the classification of ‘the genus eucalyptus’, of only a few years ago is out of date. The area of Clade is radically (almost on a weekly basis) changing, Clade were determined by ‘flower’ : phenotype, the ability to actually see the genotype is creating rapid radical changes in the science of ‘classification by origin’.

The point about text books not changing is as much about the capital cost of ordering and printing 1 million copies for a school system as anything else.
Re writes & incremental changes are work and would have to be paid for.
Having known a few authors of academic texts the contracts offered by publishers are very very one-sided, publishers get all the economic rights and the author gets the ‘prestige’ . Outright first sale could be much more of a problem for publishing houses than for for authors.

I was only suggesting that there are many ways that an author can get paid, formost the hope that their book will become the much re-read classic is a forlorn hope