Amazon Prices J.K. Rowling's New Book Sky High

Checked out J.K. Rowling's new book The Casual Vacancy on Amazon today. Just wanted to see what the reader ratings were, and what the price would be. And to my surprise, the Amazon Kindle version at the time of this writing was $17.99. What the?

I guess you can no longer justify the cost of an e-reader as a way to buy cheaper books. Publishers have decided e-books are just as expensive as paper versions. Flawed thinking.

I know writers, published and self-published will tell me how wrong I am, but for years, media publishers have tried to justify the high cost of their goods based on cost to manufacture. This isn't the case for digital books, or digital music. But I guess music is the same, you buy a digital album for $10, about as much as you would in a store. It's just crazy.

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WordPress App For Android Sports Snazzy Stats

WordPress for Android (and iOS) has a pretty snazzy stats module. The UI is simpe but has great graphs. You must log into your Wordpress.com account, and it's possible you will also need JetPack. My stats suck so thanks for helping a brother out.

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I'm Refusing To Talk About The iPhone 5 Or Samsung Galaxy S III... Today

It's not going to happen. There is no way I'm going to link bait you here to talk about those two products, the iPhone 5 and the Samsung Galaxy S III. Wouldn't you rather discuss things like solving first, second and third world problems? My next post for sure.

 

Photo by zigazou76

 

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At The Mercy Of Cloud Storage

I'm a big cloud services user. I have cloud storage accounts with a net of nearly 100GB of free space. I use a lot of the space for archives, but lately I've been using Google Drive to keep my school documents available no matter I am. And today that system failed.

Early this morning, apparently before a major Google services outage, I had saved a document I needed to print for a class later in the evening. When I got the school, and opened up my browser with the intention of printing the document, I discovered I couldn't get to Google Drive. So no homework. It was frustrating. Class started in a few minutes and I would have to turn in a late assignment because of this failure, and the failure wasn't all Google.

Luckily I had the original still in a Word document, and I was able to print it out and failure averted. But what if I didn't have a second copy? So now, I need to back up my cloud storage in multiple places in case one is off line. That seems redundant and painful.

It's also a lesson in why local applications can be important. About a month ago I removed all the cloud storage apps I had on my main machine. Dropbox, Box, SkyDrive, Google Drive, and a few more. Each of these has a cached version of my file on the local hard drive. But my thought was why do I need a local copy. The whole reason for cloud storage is so I can get it off my local storage and free up space for things, like movies.

The dilemma then is are you willing to keep cached versions of files on your local system or totally trust that the files will be available 24-7.

You could write a recipe on If This Then That (IFTTT) that copies from one service to another. But that seems so backwards and broken.

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You Can Blame Or Act On Education Failure

Look at how many kids are forced into remedial courses at the college level. Our current #Education models are failing.

— Laura(@GOPrincess) September 11, 2012

I'm in no way criticizing Laura for her statement. But it got me thinking about what the statement really means. I hope to start writing more on Educational issues, and especially education and technology. But let's start here.

Earlier, Laura says that when she was in school she excelled, and felt frustrated that she had to listen to teachers dumb down the class. I can see that happening, I saw it happen. But wouldn't a better solution be to get rid of "grade levels" and start an education system based on ability, not disability.

There will be many who claim that system won't work. I ask if you have tried it? Why wouldn't it work? If I'm an exceptional student I should be able to move at my pace and not be held back because of the "group". Or, if I'm a student who needs extra help, I should be in a class setting that gives me more attention.

Imagine a school, or schools, where one teacher could handle 20-30 kids all at the same level, and 2-3 teachers helping those who need more attention. Imagine the level of education our children would graduate with.

Grade levels, no student left behind, remediation; these are all things from an archaic education system that is dysfunctional and not producing results. It's not good enough anymore to graduate everyone for the sake of psychology.

The question is why haven't we done this? What is holding us back? Where are the road blocks? I can't be the only one who has thought of this. And if it's being done, it's not visible enough.

 

Photo by Serge Melki

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