Book Review

I was fortunate enough to be requested to review a copy of Philipp K. Janert's Gnuplot in Action before its release - the draft itself is still a work in progress, so this cannot be a full review. Because of this, it will not be scored on the KnowProSE.com scale. Also, humble apologies for the tardiness on this one. I wish I had been slacking off. Instead was really busy with travel and other things, otherwise this would have been up last week.

Graphical analysis of data is increasingly important these days because even looking at the data in a different way can lead to interesting insights. Gnuplot is an impressive application - I have had occasion to use it in the past when doing some R&D, and I admittedly wasted at least half a day fiddling with Gnuplot itself. Why? I don't use it every day - and it is safe to assume that a lot of people who would find it useful may be in the same boat. Therefore, the premise of the book seems sound.

The best way to 'explain' the usefulness of Gnuplot would be from Gnuplot examples themselves. For those of you who don't know what Gnuplot is, here's an introduction quoted from the Gnuplot home page (check out the link in the quotation):

Virtual worlds have survived their initial success and have become more grounded in the minds of the increasing number of people who use them. As such, it makes sense that businesses, ,non-profit organizations and even governments would be interested in how to leverage these synthetic worlds to their own purposes.

There are many lively weblogs to read on the topics of virtual worlds. Some are fan sites, and some tease at the importance of aspects of virtual worlds as diversely as the authors approach them. This can be very confusing to follow for someone who may not have time to follow the google or yahoo of hyperlinks scattered across another synthetic world of perspectives propped up with observation and opinion of many authors. There should be an easier way for someone unfamiliar with virtual worlds to get an idea of what is important for them to know.

Enter Virtual Worlds: A Business Guide.

As one would expect, the synthetic world of Second Life® occupies a large portion of the work - roughly half of it. This is because, at this point, Second Life is the leading synthetic world when it comes to business - some say that this is even to the detriment of Second Life, though whether that is a widely accepted opinion is different to gauge. Many residents do not actively participate in discussion on the Internet, and so their own opinions may be lost in the flotsam and jetsam of opinion tossed out into the blogosphere by those, such as myself and others, who do.

4/10/2008: The book is now available here.

I was fortunate enough to get a review copy of Benjamin Duranske's Virtual Law: Navigating the Legal Landscape of Virtual Worlds, which is available for pre-order at this time. Since the author has been following Law in more than virtual worlds at VirtuallyBlind.com, it is written by one of the very few intellectual property attorneys actively involved in this new method of entertainment, business, education and communication. Being someone especially interested in Law as it pertains to technologies, I was very happy to get the review copy.

To give this all context for those unfamiliar with virtual worlds, here are a few things that have happened over the last year:

• The first trademark of an avatar has happened.
• Pseudonymity of an avatar was verified through payment information subpoenaed from PayPal and Linden Lab in a case of copyright infringement enacted in a virtual world.
• The Terms of Service of a virtual world service provider were ruled a contract of adhesion in a lawsuit that was later settled.

That is a very small taste of what has happened in the last year within virtual worlds - and these only relate to one virtual world. Obviously, despite what many people who use virtual worlds may think or hope, Law is playing an increasingly significant role in synthetic worlds just as much as it does on the Internet - if not more. Since this is the first book on Law as related to virtual worlds, it has a lot to live up to.

On to the review.

The first chapter, Introducing Virtual Worlds and Virtual Law, explains virtual world to those who may be completely unfamiliar with virtual worlds themselves, and introduces 'Virtual Law'. As Benjamin Duranske writes (Chapter One, 'What Is Virtual Law', p 14.):

Virtual law is like "Internet law," in that it refers to a wide body of generally preexisting law that is applied somewhat differently in a new context. In fact, much of what we think of as "Internet law" applies to virtual worlds. In sum, virtual law is the statutory and case law that impacts virtual worlds and the application of that law to these spaces. It also refers to the internal governance structures that are beginning to appear in some virtual worlds...

... Virtual law includes aspects of civil procedure, constitutional law, contract law, copyright law, criminal law, tort law, patent law, property law, publicity law, securities law, tax law, trade secret law, trademark law, international law and Internet law. In each area, questions similar to those that arise in relation to real-world activity arise when law is applied to activity that takes place in virtual worlds, though with different, sometimes surprising, implications.

Therein lies not only the premise of the book, but the promise of the book.

This book is probably the most challenging book I have had to review so far, in that to review it I had to spend a lot of time staring at the sky - on the nights when conditions allowed me to do so. Having never seriously looked at the night sky for things other than navigation and the occasional howling, this book gave me a rather serious education on astronomy in short order.

The book includes a complete illustrated constellation guide, equipment lists and instructions, comprehensive charts and diagrams, information on 50 Constellations and lots of information on hundreds of sky objects.

I was, literally, awash in the sky. The book is a great guide and remains so - I cannot honestly say that I have read the whole thing. I certainly have used it a lot over the last 2 months. While there is a part of me that wants to donate the book to my secondary school alma mater's Astronomy Club - there is another part of me that is saying, "not yet!".

To do a proper review of this book, I think, would take me all year. As such, I am going to review it on how easy it is to use for someone new to astronomy.

Opening The Book

While this is a late book review for various reasons, it is a timely book review since it is the 50th Anniversary of the Lego Brick. I had originally intended to have this out before Christmas, but life had other plans involving crashed hard drives - amongst other things.

For the audience of this book, LEGO Mindstorms NXT should need no introduction. Its one of the systems that makes children above and below the age of 13 drool, but it is not as simple as snapping together a few Lego bricks. There is the NXT Microcomputer. Sensors for touch, sound, light, and even an ultrasonic sensor for measuring distance. Three servo motors with built in rotation sensors. And then there are all those neat little parts that look very impressive to someone who just opened the box, but may be intimidating when an actual task is at hand. It wasn't too long ago where just being able to have Legos move was a big deal. Now you can automate them.

Enter the The Unofficial LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT Inventor's Guide. Within the book, the author guides one through the steps for creating and rightly notes that Lego Mindstorms NXT are not just about building - they are also about programming.

Within the first 2 chapters, the Lego Mindstorms NXT kit is formally introduced to the reader - something that may be glossed over by excited people but which may prove useful in the long run.

The authors of "Against Intellectual Monopoly" (on the economics of IP) have arranged with Cambridge University Press to make their book available for free download online - even with the book not scheduled for release until July 2008. A definite hat tip to the authors Michael Boldrin and David Levine as well as Cambridge University Press is in order.

The book is here: Against Intellectual Monopoly

You can download the separate chapters, or the entire book (roughly 1.4 megabytes).

Hat tip to Alan Story, Senior Lecturer in Intellectual Property Law, Kent Law School.

Book review sometime next week, I think.

This book, when I got the chance to review it, had me very interested as accessibility on the Internet is one of the keys to the site redesign of KnowProSE.com with the (now delayed) new version of Drupal. Making content accessible to everyone is a really large task - so large that, sadly, many people take it for granted.

I must admit some of my own problems in reviewing this book - thus it taking so long to review. There were many false starts to the review which lead me to look into things for this site's future as well as its present accessibility. In this regard, the book was quite humbling - even for someone who thought he was sensitive to accessibility. Many times I stayed my hand from adjusting code on the site to write the review - in a way, this site - as well as many others - are not exactly poster material for a book such as this to be reviewed.

Suitably humbled and finding the weaknesses in my own sites, I trudged on and - steeling myself away from code editors - I am writing this review with the knowledge that I have much to do.

The book itself starts off with the various reasons for making content accessible to everyone; it is good business and usable sites are more likely to succeed. After the carrot comes the stick - Law is brought into the discussion after all the reasoned arguments are exhausted.

I was fortunate enough to be offered an advanced copy of The Future of Reputation: Gossip, Rumor, and Privacy on the Internet from Daniel Solove, which I happily accepted though I would be in Suriname - it worked out perfectly; I found it in my mailbox upon my early return. Tearing open the package, I fully intended to review the book and post it on Friday.

This did not happen. The second I opened the covers, I was stuck in a focused look at the problems of reputation on the internet - something I do have first hand experience with. The book starts with the classic issue of the 'dog poop girl' - a young woman in South Korea whose dog lightened its weight while on a train. She refused to clean it up, and has since gained infamy on the internet - even getting an entry in the Wikipedia as 'dog poop girl'¹. The short story is that she was persecuted; she dropped out of her University and has pretty much had to live that story down after resourceful internet users pried her personal information and shared it across the Internet. Internet vigilantism had come of age... but was the response disproportionate? While it is rather disgusting that the woman did not clean up after her dog, does this mean that everyone in the world should persecute her? Over dog poop? Perhaps that is taking Broken Windows too far.

As the author notes later in the book, 'Putting gossip on the Internet is a lot like throwing meat to alligators. People snap it up in a frenzy.'