The Shame of College Sports: Excellent Read

Here is the link.  I thought it was a very interesting read.  Here are the main points I took away from it.

1. The NCAA is essentially a cartel.  They use their monopoly position to fix the price at which a young athlete may play college sports.  That price is that an athlete may receive a year-to-year full scholarship and nothing more.
2. In many ways, the NCAA is exploiting the athletes.  Here are some examples:
• If a player doesn't perform on the field, he can have his scholarship revoked the next year, and if he doesn't have the money to continue at the university, he will not be able to finish his education there. 
• If a player wants to switch schools, he must sit out a full year before being able to play again.
• If a player is injured playing for his school, the school is not liable.  There is no workman's compensation in college sports.
• The player can't make any outside money off of his image even though his school can use his image to make money.
• The NCAA can punish an athlete for an infraction of their rules without proper due process.  It picks and chooses its battles seemingly at random.
3.  The NCAA makes TONS of money.  Because of items 1 and 2, the students see basically none of it.

Goodbye Freebs

I previously blogged about receiving a free Google Chromebook back in December.  Since it was free, I named it "Freebs".  Since December, I had some good times with Freebs.  I enjoyed playing around with the new ChromeOS.  I took it to school to do work with.  It was light and fast.  A few months later, I figured out how to put Ubuntu on it, and then Freebs became a more ordinary laptop.  I did a lot of tinkering around with good old Freebs.  As of late, since my laptop's hinge broke, I was using Freebs full time for my summer work.

Freebs on his first day, next to my larger laptop.

There were problems, however.  Early on, the touchpad broke.  My theory is that the wiring burned out.  I had been using a wireless mouse, which was less than ideal.  Also, although I could live with it, Freebs had a 16 GB hard drive, which is tiny for a laptop.

For my birthday, my mom gave me a new laptop.  It's Dell's convertible netbook tablet.  Here's a stock picture of what they look like:

Although it doesn't give the touch experience that an iPad gives, it's a good netbook and there are a couple of tasks where it's really useful to be able to turn it into a tablet.  Specifically, taking "ink" notes is really useful, and reading articles on the Internet in tablet mode is a distinctly more pleasant experience than reading them on a laptop.  It eventually became clear that this device was going to be my go-to take to school/browse the Internet quickly laptop.  Since that was what Freebs was, he suddenly had no purpose in my great tower of gadgets.

Logically, once I realized that I didn't need Freebs, I had to sell him.  I don't need clutter and I prefer to save money.  The thought of it made me sad, however.  Although Freebs was just a laptop with a broken touchpad, it felt like he was a part of the family.  We gave him a name and referred to him as a he.  When I listed Freebs on Craiglist to sell, it felt like I was listing my loyal dog to sell because I got another younger, better dog.

It turned out that I was able to sell Freebs literally within hours of listing.  I got my cash money, but I felt sad about it.  There is no rational reason to feel sad about it because at the point I am at Freebs was just an inanimate object and, even worse, clutter.  I still felt sad about it.

Goodbye Freebs!

Rant About the NCAA

In the news today was Ohio State and how it is vacating all of its wins from last season.  There are often stories in the news about people and schools being punished for breaking the NCAA rules.  Here are my thoughts on the NCAA rules.

Should anyone be surprised that a lot of the top teams are cheating the system?  If there were no rules against paying players, the universities would offer up lots of money to the top players so that their teams would be better and so that they would bring in more money.  There is a strong economic incentive to pay players.  

I think the NCAA is a weird system.  For football and men's basketball, there is a lot of public interest and so a school's team in these sports will generate a lot of revenue.  The rules then say that the profits don't go to the players but just go to the university; the players can't so much as parlay their fame and make money on the side; basically the NCAA is saying that not only will the schools keep the lions' share of the money, the players under no circumstances will make a lot of money in any other way.

As a student at a university, I would be somewhat happier if that money was pumped back into the academic system so that the average student didn't have to pay as high of tuition.  As I understand it, however, the money actually goes to the other many NCAA sports on campus.  In virtually all cases, no other sports programs make a profit.  In part, this is because a very small percent of people on campus actually care about those programs.  The big winners in this system are the athletes.  They get full-ride scholarships and they get to play their sport of choice for free.  It seems to me that most anyone would rather do that then work a crummy college job to pay their way through school.  I don't agree with this.  From an economics point of view, it's equivalent to the average student paying higher tuition so that these athletes can get a sweet gig.  With all due respect to those people who are NCAA athletes, I don't want to pay your tuition.

I feel that college sports should be privatized.  College and serious, high-level sports are two different things.  College sports is basically entertainment consumed by the masses, not just college students.  The United States is one of the only countries in the world that mixes school and sports we do; personally, I think the rest of the world has it right.  I believe the college sports money should go to those who actually earn it: the football players and the men's basketball players.  As for other sports, why can't the athletes themselves pay their own way?  In a privatized system they could be subsidized by sponsorships (like the Olympic athletes.)

I Switched to Linux

Within the past few months I have switched my main computer operating system from Windows to Linux.  Specifically, I have Arch Linux installed on my laptops.   I wish someone would've told me about how great Linux was sooner because I like it better than Windows.

The thing I like most about Linux is all the tinkering that I can do with it.  From my perspective, it has been much easier to learn how to dig into the inner workings of my Linux system than on my old Windows system (I have no idea how to really tinker with Windows).  This makes me feel that I have more control over my computer than I did before with Windows.  Further, just by its nature, there is a lot more customization that can be done to Linux to make it suit exactly what I want and need.  There are a lot of different options for Linux systems, ranging from the conventional to the new and radical.  To me, this makes Linux and its various distributions far more interesting than Windows ever was.

 

There are a couple other things worth mentioning.  First, my laptop has a noticable performance boost in using Linux over Windows.  I also don't have to deal with bugs that would pop up in Windows.  Second, Linux is free to install and use; not only that, it has a ton of free software applications; I actuallly have better applications on my Linux machine than I did on my Windows because it has been so easy to find high-quality free applications; also, it is super easy to install and remove applications on Linux.

Nook vs. Kindle

The new Nook is awesome.  It has a touchscreen, it is sleek, lighter than the Kindle, and has great battery life.  However, there is one feature on the Kindle which, for me, keeps the Kindle on top: wireless delivery of documents.  I blogged about this feature here.  My main use for this feature is to instantly send webpage articles and PDFs to my Kindle for further reading.

Organizing My Notes

I have been using a new application to manage my gospel-related notes.  It is called Zim Desktop Wiki.  Here is its website.  I mentioned how I have been trying to take electronic notes here.

What I like about Zim Desktop Wiki is that it lets me organize my notes by topic like a wiki.  Further, my notes are then displayed in a hierarchical table of contents on a sidebar for easy access.  For this purpose, I like this better than other note taking applications because I use my set of gospel notes as a reference, so I like to have my notes nicely organized.  The other feature I love about it is that when I copy and paste an outside source into Zim, it automatically formats it the way I happen to like it (everything in the default font and size with no hyperlinks.)

My thoughts on the new for-sale Google Chrome notebooks

I blogged a while back about getting a free Google Chrome notebook in the mail.  I eventually tinkered with it and put an alternate operating system on it.  Now they are selling commercial Chromebooks, to be released June 15th.  Here are my thoughts.

Too Expensive


The going rate for these things is $350 to $400.  For the specs on the device, that is too expensive.  One could get a cheaper computer with comparable specs and install Google Chrome on it, just use Google Chrome and nothing else, and it would be about the same thing.


It's an Interesting Idea, but...


As I stated in my last post about putting a new operating system on my device, having just a full screen Internet browser is not as good as a traditional operating system.  Currently I am running Ubuntu on my machine, and the browser speed is, as far as I can tell, just as fast.  The bootup time on Chrome OS is probably faster, but the difference is a matter of seconds.  Plus when I have problems connecting to the Internet (which happens when I go to school, for example) I still have a functional computer.  For example, in the class I assist, I used my computer to look up the gradesheet to show a few students their grades.  Google Docs was not really working, but luckily I had offline versions of the spreadsheet file; those offline versions worked more quickly than Google Docs ever works for me.

Beyond that, offline applications are, in general, simply better than online ones.  We may see a day in the future where that is not the case (given also a sufficiently fast Internet connection) but we have not reached that day.


Privacy


I have also recently come across some arguments that Google is pushing these notebooks so that they can collect user data.  Google makes 99% of its money off of advertising; the cynic may argue that all of free the things Google does--search, Gmail, Google Docs, Google Chrome, even this blog, etc.--are all designed to feed the advertising arm of it's company.  When one signs into Google Chrome, uses all of the Google cloud applications, etc., one is agreeing to give Google an awful lot of information about themselves.

I'm not really sure what all of the implications of this are, but it does make me weary about using Google services for everything.

Tinkering

Over the past while I have been distracted from blogging because I have spent too much time "tinkering". In a nutshell, I like messing around with my computerized devices to see how I can customize them. The past while I have gone overboard. Recently I have rooted my Android phone, unlocked my Chrome notebook, and I have been playing around with different Linux distributions for my laptops. When I get interested in something, it is easy for me to go overboard. I will hopefully resist the urge to tinker too much so that I can get back to doing other things.

Tinkering with my Free Google Chrome Notebook

As I mentioned a few months ago, I received a free Google Chrome notebook to try out.  It has been a fun challenge to try to do everything I need on the go with just an Internet browser.

Compaints

I do have a couple of complaints about it.  These complaints reflect my own lifestyle and may not be representative of everyone.

First, the Chrome OS is (more or less*) completely dependent on an Internet connection.  Three counterpoints to this complaint are (1) free wi-fi is "everywhere", (2) the Chrome notebook is capable of connecting to Verizon's 3G network, and (3) most anything one wants to do these days requires an Internet connection anyway.  In practice, I haven't been able to connect to my school's protected wi-fi network with the Chrome notebook, and the unprotected network is difficult to log onto.  Further, the 3G network costs money above a tiny 100 MB of free monthly data, so I don't use the 3G connection.  This is frustrating because a lot of things I would need a computer for at school don't require an Internet connection on a conventional computer.

My second main complaint is that an Internet-only system doesn't replace all of the things I normally use a computer for.  I have found that for the more intensive tasks, like school work, there are a lot of Internet-based programs which aren't as good as the conventional programs I am used to.  In addition, oftentimes Internet-based services cost money for a subscription, whereas a program installed on a conventional computer may not.  I have found myself taking my large, heavy beast of a laptop to school instead of the light chrome notebook at times because I needed to do school work there.

One extra complaint is that at present the Chrome notebook is still a little bit buggy.  For me this isn't an "official complaint" because I new it would be buggy when I got it, but it does bear mentioning.


Tinkering


I learned that it is possible to hack into the Chrome Notebook and install other operating systems on it.  At present, I am running Ubuntu on it.  I chose Ubuntu because it's free, it's easy to use, it is light enough to run on what I have, and it does everything I want offline.



* = I say more or less because I do have an app which is downloaded to the computer's hard drive and which can be used offline.  This, however, is the exception to the rule.

How Long Should an E-Mail Be

It turns out, no more than five sentences.  More on long e-mails from Zen Habits.

The End of Stamps

Here is an interesting tidbit about how Sweden is getting rid of stamps and turning to a paperless way of purchasing and applying postage.  (I found the post on Marginal Revolution.)

Getting Rid of My Books

Over the past couple months I have started getting rid of my books.  Here are my reasons:

• I like using my Amazon Kindle for books now.  It is more convenient for reading.
• Physical books take up space and collectively are quite heavy.
• Some of my books are still worth money.  I have taken a bunch of books on my shelf that I probably will never read again and have put them up for sale on the Internet.  At this point in my life, I would rather have the money than a thing just taking up space.
• An e-book will last longer.  There is no wear and tear with an electronic file.  My electronic device may be replaced over the years, but I can still use the same e-books forever.

However, I do have quite a few physical books on my shelves that I still need to read.  I'm doing my best to read them in a timely manner.

Language as a Window into Human Nature

Here is an interesting clip about different uses of language.

Freebies: Amazon Kindles

Here is the link: The Kindle wants to be free.

Porfessional

This ad was on our apartment door.

Why I Think Universal Translators Are Impossible

A universal translator is a device, featured in science fiction, which instantly translates languages.  Some commentators think that, given improving translation technology, that people won't have to learn foreign languages in the future; when meeting a foreign language speaker, one will be able to use their mobile device to communicate with them.  I am much more skeptical.


Links

• Here is the Wikipedia article on universal translators.
• Here is an article about translation software.
• Here is Google's mobile translation app.  There is a "conversation mode"--as of now, it's only available in English-Spanish--which is designed to allow two people speaking different languages to have a verbal conversation; the app uses its voice recognition technology to pick up what each person is saying and then translates it to the other person's language.

Statistics

The naive approach to programing translation software would be to program in all of the different grammar rules and then have the program fill in the blanks with words.  That is what people have tried in the past, and it didn't work.  Language is too complex and quirky to boil down to simple formulas.  As mentioned in my second link, computers would end up spitting out a lot of mangled phrases.

What has been more successful is using statistical analysis to figure out how things most likely should be translated.  What has been done is that documents which have been translated by hand from one language to another have been analyzed to see how different phrases most commonly are translated from one language to another.

Current Translation Software Is Useful, but not Perfect

There are uses for translation software.  It gives a rough estimate of what a document in a foreign language is saying.  It is the only option for translating something virtually instantly.  When it is translating something like a menu from a restaurant, it does well because there is usually a one to one relationship between those kinds of specific nouns.

On the other hand, if one wants a perfect translation, it has to be done by a person.  I remember while on my mission in Boston seeing a notice on an apartment building which had obviously been translated via an instant computer translation.  The apartment was presumably managed by an English-speaking American, but the apartment had a lot of Portuguese-speaking Brazilian immigrants living there.  There was a notice which tried to explain why the residents should not park in front of the dumpster.  It was obviously typed out in English, inputed into a translation program, and then printed out.  I remember it being funny how many blatant errors were in the document.  One I remember was that the document said, "não parque em frente do dumpster." For those who don't speak Portuguese, here's why that phrase is wrong: first, the word "parque" means a park as in the noun for a place; it never means the verb to park, which is estacionar; second dumpster is not even a word in Portuguese; the program obviously didn't recognize the word dumpster and so it just treated it as a proper noun.  Having a sentence like that would be like saying in English, "no park in front of the hoobaloo."

Artificial Intelligence

On a deeper level, to truly understand what a phrase means requires human intelligence.  There are many factors which influence the meaning of a phrase.  

The context of a conversation can change the meaning of a sentence.  For example, if I am reading a math paper, terms like "open", "ring", "annihilate", etc. have technical meanings referring to specific mathematic principles.  One then says, "OK, perhaps you tell the program that this is a mathematical paper."  Well, there may be times in that paper where I want to use the word "open" or "ring" in a conventional sense.

In a verbal conversation, intonation can affect what a phrase means.  Think of how many ways one can change the meaning of a simple phrase like "I love you": "I love you; I love you; I love you; I love you?"

The human has little difficulty sorting out subtlety.  A computer has a ton of trouble sorting out any kind of subtlety to the point that it is currently impossible to do with any degree of success approaching that of a human.  In my view, the issue is one of the possibility or impossibility of creating artificial intelligence or not.  Can a computer be created which can handle the same subtleties that a human can?

Why I Say No and Other References

I think it is impossible.  (Disclaimer: my knowledge on this subject is very limited.)  A big reason I do is because of the book Godel, Escher, Bach.  To give a (poor and woefully incomplete) summary of what I am trying to say, mathematically it is impossible to design a complete system of instructions for a computer to decipher subtlety.  This is, at least to my incomplete understanding, why a statistical method for translating something works better than trying to program a computer to translate via rules.

That Being Said, Even Human Translators Aren't Perfect


Languages are not simply copies of each other with different words in place of other words.  There are actually concepts which some languages have which cannot be adequately expressed in other languages.  To really understand what someone is saying in another language, especially in an informal setting, one needs to know the language.

Take for example sarcasm.  The concept of sarcasm is at least in part to say something where the true meaning is intentionally obscured.  Even for a human to try to translate sarcasm is difficult.  Plus, in some cultures sarcasm doesn't really exist like it does in the United States, for example.

There are just certain things which are lost in translation.  If not even an expert human can translate them, how can I expect a computer, no matter how expertly designed, could automatically do it.

Learning How to Learn

I read this article about how some colleges and universities around the country are trying to get students to learn how to learn.  They are trying to improve what is called metacognition among their students.

Freebies

1. According to this article, there are still ways to get a free Google Chrome notebook.
2. Amazon is offering a free two-month trial of the New York Times for the Kindle.  I'm trying it out.

Procrastination and Your Netflix Queue

This is an interesting article about procrastination.  One point it makes is about Netflix queues.  My queue, for example, is full of things that are "good" for me to watch: highly-regarded classic films, foreign films, documentaries, etc.  Do I actually watch these things?  Not very often.  If I am choosing a movie to watch right away, I, like the article talks about, will go for something a little more "fluffy".

Test Taking Cements Knowledge

I read an interesting article about a study which showed that taking a test did more to help students remember something than other popular methods.  Specifically, the test showed a benefit of 50% compared to other popular methods of studying. From the article:

These other methods [the methods the researchers compared testing to] not only are popular, the researchers reported; they also seem to give students the illusion that they know material better than they do.

By contrast, in talking about the struggle students go through using the testing method, the article stated:

“The struggle helps you learn, but it makes you feel like you’re not learning,” said Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College. “You feel like: ‘I don’t know it that well. This is hard and I’m having trouble coming up with this information.’ ”

I think that most students who don't study smarter, not harder fall into the trap of doing things which produce the illusion of learning instead of doing things which actually produce learning.  I see this idea relating heavily to my idea that one ought to do all of one's homework problems alone; the struggle of doing that helps one learn much faster than asking for help.

Tip: Sending Webpages to the Kindle

I have been playing around with the Amazon Kindle I received for Christmas.  One of the main uses I have had for it is to read webpages, especially long articles.

My Preferred Options


Send to Kindle extension: I recently came across the "Send to Kindle" extension on Google Chrome.  When I come across a webpage, I can click to save it for later on my Kindle.  The extension then sends the file to my Kindle automatically and formats it nicely, and it takes literally a second or two to do.


Later on Kindle: I installed an app on my phone which sends webpages to my Kindle.  It works.


Other Options in Review

Using the web browser function: The Kindle has a web browser on it.  It displays the page in black and white.  It also doesn't have a touch screen or a track pad to easily navigate through a webpage, so that part is inconvenient.  I avoid using the browser on the Kindle.  What I am more interested is using the browser on my computer--or even on my smartphone--and then saving longer articles for later on my Kindle in a clean, readable format.

Saving text to a document file: I have experimented with copying an article I want to read onto a word processing application, putting in any formating that I desire, and then sending it to my Kindle.  This has gotten rid of the random nonsense that a html file has.  The downsides are (1) it's much slower than saving a webpage and sending it as-is and (2) I have had trouble formatting the document files so that they look good on the Kindle.  I typically have to use the program Calibre, which makes things take even more time.  This is a good option, however, in those cases where I care exactly how a document looks (for example, things I want to save).

Instapaper: I experimented with Instapaper.com for a while.  It works like this: whenever I wanted to save a webpage for later, I just clicked on a button on my web browser, and it was saved in my account.  Every day, it then automatically sends me all of the articles on my list in one file.  The articles are formatted nicely.  If I want my articles before the automatic scheduled download, I can go to the Instapaper website and click to have my file sent.  This is a pretty good option, but I prefer (1) having my articles sent instantly instead of having to wait for them and (2) having my articles in separate files and not clumping them into one.

What My Students Really Think of Me

Yesterday I got back a report about my students' evaluations of me for my teaching assistant job last quarter.  I thought four different sections of the same beginning calculus class.  What I did was hold a review once a week in which I focused on the students' suggested homework assignments.  The students all received e-mails near the end of the quarter asking them to evaluate me, and I received the anonymous results yesterday.

I taught more students than I am used to teaching.  As such, I received a lot more comments than I am used to receiving, including a lot more negative comments than I am used to receiving.  Allison mentioned to me that at least I know what I need to work on.  My gut reaction to her saying that was that no, the negative comments tell me little.  When I thought about it, here are some arguments I came up with of why I take negative comments with a grain of salt.

• For every negative comment there was a positive comment saying the opposite: For example, some people thought I didn't explain things clearly enough; however, there were plenty of people who commented that I explained things clearly.
• 
  
• You can't please everyone: I have about 30 students in each of my sections.  It is impossible to please them all and to make sure they are all understanding everything.  Among the comments, here were some examples of suggestions made of how I should organize the class:
  
  1. Didn't explain hard concepts, just gave answers to the homework.
  2. Didn't cover more than a few homework questions and didn't clear up lecture questions.
  3. Go through each topic and go in order
  4. Make sections longer
  What I do in my sections is I take student requests for problems they want to see worked out an explained, and then I do them slowly and try to explain everything well.  To point #1, I did receive comments that said that I did a good job of explaining the concepts behind each problem; if I was just giving homework answers, I would cover a lot more problems (which would take care of #2's concern).  If I framed the presentation in the way #3 said, then student #1 might have had a more positive attitude about what I do.  However, doing something different from their three hours a week lecture, where they do go through topics in order, is beneficial.  Finally, there are a lot of reasons why point #4 is wrong, but I don't see why I needed to have that on my evaluation.  In summary, I try to do what I believe most students want me to do based on past experience; that way just doesn't please everyone.
• Who's commenting: Unfortunately, because on anonymity, I have no idea who or what kind of people are giving me comments.  I wouldn't take a comment from someone who came to section once or twice with the same seriousness as I would from someone who came weekly and also visited my office hours.  What I do know is that the people commenting are overwhelmingly freshmen.  When I see that, the devil on my shoulder says that they don't really know what they are talking about because this is their first college math class.  I also noticed that when a comment used my name (Chris) instead of "TA", the comment was always positive; among other things, this tells me that negative comments probably came from people who didn't come to my section often.
• Negative response bias: The students were encouraged to evaluate me, but at its core this was optional.  According to the report, only 58% of the students enrolled actually filled it out.  As I learned in my high-school statistics class, people with a negative opinion are more likely to respond to a voluntary survey then people with a positive opinion.

I actually took a positive out of the evaluations however.  I only got one response saying that at times my writing was hard to read.  At the beginning of grad school, I got several such comments each quarter.  I take it as a good sign that my handwriting is improving.

Most Don't Learn that Much in College

Here is a report about a study which found that on average students learn little in college.  Here is a quote:

The findings also will likely spark a debate over what helps and hurts students learn. To sum up, it's good to lead a monk's existence: Students who study alone and have heavier reading and writing loads do well.

I thought it was interesting that studying alone led to more learning.  I have heard many advisors and others advocate study groups as a study strategy.  I never put this idea into practice because of convenience and because I never felt that I needed study groups.  Based on this study, I was right to study alone all these years of college.


Here is another post on the topic.

Learning Another Language with the Amazon Kindle

I previously posted my review of the Amazon Kindle 3.   I would like to expand on how I have been using it for learning languages.  This feature is not necessarily exclusive to the Kindle, but I'm also not familiar with how it would be done on another device.


Language Dictionaries

I like what the Kindle can do for other languages.  The main thing I think is really cool is the ability to use a translation dictionary to get instant definitions of words.

The Kindle has a dictionary look-up feature.  If you come across an unknown word, you can arrow over to it and a quick definition pops up.  To look into it further, you can click ENTER, read the full entry in the dictionary, and then click BACK to return to your reading.  The default for this is a standard English dictionary.  With the Kindle, I found out that if I wanted to read something in another language, I could change the primary dictionary to a translation dictionary.  Whenever I come across an unknown word (which is usually much more common in another language than in English), I can click over to it and see a definition.  This is a really nice feature.

I'm not sure what program is similar to this on other devices.  Clearly it's possible to implement on other devices, I've just never seen it.  One of the things that makes it work on the Kindle is buying a good dictionary.  A good dictionary is not free because it takes time to put together.  Further, on the Kindle, a good e-dictionary is one that can handle the grammatical complexities of a language and return the correct word more often than not.  For example, it would be hard to read the news in another language without a better-than-free dictionary.  I am therefore skeptical that there exists a good replacement for this on another device without costing a lot.

One gripe I have with Amazon on this is that there are no good dictionaries for sale on the Kindle store.  All of the dictionaries I have browsed through are low rated.  They are e-versions of basic printed versions, and they tend to fail to handle all of the grammatical complexities that a good e-dictionary can.  These dictionaries sell for cheap.  I had to go to another site and buy some good e-dictionaries (which were not cheap, by the way).  I am not sure why Amazon doesn't have good dictionaries for sale currently.

Availability of Materials


My other point is that it is easier to get things to read in other languages via e-books.  It is harder to get printed books in a lot of other languages because local bookstores and libraries have no or few books that I would want to read in other languages (except for maybe Spanish).  Further, ordering a printed book on the Internet is not much easier.  Amazon.com, for example, does not have a large selection of foreign language books.  On top of that, such books would be imported, so they come at a higher price.

With e-books, I have had a much easier time finding books.  There is a lot of stuff for free on various websites.  Further, I don't have to pay an extra import fee to download something that isn't free.  Finally, there is a lot more than books that one can read.  I mentioned before how I am reading a lot of websites on my Kindle.  For languages, my favorite thing is to read the news using the program Calibre.  As I mentioned in my previous post on the Kindle, I can read newspapers for free by using Calibre to download content off of its website.

Review of the Amazon Kindle 3

For Christmas I got an Amazon Kindle, despite previously not wanting one (see this post).  Here are my impressions of it so far.

What is the Amazon Kindle?  Why Would One Want One?

Here is Amazon.com's page all about it.

Stuff I Already Have to Read

After a week or so with the Kindle, it dawned on me how many PDF files I go through on a regular basis.  Any mathematical paper I have to read (or write for that matter) is available in PDF format.  I even have links to a lot of full math books for free in PDF.  The Kindle is great for reading PDFs.  Reading them on the Kindle is better for me than reading them on a laptop because of the Kindle's e-ink screen and it's light weight.  I also like being able to underline and annotate my papers electronically.  It's really a lot like having a piece of paper on the screen.  In the past, I have never been able to sit still in front of a computer screen and read page after page of a long paper.  My solution has therefore been to print it out papers, which is fine.  The Kindle is convenient because not only do I save paper, when I'm on the go, I don't have to carry a pen and a large stack of papers to do work.  Further, when I am done with a paper, I don't have to worry about filing it away in a large physical filing system. Given the length of most of these PDF files, this really is a convenient.

Stuff I Already Want to Read

In a previous post, I wrote about how the Internet has changed the way people read.  The point is, people (including myself) have developed an aversion to sitting down and reading anything long.  With myself, I saw that I was used to the rapid-fire bombardment of information I got from browsing the Internet.  The Kindle, I have seen, makes it easier to combat this tendency.

While on the Internet, I sometimes come upon articles that are much longer than I have the time or the attention span to read, but which look interesting.  What I figured out how to do with the Kindle is to save those articles for later.  I can simply save the html file, e-mail them to my Kindle and viola I have reading material for later.  This takes a webpage and stores it on the Kindle as if it were a document.  There are two reasons I have for doing this.  First, on the Kindle I find this more convenient than fiddling with its Internet browser.  I have the cheaper Wi-fi only version of the Kindle, so I wouldn't always be able to access these webpages via the Internet anyway.  Second, I like what the Kindle does to these html files to strip them down.  The Kindle gives me the page's text--that is, the only part of the page I want to pay attention to--in a crisp, clean, e-ink screen format.  I don't have to deal with all of the other flashing side-bar ads, links, and any other extra noise that come with reading something on the Internet.  It is much easier to read webpages like this.

Here's the Kindle displaying a webpage I sent to it.  I really like being able to focus on the words. 

On top of this, I found out about a way to have content from the Internet, like the news, automatically delivered to my device for free.  Among a few options I discovered, I like the program Calibre the best.  Calibre does a lot of other things too, like convert e-books among several different file formats.  (This, by the way, makes it so that, except for DRM books, I can convert anything I want to read to formats that the Kindle reads.)  What Calibre does with automatic delivery is the following: it goes to websites (this can be blogs or newspapers or anything), takes the articles there and places them in a convenient e-book format (which, by the way, is a lot nicer than going to the websites and reading them on a browser); it then e-mails them to my free kindle account; when the Kindle is using the wireless, the content is delivered automatically to my device; I can have Calibre do this manually, or I can schedule it to do this automatically at a time where I know that my computer will be on.  (I would prefer a website to do this automatically and for free and at the same quality as Calibre, but I haven't found one that is good enough.)  Of course, if I didn't care about money, I could pay Amazon to deliver the news to me at a steep premium.  Here is an example of the newspapers they deliver, from which I get free content via the newspaper's webpage.

Learning Another Language

I have found some pretty cool features of the Kindle which help me read in other languages.  I'll post more on this later.

The Kindle Is Not What I Thought It Was (I Don't Mean That in a Bad Way)

Before I got the Kindle, I read up on it quite a bit.  I was more or less informed about what the technical capabilities of it were.  I had seen a demo model of it on display at Target.  I thought what I would mostly be using it for is to read books for fun and to perhaps bring it to church.  I thought I would have to buy books from the Amazon store on a regular basis.  However, I see that the Kindle is not quite what I thought it would be; I don't mean that in a bad way; what I mean is that I am using the Kindle more for things that I didn't think I would be using it for than for things I did think I would be using it for.  I am mostly using it for the things I have described above.

As far as reading books goes, however, I do like the Kindle experience.  I like being able to order books instantly.  I like the vast selection of free, out-of-copyright books available on various sites.  I like putting a lot of books on a light, compact, portable device.  I just don't sit down and read books as much as I do the other things I mentioned above.

Also, I still have physical books, i.e. non e-books, on my shelf that I still plan to read.  Before getting the Kindle, for some reason it seemed that getting a Kindle meant that, in large part, I would be committing to reading books exclusively on the Kindle; that, of course, is a silly notion.

Kindle vs. Other E-Book Readers

What about other e-book readers?  In choosing an e-book reader, I preferred the Kindle because it was the highest rated of all the e-book readers.  The Kindle, from what I have read, has the best e-ink display and the fastest page refresh of all the e-ink readers.  The other e-book readers have some good qualities, but for me the Kindle wins out.  The Sony reader has a touchscreen, which is nice, but because of that, it doesn't have as nice of a display; further, in actually using the Kindle, I have found that being able to navigate quickly not a big deal because by its nature an e-book reader is for reading longer documents. The Barnes and Noble Nook, which is the second most popular dedicated e-book reader, has a small LCD touchscreen below its e-ink screen; in theory this is convenient, however reviews said that the touchscreen was slow.

There are also some more expensive options for portable reading.  Barnes and Noble came out with a Nook Color.  It's an "e-book reader" with an LCD screen.  As such, it can do color, it has a touchscreen, and it's fast.  It is also capable of doing other multimedia (music and video).  Apparently, it can unlocked and turned into a Android-based tablet computer.  It runs for about $250.  More expensive than that, there are tablet computers like the iPad and the Galaxy Tab.  Tablet computers can do books in addition to all of the other things that they can do.  They are a few times more expensive than a simple Kindle.  My opinion on these devices versus the Kindle is that the Kindle does reading better; I would rather read off of an e-ink screen on a lighter device if I am reading something longer (as I explained above).

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