International math tests seem to consistently show that Americans don't have competitive math skills. We can argue that these tests don't measure real-life capabilities, but it might also be nice to see math test scores rise someday. Given the growth of online educational tools, the accessibility of good (and effective) math lessons will hopefully help to improve everyone's math talents. Here are just a few interesting links on the topic of math.

• A study of German math students suggests that parental pressure and good grades don't provide lasting incentives for kids to learn math skills. It seems obvious that the motivation behind learning would affect how well a student learns, but the conclusion could have some interesting effects on education policy and how to most effectively teach children. [url]
• Equations Squared is an online math game that assesses a player's skills as he/she plays -- awarding points for more complex mathematical understanding. The story of how this game was created is interesting, and the game won the grand prize in the ETS Math Assessment Game Challenge. [url]
• Math textbooks are created by a publishing industry which doesn't necessarily care about the quality of education. There are a lot of problems in the US education system, but there may be some creative destruction in store for the textbook industry. [url]
• Adding a nonsensical math equation to your writing can give it a bit more authority. a^n+b^n=c^n QED [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Ah, unintended consequences. TorrentFreak has been doing a fantastic job sussing out the details of how various ISPs are going to implement the infamous "six strikes" plan. Earlier, it had found that AT&T's plan was to block access to frequently visited websites, while the fourth strike will include redirections to "educational material." Time Warner Cable, for its part, has said that it will direct users to a landing page, effectively interrupting your ability to surf the web without it being crazy annoying. The latest is the discovery of the details of Verizon's plan, which will involve reducing speeds of the connection to a slow poke speed of 256kbps. I don't know if you've tried surfing the web at 256kbps lately, but it's ridiculously frustrating, because pages are optimized for much higher speeds: Comcast and Cablevision (the two other participants) haven't leaked out any details yet, but you have to imagine that the situations would be similar. One thing to note, this isn't really a "six strikes" plan at all. AT&T's more draconian actions appear to kick in after the 4th notice. Verizon's kick in after the 5th notice. I know it's been popular to call it a "six strikes" plan, but our initial read suggested that it was really more of a five strikes plan, since mitigation factors were supposed to start after five. It's interesting to see that AT&T seems to want to push that even further.

All of the ISPs, of course, will say that they're not "cutting people off" from the internet, though they are making connections barely usable. Especially troubling is that, as TorrentFreak reveals in the latest post on this, at least Verizon's responses will apply to businesses as well. So that cafe down the street that has free WiFi... may quickly be throttled down to 256kbps. That will likely mean a lot less free WiFi out there, which is a significant and worrisome consequence of this program.

All of these programs seem focused on driving people to "educational content" about copyright infringement. It will be quite fascinating to see what kind of educational content is provided. We've seen in the past that most such attempts are really bad and one-sided. Even YouTube's "copyright school" is ridiculously one-sided and perpetuates myths about copyright, and suggests that fair use is too complex for you to even bother trying to understand.

Also, as the strikes get higher, there are two things to be aware of: ISPs are then more likely to hand over info to the copyright holders, meaning that it could still lead to copyright holders directly suing. That is, the "mitigation" factors are not, in any way, the sum total of the possible consequences for those accused. On top of that, we still fully expect that at least some copyright holders are planning to insist that ISPs who are aware of subscribers with multiple "strikes" are required under law to terminate their accounts. At least the RIAA has indicated that this is its interpretation of the DMCA's clause that requires service providers to have a "termination policy" for "repeat infringers." So it's quite likely that even if the ISPs have no official plan to kick people off the internet entirely under the plan, some copyright holders will still push for exactly that kind of end result.

For all the talk about how difficult it is for musicians to make a living today, and how there are all sorts of challenges, it's quite interesting to see that other people in other professions are increasingly looking to the growing number of success stories to see what they can learn. Music manager Emily White recently alerted us to the fact that she's taking some of the lessons learned working with artists like Amanda Palmer, and applying them elsewhere as well. For example, Olympic gold medalist swimmer Anthony Ervin recently began a "comeback" attempt, and needed to find support to go "on tour," competing for the US on the World Cup circuit. Apparently, expenses for such a trip are entirely on the athlete. So Ervin started doing what artists often do: connecting with fans and giving them a reason to buy:

But what’s more spectacular than the times, places, and races is Anthony’s unusual and creative marketing campaign and his unorthodox methods for connecting with fans and formulating his own brand. It’s something we’ve never really seen before. And as some of the post-Olympic sponsorship money begins to dry out for elite swimmers, it could be a precedent going forward -- a way to generate and self-brand and connect with fans, a way to keep going.

A big part of this was an IndieGoGo campaign last fall, which raised $12,704, by really reaching out to his fans. And, as with typical crowdfunding campaigns, he's let some of his unique personality come through with the campaign and the possible awards. Since he's well known for dabbling in music as well, he offered to write people their own songs. And, of course, he also has offered up private swimming lessons for big donors as well.

What struck me about this is an entirely new way for swimmers to fund some of the more expensive swim tours out there. By providing creative incentives – like singing a song, or making a phone call – Anthony is literally giving back to the swim community dependent on the amount of support he gets. Also, throughout the Tour, Anthony’s journey is being updated. So not only can you donate, and then receive an autographed postcard, but you can also feel like you’re on the World Cup tour with him. Check out his Tweets, or his website. He’s uploading pictures of him talking to kids in Sweden, traveling around Russia.

It’s almost like Anthony has embraced some of the rock band roots he has and created his own “rock tour” of Europe, partially funded by his very own street team of loyal supporters. What’s amazing about all this is that bands have been doing this for years. Start-ups, films, photographers, long-distance athletes, too. And now, we’re seeing Olympic swimmers take to the Internet, to help fund their travels and excursions and training.

Of course, some may argue that there's nothing "new" here. And, to some extent, that's absolutely true. Lots of people are doing crowdfunding for different things these days. But it's still neat to see that these kinds of ideas are permeating into different areas where they haven't been used before, and that people elsewhere are taking their cue from some of the success stories in the music business. At the very least, it suggests that, perhaps, those embracing these new music business models aren't just on the right path, they're blazing a nice trail for tons of other areas as well.

Elite schools aren't getting any cheaper, and college tuition seems to be rising faster than a lot of other goods (though the net price may not be). So what are aspiring university students to do? Here are just a few interesting links on the future of education.

• One proposal for college students to try to pay for rising tuition fees is for schools to take a cut of their students' future earnings in lieu of upfront tuition. Indentured servitude 2.0 might kill the classical liberal arts education, but oh well. [url]
• Baby boomers might be able to take college-level classes via iPads and chatrooms, but do they really want to? Mobile classes sound useful for students of any age, so why target just the baby boomers? (This exercise left to the reader.) [url]
• Sal Khan discusses the future of credentialing -- and how schools might be separated from the role of providing proof of proficiency. The future of microcredentials could offer a way for anyone to obtain proof of expertise in a narrowly-defined domain. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Math might not be the easiest subject for some students, but there might be different ways of teaching it that could make it more tolerable for kids. The more we learn about how our brains process math problems, the better we can teach ourselves how to tackle math education. There's a lot of concern over how Americans can compete in a global economy if our kids don't have some pretty basic math skills. Maybe some of these findings will help students pick up some much needed math skills.

• Learning how to use an abacus could actually be useful. Japanese students have demonstrated that using a mental image of an abacus (no actual abacus needed) can help them perform some incredibly fast mental calculations. [url]
• American kids don't do well on international math tests, but the bright side is that we're slowly learning what might be the best remedies. Understanding *why* kids don't do well on math tests is an important part of coming up with a solution, but looking at the bad test results is pretty scary.... [url]
• Doing a few algebraic word problems before bedtime might help alleviate some math fears in children. Or they could inspire math-related nightmares that haunt kids like Freddie Krueger. You decide. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Most of us have been taught to understand math-related topics in a linear way, but that might not be the way our brains are hard-wired. Kids actually tend to have an innate number scale that is logarithmic, so even though they know how to count to ten (or even twenty), they'll actually think more along the lines of one, many, lots of many's, and then OMG so many that's like infinity. Here are just a few links on logarithmic thinking to ponder.

• Ask second graders to map out a few numbers on a blank line from 1 to 1,000 -- and you'll see that 7yo kids tend to space out the numbers in a logarithmic pattern. Fourth graders won't make the same number line map as these second graders, and it's apparently not too hard to un-learn logarithmic scales since many adults don't remember what a log scale graph is. [url]
• RadioLab has a nice podcast about how kids learn their numbers, switching from logarithmic thinking to more linear thinking. Young kids and even infants notice large changes (such as when quantities double), but they're not so good at exact amounts and small differences. [url]
• It's not just little kids. Some cultures think in logarithmic scales -- such as an Amazonian indigene group, the Mundurucu. Actually, logarithmic thinking may lie dormant in all of us, whenever we estimate quantities or deal with extremely large numbers. [url]
• What number is halfway between 1 and 9? Most formally educated adults say 5, but another answer (from kids) is 3. [url]

If you'd like to read more awesome and interesting stuff, check out this unrelated (but not entirely random!) Techdirt post.

Following the recent pro-fair use rulings concerning Georgia State's e-reserves and book scanning efforts by a bunch of colleges and universities in the HathiTrust case, Siva Vaidhyanathan has a good article pointing out that these two rulings recognize that universities are "vast copy machines" and that's a very good thing.

...these cases strengthen the claim that universities and their libraries have a special place in copyright law because they have a special place in society. Courts and even Congress have long acknowledged the essential role of copying in the educational process. That’s why the preamble to the section of the 1976 U.S. Copyright Act that outlines “fair use” specifies “teaching (including multiple copies for classroom use), scholarship, or research” as examples of “fair uses”—uses that, although they involve the copying of protected material, are considered noninfringing because they enable essential public goods.

Universities are not copyright-free zones—far from it. But they do perform special services that often demand flexibility and liberties that enable them to “promote the progress of science and useful arts,” the core mission of copyright as declared by the U.S. Constitution.

I actually think that Siva underplays the importance of learning in copyright -- as that was its original intent. The Constitutional clause concerning copyright talks about "promoting the progress of science" -- which at the time it was written meant "learning," and the very first Copyright Act in the US was actually entitled "An Act for the Encouragement of Learning."

That said, I'm a bit disappointed that Siva then takes that storyline even further to suggest that universities deserve special protections against copyright enforcement that should not apply elsewhere. For example, he insists that while the HathiTrust ruling finds fair use for universities in scanning books (even if the scanning is done by Google) it should not apply to Google scanning books itself:

In any event, we are never going to see that operatic courtroom showdown between Google and publishing industry over whether the sweeping scanning of millions of books for explicitly commercial purposes constitutes a fair use by Google. I have written many times over the years that I am dubious of the strength of Google’s argument, and nothing in either the settlement news or the HathiTrust case has undermined my conclusion.

... Google is not a library. It is not a university. It is not a public service. It is a business. Too often we forget those distinctions. The project of creating, maintaining, and offering vast collections of digital material should be something that universities and libraries control, not something we depend on one company to handle.

I have long argued exactly the opposite, that Google's book scanning project should absolutely be seen as fair use as well. The use is clearly transformative and most of the evidence suggests it increases, rather than harms, sales. But, more importantly, it really is creating a tremendous library index that will help people find information and learn. I think Siva is going way too far in suggesting that universities should get special treatment. People learn from all sorts of places, not just universities. And we shouldn't carve out special rules for universities that, by default, harm those who do not attend or cannot afford to attend those universities. Part of the wonder of something like Google's book scanning project (and other similar projects, such as the one by the Internet Archive) is that it helps make these works accessible to all -- and we should be encouraging that for the sake of learning across the board, rather than just for a few institutions.

One of the most important pieces of research to emerge last year was "Media Piracy in Emerging Economies". A central theme was that much unauthorized copying around the world is driven by attempts to impose Western-level prices everywhere, resulting in media goods that are simply beyond the reach of most people in countries whose economies are still developing.

Here's an interesting story from Costa Rica, where the same effects are playing out in education:

Thousands of students participated in a march in San José on Tuesday, October 9, 2012, protesting for their right to photocopy textbooks for educational purposes. The unrest was caused by President Chinchilla vetoing Bill 17342 (known as the 'Photocopying Law') which seeks to amend Law No 8039 on Procedures for Enforcement of Intellectual Property Rights, on the grounds that it removes protection of the work and intellectual property in the artistic, literary and technological areas.

As the article on infojustice.org notes, that veto was prompted at least in part by lobbying from publishers who charge unrealistically high prices for their textbooks, which then drives students to use photocopies instead.

It's interesting that large numbers of Costa Rican students felt strongly enough about this issue to take to the streets -- rather as thousands of their contemporaries did in Europe over ACTA earlier this year. That's evidence that this isn't simply a case of people wanting to get "something for nothing", as copyright apologists might try to frame it. Rather, this is about a group who depend on unauthorized copies in order to gain access to knowledge that is vital for their studies, but which is otherwise unaffordable thanks to monopoly pricing.

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As mentioned, last week, we held an all day brainstorming event, bringing together artists and entrepreneurs to talk about the challenges and opportunities that we all face, and to see if there are ways to help each other. I'll have a full writeup on that later this week, but one point that was raised by some of the musicians at the session was that "success" can mean different things to different people, and one full-time musician pointed out that just being able to afford her own health insurance was a kind of "success," in that it showed she'd been able to earn enough to cover that bare minimum of "necessities." So it's interesting to see, just days later, that Amanda Palmer is making a lot of news today with her fascinating #InsurancePoll campaign, which she started after reading Nicholas Kristof's story about his college roommate, who has prostate cancer and is in bad shape -- in large part because he put off going to the doctor since he didn't have health insurance. In response, Amanda realized that many musicians, similarly, do not have health insurance, and she tweeted about it:

most small-to-mid-level musicians i know don't have health insurance. some musicians find tricky ways, some pay, most take the risk & pray.
when i was in my early twenties, buying my own insurance would have been equal half my rent. it just didn't seem like an option. my parents had just watched the death of my step-brother (uninsured when stricken with a disease) almost destroy the family bank, and so they DEMANDED i get insurance.
we fought.
they offered to pay half.
i agreed.
i was lucky.
many aren't.

From there, lots of other people responded with stories about their own health insurance situation, and she decided to ask people more directly about their own health insurance situation with a quick poll question:

quick twitter poll. 1) COUNTRY?! 2) profession? 3) insured? 4) if not, why not, if so, at what cost per month (or covered by job)?

— Amanda Palmer (@amandapalmer) October 14, 2012

The end result was tons of people responding, most using the #InsurancePoll hashtag. That seemed quite interesting to Amanda, who got a volunteer to start tallying up all of the info. And she noticed some of the commentary, which noted that people in various countries were somewhat unaware of how things were elsewhere:

people OUTSIDE the US were looking at all the tweets from the US and feeling really, really, really bad for us. and some younger tweeters (teenagers, i can only assume) were shocked that we americans don't have what they have (the NHS was getting a lot of love and support from the brits, especially seeing as it's under threat).

people INSIDE the US couldn't believe what people OUTSIDE the US didn't KNOW. this is the amazing power of twitter sometimes. we all think we share common knowledge, and then something like this pops up and BAM – you see a whole bunch of people in different countries shocking the hell out of each other. we all know that lance armstrong doped, that lady gaga gained weight, , etc….but tons of people in the UK/Finland/Australia/etc don't know the extent to which US people FREAK OUT on a daily/monthly/yearly basis about insurance. how much it changes our lives. and how EVERYbody has a story.

No matter what your stand is on health insurance or healthcare, you can't deny that this bit of information sharing is both powerful and impressive. Amanda and the volunteer are going to tally up all the data and release it when it's ready, which should be interesting as well. While this is hardly a scientific or randomized survey, it is interesting information that is making more people aware of the situation that others are in. When you think about the power of social media to even create such a discussion (outside the normal realms of political fighting), it's really amazing.

A few weeks ago we wrote about a new "digital music index" from London-based Musicmetrics looking at the popularity of file sharing by location in the UK. The results showed that the act of file sharing was mainstream, rather than a limited activity. The same group has now released a US version of its report, which more or less shows the same thing.

Americans downloaded more than 97 million albums and singles using BitTorrent during the first half of 2012, with Gainesville, FL named as the country’s “pirate capital” in an influential new report. Of the 97 million torrents downloaded across the USA, around 78 percent were albums and 22 percent singles. Assuming an album contains 10 tracks, the total number of songs downloaded would have surpassed 759 million in six months.

The report admits that not all of the songs being downloaded were unauthorized, but suggests that since many of them are, the characterizations are fair. Of course, just as we saw in the UK, all this really seems to show is how widespread file sharing is. It's not a marginalized effort hidden away from society, as some would have you believe, but something that a very large percentage of the population engages in on a regular basis.

A much more interesting (and relevant) report comes from Joe Karaganis who is teasing a larger new report that's about to be released concerning "copy culture" in both the US and Germany. The first tease discusses the attitudes of file sharers in the US about whether or not "it's reasonable" to do certain types of file sharing. And the results suggest that the MPAA's (and many politicians') belief that all they need to do is "educate" people is based on very little evidence. The key point is that, contrary to the assertions of some, the "moral" questions around file sharing are rarely black and white. Karaganis explains that some seem to think that there are just two views of file sharing:

Let’s recall that there are two conventional ways of talking about the ethics of copying–both in relation to the theft of material property. First: that copying is not like theft because it is non-rivalrous–making a copy does not deprive the owner of the use of the good.  For short, call this the Paley position–the defense of digital culture as a culture of abundance.  Second: that copying is like theft because it deprives the owner of the potential economic benefit from the sale of that good (in the case of downloading, to the copier).  Call that the MPAA position–the defense of culture as a market that depends on the scarcity or controlled distribution of digital goods.

Then, he notes that copyright laws were really built up around a specific type of copying: commercial copying rather than personal copying. And the data above certainly suggests that the views of people on any sort of "moral" question change depending on the context. But... also (and this is important) based on age. The younger generation just seems to believe that basic sharing with friends and family should be seen as perfectly reasonable. The different ways of slicing the data certainly suggest that the blanket argument that "piracy is theft" is going to completely miss its mark in educational campaigns. People just don't buy it.

First, that strong moral arguments against file sharing mistake the structure of public attitudes. Not surprisingly, the public engages in many of the same negotiations of context as the law. For most people, like theft and not like theft are not diametrically opposed moral judgements about copying. Rather, they operate on a continuum. They depend on the context and scale in which copying takes place. Copying, our data makes clear, is widely accepted within personal networks, reflecting a view of culture as not only shared but also constructed through sharing. Outside networks of family and friends, in contrast, a commercial and property logic tends to prevail. Support for more active forms of dissemination and ‘making’ available’ through such networks is quite low. Support for commercial infringement–selling copied DVDs–is minimal.

No matter what sort of "education" campaign you create, you're not going to convince most people that constructing a shared culture is somehow immoral. Furthermore, the generation gap issue is significant, especially given that much of the "education" efforts are aimed at the younger generation which seems a lot less willing to buy the argument.

...there is a strong generational divide in attitudes, with 18-29 year olds far more likely than older groups to view a wide range of copying practices as reasonable. This shift is strongest in relation to sharing within networks of ‘friends’–a category that has become very elastic in the last few years through the rise of online social networks. Among 18-29 year olds, sharing with friends is entirely normalized and large in scale. On average, ‘copying from friends/family’ accounts for nearly as much of music file collections as ‘downloading for free.’ What are the reasonable boundaries of such a network? My siblings? My five closest friends? My 500 Facebook friends? Or the 5000 music aficionados who subscribe to a private file sharing network? This is where the rubber hits the road as people develop their own digital ethics. The law has not begun to address it, and educational efforts to convince people that sharing within communities is theft are likely doomed.

This, of course, is the point that we've been trying to get at for many, many years. No matter what your personal feelings are, you're not going to convince everyone else just by making a blanket moral argument that they just don't buy into. Instead, it's time to move to a more reasonable strategy (more on that shortly...).