Thursday, July 29, 2010

Spotting a Teaching and Writing Opportunity

I am somewhat familiar with HK PolyTech, and have a high opinion of the school.  Here is an article on their apparel design graduating class, with one cryptic section:
Approaching the end of the MA program at Poly U, Wilfred said he learned things not taught in a classroom, such as finding material sources, managing budgets and deadlines, etc.
Well, what does that mean?  That the program is short in these areas, and he found what he needed outside the program?   Or the program leaves that until the very end?  I suspect the former.

If one loved the fashion business, or one loved the part of business involved with sourcing, accounting and project management, then there is an opportunity to teach and write... and no doubt plenty of other technical programs skip this step, such as welding programs.

Google will feed you articles limited to keywords you choose, and in this case having google feed you articles with words school project management accounting (maybe that would bring in too many articles) sourcing would lead to teaching opportunities.

Wednesday, July 28, 2010

Mike Checks In On Open Mic Suppression

PYP advocates eliminating intellectual property rights, and explains why the concept is bogus.  Here is an example of the damage done by IPR enforcement.  One recurring theme is the Stockholm Syndrome attitude of the victims, apparent in this story.  The victims seem to take their abusers side.

Another intimation here is the "copyright holders" have hired thugs to shake down cafes and ballet schools for money, possibly earning a cut of the shakedown fee.  What if these people pressing for payment are not representatives of the copyright holders at all, just scammers?  The copyright people should be required to license their collectors, since they love a licensing requirements.

Tuesday, July 27, 2010

P O D On Sale

Lightning Source prints POD for iUniverse, and Lightning Source is owned by Ingram, the book distributor.  occasionally they put their print service on sale, I suppose when demand is down, but the prices are still no better than you can print yourself, as in Hong Kong.  Lightning Source discounts as of 7/2010:


50 - 99 COPIES ORDERED SAVE 10%
100 - 249 COPIES ORDERED SAVE 20%
250 - 999 COPIES ORDERED SAVE 30%
1000+ COPIES ORDERED SAVE 35%

Monday, July 26, 2010

Hotel Offers Night School?

A Seattle Hotel is extending its mission into education by offering debates on music, readings by local authors and how to make cocktails in the bar.  Creative.

Amazon Helps Break Textbook Racket

The textbook racket is a free market, so economic means are appropriate to taking down the bad guys.  Those $300 textbooks can be found for $25 on Amazon, or so says my college daughter.  Amazon gives special consideration to students.  One fellow cleverly likens the textbook market to the big pharmaceutical biz in his well-rounded critique.  Problem is, there are calls to regulate this market... no, no, no... the market is sorting out the problem.

Sunday, July 25, 2010

Who is Our Competition?

AS to STC, the mission statement for seattle teachers college is "lower the cost and widen access to education while ever improving student and instructor satisfaction."  I hope to have a page on our website and perhaps in each catalog devoted to metrics demonstrating whether we are meeting our mission.  The "lower the cost" will be easy to show, just state nominally what going rates were and what they are now.  Widening the access gets to census data on who we are reaching, and is tied up with our lists, mailings, and what we've been talking about... I project an early September mailing to start this ball rolling, which as I understand it is  benchmarking. 

Ever improving student and instructor satisfaction will be measured by feedback forms.  About a decade ago a couple of UC Berkeley rocket scientists (I am not making that up) developed a system for comparing UCB accounting 101 student feedback to MIT accounting 101 feedback to see whose was better.  No idea how they were doing it, but the company was called coursemetrics,com, and it went under, or perhaps blew up like a bad space mission.  I have their marketing material, and so I was hoping someday to track down the principals and see if there was anything to salvage.  It is too late to make a long story short, but the idea is not to measure just present STC student and instructor satisfaction against previous STC performance, but STC against everyone else.

Also here has been some growth in targeting the competition.  There was a series of expose articles on the University of Washington administration double and triple dipping...  apparently one can max out a pension, so the trick is to retire one day and then be rehired the next day in the same job at the same rate and start a second pension, while collecting on the first.  Some people retire and do the same job as a consultant at super premium rates.  Anyway, people must have short memories because these articles are run every couple of years and nothing happens.

It dawned on me that the University of Washington is not competition, indeed, no part of the state school system is competition for Seattle Teachers College.  When washington state was formed in 1889, the progressive movement was in full bloom, so to please those elements back East WAshington state made education the core of its mission, and dedicated 1/16th of the land to support free, compulsory, public education.  The rents from downtown seattle feed directly to UW.  Point is, government run schools are political entities, not market entities.  if there are problems with these schools, the solutions must come from the legislature, not the market.  (When I was getting my MA in Ed, talk of public/private initiatives was all the rage.  I could not put my finger on it, but it struck me as somehow off.)  

Definitions are a problem, because what we call public schools are actually quite limited in access, and what we call private are open to all comers.  And private schools can be non-profit or profit ventures.  Better definitions may be state vs market schools.  STC competition is the market schools, say Chapman, U of Phoenix, Art Institute of (name a city) Antioch and City U.  These schools are largely predatory, recruiting the hapless and loading them up with debt.  The system is wildly profitable, but would not work without guaranteed student loans (which are taxpayer guaranteed) and the risk to the taxpayers is ostensibly diminished because student loans may not be discharged in bankruptcy, something many of the students will need to consider in their futures.  Of the market schools, for-profit and non-profit, non profit is a very distorted term, a means of earning wider margins due to tax-exempt status so the administrators (owners) can be paid all the more.  Yes, an administrator taking home 11 million dollars (U of Phoenix co-ceo) which would be taxable, except as Sen Reid says, taxes are voluntary in USA.  These people know how to legally avoid taxes on their incomes, profit or non-profit..

To get in on this gig a school must be accredited, and as these things go, the accreditation bodies, like the risk rating agencies, are loaded up with people from chapman, u of phoenix, city u, etc.  

A school that depends on govt guaranteed student loans is hardly a market entity.  But such schools can pull out the money with impunity like a market entity.  Some people will argue without student loans the students cannot get the education they need. But this misses the point, the loans cover what these schools charge, not what an education costs.  Without the guarantees of the loans, no one would front so much money to a student, the schools gladly absorb as much money as is available, spread it around thick internally, and send the student off perniciously burdened.  An education does not cost what these schools charge.  Almost everyone can afford with what they normally earn an education superior to anything these accredited schools offer.  Accreditation is the Berlin Wall of education.  Seattle Teachers College will work to bring down that wall.  We will never be accredited.  Our competition is those monsters, neither state nor market, or half state half market, which prey on and devour the young, the poor, the gullible.  Seattle teachers college will give a first rate education for those who know better and would never enroll in such schools, and a fair break, an alternative, to the students preyed upon by such schools.

Saturday, July 24, 2010

Sue Your Way To Success In Publishing

A fellow in Las Vegas is suing anyone who reprints a Las Vegas Sun story, and claims to be making money for himself and the Sun.  I think what is going to happen is both will be come pariahs, since there is too much other content to bother carrying a Sun article which carries a lawsuit with it.  Perhaps the Sun does not realize this predatory practice puts the Sun at risk too.  The fellow helping them now controls how much the Sun is hurt by bad reputation, and who knows, the fellow may end up buying a hurting Sun.  Stranger things have happened.

Thursday, July 22, 2010

Freedom of the Press

Roughly outlined, in the founding of the USA were two competing ideas, personified by Hamilton and Jackson.  Hamilton was for big government, elitism, empire, industry; Jefferson was for light government, individual freedom, small business egalitarianism.  People observer we in USA talk Jeffersonian, but act Hamiltonian. Neither quite lived up to his own ideals, and Vice President Aaron Burr killed Hamilton in a duel, which may have given Hamilton an edge in the popular mind.

Jefferson was adamantly opposed to the European system of intellectual property, and rationalized a better way for USA.  Instead of the European system of first to patent, the USA law would be the inventor automatically earns the patent.  Jefferson's skeptical associates voted him the first US Patent examiner.  Jefferson's mistake is with us today.

Publishing in USA got an early Hamiltonian push.  First, elected federal officials do not pay for postage on their "messages from your elected official (aka campaign material)," your tax dollars pays for it.  This gives an incumbent a decided edge.  Second, law notices are required to be published in newspapers, and periodicals are sent via USA mail at wildly subsidized rates.  With advertising dollars and distribution costs both provided by government, publishers tended to be affectionate of the hand that feeds them.

Over time publishers found themselves exempt from child labor laws, anti-trust laws, given ink and paper subsidies, editorial content subsidized, and raw advocacy advertising provided by government agencies at top rates, and exemption from traffic and moving violation laws (newsbox delivery vans can double park with impunity, the vans have doors removed, and the riders are not obliged to wear seat belts.)  there is more but you get the picture.  It is hard to be independent when you depend on the very people you are supposed to keep in check.  The result of course is dying newspapers.

Freedom of the press is freedom from as well as freedom to.  Yes,  freedom to write what you like, and freedom from interference, but also freedom from the kind of manipulation that the press experiences today, the worst sort: distorting subsidies.

All publishers in USA enjoy some sort of taxpayer-proffered subsidy. If you are reading this in a book no doubt it was shipped in a heavily subsidized manner.  We will not have a truly free press until the subsidies are ended.

Tuesday, July 20, 2010

Writing In Hong Kong

Teaching and writing go hand in hand for this Hong Kong professional writer.  With seven million people, and a fantastic array of life stories, I'd have to disagree that pursuing money is holding back publishing in Hong Kong.  A recurring theme I see in Hong Kong is that the locals do not seem to know what they have...  I bet there is fantastic literature sitting on computers and tied up in manuscripts that writers are simply unaware of what they have got.  I like the idea of the SCMP writing competition.... this should scare up some good work.

Amazon eBooks Outsell Hardcovers!

Which isn't really saying much, since hardcover sales are not huge anyway, and we already knew ebook sales were rising.  Amazon will only speak in percentages, not in hard numbers, so this "news" is hard to quantify, but it tracks what we see with every other tech advancement.  When it is cheaper and easier to acquire and use, a given item will be acquired and used more.
Christmas day Kindle books outsold real books on Amazon.  This too was no big deal, since nobody buys books on Christmas day, but everyone who got a Kindle tried it out (with a likely free or heavily discounted book) as soon as they unwrapped their neato new toy.
An eBook version of a given book is de riguer if you wish to publish, but eBooks will neither supplant printed books nor reduce market for all books.