b.cognosco
Where leaping to conclusions is my primary form of forward motion.
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Thursday, February 20, 2003
Real Numbers From Music Industry
More evidencethat looking at real financial numbers for the music industry is key to gutting their entire position on digital music sharing. We should not begrudge publishers legitimate fees for legitimate services, but we should never have let them recast the file sharing argument as one of protecting artists. It's a patently bullshit argument and will continue to fall under close scrutiny.
Who Gets Hurt When You Pirate Music?.There's a case study in the NYDaily News -- apparently a propos nothing but this Sunday's Grammy Awards -- that breaks down the cash flow of a hypothetical hit album by a hypothetical rock quartet. It illustrates all the people that get paid along the food chain, including some odd recoupable record company expenses, like a 25 percent "packaging deduction" and a 15 percent "free goods charge," off the top, most of which the label keeps.
The bottom line is that a gold record (500,000 copies) selling at $16.98 will gross roughly $8.5 million, of which each member of the hypothetical quartet will pocket about $40,000. (The case study doesn't take songwriting royalties into account.)
So for every $16.98 album you rip, you're costing a performing artist about 34 cents, and the lawyers, producers and labels about $16.64. [Over the Edge]
Wednesday, February 19, 2003
Self-motivated Learners
Fascinating article in Silicon.com, as the father of a 13-year-old who has designed and managed her own US-based schooling from London describes the experience and draws from it lessons for everyone interested in propagating learning as a lifelong discipline. But in the end, we're back to the intrinsic need for self-motivated learners if all this is going to work.More and more, I think the role of public schooling in the US is to force-feed some rudimentary level of essential knowledge -- how to read road signs and cigarette labels, understand a credit card statement, fill out a minimum-wage job application -- and a dose of current political doctrine into people regardless of their motivation. It's a sort of self-preservation thing for society.
To be anything more than that requires a lot of effort and motivation on the part of the student. This really is the challenge with all learning, and not many students have this kind of motivation:
[...] Only the story doesn't end there. Far from it. My daughter is nothing if not resourceful. She took to the net and soon found tutors who specialise in preparing UK kids for US schooling and vice versa.Soon she was in a position to sign up for tutors twice a week and then do the rest of her schooling via distance learning, over the net. [...]
Few students show this kind of determination. Fewer still are the parents who know how to support and manage it. But it is something we must understand, and must learn to engender it in our students if we are to ever see the true benefits of extended learning tools.
Will elearning's day ever come?. E-learning - will its day ever come? Quote: "E-learning can work but it is not about the technology, which is now relatively cheap and available... What is important is providers understanding their customer base, making tools simple to use and having self-motivated users.[elearnspace blog]
Tuesday, February 18, 2003
Falcons Raise Ticket Prices
Falcons raise top season ticket price from $370 to $490. If you don't mind sitting upper deck you can still get season tix for $100 or $190 -- by far the cheapest seats in the NFL.
Falcons Raise Season-Ticket Prices. 11 Alive Feb 18 2003 1:05PM ET [Moreover - Atlanta news]
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