Eideard

They can bring back the Davy Crockett rocket -
One of the dumbest nuclear weapons ever made!

The Defense Department, considered by some a black hole of federal spending, is promising lawmakers it will open its books and show in detail how the billions are spent. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta…admitted Thursday that the Pentagon must improve its accountability.

“While the department’s systems do tell us where we are spending taxpayer funds, we do not yet have the details and controls necessary to pass an audit,” Panetta said in remarks prepared for his appearance before the House Armed Services Committee. “This is inexcusable and must change.”

Until now, the Pentagon has never been subjected to a so-called “clean audit,” a full examination of its spending. In the past, the Defense Department had pledged to provide Congress with auditable financial statements by 2017. Panetta shaved several years off that deadline to deliver that key part of how the Pentagon monitors its spending.

“I have directed the department to cut in half the time it will take to achieve audit readiness for the Statement of Budgetary Resources, so that in 2014 we will have the ability to conduct a full budget audit,” Panetta said. “We owe it to the taxpayers to be transparent and accountable for how we spend their dollars, and under this plan we will move closer to fulfilling that responsibility.”

The Statement of Budgetary Resources, according to the Pentagon, shows what funds the Defense Department received, what was obligated and what checks were written. It is just one of four parts of the internal accounting. The other three, including a consolidated balance sheet and a net cost for the entire department, will remain on the 2017 timetable.

Perish the thought that actual budget cuts have a chance to go beyond the smoke-and-mirrors cuts already agreed to between the White House, Congressional Republicans, Democrats with big military bases delivering welfare checks to their districts and the ever-popular military-industrial complex that has been sucking at at the teat of taxpayer dollars for decades.

Who needs a Cold War when you can have the War on Terror producing non-consumable goods forever and a day?

Amazon.com…now sells more eBooks than books printed on paper.

“Customers are now choosing Kindle books more often than print books,” said Jeff Bezos, Amazon’s founder and chief executive, in a statement. “We had high hopes that this would happen eventually, but we never imagined it would happen this quickly — we’ve been selling print books for 15 years and Kindle books for less than four years…”

“This includes sales of hardcover and paperback books by Amazon where there is no Kindle edition,” the company said. “Free Kindle books are excluded and if included would make the number even higher.”

The success of eBooks isn’t limited to just Amazon and its Kindle. The entire industry is pushing more digital copies now, with eBook sales tripling over the last year.

Among the recent contributors to eBook sales for the Seattle-based retail giant is the newest, cheapest version of its Kindle — Kindle with Special Offers — which sells for $114 and has risen to be the company’s best selling eReader, Bezos said.

Unlike other Kindles, Kindle with Special Offers runs advertisements and digital coupons on the eReader’s display in a strip across the bottom of the home screen or as a screen saver when the device isn’t in use.

A few sources have published a breakout by category – but, most of those require a subscription. I did see a note that gave me a chuckle: the growth of e-readers surpasses print in every category Amazon sells – except books on religion. Got to get past that Gutenberg thing, folks.

Whatever you do, don’t smoke the seeds!
Daylife/AP Photo used by permission

Thousands of copies of a new book about the Catholic Church’s teachings will have to be pulped after a translation error suggested that the Vatican had radically changed its views on contraception.

The book was officially launched on Wednesday at the Vatican, but the event was overshadowed by the embarrassing error, which will mean that around 30,000 copies will have to be scrapped.

The book, called YouCat – short for Youth Catechism – was originally written in German and contains a question and answer format about whether Catholic couples are entitled to plan the size of their families by “regulating conception”.

The answer provided was yes, because the Church sanctions ‘natural family planning’, in which married couples chart a woman’s menstrual cycle to determine when she might be capable of conceiving.

But in the Italian edition of the book, the question was translated as whether married couples could “use contraceptive methods.”

Again the answer was yes, implying that the Church had overturned its entrenched opposition to condoms, the pill and all other forms of contraception…

The translation mistake is just the latest in a series of public relations debacles to hit the Holy See.

In November, ambiguities in the translation of a book about the Pope, Light of the World, suggested that he believed that condoms were morally justifiable in some circumstances, for instance in preventing the transmission of a deadly disease such as Aids between a prostitute and a client.

Of course, the Holy Roman Catholic isn’t about to open the door to modern knowledge, ethics or understanding. Leaving the 14th Century behind might be too much of a shock. Might even lose a few gold bars along the way.

The library at Stony Stratford, on the outskirts of Milton Keynes, looks like the aftermath of a crime, its shell-shocked staff presiding over an expanse of emptied shelves. Only a few days ago they held 16,000 volumes.

Now, after a campaign on Facebook, there are none. Every library user was urged to pick their full entitlement of 15 books, take them away and keep them for a week. The idea was to empty the shelves by closing time on Saturday: in fact with 24 hours to go, the last sad bundle of self-help and practical mechanics books was stamped out. Robert Gifford, chair of Stony Stratford town council, planned to collect his books when he got home from work in London, but left it too late.

The empty shelves, as the library users want to demonstrate, represent the gaping void in their community if Milton Keynes council gets its way. Stony Stratford, an ancient Buckinghamshire market town famous only for its claim that the two pubs, the Cock and the Bull, are the origin of the phrase “a cock and bull story”, was one of the communities incorporated in the new town in 1967. The Liberal Democrat council, made a unitary authority in 1997, now faces budget cuts of £25m and is consulting on closing at least two of 10 outlying branch libraries.

Stony Stratford council got wind in December and wrote to all 6,000 residents – not entirely disinterestedly, as the council meets in the library, like many other groups in the town. “In theory the closure is only out for consultation,” Gifford said, “but if we sit back it will be too late. One man stopped me in the street and said, ‘The library is the one place where you find five-year-olds and 90-year-olds together, and it’s where young people learn to be proper citizens’. It’s crazy even to consider closing it.”

Beancounters never think of the support such services provide to the future of a community. I’ve written a number of times of the value and direction provided to my life by weekly visits to our neighborhood Carnegie Library. It was a regular part of Saturday recreation for my mother and sister and me.

Milton Keynes Council should support libraries and independent learning – not work at spoiling the process for others.

Nearly three decades of war and religious extremism have devastated medical libraries and crippled the educational system for doctors, nurses and other health professionals. Factions of the Taliban, which ruled Afghanistan from 1996 to 2001, singled out medical texts for destruction, military medical personnel say, because anatomical depictions of the human body were considered blasphemous.

“They not only burned the books, but they sent monitors into the classroom to make sure there were no drawings of the human body on the blackboard,” said Valerie Walker, director of the Medical Alumni Association of the University of California, Los Angeles.

Ms. Walker is helping lead an ambitious effort by American doctors and nurses, both civilian and military, to restock Afghanistan’s hospitals, clinics and universities with medical textbooks and other reference materials.

The project, called Operation Medical Libraries, began modestly in 2007 with a plea for books from a U.C.L.A. medical graduate serving in the Army. It has since been embraced by 30 universities and hospitals, more than a dozen professional organizations and scores of individual doctors and nurses…

Like most others involved in the program, Dr. Maldonado heard about it from a colleague. And word has spread among medical officers stationed in Afghanistan, who act as volunteer points of contact to shepherd books to the libraries…

By Ms. Walker’s estimate, 27,000 medical texts have reached Afghanistan through Operation Medical Libraries, but she adds that the number is probably much higher. Donors can contribute directly by visiting the project’s Web site to find a military volunteer’s address, then shipping the books on their own.

Please, join in. Collect books. Get folks to collect and ship them to the Project.

RTFA. Reflect on the “joys” that fundamentalist religions almost inevitably bring to whatever part of the world is under their subjugation.

Whether rich or poor, residents of the United States or China, illiterate or college graduates, parents who have books in the home increase the level of education their children will attain, according to a 20-year study led by Mariah Evans, University of Nevada, Reno associate professor of sociology and resource economics.

For years, educators have thought the strongest predictor of attaining high levels of education was having parents who were highly educated. But, strikingly, this massive study showed that the difference between being raised in a bookless home compared to being raised in a home with a 500-book library has as great an effect on the level of education a child will attain as having parents who are barely literate…compared to having parents who have a university education… Both factors, having a 500-book library or having university-educated parents, propel a child 3.2 years further in education, on average.

Being a sociologist, Evans was particularly interested to find that children of lesser-educated parents benefit the most from having books in the home. She has been looking for ways to help Nevada’s rural communities, in terms of economic development and education.

“What kinds of investments should we be making to help these kids get ahead?” she asked. “The results of this study indicate that getting some books into their homes is an inexpensive way that we can help these children succeed.”

Evans said, “Even a little bit goes a long way,” in terms of the number of books in a home. Having as few as 20 books in the home still has a significant impact on propelling a child to a higher level of education, and the more books you add, the greater the benefit…

The researchers were struck by the strong effect having books in the home had on children’s educational attainment even above and beyond such factors as education level of the parents, the country’s GDP, the father’s occupation or the political system of the country.

Having books in the home is twice as important as the father’s education level, and more important than whether a child was reared in China or the United States. Surprisingly, the difference in educational attainment for children born in the United States and children born in China was just 2 years, less than two-thirds the effect that having 500 or more books in the home had on children.

I presume the benefit was from having access to the books. It certainly was an advantage for me and my sister.

Though both of us were taught to read before entering kindergarten, though both took those long Saturday roundtrip walks to the Carnegie Library in our community – our parents had belonged to a couple of book clubs for all their lives together. It took me years – enjoyable years I might add – to catch up to both of them reading through our home library.

The government in the Indian state of Meghalaya has confiscated textbooks showing pictures of Jesus Christ holding a cigarette and a can of beer.

The book has been used for primary classes and has caused a furore in the north-eastern state, where more than 70% of the population are Christians.

State Education Minister Ampareen Lyngdoh said legal action against the publishers was being contemplated.

The controversial picture of Jesus was discovered in cursive writing exercise books being used at a private school in the state capital, Shillong…

The minister said that…his government has taken speedy action by seizing all the copies of the textbook from schools and bookshops.

“We are deeply hurt by the insensitivity of the publisher. How can one show such total disrespect for a religion?” asked Dominic Jala, the Archbishop of Shillong…

The Catholic Church in India has banned all textbooks by Skyline Publications from all its schools.

Doesn’t it warm the cockles of your heart to see such understanding and tolerance for all rational religious points of view?

Amid the flat, wide fields of central France, a team of re-trained secretaries and IT experts is packaging Europe’s literary heritage for the digital era…

The company they work for, Safig, is one of the few European firms to digitize books, using automatic and human page-turners. That places them right at the center of France’s plan for a massive online library, and its attempts to negotiate a digital books deal with U.S. internet giant Google…

Fans of France’s 750 million euro scheme to digitize its libraries and museums see it as a union of cultural pride and industrial strategy — Bruno Racine, head of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France, is also a strategic advisor to NATO, the military alliance.

Skeptics point out that Google’s 10 million digitized books dwarf any French effort so far, such as Safig’s three-year contract to scan 300,000 books for the Bibliotheque Nationale.

One possible outcome is a compromise with Google that would accelerate mass digitization…

France has said it is ready to talk to Google over a joint project, but wants to extract far more generous terms than other partners — for example, through a free book swap.

That stance marks a shift in attitude following the departure of Jean-Noel Jeanneney as director of the Bibliotheque Nationale de France in 2007. Jeanneney was a fierce Google critic and even wrote a book attacking the company’s book project as a threat to non-Anglophone culture.

Under the deal, the Bibliotheque Nationale could let Google use the digitized books and in return would have free access to Google’s far bigger collection.

“We welcome the spirit of the proposal,” Google spokesman Simon Morrison said. “We are happy to talk.”

It’s always good for a chuckle to watch nations fight cultural battles against global communications. There are people in French letters who still oppose translations into other languages. Or they will only allow specific languages in translation.

I had a friend in Warsaw who quite legally translated French classics into Polish – and also enjoined by the owners of IP rights not to translate the same works into English on occasion.

Its denigrators will be kicking themselves: a children’s book about two male penguins who raise an orphaned chick has shot up Amazon’s bestseller charts after it was named as the title which people have tried hardest to ban in the US.

And Tango Makes Three by Justin Richardson and Peter Parnell is a children’s picture book based on the true story of a zookeeper at a New York zoo, who spotted two of his male penguins attempting to hatch a stone, and “realises that it may be time for Roy and Silo to become parents for real”. Parents in the US have complained about its “homosexual undertones” (it’s “a homosexual storyline that has been sugar-coated with cute penguins”, said one) according to the American Library Association, which puts together a list of the most challenged titles in the country every year. And Tango Makes Three has topped that list for the last three years…

Richardson himself said today that it was “regrettable that some parents believe reading a true story about two male penguins hatching an egg will damage their children’s moral development”. “They are entitled to express their beliefs, but not to inflict them on others,” he added.

I sincerely hope that as the gradual march up the incline of knowledge and education includes more and more of our species – bigots and fools will continue to pitch themselves over the side of this cliffside path.

Poisonally, I can’t wait to try this. Especially, if and when Google is allowed to offer out-of-print books.