Shadow

Moving to a new computer. The new C drive is a little crammed, so I moved all my PDF files, 4G of them, to D drive. I thought I copied all program perferences to the new user profile, including Adobe Acrobat’s Organizer preferences.

If you are like me, reading tons of PDF files for live, the Organizer (since 8.0?) can be a life saver. You can assign PDF files to categories, and it keeps track of all the files you read in the past week, month, year.

Except for one thing — all the file paths are hard-coded. Once you move your library to a different location, you loose all your "collections". Adobe simply can’t find them, and it makes no attempt to relocate them.

The files, under "C:\Documents and Settings\username\Application Data\Adobe\Acrobat\8.0\organizer70", look awfully like MySQL files. So I gave it a shot. Copied the files to a LAMP server, made new a directory under "htdoc/mysql/data". Fired up PhpMyAdmin. Sure enough, it recognizes it right away like another MySQL databases.

How do I change the path names? Here’s a one liner example:

Search and Replace in MySQL database with phpMyAdmin

UPDATE `flexinode_data` SET textual_data replace textual_data, /audio/ , WHERE `field_id` 41

In my case:

Look under table "files", and do:

UPDATE `files` SET `file_diPath` = replace(`file_diPath`,"/C/Documents and Settings/username/My Documents/eLibrary","/D/eLibrary");

 and

UPDATE `files` SET `display_path` = replace(`display_path`,"C:\\Documents and Settings\\username\\My Documents\\eLibrary","D:\\eLibrary") ;

Now copy all the files back to your Adobe Acrobat Organizor folder (I made a backup first). Wola, back to business. 

Sara Mead took a more careful look at the latest Reading First report on her blog Early Ed Watch. The discussion focused on the curious finding that late-awardees did better than the earlier cohort.

A Second Look at Reading First | New America Blogs

… researchers found evidence of both increased instructional time devoted to the 5 components, and improved reading comprehension test scores in the later group of schools. That makes intuitive sense: Reading First is based on the idea that implementing the 5 components of effective reading instruction will improve student reading, so the program is unlikely to improve student achievement in schools where it doesn’t also cause teachers to increase time devoted to the 5 components.

Mead suggests a causality here: increased instruction time on the 5C resulted in better test scores. I looked into the report to see if there is any analysis to shed light on this. To my surprise, all they presented there are means and estimated means. I can’t even find a correlation between the two variables across sites, schools, or individuals.

I doubt they didn’t look into this. Why wasn’t it reported? 

 

The study of Reading First is not complete, but the early results are not promising. Not at all.

If the program continues to do nothing, it should be abandoned. There’s more than one way to teach a kid to read. Let’s try other methods - until we find one that works.

Says an editorial today on MassLive.com. WashingtonPost yesterday had a piece on Russ Whitehurst:

Education chief pushes scientific path to learning

Grover "Russ" Whitehurst is the point man in the push to elevate the role of rigorous research in public education. (Sarah L. Voisin/washington post)

 

By Maria Glod

Washington Post / May 4, 2008

WASHINGTON - The Bush administration’s chief of education research says teachers too often rely on "folk wisdom" instead of proven methods to help students learn reading and math. Just as doctors consider data from drug trials and clinical research when they treat patients, he wants educators to think more scientifically in their quest for the right textbooks, technology, teacher training, and lesson plans to raise student achievement.

What do the two have in common? The belief that there is a — singular — solution that will solve the literacy problem. Guess who is goining to find that magic bullet?

If your answer is not the scientists or the politicians, you are unamerican.

Lots of talks after the news broke that Reading First failed the midterm exam. The final prospect doesn’ look good either. I have more than once expressed my marvel over how everything education is politics in the US. 

Among the 200+ news stories on this topic on Google News is this editorial, which I openned in random. After babbling about how much FR costs and how bad it is, the anonymous editor concluded:

ReviewJournal.com - Opinion - EDITORIAL: Another Washington success story

The Department of Education was created barely 30 years ago — it was Jimmy Carter’s sop to the teacher unions. Since then, the state of the American public school system has been in annual decline.

The country would be far better off if we stopped filtering education tax dollars through the beltway, blew up the entire federal Education Department along with No Child Left Behind, and instead let states and local districts take the lead in embarking upon aggressive reform.

When it comes to teaching kids to read, do state politicians or your county commisioners know secrets that the Feds didn’t? Why are they a better bet?

NAEP keeps reading data from 1972. Government-initiated reforms, Federal or State, did little to change student performance. Statistically significant, maybe. But practically children read at about the same level as 40 years ago. Is the Dept of Ed doing a good job? No, but is it better without it? There is hardly any evidence that state governments will do any better.

Every 3rd grader a reader by year 2000 was the #1 goal of the Dept of Ed when Bill Clinton was around, but it’s long forgotten. Bush’s NCLB set the same goal for 2014, and it’s not going to happen. Isn’t time to admit that policies and politicing ain’t the most effective way to teach kids to read?

It’s on the news: Reading First is this much effective.

Reading First Impact Study: Interim Report - Introduction

• PDF: Full Report (1.64 MB)

Created under the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB) of 2001, the Reading First program provides assistance to states and districts in using research-based reading programs and instructional materials for students in kindergarten through third grade and in introducing related professional development and assessments. The program’s purpose is to ensure that increased proportions of students read at or above grade level, have mastery of the essential components of early reading, and that all students can read at or above grade level by the end of grade 3. The law requires that an independent, rigorous evaluation of the program be conducted to determine if the program influences teaching practices, mastery of early reading components, and student reading comprehension. This interim report presents the impacts of Reading First on classroom reading instruction and student reading comprehension during the 2004-05 and 2005-06 school years.

The evaluation found that Reading First did have positive, statistically significant impacts on the total class time spent on the five essential components of reading instruction promoted by the program. The study also found that, on average across the 18 study sites, Reading First did not have statistically significant impacts on student reading comprehension test scores in grades 1-3. A final report on the impacts from 2004-2007 (three school years with Reading First funding) and on the relationships between changes in instructional practice and student reading comprehension is expected in late 2008.

Accessites.org has a good discussion on Graceful Degradation & Progressive Enhancement

Progressive Enhancement

Progressive enhancement became known — at least under that name — in 2003, when Steve Champeon began using it on Webmonkey and during the SXSW conference. It starts at the opposite end from graceful degradation: begin with the basic version, then add enhancements for those who can handle them. Again, comparing it to the design approaches: this is the same basic thought as in structural design. That starts with the markup and adds styling on top of that, which is progressive enhancement all by itself.

 

I knew F-test is generally robust against violations of normality. I also knew there are a lot of subtleties in this. But I never looked up the sources, until now. This is a good place to start:

JSTOR: Journal of Educational Statistics, Vol. 17, No. 4, (1992 ), pp. 315-339

Summarizing Monte Carlo Results in Methodological Research: The One- and Two-Factor Fixed Effects ANOVA Cases
Author(s): Michael R. Harwell, Elaine N. Rubinstein, William S. Hayes and Corley C. Olds
Source: Journal of Educational Statistics, Vol. 17, No. 4, Special Issue: Meta-Analysis (Winter, 1992), pp. 315-339
Publisher: American Educational Research Association and American Statistical Association
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/1165127

Abstract

Meta-analytic methods were used to integrate the findings of a sample of Monte Carlo studies of the robustness of the F test in the one- and two-factor fixed effects ANOVA models. Monte Carlo results for the Welch (1947) and Kruskal-Wallis (Kruskal Wallis, 1952) tests were also analyzed. The meta-analytic results provided strong support for the robustness of the Type I error rate of the F test when certain assumptions were violated. The F test also showed excellent power properties. However, the Type I error rate of the F test was sensitive to unequal variances, even when sample sizes were equal. The error rate of the Welch test was insensitive to unequal variances when the population distribution was normal, but nonnormal distributions tended to inflate its error rate and to depress its power. Meta-analytic and exact statistical theory results were used to summarize the effects of assumption violations for the tests.

Glass, G. V., Peckman, P. D., & Sanders, J. R. (1972). Consequences of failure to meet assumptions underlying the fixed effects analysis of variance and covariance. Review of Educational Research, 42, 237-288.

Ok, I will file this story under "Teaching", since I do talk about the determination of sex in my Child Development course. But the idea that food intake determines the child’s sex has always been part of the culture belief of Chinese. It’s interesting to read the 200 comments after the article.

Boy or Girl? The Answer May Depend on Moms Eating Habits - New York Times Blog

The data is based on a study of 740 first-time pregnant mothers in Britain who didn’t know the sex of their fetus. They provided records of their eating habits before and during the early stages of pregnancy, and researchers analyzed the data based on estimated calorie intake at the time of conception. Among women who ate the most, 56 percent had sons, compared with 45 percent among women who ate the least. As well as consuming more calories, women who had sons were more likely to have eaten a higher quantity and wider range of nutrients, including potassium, calcium and vitamins C, E and B12. There was also a strong correlation between women eating breakfast cereals and producing sons.

Among the comments, there is Dr. Zuk:

As an evolutionary biologist (and guest blogger here a while back, thanks for the opportunity, TPP!), I wanted to explain why biologists think it might be adaptive for females – human or animal – to have male offspring under some circumstances and females under others. In many, though not all, species, males compete for access to females; some males triumph and monopolize the available mates, and a lot of males never have an opportunity to mate at all. Females, on the other hand, can generally find a male and become pregnant.

This means that a mother producing a daughter is assured, evolutionarily, that her genes will be passed on at least in a modest number of descendants. A mother producing a son, however, may either have a large number of descendants, if that son is successful at competition, or none at all, if that son is a loser. Mothers in good condition (from eating a good diet, presumably) would therefore do well to produce a son. Mothers in poor condition risk producing a weedy male that cannot compete with rivals. But if that mother has a daughter in less-than-tiptop condition, she will still probably find a mate, so selection is expected to favor this kind of bet hedging over evolutionary time.

This hypothesis was developed back in the 1970s by biologists Bob Trivers and Dan Willard, and it has received some support in studies of animals like red deer and wild sheep. The mechanism isn’t clear; as some readers have noted, it must work via differential retention of male vs. female embryos at an early stage, since it’s the father’s sperm that determines sex. Does the hypothesis apply to humans? Hard to say. Our ancestors were probably not monogamous, so the opportunity for this kind of selection was there. But we don’t have the kind of all-or-nothing mating system shown by the deer, in which males provide no parental care and can be completely shut out of mating in a particular season. Nonetheless, it’s an interesting study, and for me provided yet another example of how close we are to our mammalian relatives.

Not everybody was a biologist, of course. Knightlaw said:

Personally, I was not eating any food “during the time of conception” of my two children. I think my husband might have thought that was kinda distracting, you know?

To which the blogger replied:

FROM TPP — Conception doesn’t occur at the exact moment of intercourse. I believe it can occur up to 72 hours or so after sex.

This is my new desktop picture. Pick yours from the 59 Greatest Galaxy Hits from NASA.

NGC 5257, NGC 5258

Arp 240 is an astonishing galaxy pair, composed of spiral galaxies of similar mass and size, NGC 5257 and NGC 5258. The galaxies are visibly interacting with each other via a bridge of dim stars connecting the two galaxies, almost like two dancers holding hands while performing a pirouette. Both galaxies harbour supermassive black holes in their centres and are actively forming new stars in their discs. Arp 240 is located in the constellation Virgo, approximately 300 million light-years away, and is the 240th galaxy in Arp’s Atlas of Peculiar Galaxies.

With the exception of a few foreground stars from our own Milky Way all the objects in this image are galaxies.

This image is part of a large collection of 59 images of merging galaxies taken by the Hubble Space Telescope and released on the occasion of its 18th anniversary on 24th April 2008.

Want more?

It’s the end of the semester, and final papers are due. As always, some will be late. I have a student emailing me the paper in Word, with a note that he forgot to bring the hard copy to class. In this case a Microsoft Word Metadata Viewer comes in handy.

Pinpoint Metaviewer allows users to quickly extract file system metadata, OLE metadata contained in Microsoft Office Files and hash values all at the click of a mouse. Metaviewer allows computer forensic examiners and litigation support professionals often need to retrieve the metadata for specific files. Pinpoint Metaviewer is a right-click send-to utility that places the power of viewing metadata and hash values inside Windows Explorer. Once the information is retrieved users can paste all or selected fields into any application.

Sprout learns your news reading habit and supplies only stuff you like. At least that’s what the beta version says. Looks like some sort of Bayesian learning:

• Sprout intuitively learns and adapts to your preferences by statistically evaluating your positive and negative feedback
• The more you use Sprout, the more it learns about your likes and dislikes; increasing the probability of finding relevant content for you
• Over time, Sprout’s growing comprehension will lead you to news and entertainment you never even though of looking for
• As your interests start to change, Sprout’s content will change with you - learning occurs within 15-20 minutes of use, and never stops

More on the developer’s site:

Sprout NewsReader

Through a unique cataloguing algorithm, Sprout delivers to you articles that match your preferences. Our cataloging system filters and sorts articles from all over the web and allows Sprout to fetch the most well-suited articles for you, our user, based on your user profile. Your profile is created by simply reading articles and telling Sprout whether you like them or not. Very quickly, our powerful profiling system aligns the articles you receive with your preferences without ever putting you through an onerous set-up process. Every time you let Sprout know what you think about an article, your profile becomes even more accurate as it takes into account endless details about those articles that you like and dislike.

Sprout is unlike any other article finding system available today. It is programmed to your individual preferences and is always learning from your responses. Instead of spending endless hours trolling the web for a few tidbits of news or information that you actually want to know about, Sprout shows you articles you’ll enjoy every time you use it. Our goal is that every article you see makes your day.

For more information and to sign up, visit www.yourSprout.com

Haven’t decided whether to try it.They do have a whitepaper here: DOWNLOAD THE SPROUT WHITEPAPER

A couple of years later I am still looking for a way to record audio in Python for my eye-tracking experiments.  

Eyelink comes with support for PyGame, which is itself a wrapper for SDL. However, SDL does not support audio recording to date. There is an old
SDL audio recording patch which I am not sure will work with the current versions of things. And it’s not officially supported in PyGame.

PySonic is a project that I should have kept track.  The latest release, though, was 2005.

And there is the good’o Snack/WaveSurfer for Tcl/Tk and Python. The last time I used it there was a bug that prevented the creation of blank sound longer than a couple of seconds. And there was also problems with buffer handling which resulted in cracking and lost sound segments.

rPath has a Guided Tour for their Joomla appliance. Interesting and tempting.

Update: Bad idea. You have to regi$ter to get root access, and by default you can’t install modules, components, or other extensions. No PhpMyAdmin. So unle$$. 

Well, at least not your typical procedual language, in the sense that it doesn’t have an equivalent of the variable, one that you can use to keep a running sum of element values.

Say you have:

 <Products>

<Product>
<Name>Gadget</Name>
<Price>$10.00</Price>
</Product>
<Product>
<Name>Gizmo</Name>
<Price>$7.50</Price>
</Product>
…
</Products>

And you want to know the sum of all item prices. You can do it, but you can’t throw things in a loop and do

<xsl:variable name="sum" select="$sum + Price" />  

You will get an error message that you can’t define the variable "sum" twice in an XSL template. In fact, variables in XSL are like "constants" or maybe "external read-only variables", whose value is set as you iterate through the XML elements, but you can’t change it after it’s assigned a value.

It turns our you can do it — you can’t change it’s value, but you can pass the value to a different template and change its value as you traverse. The solution is recursion. See Use recursion effectively in XSL. It’s like Lisp is alive again (maybe it never died in me).

For example, the  price-sum problem can be solved with a clever tail recursion algorithm:

<xsl:template name="priceSumTail">
<xsl:param name="productList"/>
<xsl:param name="result" select="0"/>
<xsl:choose>
<xsl:when test="$productList">
<xsl:call-template name="priceSumTail">
<xsl:with-param name="productList"
select="$productList[position() > 1]"/>
<xsl:with-param name="result"
select="$result +
number(substring-after($productList[1]/Price,’$'))"/>
</xsl:call-template>
</xsl:when>
<xsl:otherwise><xsl:value-of select="$result"/></xsl:otherwise>
</xsl:choose>
</xsl:template>

The reason I got into this is that I use XML eye movement experiments for stimulus control and data storage. I used to use Tcl/Tk or Python for XSLT, where I can easily mix XML with local variables. I would like to move to a more formalized workflow, where I keep a collection of XSL for standard tasks. Alas, it’s hard. But I got my code to work the way I liked.

XSLT is afterall not a programming language. Despite all the buzz around it, it’s not a general solution to data transformation. Programmers scream for an easy way to solve everyday tasks like this, while computer philosophors insist on the purity of the XSLT. I think I will go back to the mixed solution — binding XML with a programming language. In a long haul this is problematic, but XSLT doesn’t seem to be a solution either.

Just a reminder to myself: Need to upgrade to WordPress 2.5

March 29, 2008
WordPress 2.5
By Matt. Filed under Releases.
WordPress 2.5, the culmination of six months of work by the WordPress community, people just like you. The improvements in 2.5 are numerous, and almost entirely a result of your feedback: multi-file uploading, one-click plugin upgrades, built-in galleries, customizable dashboard, salted passwords and cookie encryption, media library, a WYSIWYG that doesn’t mess with your code, concurrent post editing protection, full-screen writing, and search that covers posts and pages.
For a short overview of the features with screenshots, it’d be best to visit our sneak peek announcement for RC1. Or check out a 4-minute screencast of the new interface in action. If you just want to jump straight to the good stuff here’s where you can find 2.5 upgrade and download information.

Here again is a news story about reading that ends with an advertisement in disguise. Compare this scien-fo-mercial to the poli-fo-mercial. See for yourself how the same tactics were used.

Researcher believes early exposure to the written word can help toddlers read

A U.S. infant researcher says your baby or toddler can learn to read by watching special videos from a very early age.
Robert Titzer believes hearing and seeing language as an infant can set your child on a path to reading success.
"About 90 per cent of the brain is developed by age five and then we try teaching the most important skill we’re going to teach and that’s reading," says Titzer.
Titzer has designed a series of interactive videos for babies and toddlers called Your Baby Can Read.
It’s a fun video that shows simple words in big letters, followed by the phonetic sounds and actions.
Titzer admits the video is pretty simple, but believes the key is when it should be shown — he advocates as early as six months. He says letting babies see words as they’re learning to say them can deliver suprising results.
"I’ve been in homes where people used the video, and there’s an 18-month-old reading the newspaper or a 15-month-old who can read every word in the video." says Titzer, who used the method on his own children. 

Rule #1 in journalism, present balanced views, or pretend to. In this case, the author asked a teacher.

But some teachers question the value of a video, and believe a good old-fashioned book still goes a long way. Pat Smith has been a teacher for 30 years and says it would be a shame for parents to believe plunking their child infront of the TV can teach them to read.
"It’s story, the key to being someone who has pleasure in reading is a sense of story, because that connects to so much of our lives, whether they’re children or adults," says Smith, an instructor at Kumon. 

Mira’s parents say she never watched much TV as a child, and they simply tried to share their love of reading with her.
"I think what really helped is that we read to her every day," says Hallock.

And by now you know what you should expect: the phone number of the sales office. Here goes:

Titzer says they will struggle with reading for the rest of their academic and adult life.
The videos are sold at Self Connection Books in Calgary (284-1486).

Mark Liberman offers additional readings for a freshman who has a big ambition 

Language Log: Ask Language Log: Comparing the vocabularies of different languages

 If you’re interested in taking this further, here are a few inadequate suggestions:

In the post he also touched on the effect of orthographic conventions — which I called paraorthographics in this paper — on counting words. 

Here are similar type-token plots for 50 million words of newswire text in Arabic, Spanish, and English:

Does this indicate that Spanish has a much richer vocabulary than English, and that Arabic is lexically even richer yet? No, it mainly tells us that Spanish has more morphological inflection than English, and Arabic still more inflection yet.
These curves also reflect some arbitrary orthographic conventions. Thus Arabic writes many word sequences "solid" that Spanish and English would separate by spaces. In particular, prepositions and determiners are grouped with following words (thus this might be aphrase ofenglish inthearabic style). Just splitting (obvious) prepositions and articles moves the Arabic curve a noticeable amount downward:

Arabic text has some other orthographic characteristics that raise its type-token curve by at least as much, such as variation in the treatment of hamza. And in large corpora in any language, the rate of typographical errors and variant spellings becomes a very significant contributor to the type-token curve. 

The question raised by Michael Honeycutt is a reflection of English-speakers’ fascination/fixation on words. They are not much more or less than what’s flanked between spaces and punctuations. And I argued that they were historically invented not so much for linguistic analyses but for oculomotor efficiency. They — spaces and punctuations — happen to work very well for English. Happened to, because there were invented and propagated by Irish monks. 

The new curriculum is passed today without the suggested reading list. Here are some of the books mentioned in the March 19 draft. 

Star-Telegram.com: | 03/25/2008 | New curriculum plan for English includes suggested reading list
 Suggested reading
Here are some of the books that the proposed curriculum says students should "consider" reading:
Kindergarten: The Ant and the Grasshopper;Jack and the Beanstalk
First grade: Works by Beatrix Potter; Mother Goose rhymes; Three Billy Goats Gruff
Second grade: Aesop’s fables; Cinderella; folk tales of the Brothers Grimm
Third grade: The Best Bad Thing by Yoshiko Uchida; Freckle Juice by Judy Blume; Greek and Roman myths
Fourth grade: The Brer Rabbit tales; Charlotte’s Web by E.B. White; Little House on the Prairie by Laura Ingalls Wilder; Pippi Longstocking by Astrid Lindgren
Fifth grade: Escape From Saigon: How a Vietnam War Orphan Became an American Boy by Andrea Warren; Little Women by Louisa May Alcott; Black Beauty by Anna Sewell; poems by Lewis Carroll, Ogden Nash and Shel Silverstein
Sixth grade: King Arthur and the Knights of the Round Table; poems by Langston Hughes and Henry Wadsworth Longfellow
Seventh grade: The Red Badge of Courage by Stephen Crane; Casey at the Bat by Ernest Thayer; Our Town by Thornton Wilder; The Adventures of Tom Sawyer by Mark Twain; The Tell-Tale Heart by Edgar Allen Poe; The Diary of Anne Frank
Eighth grade: A Boy of Old Prague by Sulamith Ish-Kishor; No Turning Back: A Novel of South Africa by Beverley Naidoo; The Crucible by Arthur Miller; The Jungle Book by Rudyard Kipling;William Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar;poems by Edna St. Vincent Millay
English I: Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel Garcia Marquez; Robert Bolt’s A Man for All Seasons; Lorraine Hansberry’s A Raisin in the Sun; J.D. Salinger’s The Catcher in the Rye; Harper Lee’s To Kill a Mockingbird; Baroness Emmuska Orczy’s The Scarlet Pimpernel; Charles Darwin’s The Origin of Species; poems by William Yeats and Pablo Neruda
English II: Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn; Homer’s The Odyssey; The Last of the Mohicans by James Fenimore Cooper; Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoyevsky; Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton; poems by e.e. cummings and Elizabeth Bishop
English III: Henry James’ The American; Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter; Jonathan Edwards’ sermonSinners in the Hands of an Angry God; The Great Gatsby by F. Scott Fitzgerald; The Joy Luck Club by Amy Tan;The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner; poems by Emily Dickinson and Edgar Allen Poe; plays by Tennessee Williams, David Mamet and August Wilson
English IV: Charles Dickens’ Oliver Twist; Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness; Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice; Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein; poems by Robert Browning and A.E. Housman
Source: Texas Education Agency
Online
View the proposed English language arts and reading curriculum at www.tea.state.tx.us

Back in Sept 2007 Scientific American has an article on the potential evolution advantages of schizophrenia. The claim was that schizophrenia is a language disorder —  hmm…

It’s No Delusion: Evolution May Favor Schizophrenia Genes: Scientific American
Co-author Crespi says that a number of theories have been floating around regarding the persistence of schizophrenia’s genetic underpinnings. One holds that schizophrenia is a "disorder of language" and that the illness is an unfortunate consequence of the development of human speech, expression and creativity. "Whenever you get strong selection, it’s like a big plus, and you can drag along a lot of minuses," he says. "You can think of schizophrenics as paying the price of all the cognitive and language skills that humans have—they have too many of the alleles that taken individually…might have positive effect, but together they are bad."

Time to try this: CommentPress

CommentPress is an open source theme for the WordPress blogging engine that allows readers to comment paragraph by paragraph in the margins of a text. Annotate, gloss, workshop, debate: with CommentPress you can do all of these things on a finer-grained level, turning a document into a conversation. It can be applied to a fixed document (paper/essay/book etc.) or to a running blog. This site is presented in "document" mode.

CommentPress was developed by the Institute for the Future of the Book. This is Version 1.4.1. Over time, we (and hopefully the community) will make improvements and add new features and extensions, all of which will be documented here on this site.

Read more about the project »