Walter Hutchens’ Blog

China has announced it will allow some listed firms to issue warrants. An English language China Daily story is here.

The report indicates warrants may be used to “compensate” holders of tradeable shares when a firm makes its non-tradeable shares tradeable.

The new warrants policy was announced by both the Shenzhen and Shanghai stock exchanges today (neither exchange is an SRO in a meaningful sense—they are subordinate to central policy makers, enforce the same listing standards and often make simultaneous policy announcements).

The SZSE announcement (in Chinese) is here. It contains links to a reporters’ Q&A with unnamed “responsible persons” at the exchanges and to the policy itself.

I don’t see the same material on the SHSE site yet. (They have something posted about a “virtual” warrants competition), but Sina posts the SHSE policy here. It has the same 45 articles as the SZSE warrants policy.

“Warrant” is translated into Chinese as 权证 or quan zheng, which has the literal sense of evidence of a right, the right in this case being to buy or sell securities at a set price.

PC Magazine has an interesting story, High School Trades Textbooks for iBooks, about a high school that has decided to punt traditional bound textbooks in favor of content distributed electronically, for use on notebook computers to be supplied to each student.

I think this is great. I never had my life changed by a textbook, but globally networked personal computers do offer transformative possibilities—something so obvious it seems banal to mention it.

Give a kid a textbook and you bore him; give a kid a laptop and an internet connection and you’ve started something interesting.

Yes, they will probably spend a lot of time on email, IM, games and looking for porn. But they’ll also be tied into the world of knowledge in a dramatically better way. There is the risk the might encounter an online socio-path, and there needs to be some socialization without computer mediation and some physical education to try to assure an online life isn’t a child’s onlymeaningful life, but I can think of few advantages that traditional textbooks hold over digital content.

So, does this news item the herald the overthrow of the current model of textbook publishing? Is this the signal of a dramatic change that will be accomplished in the next few years? Will my daughter, now 4, be unfamiliar with paper textbooks in the same way she’ll be unfamiliar with music from vinyl or images from film?

I really doubt it. In fact, textbook publishers probably aren’t worried at all. I bet textbooks in paper form will be common for another 10-15 years at least, and textbook publishers, for better or worse, will probably be around indefinitely.

This is largely because textbook publishing is driven by lowest common denominators. Publisher seek the largest markets and the greatest efficiencies, and school districts seek the lowest costs and most effective ways to meet the needs of their masses of students. Practically speaking, this means big states like Texas and California drive the textbook publishing business, not small, affluent and progressive school districts that want to go all digital.

Right now, big states like Texas and California cannot afford to go all digital. Even if they had the dollars for laptops (say by using Linux-based machines or the $100 laptops some people hope to build), the human capital needed for a mass roll-out would be extraordinary. They’d need a lot of money to put networks in schools, add power outlets, provide tech support and train teachers. By contrast, a paper book that can be used for multiple years and requires no technical support is a good value proposition for a state worried about providing enormous numbers of free lunches and basic English lessons. A digital divide exists, and that means going all-digital in big markets isn’t likely in the near term.

Second, the current educational system does not foster ad hoc approaches, and most teachers (like most humans) are risk-averse and too busy to reinvent the world. In other words, most teachers (and their host institutions) will still want pre-packaged textbooks for a long time, even when they shift the distribution of such texts to a digital format. Somebody has to prepare those textbooks. Publishers are not printers–they’ll step up and offer digital editions of their current list of titles when there is sufficient demand (or when offering digital editions will help drive adoption of the paper editions).

In fact, not only are publishers still needed in a digital world, they might be able to increase their profits in one. With a switch to digital textbooks there will be savings on paper, printing and physical distribution. Spending less on these things, publishers probably won’t find their margins shrinking.

Also, textbook publishers now spend a lot of money sending copies out free “review copies” that they hope will lead to adoption of their books by some teacher or program. Going digital with review copies alone could save a good bit, I imagine.

However, producing digital editions of existing or new textbooks will impose additional costs. Publishers will not be able to simply hit “save as” and generate a digital edition from the work done to format a print edition.

Thus, I suspect digital editions may sell at a premium for some time, even with smaller physical production and distribution costs.

The school districts buying laptops can probably afford to pay some premium for digital editions (and probably should base their decision to go digital on things other than substantial cost-savings).

Still, even if you don’t eliminate textooks and their publishers and even if the costs are neutral or slightly increased, there are huge—I’d even say magical—advantages to going digital.

For starters, I’ve never seen a textbook that didn’t need both updating and corrections (typos, if not facts). Both will be easier in a digital format. “Editions” could become a matter of daily builds, not 5-year overhauls.

More importantly, a digital textbook is embedded in a digital world that offers interactive possibilities inconceivable with printed books and non-networked computers.

As a kid in public school I was always told not to write on my books. They would be used by another kid the next year, so marginal annotation and decorative contributions were not welcome. (Looking at the way I now desecrate things I read, I wonder how I ever managed!) In contrast, electronic textbooks not only can avoid the problem of “Jenny loves Greg” defacing a text but can also enable the sharing of more teacher and student annotations.

Also, if a student has both a digital text and an Internet connection, broadening a discussion to other works and points of view will be much easier. In other words, the singular, authoritative voice of the textbook is undermined. This is a good thing, and I don’t mean in some post modernist lit crit sense. I mean in a very practical way the textbook pablum can be challenged and enriched. A curious or smart-ass student wanting to argue with the textbook writers is only a few clicks away from content the textbook left out (and leaving stuff out is what textbook writers do, by definition).

In conclusion, I don’t think textbooks will be foreign to my daughter. She’ll probably have both digital and printed ones, and, alas, they will probably continue to be a dead spot in her educational world—dead to a greater or lesser extent depending mainly on her teachers. Textbooks and their publishers will likely be around for her whole educational life. But thankfully she’ll have something better than textbooks—access to a personal, networked computer. She’ll be able to go beyond and around her textbooks.

This marginalization of textbooks should occur even if she doesn’t go to an enlightened school that has totally jettisoned all those heavy, interactively flat printed books. If she does go to such a school, all the better.

Tonight I made a video phone call, the first of my life. I called Helen, my daughter. It was also her first video call. Only thing is, she’s 4 and I’m 37.

We used Skype with the add-on software VSkype, plus a pair of very cheap web cams that I bought today at RadioShack.

Unfortunately, the computer at Helen’s house lacks a microphone, and so do the cheap web cams I bought (that must be a reason they were two for $30). Thus we had no sound. But the call went through and carried low-resolution, live images. We used mobile phones for audio. Not perfect, but it was a successful experiment.

Video conferencing through Skype is easy to set-up and use. Now that I’ve learned how to do it, it should be just as easy to do a China-to-US call as it was to do a call within Maryland today.

The National People’s Congress Standing Committee has made available for public comment the draft of the PRC property law. The draft is of course in Chinese. A Xinhua story about the public comment opportunity is here. The NPCSC’s announcement is here. The public comment period will run until August 20.

Soliciting public comment on draft laws is not required in China, just as indirect public consent to new laws through elections is not. Nonetheless, drafts of some administrative regulations are now routinely offered for public review prior to enactment. However, this is less common with major laws. I suppose this indicates special sensitivity about this law and a desire to practice PRC style democracy by collecting comments from “concerned parties.” It could also indicate some disagreement about the law in the NPCSC and a desire to defer enactment.

The PRC constitution was amended last March to affirm that the state protects private property.

I regard the strengthening of property rights in China as a good thing (and of course also applaud the public disclosure of draft laws). Still, one must note the irony. When Mao Zedong and a handful of others held the first congress of the Chinese Communist Party in Shanghai in 1921, they adopted resolutions calling for “elimination of the capitalist private ownership system,” and the Party later unleashed great violence in pursuit of this misguided notion. See 中国共产党历次党章的制定及修正简况 [Zhongguo gongchandang lici dangzhang de zhiding ji xiuzheng jiankuang, Summary of Previous Formulations and Revisions to the Chinese Communist Party Constitution], available here.

For the last six months I have enjoyed making web pages to show photos using Google’s free photo management product Picasa. Now I’ve learned a new trick which makes it even better.

Making web pages with Picasa is really simple. First, Picasa is a great tool for organizing all the photos on your hard drive. Using Picasa to look at your photos (whether the ones you just took or all the digital photos you’ve ever taken), you just pick the photos you want, sequence them in the order you want, hit ctrl-w and, voila, you have a web page ready to upload to a server. Composition of the web page really is a one-click affair. Picasa produces it complete with an index page of thumbnails linked to larger versions of each picture. Picasa lets you pick a variety of layouts and background colors (black, gray or white) for the page. I then use SmartFTP and simply drag the Picasa output (all in a single folder) to the directory I want it to appear in on the internet. It’s done. I then send the web page address to my Mom in an email (as a link), so she just clicks on it and can see the latest pictures of her granddaughter.

In the pre-digital era, sharing photos like this would have required a lot more work on my part. I would have had to take the film somewhere to be developed, picked up the film, chosen the good shots (and many exposures on a roll would not be good) then I would have had to mail duplicates of the decent images to Grandmother. Realistically, these added steps and time delays (and some added expense, if you don’t figure in the cost of the computer and network connection) mean that I would not have done it very often. In contrast, I’ve made about 30 of these Picasa web pages over the last 6 months. That’s an average of just over one per week, and I’ve emailed some images that I didn’t put into web pages. So Grandmother has been able to share the joy of watching Helen grow and develop. In this case, digital technology really has improved an aspect of my life.

The ease of this process is one reason it works so well. I did have to acquire access to a server to which I could upload files (in my case, I registered a domain and pay a small monthly hosting fee), but I am shielded from HTML and other arcane techno gibberish. I am free to concentrate on my photos and sharing them, not gearhead stuff.

Picasa does a good job and is free, so I am a fan of it. But there are some trade-offs. In terms of web pages, in order to keep things simple it doesn’t give you a lot of choices over the appearance of the pages you produce. It is not highly customizable. It’s the equivalent of a point-and-shoot website maker, without manual controls to override the default settings. You can just dial in a few choices. Well, as I have made more of these photo web pages with Picasa, I find that I want to modify them beyond those dial-in choices.

For example, when I have a shot that is vertically taller than it is wide, I find that I have to scroll down a bit to see the whole image on my laptop screen. This wouldn’t be necessary if Picasa didn’t put its logo on the top of the page above the photo, but there is no way within Picasa to move the logo to the bottom of the page (I have no fundamental objection to the logo—seems like a fair trade for free software), but the scrolling issues annoyed me. I had visited the Picasa site and a Google group about Picasa but never found instructions for how to solve this. I had looked at the html file Picasa produces, trying to find some code that I could edit to remove or change the position of the logo. I didn’t find anything, and I’ve never edited CSS files before, so I demurred at exploring that route.

But yesterday I did a Google search for “Picasa web pages remove logo” and found this Picasa tutorial from Walter Gajewski, director of the Media Development Lab at Cal-State Long Beach. It has simple, clear instructions about how to remove the logo from a Picasa web page and adjust the top margin! Here are the steps from Walter Gajewski:

Tip from Walter:

To eliminate the Picasa logo from your web pages and move the rest of the material closer to the top margin, do the following before uploading the web pages to your web server:

* Find the file called Style.css
* Edit the file in any text editor (e.g. Word Pad or Notepad)
* Change the “MARGIN-TOP: 70px” to read “MARGIN-TOP: 10px”
* Delete the entry that reads “BACKGROUND-IMAGE: url (‘logo.gif’);”
* Save the newly edited style.css file.

I’ve sent an email to thank him for sharing this. It’s going to allow me to enjoy Picasa even more.

Also of note, there is a WP Picasa Gallery plugin that allows you to use an xml file created with Picasa’s web page export feature to add photo galleries within a WordPress post. I’ve used it a few times, for example here and here, and really like it. However, I find I tend to prefer an entirely separate page for a large collection of photos and thus rely on Picasa to generate galleries that I can think link to through WordPress, with perhaps a single sample image in the post itself. For uploading a single image to a WordPress entry IImage works well for me.

Today I bought a new camera. I got a Nikon D70S, an “entry-level” digital SLR. Predictably, I couldn’t wait to try it out. Here are some photos from my first walkabout with the camera.

The Nikon D70S is a single lens reflex (SLR) camera. It’s the first SLR I’ve ever owned, film or digital.

SLR strikes me as an odd name because it really refers to cameras that can have interchangeable, i.e. multiple lenses, not a single lens like “point-and-shoot” cameras.

Although it has extensive manual controls, I’ll use it with auto-focus, auto-exposure and auto-everything else, particularly at the beginning.

The Nikon D70s shoots “only” 6 megapixels. But I was not upgrading from a point-and-shoot digicam to get more megapixels. I’ve read enough (and seen enough with my own eyes) to know that beyond a certain level MP is not the end all and be all for getting quality images. Indeed, I think some of the best photos I’ve ever taken were shot with my first digicam, a Nikon 990 with a “mere” 3 MP. Currently I have a 5 MP camera (a tiny Pentax Optio 5si, which I like very much). There are now many 7 MP and above cameras on the consumer market; all cost less than I paid today for a 6 MP Nikon. The Nikon D70S’ main and slightly less expensive competitor is the 8 MP Canon Digital Rebel.

There is of course nothing wrong with having more megapixels. It’s useful for making really big prints and for drastic cropping. But the main driver in my decision to upgrade my camera is that I am sick and tired of missing shots because of waiting for my camera. So many times I’ve seen a shot I wanted to get but found the moment gone when my camera finally was ready to perform. My Pentax, like most point-and-shoot digicams (and perhaps worse than others) takes too long to boot up and record a shot to memory. A few seconds can be too long when you are trying to capture an image; I want a camera that shoots boom-boom-boom, a camera that will instantly power up and then shoot in quick bursts if needed.

Digital SLRs can do that. The Nikon is ready to perform two-tenths of a second after you hit its power button–in other words, instantaneously. It can shoot three frames per second. It can buffer shots before they are written to the CF card, allowing it to sustain that 3 fps pace for, at some settings, 144 shots! In other words, it solves my camera delay problem

The image quality should be better, too—at least once I learn more about how to use all its controls and features. While it has auto-everything settings, I need to learn how to operate things manually. Right now, I don’t know an f-stop from an aperture priority from a ISO setting. But I’ll learn.

Besides the need for speed, I rationalized my purchase with the following ideas:

My father’s 80th birthday is coming up soon. We will have a big party, gathering a lot of friends and relatives. I want to get good photos at this once-in-a-lifetime event.

Helen will be 5 soon. We’ll have a birthday party for her. I want to document that. Plus, every day she does something lovely and cute. As they say, it goes by so fast. I want a better camera to record her growing up. (For example, the other night we went to the somewhat bizarre show at an establishment in the mall called Midevel Times. There number is 1-800-We-Joust. Two of Helen’s current biggest enthusiasms are horses (especially the “My Little Pony” line) and the Disney princess marketing blitz. Thus, I thought she’d get a kick out of a show with horses and a princesses. Indeed, she did. But my little digicam was simply pathetic as a tool for capturing any of it. It could do nothing with the fast-moving horses or the low light.)

I’ve become something of a photography enthusiast. In the last 7 months or so I’ve taken literally thousands of shots. I’ve sent pictures around by email, uploaded them to web sites, retouched and edited some of them, organized my collection on a big hard drive and choreographed several slide shows. Since I’m spending so much time on this hobby it makes sense to upgrade my equipment.

I’ll be spending a lot more time in China, and there’s so much to photograph there. I could chronicle part of their historic transition.

To choose a camera, I bought several magazines and spent at least 10 hours reading online. I determined that a digital SLR is the type of camera I want, and I made a list of the models in the expensive but conscionable entry-level SLR price range. Currently the main cameras contending in this space are:

There’s not an over-abundance of comparative information on all these models, partly because the product cycles move so quickly. The Nikon D70s (which I bought) and D50 were only announced in April of this year and hit the stores in May—so they’ve been on the shelves only a few weeks.

The best sources I found include:

Digital Photography Review (great info & reviews, though the detailed reviews tend to lag behind what’s on the market slightly)

There is something of a brand jihad between certain enthusiastic Nikon and Canon users. Both Canon and Nikon appear to have great cameras, and it’s great there’s competition to improve the products and drive down prices. My decision to go with the Nikon D70s was influenced by several factors.

There was no slam dunk answer from the reviews., and I didn’t have any existing investment in lenses that fit either the Canon or Nikon bodies. So I went to a Ritz Camera to try them out. Ritz’s corporate headquarters happen to be a short drive from the University of Maryland, and they have a showroom store there where I bought my Pentax pocket camera. I was happy with that experience, and I wanted to talk with someone who would actually know something about what they are selling (unlike the teenagers you usually get at BestBuy and other big retail stores). Plus I knew at Ritz I could try side-by-side comparisons. I even took my memory cards so that I could shoot and compare.

It was hard to discern any difference in image quality using the crappy monitors for ordering prints available in the store. The D50, D70s and Rebel XT were all stunningly fast. T

But the D70s just felt better in my hand (the Canon grip is smaller). Also, I enjoyed my two previous Nikon CoolPix digicams. I was tempted to go for the Nikon D50, having read it takes the best pictures out of the box. It also had a comfortable grip but was lighter than the D70s which made it feel flimsier. The guy in the store who seemed to know the most recommended the D70S. He said it has a better lens in the “kit.”

So in a close call I went with the D70S, thinking I can test drive it and exchange it if I don’t like it (Ritz actually has a 10-day return policy, meaning if I end up not liking the camera I can return it for a refund, though realistically I’d just exchange it and try something else).

I took it home, charged the battery a bit (which apparently will run the camera long enough to take over 2,000 shots–wow!) and started experimenting. My first photo was of course of my daughter Helen. She woke from a nap, told me a little about a birthday party for a classmate she’d been to today (it was a My Little Ponies theme, so she unpacked her party favors and spread them out on the floor to show me). We hung out outside in the front yard a few minutes, then she went in for dinner and I walked around the neighborhood shooting flowers. When I drove home I saw the light falling in an interesting way on stacks of wood at a nearby nursery. I took some shots there, too.

There’s a lot I have to learn about the camera. Right now, I don’t even know how to suppress the automatic flash. But while my first images aren’t ready for National Geographic, based on my experience so far I am happy with the camera. I’ll have to learn how to coax the best pictures out of it, but absolutely I have solved my problems with slow camera start-ups and shot-to-shot delays. I’m looking forward to using this camera and learning more about it and photography generally.