[Foundation-l] Analysis of statistics

[Ray Saintonge]

Samuel Klein wrote:
> I mean basic educational information about how things work, and how
> they relate to one another; data and facts; and maps, statistics, and
> visualizations of this sort of knowledge.
>   

I vaguely remember some long-ago comments from Jimbo where he foresaw WP 
as including practical information.  Somehow we drifted away from that 
into more traditional encyclopedia space by the time we started 
rejecting recipes for cooking.

> You cannot copyright ideas, nor should one copyright the simplest
> expression of them.  The merger doctrine specifies a narrow subset of
> knowledge as uncopyrightable [1]  --  basic dictionaries, catalogs,
> laws, manuals, and primers should be free as well.
>   

You and I know that, but it gets quite tiring to argue over and over 
with pusillanimous copyright paranoiacs and their witless desire to be 
absolutely safe and right about the laws that they never understood in 
the first place.

> This will be the case within a generation in many parts of the world
> -- and it will be hard to explain to our children why there used to be
> twenty different dictionaries and a hundred different "language 101"
> coursebooks for each language, all using the same types of words and
> vocabulary and images and yet struggling to look as if they were not
> all using shared source material.
>   

The problem here is one of how to reach teachers many of which, in their 
pursuit of fitting square-pegged students into round holes, would be 
quite happy if they could strap those students into a lathe.

Language learning and basic mathematics workbooks are two areas where it 
should be easiest to develop non-proprietary materials.  The one 
advantage for teachers in the developing world is that they can't afford 
proprietary material.  Teachers, especially those in advanced countries 
need to seize the power that they already have, but this is 
counterintuitive when their own years of learning were so rooted in 
deference to textbooks.

Ec