How Amazon can make money from books you already own. We tend to think of search requests as generally taking the form of “find me something I’ve never seen before.” But real-life search is often different: You’re looking for something you have seen before, but you’ve somehow mislaid or only half-remembered. You search for your…
Recent years have seen an explosion in electronic media marketed directly at the very youngest children in our society, yet very little is known about how these changes have played out in young people’s lives. In order to help understand the implications, the Foundation conducted a national study of more than 1,000 parents of children…
For the last few months, Google has been courting publishers, hoping to convince them to turn over book content that could be used in Google’s database, say people close to the discussions. | How that content would be presented is not clear, but it would likely not be provided in excerpted passages to customers, as…
“Diamond retailers contend a little bling is just the thing to declare your independence this fall,” wrote Houston Chronicle reporter Liz Embry a few weeks ago. Her story was illustrated with a photo of Ms. Sarah Jess flashing the hottest new trend in the jewelry industry: the right-hand ring. | The rings have recently been…
He never imagined just how unenthusiastic his research sponsors — and others with a financial stake in atrazine — would be about his discovery. | Six frustrating years later, Mr. Hayes and his defenders say they know only too well the lengths to which those companies will go to undermine his findings that atrazine may…
Once again, Halloween season is upon us, and with it, the wonderful anticipation of dressing up and trick-or-treating for delicious Brach’s candy. With that in mind, it’s important to remember all the ways that you can make your Halloween safer and more fun. It won’t put a damper on anyone’s holiday spirits to wear high-visibility…
Edgar Allan Poe’s most popular poem, “The Raven,” tells the story of a man who gets a late-night visit from a mysterious bird that speaks only one word: “Nevermore.” | Sounds like a pretty simple story, right? | Guess again! —Knowing Poe [Annotated Version of ‘The Raven’] (Maryland Public Television) Once upon a Tuesday weary, while…
The problem of spam or unwanted commercial e-mail is usually attributed to outlaws and hucksters — peddlers of pornography, get-rich-quick schemes and pills of dubious merit — who use hackers to send their fraudulent messages in ways that cannot be traced. | But the torrent of spam that is flowing into people’s electronic mailboxes comes…
It begins to creep in, almost unnoticed. The levels are further apart. You begin to notice that newly acquired skills are carbon copies of the old ones, with a different coloured icon and a two percent damage increase…. You try out all the little distractions the developers have put in the game to make things…
Why do so many graduate programs teach students to hate what made so many of us want to become teachers and scholars when we were undergraduates: reading literature — old and new, from every culture — as if it was more than symptomatic of deplorable cultural pathologies? —Thomas H. Benton —College and the Fall (Chronicle) I…
[B]ooks at especially high risk include those that sell to the student (particularly college student) market as secondary reading. A student could easily grab the relevant chapter or two out of a book without paying for it. Students certainly have the time and most likely the inclination to do so, and, with the help of…
Workers remodeling a 19th-century rehearsal hall at the Peabody Institute have found 10 dusty jugs of moonshine in an unlocked closet, where they apparently sat for nearly 60 years. Faded labels on the bottles suggest that the hooch was the handiwork of Gustav Strube, the first conductor of the Baltimore Symphony Orchestra. —Heather Dewar —Maestro’s…
A high school freshman expelled for writing a fictional account of a student who falls asleep in class and dreams of killing a teacher can return to school Monday while officials reconsider the disciplinary action…. “It was a story about a girl who falls asleep in class, dreams she kills her math teacher, then wakes…
Microsoft’s menu bars are awash in anachronistic images, and it’s especially evident in the latest edition of the Office 2003 application suite. This struck me as I was authoring my 364th “Inside PCMag.com” newsletter. Clicking on the Save icon, I found myself wondering why it’s still an image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. When was…
One of my classmates saw my wedding ring and asked if I was married. I said, yes, and she asked, “Happily?” Another student sneered, “Wow, married … how retro-hetero-normative.” Others snickered in approval. And so the seven-year assault on my values began. To avoid harassment, I learned to conceal who I was: my faith, my…
—‘The other phone’s a little…’ (No Media Kings) Jim Munroe is a new media generalist — a writer, interactive fiction designer, and video filmmaker. I enjoyed his video “>interactive,” and was Googling just now for something or other, and came across this short film, with a very dry, understated punchline that made me laugh out loud.…
And where are all the people who were screaming about the Plame leak? —Glenn Reynolds —Glenn Reynolds on Rumsfeld Memo and Plame Affair (Instapundit) A good collection of links exploring the media spin on the Rumsfeld memo. Reynolds argues that the leaked document, in which Reynolds critiques the Bush administration’s handling of the Iraq war, could…
She singled out a campaign by Disney – “Remember the magic” – which, she claimed, was used to invoke real or imaginary childhood memories in consumers. | She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many…
It’s poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It’s failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A’s clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental…
Books take time to transport. Their text vanishes and their pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most important, it’s still shockingly difficult to find information buried in books. Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark…