Is Mister Bluebird on your shoulder?

Last spring the U.S. Library of Congress announced – via Twitter of course -that it has acquired the complete archive of Twitter messages back through March 2006. The trove of 140-character message-toids is expected to yield a treasure of revelations about how we interact and who we are individually and collectively in the first full decade of the Digital Era.

But we don’t have to wait until analysts have divined the archive’s significance. Some researchers at Harvard and Northeastern University have already extracted some fascinating patterns from a sampling of 300 million tweets, and they’ve even mapped them.

The New York Times, reporting on the study, informs us that “You’re probably happiest in the morning and least satisfied about noon. Analyzing words in those posts, researchers found that Thursday is the saddest day; Sunday, the happiest… The moods were mapped, showing happy times [the greener areas in the video] and unhappy (red areas).”  It looks like folks on the west coast are generally happier than us grumpy northeasterners.  Can we get some of what they’re smoking?

Compare your mood swings to those in the video, and if you’re out of sync with them, well, hell, folks, get with the program!

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times.

Do crime books make you a criminal?  And if so, do spiritual books make you a saint?

Both questions came up in two articles we came across on the same day.  The first, a New York Times piece by William Glaberson, Prison Books Bring Plot Twist to Cheshire Killings, described the trial of a man charged in a triple-homicide that took place after he and two other men broke into a home in Connecticut, a heinous butchery that drew comparisons to the one described in Truman Capote’s groundbreaking “nonfiction novel” In Cold Blood. In fact, the similarity was the point of the article.

It seems that the prosecutors had tried to enter into the official court record the names of books that one of the accused checked out of a prison library before the killings. The plots of those books were  “criminally malevolent in the extreme.” The defense wanted the list thrown out. Writes Glaberson: “The defense lawyers’ suggestion that prison library books could have shaped the crime, or that knowing Mr. Hayes read them could turn jurors against him, has created a strange kind of guessing game about the literary interests” of the accused.

Glaberson raises the question why a prison library would possess the kinds of books that might stimulate – or educate – a potential criminal and push him over the line between intellectual and perpetrator, between art for its own sake and art in the service of a murderer.

At this writing the titles have not been revealed, and as there is a huge First Amendment issue riding on the question, we hope all players in this drama will consider the implications.  We’ve seen this issue before in the form of efforts to use the Patriot Act to seize library records of suspected terrorists.  Here’s a report on that controversy by an attorney whose leanings are obvious and suggest how loaded the issue is.

Balance this story with this one reported by Anna Barker in The Guardian about a man who faced a 60-year prison sentence for drug offenses but who was instead granted probation and sentenced to read. Writes Barker: “With one of the highest incarceration rates in the world, and the death penalty, the US state of Texas seems the last place to embrace a liberal-minded alternative to prison. But when Mitchell Rouse was convicted of two drug offenses in Houston, the former x-ray technician who faced a 60-year prison sentence – reduced to 30 years if he pleaded guilty – was instead put on probation and sentenced to read.”

In this case we’re allowed to know what he read. His reading list included To Kill a Mockingbird, The Bell Jar and Of Mice and Men.  “I particularly liked some of the ideas in John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty,” says Rouse. As well he might, having tasted liberty’s sweetest gifts.

“Five years on,” Barker reports, “he is free from drugs, holding down a job as a building contractor, and reunited with his family. He describes being sentenced to a reading group as ‘a miracle’ and says the six-week reading course ‘changed the way I look at life.’”

Did books in the first story impel a man to kill?  Did they, in the second, impel a man to reform?  Can we the jury accept the first as true but reject the second as false, or vice-versa?  Some stimulating thought for jurists and philosophers.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by the New York Times and The Guardian.

Can you be sued for posting a bad review? It not only happened in England, but triggered a delicious scandal as well, one involving a distinguished historian, his barrister wife, a couple of historian rivals, Josef Stalin and amazon.co.uk.

In the eye of the storm is historian Orlando Figes, who anonymously posted on amazon hatchet jobs on two books by historians working in the same academic discipline as Figes, modern Russian history.

He described one book as ”dense” and ”pretentious” and ”the sort of book that makes you wonder why it was ever published”. The other book he termed “awful.”  He did however heap praise on one book, The Whisperers: Private life in Stalin’s Russia. The author of The Whisperers was…himself.

As the identity of the hatchet-wielder began to focus on Figes, his wife – a barrister and Fellow of Girton College, Cambridge – initially claimed that she herself had written the reviews. As the spotlight shifted to Figes himself he started rattling the sword of litigation at the press and academic colleagues to scare them off the trail. The ploy did not work. Now he is not only dining on humble pie but will pay damages and costs to the author victims of his nasty reviews.

The question nags: what exactly did Figes do that was wrong? He was nasty, mean-spirited, petty, jealous, truculent and craven (he blamed his conduct on depression caused by “immersion in Stalin’s crimes while researching his book,” said one report). Now, we are not lawyers – solicitors as they call them in England – but as ugly as Figes’ transgressions are, none of them is illegal as far as we know.  Indeed, if all the malicious anonymous reviewers were sued for libel our court system would break under the weight of ligitation.

Obviously the laws in UK are different from America’s. We know this to be true in the matter of “libel tourism” about which we have written here. (See Can’t Sue for Libel in US?  Take Your Beef to Britain, Libel Capital of the World.) The issue seems to be anonymous malice (is there a lawyer in the house to help us out?) The charges can be inferred by the apologies he made to the authors and pledges that Figes made to the court: “He also gave an undertaking not to repeat the allegations, not to post pseudonymous reviews of their works, and not to use fraud, subterfuge or unlawful means to attack or damage [the authors] in their professional capacity.”

Whatever law was invoked, Figes was required to pay damages plus legal costs.

In the absence of a solid legal opinion we can only draw this moral from the shabby case of Orlando Figes: If you’re going to be malicious, do it under your real name.

For further details read Orlando Figes agrees to pay damages over negative Amazon reviews and The TLS, Orlando Figes and the law

Richard Curtis

Last year your intrepid blogger, armed with a Panasonic Lumix, risked life and limb to capture the setting sun as it bisected New York City’s 42nd Street. The moment, I later learned, is known as “Manhattanhenge.” “As you may know” blogs Neil deGrasse Tyson on the Hayden Planetarium website, “Manhattanhenge takes place on two consecutive days, twice a year, when the setting Sun aligns precisely with the Manhattan street grid, creating radiant sunsets that burst across our brick and steel canyons, simultaneously illuminating both the north and south sides of every street. A rare and beautiful sight.”

Manhattanhenge is scheduled for July 11th/12th this year but as I watched the trajectory of the setting sun from our Upper East Side condo balcony I could see a solar event shaping up that might not be chronologically precise but the effects were stunning nonetheless. I hopped in the elevator, positioned myself on the street in defiance of taxis and SUVs, and caught this photo, which I post today in honor of the 4th July.

Richard Curtis

The Bulwer-Lytton prize for the worst opening sentence of a novel has been given annually since 1982 by San Jose State University.  This year’s recipient is Molly Ringle, according to The Guardian’s website.

The first line of her novel The Ghost Downstairs reads:

“For the first month of Ricardo and Felicity’s affair, they greeted one another at every stolen rendezvous with a kiss – a lengthy, ravenous kiss, Ricardo lapping and sucking at Felicity’s mouth as if she were a giant cage-mounted water bottle and he were the world’s thirstiest gerbil.”

The prize is named after the first line of Bulwer-Lytton’s novel Paul Clifford, published in1830. It started “It was a dark and stormy night…”  Though it may have seemed vaguely fresh at the time, it has become the standard for quintessentially cliched story openings.

Recipient Ringle took it with good humor and stands by her gerbil metaphor, which was inspired by her nursing child: “There are definitely worse ways to get 15 minutes of fame,” she commented. Nevertheless, authors who seek immortality may want to skirt this particular honor.

It’s all here, including a doozy of a runner-up: Bulwer-Lytton prize for bad writing goes to ‘inappropriate’ gerbil sentence

Richard Curtis

Remember when IBM pitted its Deep Blue computer in a chess match against human opponents? Well now, HotHardware reports that IBM has developed a “Question Answering” supercomputer that not only answers questions put to it in plain English, but is good enough to play Jeopardy.

The machine is named “Watson” after IBM’s founder but perhaps a play on Dr. Watson, whose questions to his companion Sherlock Holmes invariably elicited the reply, “Elementary, my dear Watson.” And don’t forget Alexander Graham Bell’s assistant Watson, who was summoned by Bell on the freshly invented telephone to see if it worked. It worked.

Though it sounds like a multimillion dollar parlor trick, in fact IBM has set its sights on no less a rival than Google. Its ability to answer questions in conversational English give it the advantage over the Google keyboard.

Yo Watson, pick up! (What Alexander Graham Bell actually said was, "Mr. Watson, come here, I want to see you.")

And responding to Jeopardy questions is particularly challenging.  Watson needed to be “trained” to recognize those questions, which are really answers.  And, as the video shows, Jeopardy’s format is filled with puns and other wordplay, requiring a nimble intellect.

HotHardware points out that Watson passed some tests with flying colors, but it still has a way to go before it puts Google out of business.  “Watson has a tendency to crash [and] sometimes goes on streaks of getting everything wrong.”

Well, yes, that can be a problem!

Richard Curtis

John Norman’s Tarnsman of Gor, the novel that launched one of the great science fiction sagas of all time, has just been released as an audio by Brilliance. It’s narrated by the astonishingly versatile Ralph Lister, who may well become the Voice of Gor.

According to Chronicles of Gor website, the place for all things Gorean, the second audio (Outlaw of Gor) is scheduled for August 15, 2010, Priest-Kings of Gor for October 15, 2010, and Nomads of Gor for December 15, 2010. Next year, on February 15th, 2011, Assassin of Gor will follow and on April 15, 2011, Raiders of Gor will be released.

Narrator Ralph Lister IS the Voice of Gor

Each book will be available in four different formats. Tarsnman for instance will be in a seven CD audio version, a single CD MP3 version, an online download, and two special Library editions with Brilliance’s unprecedented lifetime replacement guarantee. Prices vary depending on the chosen format. The total duration of the audio production is 8 hours. Subsequent books may vary in production time.

The 28 volume (and counting) Gorean Saga is E-Reads’ bestselling science fiction series. Visit the John Norman page to see a complete list of all titles in the series plus the wonderful Telnarian Trilogy, Imaginative Sex, and other classic Norman works.

Richard Curtis

[Reader: if you don't think Screens = Distraction, here's a test: how many times in the course of reading this article do you look away from the text? And how much information do you retain?]

TMI – Too Much Information – can be embarrassing. It can also be destructive.

That’s the conclusion reached by researchers in studies of media use. “We are exposing our brains to an environment and asking them to do things we weren’t necessarily evolved to do,” a neuroscientist is quoted by Matt Richtel in a major in in-depth article in the New York Times, Hooked on Gadgets, and Paying a Mental Price. “While many people say multitasking makes them more productive,” Richtel writes, “research shows otherwise. Heavy multitaskers actually have more trouble focusing and shutting out irrelevant information, scientists say, and they experience more stress… Even after the multitasking ends, fractured thinking and lack of focus persist.”

These findings reinforce concerns we’ve expressed here (See The Medium is Screens. The Message is Distraction and More Evidence that Screens=Distraction) about potentially negative effects of screen-learning on young minds. Experiments demonstrate that children using computers were far more easily distracted and unable to retain information than their paper-reading counterparts.

Now, however, the same effects are manifesting themselves in adults. Richtel’s must-read examination of the impact of technology on mental processes, reveals that we consume 12 hours of media daily, compared to five hours fifty years ago. But it’s not just the amount of time we spend in front of a screen, it’s the quality of that time that is taking its toll on every aspect of daily life. Though the analogy of addiction has frequently been used to describe media technology fixation, the addiction is closer to food and sex than to drugs and alcohol, says a leading brain scientist, because too much of a good thing – food, sex, information – is inimical to health, safety, and human relationships. What Richtel calls information bursts “play to a primitive impulse to respond to immediate opportunities and threats. The stimulation provokes excitement — a dopamine squirt — that researchers say can be addictive”

Infatuation with computers, e-books and tablets can blind us to the downside of the technology, and it’s good that revelations such as those Richtel reports have begun to come out now when we need to achieve a balance between benefits and liabilities.

If you think these conclusions don’t apply to you, click here for a test.

Richard Curtis

Once again it’s time to play You Be the Agent.

Today’s question is, How much is one line of poetry worth? Not a lot, you say? Suppose you represented the Robert Frost estate and someone requested permission to use the line “And miles to go before I sleep” in an anthology. Still think it’s worth nothing?

That’s the kind of question that comes up daily in every literary agency. But with the introduction of digital technology, decisions that were once fairly cut and dried have become head-spinningly complex. Marc Aronson, in an op-ed piece published in the New York Times, stated the issue cogently: “In order for electronic books to live up to their billing, we have to fix a system that is broken: getting permission to use copyrighted material in new work. Either we change the way we deal with copyrights — or works of nonfiction in a multimedia world will become ever more dull and disappointing.”

What does Aronson mean? “Given that permission costs are already out of control for old-fashioned print,” he writes, “it’s fair to expect that they will rise even higher with e-books. After all, digital books will be in print forever (we assume); they can be downloaded, copied, shared and maybe even translated. We’ve all heard about the multimedia potential of the iPad, but how much will writers be charged for film clips and audio? Rights holders will demand a hefty premium for use in digital books — if they make their materials available in that format at all.”

Aronson thinks it’s high time for a new permissions model grounded in the realities of the digital paradigm. “Instead of paying permission fees upfront based on estimated print runs, book creators would pay based on a periodic accounting of downloads.” Though accounting for sales under this system might at first seem daunting, the micropayment management such as Paypal is already commonplace.
Aronson is onto something. Expect to hear more about it.

Richard Curtis

Every Blogger owes a debt of gratitude to newspapers and magazines. This posting relies on original research and reporting performed by The New York Times.

You know the cliché that goes “If they can put men on the moon they should be able to (fill in the blank)?  Well, I have one for you. If they can put men on the moon they should be able to make a conference name tag that works.  But if wardrobe malfunctions at the recent Book Expo America are any indication, we are as far from producing a sensible name tag as we are from establishing a colony on Neptune.

The book conference’s name tags, suspended around the neck by a lanyard, were certainly large enough – about 4 inches square – and the typeface a highly legible 18-point sans serif bold.  The problem was that the tags tended to twist on their lanyards, displaying their blank reverse sides and forcing the viewer to resort to a variety of unsatisfying strategies to identify the wearer.  Such as…

• hoping an errant breeze will spin the tag back to obverse
• hoping a third party will address the person by name
• presenting your card and praying the presentation will be reciprocated
• asking the person’s name and learning that he or she is the head of a major publisher
• asking the person’s name and learning he or she is someone you recently dined with…or slept with

The solution is obvious: print names on both sides of the tag.  But it’s clearly more obvious to me than to the Expo’s planners and it’s not a laughing matter. In this age of social networking, the failure to know whom you’re talking to is not just embarrassing, it could mean lost business.

But I’m not through.

Lanyards are poor devices for displaying identification. Name tags depending from them hang down to the nether regions, requiring one to gaze awkwardly at the bearer’s belly. Short of pretending to tie one’s shoelaces to effect a surreptitious glance at the name tag, it means another business opportunity missed.

It does not require an advanced engineering degree to perceive that the best location for name tags is the chest, but even that solution is fraught with issues.  Many people like to show off their attire and resent having their fashion statements compromised by a name tag. Some of us worry that the tags’ pins will leave unsightly and irreparable holes in dresses, blouses or jackets.

That problem led to the creation of paper “Hello My Name Is” tags with peel-off backings, which are great unless the adhesive is so strong that it leaves a rectangular patch on one’s clothing, or so weak as to cause the tag to curl up or simply fall to the floor.  It can be jolly fun to attend a conference and count the number of paper name tags adhering to attendees’ shoes. I once observed a significant publishing executive walking about with someone else’s name tag stuck to his behind like a Kick Me sign.

But I’m still not through.

If you attend a party or conference that uses paper name tags you owe it to fellow attendees to print largely and neatly.  All too many people write their names in tiny script or illegible scribbles, forcing  one to gape boorishly at a woman’s embonpoint when he’s simply trying to get a good gander at her name.  Honestly, lady, I’m not staring at your bosom. I’m just trying to read your damn name tag.

And talking of boors, are there any more pretentious than those who feel they’re so notable they do not need to wear a name tag at all?

So yes, if they can send men to the moon, can they not produce a sensible name tag? I hope so, and maybe they could have it ready for next year’s BEA?

(Hello. My Name Is) Richard Curtis