betajames

Why have they done this? I’m sure they have numerous reasons, but likely it comes down to one main thing – as nice a gesture as it might seem, Twitter simply does not work if you follow everybody back.

If you need specifics, think about this – your direct message inbox on Twitter is bad enough when you’re following just a dozen spammers or auto-DMers. Can you imagine what it must be like when you’re following hundreds of thousands? Even if we take a trip to la-la land and assume that all of those people are legitimate, they’re still going to bombard you with DMs, and when you get to those kinds of numbers it must be so overwhelming that one of the few legitimate options you have is to just ignore the darned thing.

He was less well-known, but no less talented, as a literary critic. Proof of it has resided, mostly unnoticed, in a small library in Redding, Conn., where hundreds of his personal books have sat in obscurity for 100 years. They are filled with notes in his own cramped, scratchy handwriting. Irrepressible when he spotted something he did not like, but also impatient with good books that he thought could be better, he was often savage in his commentary.

“The English of this book is incorrect & slovenly & its diction, as a rule, barren of distinction,” Twain scribbled in his copy of a 1906 autobiography of Lew Wallace, the Civil War general who wrote “Ben-Hur.”

Mr Bean said that face-to-face contact in universities had to be about more than simply passing on information that could be obtained digitally.

And he said that universities that embraced informal learning across a range of digital platforms would find that the approach encouraged enrolment into formal higher education.

"That's the world we are in today. I think it is the only way we are going to be able to deal with the challenges of globalisation and massification," he added.

Rohrer’s latest creation lets two players improvise a story over the internet, pairing constantly evolving story lines with crude graphics and comic book-style speech and thought bubbles. It can be hard to get the hang of at first, but the trade-off is a game that lets players have more control over their story than almost any other game allows.

Here’s how Sleep Is Death works: One person takes the role of “controller,” who steers the story and creates the assets the story will use. The other person, known as the “player,” can either go along with the story the controller has set up or try to subvert it to their own intentions. The controller and the player take turns performing their actions, with each having a 30-second time limit per turn.

To test the idea, they obtained data from the National Science Foundation on the number of researchers per capita in each state, and then randomly selected research papers that contained the phrase "test* the hypothes*". Those papers were characterized as either confirming (positive result) or rejecting (negative result) the hypothesis. To link the papers to the geographic data, the researchers used the address of the corresponding author, who is responsible for getting the paper to the journal and answering any further inquiries on it.

The end conclusion of the analysis is that "those based in US states where researchers publish more papers per capita were significantly more likely to report positive results, independently of their discipline." In other words, as local competition increases, the fraction of papers that confirmed a hypothesis went up.

The industry’s great hope was that the iPad would bring electronic books to the masses—and help make them profitable. E-books are booming. Although they account for only an estimated three to five per cent of the market, their sales increased a hundred and seventy-seven per cent in 2009, and it was projected that they would eventually account for between twenty-five and fifty per cent of all books sold. But publishers were concerned that lower prices would decimate their profits. Amazon had been buying many e-books from publishers for about thirteen dollars and selling them for $9.99, taking a loss on each book in order to gain market share and encourage sales of its electronic reading device, the Kindle. By the end of last year, Amazon accounted for an estimated eighty per cent of all electronic-book sales, and $9.99 seemed to be established as the price of an e-book. Publishers were panicked. David Young, the chairman and C.E.O. of Hachette Book Group USA, said, “The big concern—and it’s a massive concern—is the $9.99 pricing point. If it’s allowed to take hold in the consumer’s mind that a book is worth ten bucks, to my mind it’s game over for this business.”

I am still using my computer to type; I'm just not connected to the Web. And I do have a student, Pat, who is helping me with this column. I dump my Word document and drawings (which have been scanned) onto his thumb drive, and he sends it along to my editor, who faxes me back edited copy to discuss. "Isn't that cheating?" I'm asked. "Pat is my shabbos goy," I reply.

Learning networks in previous decades were insular groups formed around academic journals, learned societies, and professional conferences. Today, galaxies of students, academics, professionals, and amateurs are using blogs, wikis, presentation tools like Slideshare, YouTube videos, and e-mail lists to collaborate, pursue, and present knowledge in any discipline. All are supported by, yet independent of, universities, other cultural and government institutions, and private companies, not to mention hours of volunteered time by enthusiasts.  

I don’t think art is an either/or proposition. Any medium can accommodate it, and there can be at least a little art in nearly everything we do.

Once in a while, someone makes a work in their chosen medium so driven by aesthetic concerns and so removed from any other consideration that we trot out the A-word, but even then it’s a matter of degrees, and for most creative endeavors you can find a full spectrum from the sublime to the mundane.