a Twitter recommendation

looking through my Twitter feeds today, after 5pm, this one caught my eye:

Carl Bildt ‏@carlbildt

Rereading John Julius Norwich's "A History of Venice" is always a true pleasure. A great history told in a most enjoyable way.

Carl Bildt is Foreign Minister of Sweden since 2006. Before that most other things.

· http://carlbildt.wordpress.com

So, after looking for the book in theOPAC and finding it at  945.31 N, I walked back into the stacks, and got it. I do think this might be the first book recommendation I've gotten via Twitter (without a doubt, the first recommendation from Minister Bildt  —or, almost certainly).

Norwich, John Julius. (1982). A history of Venice. New York : Knopf.

Why Reading Isn’t Dead

The news that Borders Group Inc. has filed for Chapter 11 protection and also plans to close 30 percent of its stores doesn’t come as much of a surprise. Increasingly, consumers and publishers are focusing on e-books, and many readers prefer to order books online through retailers like Amazon.com. I love small bookstores. I have a particular fondness for the Lift Bridge Book Shop in Brockport, New York, my hometown. The store may have more books than there are residents in the community.

I don’t think the Borders bankruptcy is an indication that reading is dying–it’s really a sign that reading is changing. The recording industry faced a similar shift. People hadn’t fallen out of love with music — they just wanted it in other forms.

Excellent point.

I’ve found that my 8-year-old son and his friends may actually be more excited about reading than kids of previous generations. They talk excitedly about Harry Potter, A Series of Unfortunate Events and other book franchises. My son’s 16-year-old babysitter borrowed some of my copies of the Hunger Games books. And on more than a few nights, I’ve had to go into my son’s room and turn off his iPod after he fell asleep listening to the Narnia books or the Secret series.

Poisoning the Well

Torsten Blackwood/Agence France-Presse — Getty Images

 The right wing is in absolute denial that there is such a problem; some yahoo just recently said that all the snowstorms we're having proves that there is no such phenomenon as global warming. It's socialism's agenda, another way to grow government.

Hertsgaard, to his credit, refuses to sugarcoat these facts. For all the justifiable fears about flooded coastlines, he writes, the “overriding danger” in the coming years is drought. “Floods kill thousands, drought can kill millions,” one expert told him. Within two decades, the number of people in “water-stressed countries” will rise to three billion from 800 million.

Only when they see the palpable truth will naysayers admit there is a problems, if then.


“Scientists had actually underestimated the danger,” he writes. “Climate change had arrived a century sooner than expected.” What’s more, given our current trajectory — economic, cultural and, most important, political — it’s guaranteed to get a lot worse before it gets any better. (Significant impacts like sea-level rise are now “locked in.”) And it won’t get any better — indeed, it will become truly unmanageable — if we don’t make the necessary cuts in global greenhouse emissions.

When the FDR Drive is underwater, what will skeptics say then?

This leads Hertsgaard to what he calls the new “double imperative” of the climate fight. “We have to live through global warming,” he writes, “even as we halt and reverse it.” In other words, while deep emissions cuts (what experts call “mitigation”) remain the top priority, that alone is no longer enough. We also have to do everything we can to prepare for the effects of climate change.

Cap and trade is anathema to the right wing.

Wealth and technology clearly matter, but politics and culture may trump them. Take Louisiana: efforts to prepare for future hurricanes, Hertsgaard writes, “have been crippled by the state’s history of poor government” along with “its continuing reluctance — even after Katrina — to acknowledge the reality of global warming for fear that might harm oil and gas production, and an abhorrence of taxes and public planning as somehow socialistic.”

God

Reading about John McWhorter, having seen his op-ed piece in the Times, I cam across the name of Robert Wright

Bloggingheads.tv (sometimes abbreviated "bhtv") is a political, world events, philosophy, and science video blog discussion site in which the participants take part in an active back and forth conversation via webcam which is then broadcast online to viewers. The site was started by the journalist Robert Wright (The Evolution of God, Nonzero, The Moral Animal) and the blogger and journalist Mickey Kaus on November 1, 2005. (Kaus has since dropped out of operational duties of the site as he didn't want his frequent linking to be seen as a conflict of interest.) Most of the earlier discussions posted to the site involved one or both of those individuals, but since has grown to include a total of more than 250 other individual contributors, mostly journalists, scientists, authors, well known political bloggers, and other notable individuals.

Hogs, purpose, break

Mediocre 2007 film, predictable, stereotypical, two-dimensional characters, with a few laughs, and a thud of an ending. What a way to make a living.

Purpose (2002): badly dated; good idea, badly executed and quite mediocre. Mia Farrow as a hard-edged financial manager totally unbelievable, uncvonvincing and badly cast. Did somebody owe her a favor?

Lucky Break (2002). Seemed a good idea; couldn't understand what language they were speaking, turned it off.

Roger Ebert

For years I have gone to his website to find film reviews; I do not always agree with his taste, but always know I will find a forceful opinion expressed unequivocally. Today I saw a news item of his appearance on Oprah's show. The accompanying photograph shocked me; I had no idea he has been battling cancer for years. His opinions remain unchanged: forceful, unambiguous.

That Esquire article is very good. Mention is made of a Scottish company developing text-to-speech computer software: Ebert is waiting for a Scottish company called CereProc to give him some of his former voice back. He found it on the Internet, where he spends a lot of his time. CereProc tailors text-to-speech software for voiceless customers so that they don't all have to sound like Stephen Hawking. They have catalog voices — Heather, Katherine, Sarah, and Sue — with regional Scottish accents, but they will also custom-build software for clients who had the foresight to record their voices at length before they lost them. Ebert spent all those years on TV, and he also recorded four or five DVD commentaries in crystal-clear digital audio. The average English-speaking person will use about two thousand different words over the course of a given day. CereProc is mining Ebert's TV tapes and DVD commentaries for those words, and the words it cannot find, it will piece together syllable by syllable. When CereProc finishes its work, Roger Ebert won't sound exactly like Roger Ebert again, but he will sound more like him than Alex does.

latimes.com article: Roger Ebert takes to Twitter to give tea party followers a thumb's down. The film reviewer is aiming barbs at Sarah Palin and other conservatives.


Who's the biggest scourge of the tea party movement these days? It might be film critic Roger Ebert, who lately has been tossing brickbats at Sarah Palin and other right-wing politicians in between rendering verdicts on the latest movies. Over the last few weeks, Ebert has used his busy Twitter page to give the tea party belittling nicknames, predict it will quickly fade and opine that "a loud movement is not the same as a mass movement. I write about the TeePees because it's so sad how they've been manipulated to oppose their own best interests," Ebert said in an e-mail, using his latest epithet for the tea party followers. "I am a liberal."

Well said.

His thoughts have earned him scorn from conservatives who accuse him of elitism and trashing ordinary Americans. More notable than the political spat, though, is what it says about the rapidly evolving media and Ebert's place among them. Because of his decades of TV appearances, including with his late partner Gene Siskel, Ebert is perhaps the only critic in America who really has a household name.

But due to complications from cancer surgery in 2006, he has been unable to speak. The story of his recovery battle, along with a jarring portrait that revealed his surgically ravaged jawline, recently appeared in Esquire. Tuesday, he will appear on a taped piece on "Oprah" to unveil an electronic device that promises to give him back some vocal function. Given the fact that for years Ebert was never far away from a microphone, there's irony in the fact that his current battle with the tea party followers is conducted in text only, with bite-sized tweets and blog posts.


Now the 67-year-old reviewer finds himself at the center of the debate over whether and how mainstream journalists -- who have typically labored in silos of specialization and avoided anything that called into question a pose of objectivity -- should mix it up in the woolly world of social media. Many large news-gathering organizations, including the Los Angeles Times, have rules governing reporters' and editors' use of Facebook, Twitter and other applications. Some experts say the time may be ripe to rethink such restrictions.

"In an era in which newspapers are in decline, any journalist who attracts attention in any area should be welcome," said Paul Levinson, a professor of communication and media studies at Fordham University who is also an active Twitter user. "Distinctions that keep reporters penned into a small area never made much sense. The greatest journalists and writers were always Renaissance men and women, able to do many tasks."

Andrew Breitbart, publisher of several influential conservative blogs including Big Hollywood, defends Ebert the new-media user while attacking Ebert the political thinker. Breitbart says that Ebert's Twitter posts reveal a patronizing view of tea party adherents that serves as a "caricature of the liberal mind-set" and that the critic brims with "raw contempt for Middle America."

As opposed to patronizing Middle America? Whilst I admire Breitbart for being able to make the distinction, his views can hardly be considered middle america: he's a conservative elite, contrasted to Ebert being a liberal elite.

... Breitbart adds that the current fracas ultimately proves how much power has tilted to new media and away from mainstream outlets such as newspapers, where Ebert has reviewed movies for more than 40 years. "I am a proponent of Roger Ebert using Twitter to express his point of view," Breitbart said. "It's a testament to the new media. Where is he having a bigger impact, in the Twitterverse or doing his reviews of movies?"


Ebert admits he was slow to appreciate Twitter but is now a fan. "It's an art form," he said in an e-mail interview with The Times. "It encourages minimalism, almost like a word game. "Having said more than once 'I will never be a twit,' I now feel it is a splendid discipline . . . I link to great writing on the web. I also like to link to the unique, the beautiful, the weird. "That day is a sad day," he said, "when a newspaperman fears to tweet."

Both recognize the power of new technology, its impact. But, those who don't tweet, or know what tweeting is, what about them?

Esquire magazine cover.

The Chris Jones article in Esquire.
• My Esquire interview with Lee F---ing Marvin..
•
The New York Times review of Chris Jones's "Too Far From Home: A Story of Life and Death in Space," by Janet Maslin. 

Photos: Roger Ebert through the years
Rosenthal: Ebert introduces The Ebert Club

Fiction Liberation Front

A new book: Collected stories, by Lewis Shiner. On the jacket reference is made to a website.

Welcome to the online collection of works by Lewis Shiner. Read this manifesto for a quick explanation of what's going on here.

The manifesto begins: It's hardly news that the Internet Revolution has toppled the traditional short story markets. If you look through the periodical racks at one of the big chain bookstores (what passes for a newsstand in most of the US these days), you'll be hard pressed to find a magazine devoted to fiction. It's been a slow decline since the heyday of the pulps, true, but the last few years have seen even the remaining SF and mystery digests falling back to a subscription model.

What we don't know is what comes next. Some magazines, like Subterranean, have moved online; many have just gone under. Even the idea of a magazine may cease to be relevant. The only thing that seems likely is that whatever future the short story has, the Internet will be involved in it. The thing that's least clear is how--or whether--artists will be compensated for their efforts.

Googled

Auletta, Ken. (2009). Googled: the end of the world as we know it. New York : Penguin Press.







In "Googled," New Yorker writer Ken Auletta tells the familiar story of the company's rapid transformation from Silicon Valley start-up to global corporation. As expected, we hear about the young Rollerblading employees at Google's Mountain View, Calif., headquarters, with its massage rooms, pool tables and free meals. But thanks to the unusual degree of access that the company granted the author—and thanks to his sharp eye—"Googled" also presents interesting new details. The book describes, for instance, Google's close relationship with former Vice President Al Gore—during a meeting with him, back in his hirsute phase after leaving office, Google executives showed their solidarity by donning fake beards.

Many companies and people are worried abouit the behemoth that is this company.


In contrast to all this corporate anxiety, consumers so far have been upbeat about the extraordinary power that Google wields. As Mr. Brin explains, Google's importance in people's lives comes from "determining what information they get to look at." Lawrence Lessig, who was an expert in the Microsoft antitrust case (and is now a professor at Harvard Law School), tells Mr. Auletta that Google will soon be more powerful than Microsoft ever was, since primacy in search gives the company unprecedented control over commerce and content.

Determining is a powerful word.

Google's favor turned Wikipedia into the world's leading reference source, but a few algorithm tweaks would easily send that torrent of traffic elsewhere. Mr. Lessig says that, for the moment, we take comfort from the fact that Google has been led by "good guys." But then he asks: "Why do we expect them to be good guys from now until the end of time?"

A tweak in the algorithm made Wikipedia be the top result in many searches.

Mr. Auletta notes that many successful companies have appeared "impregnable"—until they didn't. IBM once had a 70% share of the massive mainframe computer market. Then came antitrust action and the personal computer. A company expanding into as many arenas as Google is will almost certainly "wake up the bears," as Verizon Chairman and CEO Ivan Seidenberg puts it.

Problems for Google might lie beyond the horizon, but the immediate future promises more success: Google is well-positioned for the transition to "cloud computing," where software and data are stored online rather than on personal computers. Mr. Schmidt says that cloud computing will be "the defining technological shift of our generation." Accordingly, Google's greatest value creation probably still lies ahead.

Start-up nation

Senor, Dan.(2009). Start-up nation: the story of Israel's economic miracle. New York : Twelve, 2009.

956.9405 S


Saw ad in today's Journal. HWPL, among other libraries, owns it.

From a Kirkus review, this phrase caught my eye: A pair of savvy policy wonks investigate how Israel has generated some notable economic wonders.In the face of the pervasive, virulent hostility of surrounding regimes, the young nation of Israel produces, per capita, more scientific papers than any other country. Amid frequent acts of terrorism, the Jewish state leads the world in percentage of GDP invested in research and development.

Vantage point

Vantage point


Interesting idea. US television (GNN, a fictional network) is carrying the US president (played aloofly by William Hurt, who sort of looks presidential) appearance in a plaza in Salamanca, Spain, at a summit of Western and Arab nations. As he is introduced and starts to speak, he is shot, twice. He is rushed off in an ambulance. Moments later a bomb explodes. A few more moments later a Secret Service agents bursts into the television truck and demands to see its tapes, and spots suspicious activity.

The film backs up to seconds before 12, and tells the same story from a different person's perspective 7 other times.

At first, the movie is gripping, the story well told. An interesting idea: how do different people see the same sequence of events? However, by the fourth or fifth, the cumulative effect becomes tiresome rather than illuminating.

After the teevee's perspective come others: Dennis Quaid's Secret Service agent, Thomas Barnes, just-returned to the job after a medical leave (having taken two bullets in protection of the president some unspecified time back); Forest Whitaker's tourist with a hand-held camera, who catches action and befriends a little girl who bumps into him and loses her ice cream; the President, who actually than actually having been shot is ensconced in a hotel room, his double having taken the bullets; one of the terrorists; and so on.

A big car chase scene follows Barnes spotting one of his fellow agents in a Spanish police uniform (he calls Washington on his cellphone, and describes the "rogue agent"). Meantime, one of the bad guys has infiltrated the hotel where the President is staying, and works his way up to POTUS's floor. A co-conspirator detonates a vest-bomb to create a diversion, and that first bad guy guns down all remaining agents, both outside and inside POTUS's room. POTUS is kidnapped, there is much shooting, more car chasing, and in the end the good guys win.

As far-fetched as it might seem, events of the last eight years have shown that wild schemes are planned, and can be executed. Technology is featured in a way that is intriguing: cellphones to call around the world; smart phones used to remotely shoot the president and detonate bombs. Alas, technology could not rescue this film. The Times review didn't mince words.

Eiffel's tower

One of two books on the New Book cart at Information Desk today that intrigued me:

Eiffel's Tower, by Jill Jonnes. The book, of course, has its own website. In it, some pictures are shown, including one I really like: the tower being built.





The Eiffel Tower grows, reads the caption, December 7, 1887. Credit is given to Otis Archives.

Friendlyvision

"Friendlyvision" B Friendly E
By Ralph Engelman
Columbia University, 424 pages, $34.50

Next

Next : the future just happened. (2001). Lewis, Michael. New York : W.W. Norton.

Txtng : the Gr8 Db8

Txtng: the Gr8 Db8. (2008). Crystal, David. New York: Oxford University Press.