Barnes and Noble to use Paperlogic's Superthing e-Reader

Barnes and Noble Will use superthin e-Reader from Plastic Logic.

The reader will also be able to access wi-fi connections.

7 Habits Essential for Tackling the Multitasking Virus

I recently wrote an article about a heartbreaking new trend in our classrooms. In Universities throughout the US, students are surfing the internet, shopping online, Facebooking, and emailing while their professors speak to disengaged minds.

One can argue that kids have always passed notes, but this semester’s explosion of multi-tasking is on a terrifying scale and teachers nationwide are bereft. The Dean of the University of Chicago Law School just banned surfing during class. Harvard Business School was forced to cut off internet access. Columbia, Barnard and countless others are hustling for solutions, but students demand that their rights are not infringed upon.

You can read my account of this crisis and of the dangers of multitasking in this piece on Tim Ferriss’s blog. What I would like to do now is propose some actionable solutions to a cultural problem that extends far beyond our schools.

In my opinion, cutting off internet access in classrooms, while a good idea, is just addressing the symptom of a much broader disengagement. We have to get to the root of the problem by understanding why kids, and adults for that matter, are not deeply immersed in what they are doing.

What is getting in the way of presence? Alienation. From a very young age, kids are not being listened to and so they are turning off their minds. Horrible policies like No Child Left Behind, and the gauntlet of standardized tests our kids have to endure, are turning education into a forced march. Most of the professional world is an extension of the same problem. Everyone is being jammed into the same cookie cutter mold, and that is not how anyone will thrive. Below are some internal solutions to navigating an increasingly disconnected external environment.

1. Do what you love.
2. Do it in a way you love and connect to.
3. Give people a Choice and they become engaged.
4. Release a fear of failure.
5. Build positive routines.
6. Do one thing at a time.
7. Take Breaks.

Read more.

The Long Term Plan to Steal Elections

Jim Crow has returned to American elections, only in the twenty-first century, instead of men in white robes or a barrel-chested sheriff menacingly patrolling voting precincts, we are more likely to see a lawyer carrying a folder filled with briefing papers and proposed legislation about "voter fraud" and other measures to supposedly protect the sanctity of the vote.

Since the 2004 election, activist lawyers with ties to the Republican Party and its presidential campaigns, Republican legislators, and even the Supreme Court -- in a largely unnoticed ruling in 2006 -- have been aggressively regulating most aspects of the voting process. Collectively, these efforts are undoing the gains of the civil rights era that brought voting rights to minorities and the poor, groups that tend to support Democrats.

In addition, the Department of Justice (DOJ), which for decades had fought to ensure that all eligible citizens could vote, now encourages states to take steps in the opposite direction. Political appointees who advocate for stringent requirements before ballots are cast and votes are counted have driven much of the DOJ's Voting Section's recent agenda. As a result, the Department has pushed states to purge voter lists, and to adopt newly restrictive voter ID and provisional ballot laws. In addition, during most of George W. Bush's tenure, the DOJ has stopped enforcing federal laws designed to aid registration, such as the requirement that state welfare offices offer public aid recipients the opportunity to register to vote.

Scary.
More.

Awesome New Old Heinlein Book

I'm absolutely in love with this recently released Heinlein book, For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs.

Everything about this novel is interesting, even the experience of reading it. For Us, the Living: A Comedy of Customs was written in 1938-1939; it is Robert A. Heinlein's first extended piece of fiction, and was never published because in 1939 it was not simply unsold: It was probably unpublishable. Over the 20th century, didactic novels of a utopian bent had been increasingly perceived as unmarketable (dystopias like Huxley's Brave New World [1932] or Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four [1949] do very much better); but more specifically, For Us, the Living promulgates the kind of arguments about sex, religion, politics and economics that normally gain publication through fringe presses, not the trade publishers Heinlein submitted his manuscript to, Random House and Macmillan (which did all the same publish B.F. Skinner's Walden Two in 1948).

For us, though, in 2004, For Us, the Living, as far as its arguments go, is pure Heinlein; indeed, because almost every radical notion he ever generated appears here in utero, the book rewrites our sense of Heinlein's entire career; and because Heinlein's career, as we understood it, has always seemed expressive of the nature of American SF from 1939 to 1966, this small, slightly stumblebum first novel rewrites our understanding of those years, especially the early ones, when John W. Campbell Jr. was attempting to shape the nascent genre into a weapon of future-purification.

It has certainly been well known that Heinlein (unlike the younger Isaac Asimov) found Campbell's personality and diktats less than persuasive, but the degree to which he corralled his imaginative intellect, in order to help create the SF that missed the boat, has never I think really been guessed. In a nutshell, the ideas about sex and privacy and government that inch into view—just a little pruriently, perhaps—through the finger-wagging pages of For Us, the Living are exactly the ideas that the professional writer Heinlein only let himself begin to utter again in 1959, with Starship Troopers. I'm not about to suggest that if Heinlein had been able to publish openly in the pages of Astounding in 1939, SF would have gotten the future right; I would suggest, however, that if Heinlein, and his colleagues, had been able to publish adult SF in Astounding and its fellow journals, then SF might not have done such a grotesquely poor job of prefiguring something of the flavor of actually living here at the onset of 2004.
Watching the Competent Man being born

A short notice of this text cannot begin to articulate the minutiae of similtude and difference between early Heinlein and late. Central to both periods is the concept of the absolute privacy of the individual citizen of America; as the new Constitution of 2028 states:

Every citizen is free to perform any act which does not hamper the equal freedom of another. No law shall forbid the performance of any act, which does not damage the physical or economic welfare of any other person. No act shall constitute a violation of a law valid under this provision unless there is such damage, or immediate present danger of such damage resulting from that act.

This is a radical doctrine, as Heinlein clearly argues, for it means

the end of the blue laws, and a grisly unconscious symbiosis between the underworld and the organized churches—for the greatest bulwark of the underworld were always the moral creeds of the churches.

And so forth. These two quotes, which appear 200 pages apart in the text, are, as one might put it, just like Heinlein. The consequences, direct and cognate, which For Us, the Living doesn't really go very far to dramatize, run from the absolute and genuine separation of church and state, to the liberation of women, to very widespread private nudity, and to what we call, in this world, "open marriage."

The story through which these arguments are put—they include long lessons in Social Credit—begins typically. A young man named Perry from 1939 is, more or less magically, transported to 2087, where he learns about the brave new world which has evolved. He is necessarily as stupid as most of his fellow visitors to utopia—else there would be no reason to tell him everything down to the last detail—but gradually changes into a Competent Man, piloting the first spaceship around the moon in a slingshot ending, though before he gets Competent he has to spend a while in a psychological rehabilitation unit after biffing the nude male friend of his new nude lover Diana because he has failed to grasp the implications of privacy as applied to sexual freedom. The language in which this is all laid down (the word "breasts" never appears, though "breast"—designating a vague frontal region—shows up lots) is perhaps the most poignant residue of the claptrap writers had to grapple with just a few decades ago.
...

More here and here.

“The Big Space F**k” - Kurt Vonnegut

“The Big Space F**k”
Kurt Vonnegut

“What was the dirtiest story I ever wrote?” wrote Kurt Vonnegut in “Palm Sunday,” his 1981 “autobiographical collage.” “Surely ‘The Big Space F**k,’ the first story of literature to have ‘f**k’ in its title. It was probably the last short story I will ever write. I did it for my friend Harlan Ellison, who printed it in his anthology ‘Again, Dangerous Visions.’” It’s a terrific, and terrifically relevant, story. I found only a fragment of it on the Web. Here’s the story in full as it appeared in “Palm Sunday,” courtesy of the Notebooks’ head clerk, O.C.R.

----

In 1987 it became possible in the United States of America for a young person to sue his parents for the way he had been raised. He could take them to court and make them pay money and even serve jail terms for serious mistakes they made when he was just a helpless little kid. This was not only an effort to achieve justice but to discourage reproduction, since there wasn’t anything much to eat any more. Abortions were free. In fact, any woman who volunteered for one got her choice of a bathroom scale or a table lamp.

Unfortunate Book Title...

From flickr.

Higher Intellect

Higher Intellect is a World Wide Web server hosting a searchable database of over 200,000 text files on a variety of subjects. We also host a server running on the Hotline and KDX protocols featuring a vast collection of antique software, obscure operating systems, and open source software.

Here.

Harry Potter Spoiler

I know who dies.

Just finished the book. Nice light reading, in about a day and a half. 8-)

O.J. Simpson's Confession

Publisher calls book a confession by O. J. Simpson

The publisher of a book by O. J. Simpson, in which he hypothesizes about how he could have committed the 1994 murder of his ex-wife and her friend, said on Thursday that she believed Simpson's statements were, in fact, a confession.

Titled "If I Did It," the book is scheduled for release on Nov. 30. A two-part television interview of Simpson is to be broadcast on Fox on Nov. 27 and Nov. 29.

Regan also said she was told that the advance and royalties for the book, which was written with an uncredited ghostwriter, would go to Simpson's children and not to him. Simpson owes $33.5 million plus accumulated interest to the victims' families after being judged responsible for the deaths in civil court.

Denise Brown, the sister of Nicole Brown Simpson, issued a statement accusing Regan of "promoting the wrongdoing of criminals."

Regan defended her actions, saying that she was approached with the idea of a book by "a manager who represents a third party," and that the third party owned the rights to the story.

"We contracted with the third party," she said. "I was told that the money would go to his children. They said the money was not going to Simpson. If it is I hope Fred Goldman and the Browns and everyone else can get it."

Asked if she would help the victims' families gain access to the money to help satisfy the court judgment against Simpson, Regan said, "If they want any information I'm happy to give it to them."

More.


Ok... I'm not sure if I buy the "money is not going to OJ" part, but I hope it's true. Skipping over the fox interview is probably a good idea in any case, since Fox is probably paying OJ.

Google Scares

Google is offering free, downloadable, scary books for Halloween. Lookie here.

Bulletproof Books

(...) Neil Cavuto [FOX] hosted a candidate who suggested giving kids thick textbooks, covered in Kevlar, to use to shield themselves when the bullets start flying (...)
Bill Crozier, a Republican running for the office of State Superintendent of Schools in Oklahoma, was Cavuto's guest. Cavuto introduced Crozier saying it is Crozier's belief that it's "high time for students to protect themselves" and thus he wants, "textbooks used as shields."

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