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      <title>BBC NEWS | Magazine Monitor: Web Monitor</title>
      <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/</link>
      <description>The Magazine&apos;s recommended daily allowance of news, culture and your letters. </description>
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      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: stifling yawns, the history of fake beards, and dating data.

&bull; Being the leader of the free world means you have to look at a lot of boring stuff. That's the conclusion of New York Magazine which has compiled a photo gallery of President Obama apparently feigning interest in mundane things. He looks concerned at an array of solar panels, considers the marvels of many microscopes and, for some reason, is shown lots of office wiring.

&bull; Brian Palmer at Slate reports on what he sees as the most significant aspect of the Dubai killing recently reported: the presence of fake beards. He looks back at the history of bogus beards:
"Fake beards have played supporting roles in several notable international incidents. When Australia's Nugan Hand Bank collapsed in 1980, amid accusations of having trafficked drugs to support American intelligence operations, one of the institution's founders was allegedly smuggled out of the country in a fake beard. Antonio Mendez, the former chief of disguise for the CIA, used fake facial hair extensively in Cold War Russia. He often put false mustaches on agents going to pick up Russian nuclear secrets from a double-agent called Trinity, so they would blend in with the other comrades. The CIA is so keenly aware of the importance of facial hair that it twice concocted schemes to remove Fidel Castro's beard, hoping that his nude face would seem less authoritative to the Cuban people."


&bull; Data mining at its finest is seen at the blog for dating network OK Cupid, as Mentioned before in Web Monitor.  Christian Rudder has been crunching the numbers from his userbase and argues male singletons are wrong to restrict the age of their potential partners, and are wrong if they assume women get less attractive as they get older:
"Many of you are probably scoffing at the idea that many 35 year-olds are as attractive as many 25 year-olds, but there are social factors at work that you might not consider as you go through life making judgments. Most importantly: nationwide, thirtysomethings are much more likely to be married and therefore much more likely to have stopped optimizing their attractiveness. So the typical 35 year-old woman you see out in the world isn't representative of the single 35 year-olds who are still dating and looking good."

Links in full

Brian Palmer &#124; Slate &#124; Go Go Gadget Beard!
Christian Rudder &#124;  OK Cupid &#124;  The case for the older woman
New York Magazine &#124; A history of President Obama feigning interest in mundane things]]></description>
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         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Thu, 18 Feb 2010 16:20:24 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: no title envy, inventing words and recreating voices.

&bull; Dame Judi Dench and Dame Helen Mirren are examples used by Mark Lawson on Radio 4's Front Row to give actress Vanessa Redgrave title envy. But she was having none of it, insisting she doesn't want to be a dame anyway:

"I don't think I want to be a dame because I'm a Unicef goodwill ambassador... I just don't want to be dame of the British Empire. It doesn't fit my skin."

&bull; Comedian Alex Horne is trying his hardest to invent a new word and get it into the English dictionary. Four years on from the start of this mission and despite having a book under his belt on the subject, there is still no extra word in the dictionary thanks to him. He explains in the Independent how he is keeping his resolve:
"Take 'bootylicious', a striking adjective that recently succeeded in scaling the dictionary walls, thanks to a solitary soul called Beyoncé Knowles. Yes. She did it. Beyoncé got a word in the dictionary. And if Beyoncé could do it, I thought, I could do it (which isn't always a mantra for my life. I don't always compare myself to one third of Destiny's Child. But on this occasion I felt I was justified)."

&bull; Roger Ebert is a television film critic in the US who has lost his ability to speak due to cancer. Esquire's interview with Mr Ebert shows how his previous fame will help him speak again:
"CereProc [a company which tailors text-to-speech software] 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 [the generic voice] does."

Links in full
Vanessa Redgrave  &#124; BBC Radio 4 &#124; Front Row
Alex Horne &#124; Independent &#124; How to invent a word
Chris Jones &#124; Esquire &#124; Roger Ebert: The Essential Man]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_155.shtml</link>
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         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Wed, 17 Feb 2010 15:37:20 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: one way to celebrate Darwin's anniversary and the extinction of the written word.

&bull; What would be the most inappropriate celebration of the 200th anniversary of Charles Darwin's birth and the 150th anniversary of the publication of The Origin of Species? The answer, as both Vanity Fair and More Intelligent Life have independently concluded, is to go to the Creation Museum in Kentucky. AA Gill in Vanity Fair was taken aback at how packed the museum is:
"What is truly awe-inspiring about the museum is the task it sets itself: to rationalize a story, written 3,000 years ago, without allowing for any metaphoric or symbolic wiggle room. There's no poetic license. This is a no-parable zone. It starts with the definitive answer, and all the questions have to be made to fit under it. That's tough. Science has it a whole lot easier: It can change things. It can expand and hypothesize and tinker. Scientists have all this cool equipment and stuff. They've got all these 'lenses' and things."

Natasha Lennard in More Intelligent Life had her own theories about the museum's inclusion of dinosaurs:
"Visitors emerge from a tour of Biblical history into a vast gift shop stocked with T-shirts, toy dinosaurs and an extensive array of creationist literature, much of which was penned by Ken Ham himself. Suddenly, those strenuous efforts to reconcile scripture and the dinosaurs seem commercially justified: kids do adore ancient reptiles, particularly when they get to own a model of their very own."

&bull; The end of the written word is nigh according to Patrick Tucker, senior editor of The Futurist, in Encyclopaedia Britannica's blog:
"If written language is merely a technology for transferring information, then it can and should be replaced by a newer technology that performs the same function more fully and effectively... As originally proposed by futurist William Crossman, the written word will likely be rendered a functionally obsolete technology by 2050."

In the Guardian Charlie Brooker takes this one step further in his ode to the e-book:
"The only thing I'd do to improve them is to include an emergency button that automatically sums the entire book up in a sentence if you couldn't be arsed to finish it, or if your plane starts crashing and you want to know whodunit before exploding over the sea. Ideally it'd shriek the summary aloud, bellowing something like 'THE BUTLER DID IT' for potboilers, or maybe 'THE SCULPTRESS COMES TO TERMS WITH THE DEATH OF HER FATHER' for highbrow fiction. Which means you could effectively skip the reading process entirely and audibly digest the entire contents of the British Library in less than a month. That's ink-and-paper dead, right there."

Links in full
Peter Jackson &#124; BBC &#124; Who goes to a creationist museum? 
AA Gill &#124; Vanity Fair &#124; Roll Over, Charles Darwin!
Natasha Lennard &#124; More Intelligent Life &#124; Of Myths and Museums 
Patrick Tucker &#124; Encyclopaedia Britannica &#124; Could Written Language Be Rendered Obsolete?
Charlie Brooker &#124; Guardian &#124; Why I'm an ebook convert]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_154.shtml</link>
         <guid>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_154.shtml</guid>
         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Tue, 16 Feb 2010 16:20:38 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: a spoil-sport, an unlikely threat to crossword writers and a caution against the life of the mind.

&bull; Contrarian Christopher Hitchens is being a spoil-sport - quite literally - in Newsweek. The Winter Olympics has got him arguing that sport isn't the diplomatic tool it is sometimes sold as:
"Whether it's the exacerbation of national rivalries that you want - as in Africa this year - or the exhibition of the most depressing traits of the human personality (guns in locker rooms, golf clubs wielded in the home, dogs maimed and tortured at stars' homes to make them fight, dope and steroids everywhere), you need only look to the wide world of sports for the most rank and vivid examples. As George Orwell wrote in his 1945 essay 'The Sporting Spirit,' after yet another outbreak of combined mayhem and chauvinism on the international soccer field, 'sport is an unfailing cause of ill-will.'"

&bull; Here's one Paper Monitor should appreciate. The Crash Blossoms blog collects ambiguous headlines that can be unintentionally funny. There are some favourites chosen by Ben Zimmer of the New York Times:
"Nouns that can be misconstrued as verbs and vice versa are, in fact, the hallmarks of the crash blossom. Take this headline, often attributed to The Guardian: 'British Left Waffles on Falklands." In the correct reading, 'left' is a noun and 'waffles' is a verb, but it's much more entertaining to reverse the two, conjuring the image of breakfast food hastily abandoned in the South Atlantic. Similarly, crossword enthusiasts laughed nervously at a May 2006 headline on AOL News, 'Gator Attacks Puzzle Experts.'"

&bull; William Pannapacker, an English lecturer has taken it upon himself over the last year to be academia's whistleblower against the university industry. He's been urging people not to bother studying humanities after an undergraduate degree and claimed universities have been deceitful in their claims about job opportunities in academia. He's back in Chronicle of Higher Education warning against "the life of the mind":
"If you are in one of the lucky categories that benefit from the Big Lie, you will probably continue to offer the attractions of that life to vulnerable students who are trained from birth to trust you, their teacher.
Graduate school in the humanities is a trap. It is designed that way. It is structurally based on limiting the options of students and socializing them into believing that it is shameful to abandon 'the life of the mind.' That's why most graduate programs resist reducing the numbers of admitted students or providing them with skills and networks that could enable them to do anything but join the ever-growing ranks of impoverished, demoralized, and damaged graduate students and adjuncts for whom most of academe denies any responsibility."

Links in full

Christopher Hitchens &#124; Newsweek &#124; Fool's Gold  
Crash Blossoms blog
Ben Zimmer &#124; New York Times &#124; Crash Blossoms
William Pannapacker &#124; Chronicle of Higher Education &#124; The Big Lie About the 'Life of the Mind']]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_153.shtml</link>
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         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Mon, 15 Feb 2010 15:49:27 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description>A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: recreating the Neanderthal, the end of the pun and settling down.

Zach Zorich in Archaeology magazine looks at the extensive work going into cloning the Neanderthal. It&apos;s problematic:

&quot;The ultimate goal of studying human evolution is to better understand the human race. The opportunity to meet a Neanderthal and see firsthand our common but separate humanity seems, on the surface, too good to pass up. But what if the thing we learned from cloning a Neanderthal is that our curiosity is greater than our compassion? Would there be enough scientific benefit to make it worth the risks?&quot;

Tim Parks in the New York Review of Books warns that we could be seeing the end of pun. Although groan-inducing crackers gags may not be missed, Mr Parks is unhappy about what he sees as the end of more sophisticated word-play. He blames authors, for chasing international success by writing in simpler easier-to-translate language: 

&quot;What seems doomed to disappear, or at least to risk neglect, is the kind of work that revels in the subtle nuances of its own language and literary culture, the sort of writing that can savage or celebrate the way this or that linguistic group really lives. In the global literary market there will be no place for any Barbara Pyms and Natalia Ginzburgs. Shakespeare would have eased off the puns. A new Jane Austen can forget the Nobel.&quot;

Lori Gottlieb&apos;s book Just Marry Him: The Case for Settling for Mr Good Enough has caused an online furore according to Adelle Waldman in More Intelligent Life. She explains why she isn&apos;t so turned off by the idea:

&quot;She debunks the vapid &apos;You go, girl!&apos; form of empowerment, which often harms women by suggesting that they shouldn&apos;t settle for less than everything. As a television series, Sex and the City dramatised some of the challenges (and perks) of looking for love as a mature woman. Unfortunately its big-screen culmination delivered a very Hollywood ending - fluffily satisfying, but hardly representative. Gottlieb, in contrast, tells her story as if she were speaking to a roomful of adults, who can be trusted not to faint at bad news.&quot;

Links in full
Zach Zorich  &#124; Archaeology  &#124; Should we clone Neanderthals?
Tim Parks  &#124; New York Review of Books  &#124; The dull new global novel
Adelle Waldman &#124; More Intelligent Life  &#124;Just marry him?
</description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_152.shtml</link>
         <guid>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_152.shtml</guid>
         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Thu, 11 Feb 2010 14:35:51 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: the band that showed corporate America how to do business, why authors write books when they earn barely more than minimum wage, and what happens when film stars and surrealists mix.

&bull; Joshua Green in the Atlantic says the Grateful Dead have long been a subject of academic curiosity. One of the first journal articles to focus on the rock band appeared in the Journal of Psychedelic Drugs about the LSD consumption of fans. But Mr Green argues that oddly enough, the band's influence on the business world may turn out to be a significant part of its legacy. Not only were they the first to give away free stuff, but lyricist John Perry Barlow was an internet pioneer. All in all, Mr Green says, they changed business:
"Without intending to - while intending, in fact, to do just the opposite - the band pioneered ideas and practices that were subsequently embraced by corporate America. One was to focus intensely on its most loyal fans. It established a telephone hotline to alert them to its touring schedule ahead of any public announcement, reserved for them some of the best seats in the house, and capped the price of tickets, which the band distributed through its own mail-order house... Treating customers well may sound like common sense. But it represented a break from the top-down ethos of many organizations in the 1960s and 70s. Only in the 80s, faced with competition from Japan, did American CEOs and management theorists widely adopt a customer-first orientation."

&bull; In the Big Picture, economist and author Barry Ritholtz works out he earned less than $10 an hour to write his book about the bank bailouts. Given that other authors tell him he's lucky to break even, he wonders why people bother writing books:
"People who otherwise wouldn't have thought twice about you (Him? He's an idiot!) suddenly start to take you seriously. You become 'the guy who wrote the book'. Your speaking fees double, your regular business benefits. Other publishers start pitching you book ideas. In general, your personal brand becomes more valuable. My friend (and book agent) Lloyd Jassin says you write a book to Build your Brand.  And there is much truth to that."

&bull; Film actress Ali MacGraw has been out of the limelight for decades, save late-night repeats of the film Love Story. In an interview with Sheila Weller for Vanity Fair, she insists she wanted it that way and reminisces about surreal times where, fittingly, Salvador Dali was involved:
"'At one surreal cocktail party, the two most extraordinary people were Richard Nixon - so uncomfortable that his small talk was heartbreaking - and Salvador Dali,' she says. When MacGraw complimented Dali on his 'incredible cloisonne walking stick', he invited her to the King Cole Bar, in the St Regis hotel, where he held lecherous court over a coterie of ingenues. MacGraw beat a hasty exit, but Dali later sent her a gift-boxed, imitation-pearl-encrusted live iguana."]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_151.shtml</link>
         <guid>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_151.shtml</guid>
         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Wed, 10 Feb 2010 16:54:17 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: the result of a comedy show audience's political manifesto, Generation X and the end of pop culture and reading the mood of graffiti.

&bull; Activist and comedian Mark Thomas is giving someone the chance to stand in the next election with a manifesto collected from ideas thrown about at his comedy gigs. He's produced the "people's manifesto" which includes, among the anti-MP, anti-banker anger he says you might expect, a promise of more feral chickens breeding on round abouts to encourage drivers to slow down, celebrity death requests and more:
"One chap in Leicester wrote:
'Everything in supermarkets should be stacked in alphabetical order.' Pondering a world where Hovis would be found next to Hobnobs or coffee next to cotton wool, I congratulated this chap saying that I thought his policy was very funny. He fixed me firmly with a glare and said, 'It's not funny, it's serious. I can't find anything.'"

&bull; The writer who popularised the term "Generation X", Douglas Coupland, declares pop culture over in the New York Times magazine: 
"I'm starting to wonder if pop culture is in its dying days, because everyone is able to customize their own lives with the images they want to see and the words they want to read and the music they listen to. You don't have the broader trends like you used to."

Questioned on how the the success of Avatar and Harry Potter fitted into this, he stuck to his guns:

"They're not great cultural megatrends like disco, which involved absolutely everyone in the culture. Now, everyone basically is their own microculture, their own nanoculture, their own generation."

&bull; Quinn Dombrowski has carried out a longlitudinal study of graffiti scrawled on the walls of  Chicago University's library. He says he hopes to gain an insight into student life much like insights of streetlife from Pompeii's ancient graffiti. He's transcribed 620 "pieces" of graffiti since 2007 and put them on his website, Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur. He analyses students' declarations of love and hate to find whether they correlate with the seasons:
"The prevalence of graffiti referring to love, despair, and sex varies depending on the time of year, in rather surprising ways. Love peaks in October - right as the school year starts - and remains at that high level through November, when despair also peaks (around the time of fall quarter midterms). After November, both love and despair graffiti drop off significantly until spring. Love peaks again in April (beginning of spring quarter) before falling off in May, when despair has its second peak."


Links in full

Mark Thomas &#124; The People's manifesto
Deborah Solomon &#124; New York Times magazine &#124; Dreaming of a White Olympics
Quinn Dombrowski &#124; Crescat Graffiti, Vita Excolatur ]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_150.shtml</link>
         <guid>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_150.shtml</guid>
         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Tue, 09 Feb 2010 16:20:18 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: confessions of a recluse's gatekeeper, why we love a good fight and the economics of reading.

&bull; Every good celebrity recluse, it appears as staff to help them, well, reclude. One such gatekeeper, Joanna Smith Rakoff maps out the job in Slate. She remembers her reluctant role replying to JD Salinger's fan mail with polite rejections:
"We were Salinger's gatekeepers - charged with protecting his life and work - but in order to do so, we had to buy into the mythology that had sprung up around the man, too. We had to believe that Salinger's privacy was the most important thing in the world, to be protected at all costs. And in order to make this leap of faith, we needed to believe that Salinger, as his fans insisted in the letters I fielded daily, was the greatest writer of the 20th century. It was an honor I wasn't willing to bestow."

&bull; Having written a protester's handbook, Bibi van der Zee says she gets accused of only being interested in protests when a fight breaks out. In the New Statesman she looks at why violence is so interesting: 
"Anyone who has ever seen a fight break out and has an honest streak in their body will admit that, at some level, they just wanted to stand and gawp. There is a moment in a bar, or at a gig, or at a protest, when anything could happen. When violence begins to break its way up through the concrete, suddenly everything you know about people is useless and that isfascinating. Frightening, upsetting and terrifying in the way it can spiral out of control, in the way that violence breeds more violence, more anger and pain. But fascinating, too."

&bull; A debate has been started on the web after Martin Amis revealed in an interview with Prospect magazine, mentioned in Web Monitor, that he doesn't read younger authors' work. His theory goes that time is yet to tell if their work is any good and he isn't prepared to risk wasting his time on a bad book.
Norm Geras in his blog Normblog disagrees with this method of selecting your reading:
"It's possible to enjoy a book, come to think of it, that may not stand the test of the ages. So what if it doesn't? You can read those that do as well."
Ian Lesley in his blog Marbury thinks time is too short, so is on Martin Amis's side:
"So what you need is a way of reliably predicting which books you'll enjoy most (or at least minimising the inevitable unreliability of any strategy). The test of time - of previous readers - is the best predictive test available to us (and no, I don't feel bad about free-riding off other people's 'work' in this instance)."

Links in full

Joanna Smith Rakoff &#124;Slate &#124; My adventures answering J.D. Salinger's mail
Bibi van der Zee &#124; New Statesman &#124; Why we all love a fight
Norman Geras &#124; Normblog &#124; Rules for reading

Ian Leslie &#124; Marbury &#124; The economics of reading
]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_149.shtml</link>
         <guid>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_149.shtml</guid>
         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Mon, 08 Feb 2010 15:15:13 +0000</pubDate>
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      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: artificial-limb envy, chicken feed and testing whether bonuses work.

&bull; Could we enter an age of artificial limb envy? That is what Paul Hochman in Fast Company is trying to convince us. He puts across an argument that the prosthetic limb industry is about to enter an age of high profit due a future increase in amputees from diabetes related diseases and better engineering. He talks to Hugh Herr, double amputee director of the Biomechatronics Group at the MIT Media Lab:
 
"It's actually unfair. As tech advancements in prosthetics come along, amputees can exploit those improvements. They can get upgrades. A person with a natural body can't." 

&bull; What can managers learn from chickens? Peter Lennox in the Times Higher Education Supplement conducts a self-confessedly unscientific study into chicken transferable poultry skills. He promises they can teach us lots about behaviour, ethics, evolution and the "psychopathic nature of modern efficiency". His ideas about chickens' inner-thoughts and existential angst are, by necessity, based on guesswork - but he supplements this supposition with some observations of human behaviour:

"Watching chickens helps us understand human motivations and interactions, which is doubtless why so many words and phrases in common parlance are redolent of the hen yard: 'pecking order', 'cockiness', 'ruffling somebody's feathers', 'taking somebody under your wing', 'fussing like a mother hen', 'strutting', a 'bantamweight fighter', 'clipping someone's wings', 'beady eyes', 'chicks', 'to crow', 'to flock', 'get in a flap', 'coming home to roost', 'don't count your chickens before they're hatched', 'nest eggs' and 'preening'." 

&bull; Never mind the ethics of bankers' bonuses, behavioural economics professor Dan Ariely says in Wired that his research shows bonuses don't even work. They could in fact make things worse. Prof Ariely describes the effect of carrot-dangling in his experiments:
 
"We asked them, for example, to assemble puzzles and to play memory games while throwing tennis balls at a target. We promised about a third of them one day's pay if they performed well. Another third were promised two weeks' pay. The last third could earn a full five months' pay. (Before you ask where you can participate in our experiments, I should tell you that we ran this study in India, where the cost of living is relatively low.)
&nbsp;
"What happened? The low-and medium-bonus groups performed the same. The big-bonus group performed worst of all." 
He goes on to make a provocative conclusion:
 "The financial crisis, perhaps, didn't happen in spite of the bonuses, but because of them." 

Links in full

Paul Hochman &#124 Fast Company &#124 Prostheses You'll Envy 
Peter Lennox &#124 Times Higher Education &#124 Pecking order
Dan Ariely &#124; Wired &#124 Bonuses boost activity not quality
]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_148.shtml</link>
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         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Thu, 04 Feb 2010 14:30:06 +0000</pubDate>
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      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: the new reason we multitask, how to survive a 35,000ft fall and the science behind the cowboy films.

&bull; Scientists, surprisingly, have been studying the question of why the good guy always wins in a Hollywood shoot-out. Debora MacKenzie in the New Scientist says Nobel prize winner Niels Bohr has a theory about this - the good guys are second to draw their gun and are quicker at reacting. Now she's found another scientist Andrew Welchman who's found this may not be true in real life:

"Now Welchman says neuroscience doesn't support Hollywood's portrayal either. The only way the last guy to draw could win is if the reactive part of the brain makes him move so fast that the time it takes him to draw, plus his reaction time, is less than the time it takes the first guy just to draw."

&bull; If you're reading this while you should be working then you may credit yourself with being able to multitask. David Glenn at the Chronicle of Higher Education thinks multitasking is a myth which has developed over the last decade.

Clifford Nass, a professor of psychology at Stanford University has previously found that multitaskers are the worst at multitasking. He told Mr Glenn the motivations behind multitasking need to be considered:

"One of the deepest questions in this field... is whether media multitasking is driven by a desire for new information or by an avoidance of existing information. Are people in these settings multitasking because the other media are alluring--that is, they're really dying to play Freecell or read Facebook or shop on eBay--or is it just an aversion to the task at hand?"

&bull; Dan Koeppel in Popular Mechanics dispels a myth that falling out of a plane means dying. In How to Fall 35,000 Feet - And Survive he gives a countdown of what to do should the event arise:

"Granted, the odds of surviving a 6-mile plummet are extra¬ordinarily slim, but at this point you've got nothing to lose by understanding your situation. There are two ways to fall out of a plane. The first is to free-fall, or drop from the sky with absolutely no protection or means of slowing your descent. The second is to become a wreckage rider, a term coined by Massachusetts-based amateur historian Jim Hamilton, who developed the Free Fall Research Page--an online database of nearly every imaginable human plummet. That classification means you have the advantage of being attached to a chunk of the plane."


Links in full

David Glenn &#124; Chronicle of Higher Education &#124; Divided Attention
Dan Koeppel &#124; Popular Mechanics &#124; How to Fall 35,000 Feet - And Survive
David Glenn &#124; Chronicle of Higher Education &#124; Divided Attention
Debora MacKenzie &#124; New Scientist &#124; Draw! The neuroscience behind Hollywood shoot-outs
]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_147.shtml</link>
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         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Wed, 03 Feb 2010 15:39:26 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: graduation day with the queen of the wizards, Geordie trucker confessions and the emergence of the "spokespirate".

&bull; An old JK Rowling commencement speech at Harvard has been buzzing around the web since it was posted on the lecture-sharing website Ted. After wondering what pearls of wisdom she could pass on to Harvard graduates, Ms Rowling decided they wouldn't know enough about failure because, as she puts it, "[t]he fact that you are graduating from Harvard suggests that you are not very well-acquainted with failure." 

She explains that if it weren't for failing "to an epic scale", she wouldn't have written the Harry Potter books:

"An exceptionally short-lived marriage had imploded, and I was jobless, a lone parent, and as poor as it is possible to be in modern Britain, without being homeless. The fears that my parents had had for me, and that I had had for myself, had both come to pass, and by every usual standard, I was the biggest failure I knew.
&nbsp;
"I stopped pretending to myself that I was anything other than what I was, and began to direct all my energy into finishing the only work that mattered to me. Had I really succeeded at anything else, I might never have found the determination to succeed in the one arena I believed I truly belonged."

&bull; If one ever wonders about how a tabloid journalist looks back at his or her work, Web Monitor can offer a little insight from Jon Craig who now works for Sky's Boulton and Co blog; he reveals his part in a "slur" of Mo Mowlam while at the Daily Express: 

"Now, it wasn't me, back in my Fleet Street days, who wrote in 1997 that she looked like 'an only slightly effeminate Geordie trucker'.
&nbsp;
"That was the late Lynda Lee Potter, in the Daily Mail. But it was my story in the Daily Express the day before about Mo's dramatic change in appearance that got the lady columnists sharpening their claws...
&nbsp;
"Naturally, my memory was jogged when I watched the Channel 4 film, Mo, starring the brilliant Julie Walters, and I think I probably cringed in my front room as I heard her read out the Lynda Lee Potter 'Geordie trucker' column in horror."

&bull; Mark Liberman at the blog Language Log has been carefully documenting new words for the last seven years. He's found a new word that has tickled him: "spokespirate", found in an article about Somali pirates in Newser: 

"'They are the ones pirating mankind for many years,' a spokespirate tells Agencia Matriz del Sur."

Mr Liberman adds that he suspects the word isn't completely original, but that he hasn't seen it used in reference to "ship-jacking" pirates. Language Log, incidentally, is also mentioned in yesterday's conversation at the Guardian about that newspaper's use of the "gate" suffix to indicate a scandal.

Links in full
JK Rowling &#124; Ted &#124; The fringe benefits of failure
Jon Craig &#124; Sky News &#124; Mo, me and the 'Geordie trucker' slur
Mark Liberman &#124; Language Log &#124; Spokespirate
]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_146.shtml</link>
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         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Tue, 02 Feb 2010 15:11:33 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: wasted youth, Stephen Fry's failed hiatus and what happens when the restaurant critic eats on the High Street.

 &bull; In an interview where he reveals his least favourite author, Martin Amis in Prospect magazine dismisses younger writers as a waste of time:

"But it's a fantastically uneconomical way of reading, to read your youngers. No-one knows if they are any good. Only time knows that."

It turns out he cringes at his own early work, which was, Web Monitor understands, much-feted at the time:

"I tried to read The Rachel Papers [Amis's first novel] recently, to reacquaint myself with what it is like to be 20 or 19, and I couldn't read it. I knew it quite well so I knew all the good bits, the not bad bits, but as a structure and as a... the craft is pitiful."

&bull; Stephen Fry is not doing too well with his self-imposed microblogging hiatus. He promised to take a Twitter holiday to work on his memoirs, since when he has tweeted over 40 times. Most recently, promising he is just "popping up again quickly", he is pointing his followers to a protest song concerning the government's file-sharing plans.

&bull; Most restaurant reviewers visit places where Web Monitor wouldn't be able to afford the starters. In the New Statesman, Will Self has been working his sedentary way around fast food outlets. He is unsurprisingly downbeat about most, but the Japanese noodle chain Wagamamas almost gets a compliment. Mr Self seems perturbed at his near-magnanimity:
 "Sometimes I think my ideal meal out is being served a slice of white bread by an aggressive anaesthetist in an operating theatre." 

Links in full

Tom Chatfield &#124; Prospect &#124; Martin Amis: the Prospect interview
Stephen Fry &#124; Twitter
Will Self &#124; New Statesman &#124; Real Meals: Mama said knock udon out
]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_145.shtml</link>
         <guid>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/02/web_monitor_145.shtml</guid>
         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Mon, 01 Feb 2010 16:10:02 +0000</pubDate>
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      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today on Web Monitor: Ozzy Osbourne's kind of autobiography, the source of a Hollywood producer's outburst and slum chic. 

&bull; Ozzy Osbourne has been promoting his autobiography. Actually, perhaps "autobiography" is not the mot juste, since none of it was written by Osbourne. Talking to Cole Louison at GQ he admitted (in his usual colourful language) that he never put pen to paper. Otherwise he wouldn't have got anywhere:
"I'd still be writing the first page. I got a ghostwriter, Chris [Ayres], and he was relatively easy to work with. I have a thousand and one stories, so went pretty quickly. We actually had enough for two books."

&bull; Web Monitor previously mentioned an outburst from Hollywood producer Harvey Weinstein in the blog Letters of Note. The letter complained that director Errol Morris was so boring in an interview promoting his film that there may be need for an actor to play him in future. Now blogger Jason Kottke has tracked down what seems likely to be the NPR radio interview which provoked such a reaction. 

&bull; Believe it or not, slums are fast becoming fashionable among town planners, Stewart Brand at Prospect magazine reports. Praised for their "walkability", if not their hygiene and living standards, they are also noted for their thriving business life:
"Alleyways in squatter cities, for example, are a dense interplay of retail and services -- one-chair barbershops and three-seat bars interspersed with the clothes racks and fruit tables. One proposal is to use these as a model for shopping areas."

Links in full

Cole Louison &#124 GQ &#124 Yes, Ozzy Osbourne Wrote A Book (Kinda)
Errol Morris &#124 NPR &#124 Filmmaker as Detective
Stewart Brand &#124; Prospect &#124; How slums can save the planet]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/01/web_monitor_144.shtml</link>
         <guid>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/01/web_monitor_144.shtml</guid>
         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Thu, 28 Jan 2010 16:34:58 +0000</pubDate>
      </item>
      
      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: a dying music genre, how to sell a movie and confessions of a book pirate.

&bull; It's fun for cultural commentators to pronounce musical genres dead. But for Rachel Maddux at Paste magazine, when she proclaimed indie music dead, she had another problem: defining what it is. She gives it a go:
"Indie is, at once, a genre (of music first, and then of film, books, video games and anything else with a perceived arty sensibility, regardless of its relationship to a corporation), an ethos, a business model, a demographic and a marketing tool. It can signify everything, and it can signify nothing. It stands among the most important, potentially sustainable and meaningful movements in American popular culture - not just music, but for the whole cultural landscape. But because it was originally sculpted more in terms of what it opposed than what it stood for, the only universally held truth about 'indie' is that nobody agrees on what it means." 

&bull; The blog Letters of Note collects correspondence they say deserves a wider audience. They've published a letter from the Hollywood studio head Harvey Weinstein to documentary maker Errol Morris after a promotional interview for the film, which later went on to win many awards. The producer finished with the greatest put down Web Monitor has seen:
"If you continue to be boring, I will hire an actor in New York to pretend that he's Errol Morris. If you have any casting suggestions, I'd appreciate that." 

&bull; In anticipation of e-readers increasing book piracy, much like film and music piracy. C Max Magee at the Millions found someone who pirates books now. Calling themselves "The Real Caterpillar" they told the Millions the whole process can take over 40 hours for one book, which begs the question why bother:
"The dearth of material I was interested in is what prompted me to scan in the past, in order to share some of my favorite, less popular authors with as many people as possible... I assume they [pirated books] are primarily produced by individuals like me - bibliophiles who want to share their favorite books with others. They likely own hundreds of books, and when asked what their favorite book is look at you like you are crazy before rattling of 10-15 authors, and then emailing you later with several more. The next time you see them, they have a bag of 5-10 books for you to borrow." 

Links in full


C. Max Magee &#124; The Millions &#124; Confessions of a Book Pirate
You're boring &#124;  Letters of Note
Rachael Maddux &#124; Paste Magazine &#124; Is Indie Dead?]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/01/a_celebration_of_the_riches.shtml</link>
         <guid>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/01/a_celebration_of_the_riches.shtml</guid>
         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Wed, 27 Jan 2010 15:26:14 +0000</pubDate>
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      <item>
         <title>Web Monitor</title>
         <description><![CDATA[A celebration of the riches of the web.

Today in Web Monitor: ageing and the action film, getting the message out and why computers in films aren't like those in real life.

&bull; Mel Gibson reveals to Jeanne Wolf in Parade Magazine that he's started feeling the strain of action scenes:
"It's getting harder. You wake up the next day like road kill, even though it's just pretend fighting. Having some 25-year-old guy jamming you into walls and stuff wreaks havoc with your lumbar. I usually book a chiropractor in advance because you know it's gonna suck."

&bull; Stephen Battersby at New Scientist opens a cosmic can of worms when he considers the astronomer's dilemma to be discussed in April: after decades of listening out for extra-terrestrial life and hearing nothing, should we be sending out our own messages? And if so, what would ET be interested in?. Mr Battersby's conclusions are a little suprising:
"If Earth's efforts are anything to go by, we can expect a basic maths lesson and some pictures of naked aliens."

&bull; Petra Maya at the radio station NPR asks why computers in films are nothing like those in real life. She turns to graphic interface designer Mark Coleran who is responsible for designing computer screens in films such as The Bourne Identity. One reason is that when computers started appearing in films, not everyone knew what they actually looked like - but knew what video games looked like. The use of large text stuck because it got the message across clearly. 
Now, he says, life is imitating art: 
"The interfaces Coleran creates can seem fantastically futuristic - he gets a lot of inspiration from university software labs and prototypes from companies like Microsoft. But occasionally a product hits the market that bears an uncanny resemblance to one of his fantasy designs. 'And unfairly,' he says, 'sometimes we get credit for it.'"


Links in full

Jeanne Wolf &#124; Parade &#124; 'Life's Experiences Season You'
Stephen Battersby &#124; New Scientist &#124; Exolanguage: do you speak alien? 
Petra Maya &#124; NPR &#124; Hollywood's Computers]]></description>
         <link>https://meleleh.pages.dev/blogs/magazinemonitor/2010/01/web_monitor_143.shtml</link>
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         <category>Web Monitor</category>
         <pubDate>Tue, 26 Jan 2010 15:27:23 +0000</pubDate>
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