All posts by Adam

Worth Noting: Author gets $4.20 (print book) vs $2.27 (ebook)

The upshot: From an e-book sale, an author makes a little more than half what he or she makes from a hardcover sale.

The new economics of the e-book make the author’s quandary painfully clear: A new $28 hardcover book returns half, or $14, to the publisher, and 15%, or $4.20, to the author. Under many e-book deals currently, a digital book sells for $12.99, returning 70%, or $9.09, to the publisher and typically 25% of that, or $2.27, to the author.

(via)

Two ways to read [a banned book]

Un libro, una sensación, una canción.

Hmm, how intriguing: we apparently have two ways to read…including reading a banned book:

It turns out that the literate brain contains two distinct pathways for making sense of words, which are activated in different contexts. One pathway is known as the ventral route, and it’s direct and efficient, accounting for the vast majority of our reading. The process goes like this: We see a group of letters, convert those letters into a word, and then directly grasp the word’s semantic meaning.

The second reading pathway – it’s known as the dorsal stream – is turned on whenever we’re forced to pay conscious attention to a sentence, perhaps because of an obscure word, or an awkward subclause, or bad handwriting.
Although scientists had previously assumed that the dorsal route ceased to be active once we became literate, Deheane’s research demonstrates that even fluent adults are still forced to occasionally make sense of texts. We’re suddenly conscious of the words on the page; the automatic act has lost its automaticity.
Read more at Wired’s Frontal Cortext blog

(via)

‘Third World America’ : How the world (or, er, one magazine in Canada) see the US

third world america

The Sept. 20, 2010 issue of Maclean’s Magazine (a Canadian newsweekly, much like Time or Newsweek) offers us an article entitled “Third World America: Collapsing bridges, street lights turned off…:the decline of a superpower.”

Do you you agree or disagree with that sentiment?

A pull-quote from the article:

A pared-down police force, how can people be safe, a county judge was asked: “Arm yourselves.”

So, is this the unvarnished truth or merely scare tactics?  What do you think?  Where are we headed as a country, economically- and culturally-speaking?

Librarians Abandon Dewey Decimal System in Favor of Netflix Categories

maxpower on flickr

So,  would YOU enjoy using a library that classifies its books according to Netflix categories instead of a ‘normal’ library classification system like Dewey or Library of Congress?

“There has definitely been some healthy debate as to where some of our books will now live,” said Poleman, recounting a particularly heated debate about whether Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights belonged in the “Romantic Comedy” or “Cerebral Drama” section.

(found via what’s in rebecca’s pocket?)

Dance in order to explain your research? Yes, why not?

Here’s an idea:  See if your English instructor or your Speech / Communications instructor would allow you to dance in order to explain your research.

You see the American Association for the Advancement of Science has put on the third annual Dance Your Ph.D. competition wherein a Ph.D thesis is explained with a dance routine.

Here is one of the finalists.   Enjoy.

Selection of a DNA aptamer for homocysteine using SELEX by Maureen McKeague

(found via Boing Boing)