For all its many virtues, the fifth edition is not perfect. Its one glaring flaw is an introductory essay written by the chairman of the Usage Panel, Steven Pinker, a Harvard University linguist and cognitive scientist who is also an avowed descriptivist. In “Usage in The American Heritage Dictionary,†Pinker writes, “(W)hen many speakers misuse a word on many occasions in the same way — like credible for credulous, enervate for excite, or protagonist for proponent – who’s to say they’re wrong? When enough people misuse a word, it becomes perverse to insist that they’re misusing it at all.â€
A team of Canadian researchers have uncovered an unusual new example of “upstream filtering,†where online content in one country is blocked in another country due to filtering that happens in transit.
Researchers at the Citizen Lab at the Munk School of Global Affairs at the University of Toronto, revealed that some Oman Internet users using the Omantel ISP are also being subjected to Indian content restrictions because of traffic flowing through India.
“It goes to show what you can find when you begin to probe beneath the surface of the Internet, and what you see when you have governments start to mess with the openness of the Internet,†Ron Deibert, Citizen Lab’s director, told Ars on Thursday. “In this case you have a perverse situation where citizens in one country are subject to filtering in another country.â€
The writer F. Scott Fitzgerald considered, among other things, in this letter with his editor, Maxwell Perkins, to alternate name for his novel ‘The Great Gatsby.’Â He was leaning towards: “Gold-hatted Gatsby”
The front page of the New York Times Book Review has always been—and continues to be—a much coveted spot for authors and publishers alike. But just how much does a Book Review cover affect a book’s sales in today’s publishing climate
PW found that the Gray Lady still has influence in the minds of readers, though not nearly on a big enough scale to seriously alter a book’s fortunes…
