Eighteen years ago today, CERN released the source code of WorldWideWeb — the first Web browser and editor — into the public domain. Tim Berners-Lee has some screen shots of the browser at his CERN page.
via WorldWideWeb: 18 years in the public domain – Boing Boing.
Earlier this year, the UK-based non-profit organization Media Standards Trust created the website Churnalism as a tool to determine when “journalism†is actually just a cut-and-pasted press release. Here’s how it works: you enter the text of a press release into the site’s “Churn Engine†which searches its article database to find the articles with the worst “Churn Rating,†i.e. the most egregious copying of the press releases.
Tracking churn, via MOBYLIVES
The 2011 BTBA Fiction Finalists (in alphabetical order by author):
The Literary Conference by César Aira, translated from the Spanish by Katherine Silver (New Directions)
The Golden Age by Michal Ajvaz, translated from the Czech by Andrew Oakland (Dalkey Archive)
A Life on Paper by Georges-Olivier Châteaureynaud, translated from the French by Edward Gauvin (Small Beer)
The Jokers by Albert Cossery, translated from the French by Anna Moschovakis (New York Review Books)
Visitation by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky (New Directions)
Hocus Bogus by Romain Gary (writing as Émile Ajar), translated from the French by David Bellos (Yale University Press)
The True Deceiver by Tove Jansson, translated from the Swedish by Thomas Teal (New York Review Books)
On Elegance While Sleeping by Emilio Lascano Tegui, translated from the Spanish by Idra Novey (Dalkey Archive)
Agaat by Marlene Van Niekerk, translated from the Afrikaans by Michiel Heyns (Tin House)
Georg Letham: Physician and Murderer by Ernst Weiss, translated from the German by Joel Rotenberg (Archipelago)
The 2011 BTBA Poetry Finalists (in alphabetical order by author):
Geometries by Guillevic, translated from the French by Richard Sieburth (Ugly Duckling Presse)
Time of Sky & Castles in the Air by Ayane Kawata, translated from the Japanese by Sawako Nakayasu (Litmus Press)
Child of Nature by Luljeta Lleshanaku, translated from the Albanian by Henry Israeli and Shpresa Qatipi (New Directions)
The Book of Things by Aleš Šteger, translated from the Slovenian by Brian Henry (BOA Editions)
Flash Cards by Yu Jian, translated from the Chinese by Wang Ping and Ron Padgett (Zephyr Press)
Best Translated Book Award Winners Announced Tomorrow | Full-Stop.net.
What everyone knows about Harper Lee, born on this day, April 28th in 1926, is that she wrote only one book, To Kill a Mockingbird, and that, although still living in her hometown of Monroeville, Alabama, she has declined to speak about it for the past forty-five years
In the current Literary Review, University of Liverpool professor Philip Davis, author of Shakespeare Thinking, describes his ongoing collaborations with neuroscientists to study The Bard’s syntax and one of his favorite linguistic tricks: the functional shift. One kind of functional shift is the “verbing” of a noun — for example, “parenting our children.” Shakespeare frequently verbed nouns to great effect and Davis wanted to find out if the literary device could be understood with neuroscience. So he and his colleagues are using EEG and other methods to measure the brain’s response to Shakespearian functional shifts.
