THE LO LAT SONG - A NEW SONG IN TAIWANESE music BY 簡定原-- vocals by 李怡樺 - produced by 丹布隆

一個老美的主張：''New Taiwan'' ◎Dan Bloom

2011-10-24T19:46:00.000-07:00

Original English letter in the Taipei Times：New Taiwan ......◎丹布隆 (Dan Bloom)

Dear Editor,

Now that the Double Ten Day festivities celebrating the 100th

anniversary of the revolutionary uprising that led to the founding of

the Republic of China in 1912 are over, I would like to suggest that

for the next 100 years, Taiwan be referred to in Chinese and in

English as [“New Taiwan.”]

This new name is meant to symbolize the fact that a new Taiwan is

rising from the history of the first 100 years, and that the next

century might be a time when old, outdated ethnic divisions and

political party mudslinging will be transformed into ethnic harmony

and political cooperation across party lines.

This ''New Taiwan'' could become a lighthouse of hope for the 23

million people living here, as well as for overseas Taiwanese living

in Japan, North America, Europe and elsewhere.

And who knows, by the year 2111, the population of NEW TAIWAN ight

reach 40 million or more, some of whom will be descendants of new

immigrants from Vietnam, Cambodia, the Philippines, Thailand and

China.

Think of it. A '''New Taiwan'' — out with the old, in the with new.

There is already New Taipei City (新北市), and many other place names

around the world with “new” in their names, such as New Zealand and

New Caledonia, New Orleans and New York, New Mexico and New Jersey.

So let's start calling this country as “New Taiwan” to signal a new

century of life for this evolving island nation that never gives up.

一個老美的主張
(email at: bikolang@gmail.com )

翻譯者：黃大河

Dear Friends in Taiwan and overseas:
慶祝建國百年的熱度開始消退之際，我這在台居住近二十年的老美，很想為台灣獻上接下來百年的願景。

筆者知道，百年前建國時，中華民國「在」中國大陸。

六十年前撤退來台時，是中華民國「來」台灣。後來李登輝總統修飾為中華民國「在」台灣，最近蔡英文女士又更新為中華民國「是」台灣。

筆者則深信未來的一百年，台灣應該脫掉中華民國牌的舊衣，改穿新台灣牌（New Taiwan）的新衣。

披上新衣的新台灣，向全世界宣示台灣在未來的一百年，將是新而獨立的國家，是擺脫政黨惡鬥，轉型族群融洽的國家。

這個新台灣，也將成為全台兩千三百萬人民的新希望，同時也會成為長住日本、北美、歐洲及其他地區海外華人的精神燈塔。筆者期許除舊迎新的新台灣，百年後會像今日美國，由來自不同國家、不同民族的後裔，如越南、泰國、菲律賓、中國等新移民，構成新台灣國的公民。

世界上有很多類似的新興國家或區域，採用新字（New）開頭的名字如：New Zealand、New York、New Orleans、New Jersey、New Caledonia等。讓我們齊聲協力在下一個百年的起始年推動「新台灣」，不達目的誓不罷休！

（作者漢名丹布隆，美籍媒體人
http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/；
翻譯者：黃大河）自由時報1024

Click to enlarge to see LO LAT entered as name of tree contest

2011-10-19T20:24:00.001-07:00

Chapter 7, the book, the movie, the screenplay, the dream, the plan, circa 2080....

2011-10-17T07:37:00.000-07:00

Ah-Ye's Fantastic Beef Hot Pot Restaurant in Rende, Tainan County.......NT$1100 for two people.....but oishii!

2011-10-16T20:23:00.001-07:00

I think we ate every part of the cow, from head to toe, including tail and LP!

Showtime! with Huang Fei, national treasure of Taiwan! and Ginny and her Dad and Gaki of SEEDIQ BALE movie! -- a nice trip to Tainan Country memories

2011-10-16T20:19:00.000-07:00

ABOVE: Ginny with her dog Poter in Tainan, and her friend Gaki and her father at exhibition in "Yongkang District Socialist Education Center"(永康社教館) in Tainan. Gaki is one of the actors in SEEDIQ BALE the movie. I met Ginny and her father on Sunday night at the temple in Lonchi while waiting for the Huang Fei mini-concert to begin. ABOVE SOME PHOTOS BACKSTAGE BEFORE THE SHOW BEGAN.

On the road to Tainan to see Huang Fei mini-concert, with Richard Huang, no relation, driving his Altis Toyota Corolla sedan with GPS map

2011-10-16T20:16:00.000-07:00

LO LAT hand sign created by students at Chung Cheng University in Chiayi

2011-10-13T06:22:00.000-07:00

The gentleman on the extreme right of the photo, Tyler Chou, who studied in

San Diego for a year, came up with this idea on the spot in ten seconds, and I immediately said I LOVE IT, PERFECT. so now we have universal hand sign for two L's, signifying LO....LAT..... Thank you Tyler, and thank you, CCU!

老外推廣「魯力」已集滿千句 - LO LAT SONG OF TAIWAN

2011-10-07T21:54:00.000-07:00

Listen to SOUND HERE: and turn volumne to highest sound:

TTV news story by FTV TV reporter in Chiayi, September 8, 2011, aired nationwide on TVBS, ETTV, San Lih TV, cti-TV, FTV and TTV.

老外推廣「魯力」- ''LO LAT'' - 已集滿千句

在嘉義，有位熱愛台灣的美國人丹布隆，他極力推廣這句台語:魯力，也就是謝謝的意思，他說，這句話讓他好感動，立志要收集一萬位民眾說魯力，目前已經收集了一千句，最近他還請朋友編了電音版的「魯力歌」，推廣魯力不遺餘力。

THE COMPOSER AND THE VOCALIST: TINO JIAN and AMANDA LEE!
簡定原 ...&.... 李怡樺

''TAIWAN LO LAT'' song sung by country western singer in Texas USA

2011-10-05T19:44:00.000-07:00

YOUTUBE LINK for audio mp3:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=v9U6vcp4KLs

Singer is: J. Gale Kilgore in Texas USA, a retired dentist and country western singer galore

Words written by: ''Biko Lang'' in Taiwan

[Lyrics]

There used to be a place called home where people played and prayed,

Worked hard and raised a family or two

And at the end of the day there was always time to say

LO LAT

LO LAT

----------------------------
When food was scarce the farmers shared their grains and rice

No one starved and no one lost face

And at the end of the day there was always time to say

LO LAT

LO LAT

---------------------
I think you know the place I mean, lost in time, it's not there now

While it's gone and is no more, memories linger, and how!
And at the end of the day there's always time to say

LO LAT

LO LAT

So sing this golden song of yore, and yes you can even today

Travel back with me in time, when there was always time to say

LO LAT

LO LAT

Yes, there used to be a place called home where people played and prayed,

Worked hard and raised a family or two

And at the end of the day there was always time to say

LO LAT

LO LAT

Anna Amanda Lee, vocalist and lyricist for LO LAT SONG, with indie producer Dan Bloom -- MUSIC COMPOSED BY TINO JIAN

2011-10-05T19:34:00.001-07:00

老外推廣「魯力」已集滿千句　編電音「魯力歌」揪三太子助陣　就是愛台灣拚集萬句「魯力」 2011/9/8 蔡崇梧報導列印轉寄討論推薦▼台視新聞

2011-10-02T19:49:00.001-07:00

老外推廣「魯力」已集滿千句　編電音「魯力歌」揪三太子助陣　就是愛台灣拚集萬句「魯力」 2011/9/8 蔡崇梧報導列印轉寄討論推薦▼台視新聞

http://www.ttv.com.tw/100/09/1000908/10009084354001I.htm
TTV tv news show
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

在嘉義，有位熱愛台灣的美國人丹布隆，他極力推廣這句台語:魯力，也就是謝謝的意思，他說，這句話讓他好感動，立志要收集一萬位民眾說魯力，目前已經收集了一千句，最近他還請朋友編了電音版的「魯力歌」，推廣魯力不遺餘力。

站在嘉義市街頭，拼命對著遶境隊伍說魯力，他是美國人丹布隆，到台灣居住15年，他愛上嘉義，也愛上「魯力」這句，表達感謝之意的台語。

立志要錄一萬位民眾說魯力的聲音，剛好碰上廟宇遶境，丹布隆帶著錄音機，邀請民眾加入，說魯力的行列目前已經收集了1000句魯力，不過用說的還不夠，丹布隆揪來繞境隊伍，還揪了電音三太子，一起和地上擺出的魯力字型拍照留念，但丹布隆的壓箱寶，還有這首「魯力歌」，曾經有過小星星版，這回改編電音路線，許多台灣民眾看到一個美國人，竟然如此喜愛台灣，也紛紛向他說聲好棒。

推廣台語「魯力」老外已收集千句 ----- 丹布隆 vs. LO LAT

2011-10-02T19:45:00.000-07:00

http://n.yam.com/view/mkvideopage.php/20110908695399

推廣台語「魯力」老外已收集千句

更新日期:.....2011/....09/.....06
FTV television news show, Chiayi TV office

在嘉義，有位熱愛台灣的美國人丹布隆，他極力推廣這句台語:魯力，也就是謝謝的意思，他說，這句話讓他好感動，立志要收集一萬位民眾說魯力，目前已經收集了一千句，最近他還請朋友編了電音版的「魯力歌」，推廣魯力不遺餘力。

站在嘉義市街頭，拼命對著遶境隊伍說魯力，他是美國人丹布隆，到台灣居住15年，他愛上嘉義，也愛上「魯力」這句，表達感謝之意的台語。

立志要錄一萬位民眾說魯力的聲音，剛好碰上廟宇遶境，丹布隆帶著錄音機，邀請民眾加入，說魯力的行列目前已經收集了1000句魯力，不過用說的還不夠，丹布隆揪來繞境隊伍，還揪了電音三太子，一起和地上擺出的魯力字型拍照留念，但丹布隆的壓箱寶，還有這首「魯力歌」，曾經有過小星星版，這回改編電音路線，許多台灣民眾看到一個美國人，竟然如此喜愛台灣，也紛紛向他說聲好棒。(民視新聞鄭榮文嘉義報導)

這篇新聞讓你覺得？ SMILE!

Dan Bloom is collecting 1 thousand voice signatures, one by one
......he also asked MR JIAN to arrange the electricity sound version “LO LAT the song”, promoted Lu Li to spare no effort. Stands in the Jiayi street corner, went all out to treat 遶 the boundary troop to say the Lu strength, he was American fell in love with Jiayi, also fell in love with “the Lu strength” this, meaning's of the expression thanks Taiwanese. Resolved to record 10,000 populace saying that the Lu Li sound, just bumped into the temple 遶 boundary, Danbulong is bringing the tape recorder, invited the populace to join, said that the Lu Li ranks had collected at present already 1000 Lu strength, but used to say also not 夠, Danbulong clutched circles the boundary troop, but also has clutched electricity sound SANTAIAZI three crown princes, together and ground exhibited Lu Li the font photograph accepted as a memento, but Danbulong pressure box was valuable, but also had this head “Lu Li the song”, once had the too small star version, this chapter of reorganization electricity sound route, many Taiwan populace saw that to an American, unexpectedly so liked Taiwan,Said the sound at ta girl in abundance to him. (FTV news report by Mr Zheng Rong-wen Jiayi TV report) ~~This news lets you think?~~ [SURE DOES. SMILE]

LO LAT SONG - news

2011-10-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

ANNA AMANDA LEE - SINGER AND LYRICIST ...Song Composer 簡定源（Tino）Photo by 江俊亮, CNA

因為一句台語老外出 CD
NOTE: Song was composed by musician 簡定源（''Tino'') ...Lyrics were written by Anna Amanda Lee with producer Dan Bloom.....CD available free of charge by asking for one at email address: bikolang@gmail.com [We will send you a YouTube mp3 of the song, free of charge.]

2011-10-02 （中央社記者 reporter Mr Jaing 江俊亮 嘉義市 Chiayi City Bureau）

因為偶然聽到1句台語的道謝話「櫓力」，讓美籍作家丹布隆覺得很美、很有意義，他除了四處教人說這句古老的台灣話之外，也獲「台灣好謠嬌」樂團主唱義助，為他出1張單曲CD。

在嘉義市住了15年的美籍作家丹布隆（Dan Bloom）是美國波士頓人，曾在法國、義大利、墨西哥、日本等國家工作過，1996年來台，喜歡台灣的小吃與人情味，因此定居下來，自稱「哈台族」。

大學主修文學的丹布隆，除了在學校兼差教英文，幫 China Post、Taipei Times 等報社寫文章之外，也以台灣生活經驗為主題，先後出版過「丹布隆哈上台灣夜市」等幾本中文書及英文童詩。

今年4月，丹布隆在搭公車時，聽到一名老先生向公車司機說「櫓力」（Lo-Lat），讓他覺得很新鮮，因為他從未聽過這個詞彙，問遍大學生及中小學生，幾乎沒有人知道意思。

後來，在老一輩的解說下，丹布隆才知道原來「Lo-Lat」是台語的道謝話，也寫成「櫓力」或「勞力」，除了有「勞您之力」的意思以外，兼具感謝、多謝、勞神、費力、辛苦等多層涵義。

由於「櫓力」這個古老的詞彙，除了老一輩還在使用之外，年輕人幾乎不用，讓丹布隆覺得很可惜，於是大力推廣說「Lo-Lat」運動，他改編兒歌，自己教唱，並將影音上傳網站，獲得熱烈回響。

為了讓更多人認識這個台語詞彙，丹布隆還展開「萬人說Lo-Lat」行動，他拿著錄音機四處找對象，要錄下1萬人說「Lo-Lat」的聲音，如今已錄到1000多句，他還打算要招募各國、各種膚色的人來說「Lo-Lat」。

與丹布隆有一面之緣的「台灣好謠嬌」樂團發起人兼主唱李怡樺（Amanda Lee），5個月前到嘉義，認識了丹布隆，她最近從媒體上在獲悉丹布隆有意將「Lo-Lat」寫成歌、錄成CD，於是義務操刀，為他寫下「The Lo-Lat Song」。

李怡樺還找來曾為藝人伴奏的鍵盤手簡定源（Tino），為「The Lo-Lat Song」編曲、配樂，由於李怡樺住台中，她與丹布隆只靠電話、e-mail溝通，沒想到第2次見面，就把CD送到丹布隆手中，讓丹布隆覺得不可思議。

屏東長大的李怡樺說，她家裡做生意，小時候經常聽父親跟客人說「Lo-Lat」，因此對這句古老的台灣詞彙很有感情，她在「The Lo-Lat Song」第1句就寫「阿嬤，阿公，感謝、櫓力；阿公阿嬤笑瞇瞇」。

為了協助丹布隆推廣說「Lo-Lat」運動，李怡樺在歌詞中也寫道「美國、英國、澳洲、美洲、日本、韓國、聯合國，不管你是啥米人，大家作伙來說Lo-Lat」。

曾經將台灣民謠「午夜花」改編為英文歌詞，並在外國演唱的李怡樺說，為丹布隆出版「The Lo-Lat Song」CD，是「台灣好謠嬌」樂團自去年10月在台北花博會演出之後，她認為最有意義的事。

丹布隆與李怡樺兩人第2次見面，就像多年好友，一聊就是4個小時，李怡樺稱讚丹布隆是「正港ㄟ台灣郎」，丹布隆稱讚李怡樺才華洋溢、「真是天才」，兩人不僅互相讚美，也互道「Lo-Lat」。

The Lo Lat Project

2011-09-16T07:59:00.000-07:00

The Lo Lat Project is thousands of people photographing -- [and
sometimes photoshopping] -- and posting images of the Taiwanese Hoklo
term LO LAT spelled out in big letters in various landscapes or photo images that they make in their home countries.

It's a feel good kind
of thing. LO LAT means "thank you very much" and is a term that is
over 300 years old from Taiwan and it's really means something like
"thank you very much sincerely from the bottom of my heart". But the
term today is hardly used in modern Taiwan, it is deemed to be too
old-fashioned for most people
under the age of 40 now, but it is the hope of the LO LAT Project to
show Taiwanese people young and old that the LO LAT term still has a
power
and fascinattion the world over.

So send in your LO LAT photos wherever you are.

And LO LAT to you!

ABOUT THE LO LAT PROJECT: It is non-profit and for fun. It is to share
the spirit of Taiwan's Hoklo languag with people around the world.
We welcome your participation wherever you live and whatver language you speak. Use your imagination to set your own version of LO LAT spelled out in English letters in any setting you can think of and with any background you want and with any animals or pets or landscapes you dream of.

LO LAT!

LO LAT DOG - Photos by Timothy Chen

2011-09-15T03:00:00.000-07:00

When Banyan Tree and Autumn Maple Tree Got Married

2011-09-15T01:49:00.000-07:00

An old folk tale from Taiwan, translated by Ellen DeSouza

Before Banyan Tree and Autumn Maple Tree held a happy wedding party for all the trees and flowers and animals in the forest of Ludong, they had already been fused together -- like this! (double truck 2 pages artwork here) -- for over 90 years!

Long ago, or so Amah says, a little bird dropped two seeds in the forest one day and they began growing together as a double tree, a fused tree, entwined in each other's roots and branches. This happened in Ludong in Yilan County in 1920 during the Japanese colonial period. As you can imagine, this amazing tree has seen many summers and winters, vibrant springtimes and melancholy falling leaves of autumn!

Two trees, one miracle! Two trees, one wedding!
Two trees, and a party for all the animals and flowers
and insects of the forest!

The wedding invitations went out to all the denizens of the forest. The date was set for November 12. Here is what one invitation, to the butterfly families of Yilan, looked like:

Dear Butterflies of Ludong,

You are cordially invited to attend our wedding at the Gurgling Brook Bridge on Nomveber 12. Please wear your finest colors and be prepared for the best wedding party you ever attended.

Sincerely,

Mr and Mrs Banyan-Maple Tree

And what a wedding it was: deer and fox, squirrels and birds, butterflies and Formosa Landlocked salmon, Formosa Bear and even snails and slugs and sengaga! Horses and cows and pigs and goats! Butterlies of all the colors of the rainbow!

And under a clear blue sky with white clouds high above smiling down on the happy forest, Banyan Tree and Autumn Maple Tree --fused togther already for 90 years, got married ...in quiet wooded grove in Ludong.

Rejoice! Rejoice! The bees and the mice and the crows and the fish all rejoiced, and you could even see the happy fish wriggling their fishy tails in the blue waters below the Gurling Brook Bridge.

The Mayor was there, and the Superintendent of the Foresty Bureau, and over 100 movie stars and TV stars and pop singers from Taipei came to the party as well. It was and always will be remembered as THE FOREST WEDDING OF THE CENTURY!

Said the Ox who was officating at the wedding:

"Do you, Banywan Tree, take Autumn Maple Tree, as your wife today?

I do.

And do you, Autumn Maple Tree, take Banywan Tree, as your husband today?

I ...I.....I do!

I now pronounce you Tree and Tree, fused together now and forever, congratulations to you both, and long live the beautiful Ludong Forest of Yilan County!"

And when the wedding ceremony was over, everyone raised a small glass of mountain dew to congratulate the happy couple, and said GAN BEI and LO LAT.

This is not the End. This is very beginning of a new chapter in
the life of the fused trees of Ludong Forest.

Dear Students,
If you would like to write a letter in your own handwriting to the happy Banywan Tree and the Autumn Maple Tree to tell them your feelings about this book and their wedding, you may write to them at this address:

Ludong Forestry Office
PO BOX 1000
Ludong, Yilan, Taiwan ROC

And every letter they get will be read, and responded to, too.

HEINKEN ''LO LAT'' photos - cute and KUSO! LO LAT means "thank you" in Hoklo Taiwanese...

2011-09-15T00:28:00.000-07:00

LO LAT - CD cover - demo - music composed by 簡定原-- vocals by 李怡樺

2011-09-08T05:02:00.000-07:00

Photos [above] courtesy of 張永澤, National Chiayi University student, Shimin Campus

THE COMPOSER AND THE VOCALIST: TINO JIAN and AMANDA LEE!
簡定原 & 李怡樺

Electronia Version of THE LO LAT SONG for Santaizi Dance Performance

2011-09-06T20:42:00.001-07:00

Music by 簡定原-- Vocals by 李怡樺

丹布隆 ...LO LAT! -- 台羅字幕.......Tsin lóo-la̍t.....(song titled '''The LO LAT song'' )

2011-05-14T06:25:00.000-07:00

挽救台灣話

◎ 丹布隆, 黃大河

台灣人離台灣話越來越遠了，會用「勞力-Lo Lat」表達謝意的人更少。

對岸的廈門人已經開始『挽救廈門話運動』，讓年青一代的廈門人多講廈

門話，但是台灣人呢？會說台語的台灣人幾乎成了稀有品種(diminishing

species)，筆者在日常生活中很難遇上使用台語交談的年輕族群。

看看香港人，他們長久以來都說：「唔該晒你」表達感謝。上海人也使用具有

上海特色的「謝謝儂」。他們似乎都無意讓這些具有當地特色的感謝語被任何

外來語取代。很不幸，台灣人的「勞力-Lo Lat」似乎已瀕臨消失。

我們呼籲愛台灣的各界人士踴躍參與討論「勞力-Lo Lat」，或許能喚醒大家愛

說「勞力-Lo Lat」，從而激起愛說台語的風潮。

(Dan Bloom漢名丹布隆，美籍媒體人[email: bikolang@gmail.com

http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2011/05/10/2003502879]。Terry Huang本名黃大河)

BLOG: http://zippy1300.blogspot.com/

http://www.associatedcontent.com/article/8053809/tao_tao_scores_a_touchdown_sings_lo.html?cat=16

http://video.udn.com/video/Item/ItemPage.do?sno=334-233-2F314-233-2B3-2B3032313b4-233-2B32-21-3D

LO LAT !

by LIBERTY TIMES reporter in YUNLIN COUNTY, 斗六, MISS LIAO: May 8

因為一個笑容，美國人丹布隆在斗六火車站教人說台語﹁LO LAT﹂(意為感謝)，還發願要錄製一萬個人說﹁LO LAT﹂，尤其碰到年輕人、小朋友，就夾雜著美語、及不太﹁輪轉﹂的台灣話、國語，向人說明﹁LO LAT﹂的意思，用錄音機請人留下﹁LO LAT﹂一句話，還不忘帶上一句我是﹁新台灣人﹂，讓人印象深刻。

　﹁LO LAT﹂、﹁LO LAT﹂、﹁LO LAT﹂，近日來在斗六火車站附近，常見到有一個外國人拿著錄音機，到處請人說﹁LO LAT﹂，原本是一句台灣人極為常用的通俗話，為什麼能讓這個外國人如此著迷？

　丹布隆說，他在美國阿拉斯加出生，旅遊過數十個國家，到台灣十餘年，特別喜愛台灣，自稱新台灣人，近年來定居嘉義，在學校兼差教英文、幫CHINA POST翻譯寫文章，偶而也出書，一個月前，偶然聽到﹁LO LAT﹂這句話，結果問他的朋友，很多人都不知道什麼意思。
　日前丹布隆到一家麵店吃東西時，對麵店老板說﹁LO LAT﹂，老板竟然笑得很燦爛，一問原來這個五十歲的麵店老板懂﹁LO LAT﹂的意思，再問，才知道這句好話大多是中高齡者才說，年輕人很少用，回到學校問學生，學生們大都不知道，甚至不曾聽過，更不會說。

　但因為那個麵店老板的笑容，留給丹布隆極深的印象，於是發願要錄製一萬個人說﹁LO LAT﹂，尤其是針對年輕人及小孩子，因此，他特別利用假日搭火車從嘉義到斗六，在街頭教年輕人說﹁LO LAT﹂。

　在斗六火車站旁開美容院的余淑芬說，這個外國人拿著錄音機到店裡一直說﹁LO LAT﹂時，根本沒有人搞懂他的意思，後來經過交談，才知道丹布隆的用心，還收到一張很可愛的名片，覺得很有意思，更佩服他的勇氣。

　丹布隆則認為，住在台灣多年，愈來愈發現台灣話很有趣又有意思，但年輕人卻很少使用，才會突發奇想準備錄製一萬個人說﹁LO LAT﹂，完成後ＰＯ在網路上宣導，由於才第一個星期，錄到的人不多，也碰到不少人因為恐懼或不好意思，不敢對著錄音機說話，讓他有點受傷，希望大家以後在街頭看到一個拿錄音機的外國人，可以大方對他說﹁LO LAT﹂，讓他早日圓夢。

　本身精研台語的前雲林縣府教育處長郭清江指出，﹁LO LAT﹂，參考吳崑松的﹁通用台語字典﹂寫成﹁憦力﹂，即感謝、多謝、勞神、費神、辛苦，另在五南圖書出版的台灣閩南語辭典則寫成﹁努力﹂，看到有外國人這麼用心推台語，讓人感動，但其實要能普及還是得要政府重視。

------------------------

沒聽過LO-LAT 美國人教你說台語

【聯合報╱記者柯永輝／嘉義報導】 2011.05.01

美國人搶救台語老詞彙LO-LAT / 柯永輝來台15年的美國人丹布隆愛上台灣，自稱「新台灣人」，他最近在公車聽到有人向司機說「LO-LAT」，好奇詢問得知是台語「謝謝」的意思，但他詢問年輕一輩的台灣人，幾乎都不知道，他很感慨，除了用童謠改編成「The LO-LAT Song」上傳網路，還展開「萬人說LO-LAT」行動，希望搶救這個台語老詞彙。

「我有一個夢，希望白冰冰、澎恰恰、伍佰、吳宗憲、張菲等知名藝人，有一天能把LO-LAT歌錄成CD，讓小朋友和年輕一輩的台灣人能重新認識這個代表感恩的詞彙！」丹布隆知道他的心願不容易實現，但他相信有夢最美、事在人為。

43歲的丹布隆來自美國波士頓，他從大學畢業就開始到各國旅遊，包括歐美、日本等地，15年前應台灣友人邀請到嘉義旅遊，沒想到這麼一遊就不想走了，停下漂泊的腳步，把台灣當成第二個家，寫了「哈上台灣」、「哈上台灣夜市」兩本書，甚至說「將來我走後，把骨灰撒在嘉義的山上」。

丹布隆說，1個多月前在嘉義市搭公車，聽到一位歐吉桑下車時跟司機說「LO-LAT」，他覺得很納悶，詢問後得知是台語老詞彙，意思是謝謝別人幫我們付出的「勞力」，但是他詢問了許多大學生，還有幼稚園、小學生，幾乎都沒人知道。

丹布隆覺得這個詞的用意很好，若逐漸沒人使用而消失，非常可惜，於是把童謠「小星星」改編成「LO-LAT」歌，並錄了影音後上傳YouTube，希望讓台灣的幼稚園、國小學童朗朗上口，傳承這個感恩的詞彙。網址
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-OQ35wVU6Vc

為了讓更多年輕人知道這個詞彙，他也展開「萬人說LO-LAT」行動，要用錄音機錄下1萬人說「LO-LAT」，已有近百人響應。

新聞辭典／LO-LAT：多謝

嘉義大學中文系副教授陳茂仁表示，「LO-LAT」可寫成「勞力（台語）」是表示勞煩你做某件事，這個表示謝謝的用語可說是農業社會的產物，因農業社會收割需要很多人力，有時候需要鄰居的幫忙，所以會說「勞你的勞力」。

另有一說是寫成「櫓力（台語）」，早期靠水生活的人，因為時常坐船，為感謝船夫搖櫓而產生這個詞，與「勞力」兩者都通。

陳茂仁也指出，其他表示謝謝的台語有「感謝」、「感恩」，至於「多謝」因為「多」的台語發音和台語的刀子相近，有用刀去射人的感覺，所以民間較少用
http://www.taipeitimes.com/News/taiwan/archives/2011/05/10/2003502879
-----------------------
AND A BIG DEEP THANK YOU, LO LAT, TO MY TEACHERS IN TAIWAN, AMONG THEM:
TEACHER TUNG, DR TIEN, DR ONG, SHINE, PAUL, CHEN LI-JEN, MIDDLE WAY, YU-PING AND TAO TAO in USA, SEBO KOH, MILO THORNBERRY IN USA, STAN YANG AT FAPA, AND THE GOOD PEOPLE OF CHIAYI CITY AND CHIYAI COUNTY, INCLUDING MRS HUANG IN THE LOCAL NURSING HOME WHO JUST TURNED 100 YEARS OLD AND ALSO REMEMBERS LO LAT DURING HER LIFE IN SHINKANG, CHIAYI COUNTY!

COMMENTS .....LO LAT......

DELETED

2010-08-22T19:24:00.000-07:00

THE DIGIRATA
◤ GO placidly amid the hot links and the distractions, and remember what peace there may be in unplugging. ◤ As far as possible without surrender be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking. ◤ Key in your truths quietly and clearly; and read what others have to say, too even the dull and the ignorant; for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree. ◤ Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies, for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet. ◤ If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and have more visitors, you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what it is and don't worry abut the big guys. ◤ Enjoy your online achievements, as well as your plans for future downtime. ◤ Keep interested in your own blogging, however humble; it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time. ◤ Exercise caution who you give your personal details to; for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting to part you from your money.◤ Be yourself when you are online, or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona. ◤ Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid, and let no one steal your password, especially those pesky phishers. ◤ Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers and gracefully chat with your Facebook friends in real time. ◤ But don't over do it, and always take time out to unplug and enjoy a weekly internet sabbath. ◤ You are a child of the Digital Age, no less than the spam and the pixels; and you have every right to blog to your heart's content. ◤And whether or not it is clear to you,no doubt cyberspace is unfurling as it should, well, sort of, and you are part of the great equation, whatever that might turn out to be.◤ Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will. ◤ E-readers to the fore! ◤ Whatever your labors and your aspirations, in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.◤ Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery, atomic typos and qwerky (sic) keyboards, it is still a beautiful online world. ◤ Be cheerful. ◤ Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible. ◤Strive to be a happy camper and unplug often.◢

The Digirata -- by ''Anonymous''

2010-08-19T21:09:00.000-07:00

GO placidly amid the hot links and the distractions,
and remember what peace there may be in unplugging.
As far as possible be on good terms with all persons online and never never flame others or engage
in any kind of cyberbullying or cyberstalking.

Key in your truths quietly and clearly;
and read what others have to say, too
even the dull and the ignorant;
for they too have their stories and ideas to impart, even if you disagree.

Avoid angry and aggressive flamers and out of control cyberbullies,
for they are vexations to the spirit of the internet.

If you compare your blog with other blogs that are better and have more visitors,
you may become vain and bitter, so just enjoy your own blog for what it is and don't
worry abut the big guys.

Enjoy your online achievements, as well as your plans for future downtime.

Keep interested in your own blogging, however humble;
it is a real possession in the changing fortunes of time.
Exercise caution who you give your personal details to;
for the world is full of trickery and Nigerian scams waiting
to part you from your money.

Be yourself when you are online,
or, if it so pleases you, adopt a persona.
Use your real name or a pseudonym for your userid,
and let no one steal your password,
especially those pesky phishers.

Take kindly the counsel of your fellow bloggers
and gracefully chat with your Facebook
friends in real time. But don't over do it,
and always take time out to unplug
and enjoy a weekly
''internet sabbath''.

You are a child of the Digital Age,
no less than the SPAM and the pixels;
and you have every right to blog to your heart's content.
And whether or not it is clear to you,
no doubt cyberspace is unfurling as it should,
well, sort of, and you are part of the great equation,
whatever that might turn out to be.

Therefore be at peace with Amazon and Yahoo,
and make of your Kindles and your nooks what you will.
E-readers to the fore!

Whatever your labors and your aspirations,
in the multitasking distractions of cyberspace
keep peace with your soul -- if you still have one.

Remember: With all its sham, mattdrudgery and quirky keyboards,
it is still a beautiful online world.

Be cheerful. Be careful, too. Use the smilely emoticon as much as possible, and
strive to be a happy camper. Unplug often.

----------------------------------------------

[An encrypted message found in a bottle floating across a glaring screen in the middle of Manhattan, and keyed-in by an anonymous messenger.]

THE DIGIRATA - a Desiderata for the Digital Age - by "Anonymous 2010" - an encrypted message found in a virtual bottle floating across a screen somewhere in the infinite vaporsphere

2010-08-19T07:47:00.000-07:00

"Unplug, unwind, unschlep."
-- Universal Motto of the Great Unplugged

* * * * * * * * * *

GO placidly amid the multitasking distractions and the hot links and know what peace there may be in going unplugged. Sign in with your real name or a userid that hides you from detection, but never flame others or call them names you would never want others to call you. Respect the opinions of others, no matter how weird or contrarian they may seem to be, because, remember, we are one people, one Earth, one digiverse, one blogosphere, united and together as a force for good and enlightenment in this post-Gutenberg age of ours.

Cyberbullying is a no-no. And know that posting private links or photos you found online to embarass others is punishable in court. Respect the age, race, religion, nationality, user status, ethnicity, gender and sexuality of all your "friends" and nonfriends, and most importantly, never do unto others what you would never want them in a million years to do to you. [Did we say that already? Well, it bears repeating!]

Taste the virtual sushi, sashimi and sake, read to your heart's delight on a nook or a Kindle or your handy iPhone and feel free to post your more memorable "karry-okie" performances on YouTube or Facebook. Never, never bully others. Make friends with complete strangers, if you wish, it's fun, and invite them gently into your cyberhome, but always provide them with a key to the door so can get out if they so choose.

Remember, cyberspace is a vast theater of the possible and the impossible, and know that not everything you read online is trustworthy or verifiable, or, as Bill Geist of CBS News puts it: "About 95 percent of the news we get online should be vewied in much the same way as we view professional wrestling."

Plug in, plug off, switch over, opt out and go wherever your digital imagination wants to take you. Enter uncharted and un[Google]mapped territories, yes, but always use safeguards and a safety net just in case there are perverts or hackers lurking in the vaporsphere just waiting to entrap you. Beware those annoying phishing expeditions, the ''send me more money'' scams, the ''you have $25 million dollars in a secret Nigerian bank account" emails and all the other overly-aggressive evil forces of the dark realms.

Whatever you do, never go to bed angry at anyone you've met online! Kiss and make up, hug and make amends, extend the hand of peace and treat everyone online as your brother or sister. Really!

Oh yes, and when you feel overwhelmed and stressed and over-distracted, do what should come naturally: unplug, unwind, unschlep.

Remember, you can walk away from this anytime, there's always an ''internet sabbath'' waiting for your contemplation and enjoyment. YOU are the master of this seemingly soul-less machine and not the other way around, so never let it push you around or tell you what to do. You make the rules.

[And from now on, please lowercase the word "internet" and let the word gingerly take its uncapped place alongside other lowercased words such as radio, movies, television and books.]

Is there a diffference between reading on screens and reading on paper? Neuroscientists want to know, and the MRI and PET scan research is about to begin. Only brain science can separate the pixels from the pulp, and the likes of Oliver Sacks, Anne Mangen, Maryanne Wolf, Gary Small and Jonah Lehner will soon dish. Listen to them!

Okay, most of all, last word: Enjoy! [Make every second count! Because you only live once!]

-- found in an encrypted message in a virtual bottle floating across a screen in the infinite vaporsphereon August 13, 2010

----------------------------------
Text keyed in by digirata@gmail.com
while basking in some ''wonder-full'' downtime on a quiet [traffic] island in the middle of Manhattan

An interview with Peter Melzer on the pros and con of reading on screens in the digital age

2010-08-18T20:31:00.000-07:00

webposted on August 15, 2010

[NOTE: Peter Melzer is a science and technology writer in his mid-50s, based in Virgina. He used to serve as principal investigator on a study examining Braille reading-related brain activation in people with severe visual disabilities and was very interested in the cognitive aspects of the work.]

DANNY BLOOM: In your opinion, Peter, and in your reading and research, do you think the brain processes reading from a screen differently than reading from a page? And how might this difference, if there is one, be measured or studied?

PETER MELZER: If the screen device provides exactly the experience of reading pages in a book, there may be none. Outcome may depend substantially on screen design. For example, reading text on a CRT monitor is considerably different from reading text on a book page. Because of the refresh rate, the screen is flickering. We may not notice, but our visual system registers the flicker, making the job of analyzing a text exhausting. Modern e-readers use LCD screens that do not flicker. We may find a other shortcomings. But as the technology improves the reading experience, we may anticipate less of a difference in information processing.

A difference in cerebral information processing between screen readers and book readers could be examined non-invasively with neurofunctional mapping using functional magnetic resonance imaging (fMRI) or the subtractive water method and positron emission tomography (PET), or magneto-encephalography (SQUID). Single photon emission computed tomography (SPECT) is another possibility. Recordings of event-related potentials from the scalp represent a less costly route of exploration that may be useful. The aim of study with any of the above methods would be to determine whether screen readers differ from book readers in their reading-related nerve cell activation in visual cerebral cortex and in association cortex where language is processed and cognitive functions are executed.

Ultimately, however, we wish to find out whether the cognitive abilities of screen readers are different from those of book readers. School psychologists would know what tests to use.

DANNY BLOOM: In your opionion, are html pages so overwrought with information that readers lose focus? What kind of research bears this out?

PETER MELZER: This is my personal impression. A reader needs a lot of concentration to skim for information of interest when confronted with web pages consisting of three long columns of pictures, some moving. The web site of the Huffington Post is a good example.

DANNY BLOOM: In your opionion, how close do you think the visual experience of an e-reader can be made to resemble that of a book, that is, how pleasing to the eye an e-reader page can be made?

PETER MELZER: I do not know. But there are many parameters to consider like color, luminance, brightness, and contrast. Attributes may vary with the angle of view. We never sit entirely still in front of a book. Perhaps LCD screens need a much wider angle of view and change luminance with tilt. I suppose experience will tell.

DANNY BLOOM: You once told me that if the emulation is close enough, we may not find a difference in brain activity, certainly not in the early stages of visual information processing. But, The interesting part would be, if we found a difference in activation in association cortex where language is processed. is there any research on this yet, and if so, do you think the makers of ereaders are concerned about this or do not care at all?

PETER MELZER: I do not know of any brain research comparing screen readers with book readers. The manufacturers of e-readers would be very concerned, if research showed a negative effect of their products on our cognitive abilities. Uncovering differences in cortical activation would be of secondary interest.

DANNY BLOOM: If, in fact, we find out that there is more to electronic screen reading than meets the eye -- That is, whether the computer information age changes the way we process language and whether the effect may be detrimental to the processing of our thoughts -- will these findings have any impact on makers of Kindles and nooks and other ereaders and on the entire ebook industry?

PETER MELZER: Of course, the industry would take such findings very seriously. Educators would bar the devices from schools, if they turned out to be detrimental to our cognitive functions. We only want the best for our children.

DANNY BLOOM: You once told me: "As interesting as such brain activation studies may be, ultimately we shall look at outcome, that is, whether gathering information read from screens degrades our cognitive abilities. We do not need expensive fMRI or PET scans to answer this question. School psychologists use ability tests routinely. They would have to compare children who mainly use computers to children who do not. If performance was degraded, we would have to tease apart whether the cause is the screen or the ubiquitous distractors that web2 presents." Can you say some more about this....?

PETER MELZER: As I stated above, the effects on our mind are of utmost concern. How our brain effects the change is of secondary interest. The cause for cognitive underperformance may not be the screens per se, but the load of information on the web pages and the distractors therein, which may impede our ability of focusing on what is important.

DANNY BLOOM: Have you ever seen or read any of the research papers by Anne Mangen in Norway on these issues -- and what do you think of her work?

PETER MELZER: I have not read any of her work yet.

DANNY BLOOM: If we later find out that reading on paper is very different from reading on screens, either in terms of neuroscience or just in terms of distractability and materiality, do you think the culture at large might benefit from a new word for "screen-reading" -- whatever that word might be -- in order to help better understand the two reading modes by giving them different and maybe competing names? If so, what might YOu nominate for this word or term for reading on screens. marvin Mirsky at MIT AI lab told he likes "screen-reading" as a new term for this. What do you think or can you suggest a better word?

PETER MELZER: ''Screen reading'' sounds fine.

DANNY BLOOM: Gary Small at UCLA has said "the tech train has already left the station and cannot be stopped" and that whatever findings reserachers find out later about the differences between paper reading and screen reading WILL NOT MATTER MUCH to the ereader industry or computer industry, because there is so much money to be made by selling SCREENS? do you agree or disagree?

PETER MELZER: I do believe that the industry must be very interested in manufacturing a product that is most pleasing to the reader. Like smartphones, the one the users like most will carry the market.

DANNY BLOOM: What is your main interest in all this, in terms of reserach or personal insights of your own?

PETER MELZER: I used to serve as principal investigator on a study examining Braille reading-related brain activation in people with severe visual disabilities. I liked the cognitive aspects of the work.

DANNY BLOOM: Thank you, Peter, for your time for this interview.

PETER MELZER: Thank you for taking the time to interview me.

LINK to PETER MELZER's BLOGSITE
http://brainmindinst.blogspot.com/

I see by the snailpapers today that David Bader has a new book out, THE BOOK OF MURRAY, about the .....

2010-08-17T01:56:00.000-07:00

......The Life, Teachings and Kvetching of the
Lost Prophet

This remarkable faux Biblical narrative tells the story of the Only Testament Worth Reading's
most unlikely prophet, Murray, son of Irving, of the Tribe of Levi's Jeans (Relaxed
Fit). As ancient scrolls go, I think it's the best book Bader's written.
You can read excerpts at:

http://www.extremely.com/

It's on Amazon here:

http://www.amazon.com/exec/obidos/ASIN/0307453243/theextremelrefor

THE BOOK OF MURRAY will be in bookstores soon, in time for the Jewish Low
Holidays. It's also an excellent Hanukkah Channukah However You Want to Spell It gift. And you doona haf ta bee Jewish to enjoy it. Cordoba House people welcome, too. This is America, after all!

THE BOOK OF MURRAY:
The Life, Teachings and Kvetching of the Lost Prophet
Harmony Books - August 24, 2010
ISBN: 978-0307453242

TO LEARN MORE ABOUT READING
READING vs. SCREENING SEE THIS VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

Nicholas Carr makes a point but I counter it here, below:

2010-08-16T21:50:00.000-07:00

on his blog, Rough Type, Mr Carr notes: "This would also help explain why the internet (LOWERCASE, NICK!) continues to distract us even when we're not online. Part of our mind is still thinking about that new message that might have just arrived in our inbox. What makes that hypothetical unread message particularly distracting is that it could actually be important. You won't know until you've read it. Admit it: The suspense is killing you."

But Nick, this is no different in a way than long ago before email, waking up in the morning and anticipating what letters might arrive at home from the postman or at the office at work. The suspense never killed us. Even though some of the mail that did arrive later in the day WAS important. I think you are wrong here.

Besides, that ENTIRE NYTimes piece was pure drivel, sophomoric travel writing by Matt Richtel. It really makes the Times look bad to publish such crap there. Those PHDs know nothing!

The Unplugged Challenge: Readers Respond - by Joshua Brustein, New York Times

2010-08-16T21:42:00.000-07:00

Danny Blom's 2 minute New York Times Unplugged Challenge Video here

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

Frederick Forsyth at 72, still going strong.....

2010-08-16T07:15:00.000-07:00

There are few sex scenes in Mr Forsyth's books, but he happily admits he has had several intriguing liaisons in his past. Once, when he worked in Prague for Reuters, he was constantly followed by the secret agency, the STB.

One night, at a disco, he met a pretty girl named ''Jana''.

"We had a drink and a dance. It was a hot August night, and I suggested we have a swim in the lake. So we went skinny dipping, then I spread out a rug and we screwed. It was lovely. As I drove her back to the hotel, I remarked that there were no headlights in my rear view mirror.

"Where the hell are the STB," I said.

She replied, 'You just made love to it'."

Hypatia asks the New York Times Joshua Brustein....

2010-08-16T07:00:00.001-07:00

I notice your people ranged from teens to 40's. Did no one
older respond, or did you decide not to use any older respondents?

Joshua to respond soon, according to inside sources.

Stelios in the UK wants to know....

2010-08-16T06:34:00.001-07:00

A question I have is if writing on a comupter or writing by hand makes a difference in how our brain processes information during the task of writing.

I suggest a functional MRI of people who usually write by hand (at different levels, just admin forms, fiction, academic and so on) and people who write on a computer. I expect that the wiring in the brain will differ between the two groups. Unfortunately, my field is very removed from this area so I cannot personally run any experiments. So, I am putting the idea out there in case somebody takes it up.

The Unplugged Challenge at the New York Times: Readers Respond, including Danny Bloom

2010-08-15T20:57:00.000-07:00

Joshua Brustein writes:

Readers of the New York Times took temporary leave of their technological tethers and shared their experiences with The Times in video clips. Unfortunately, Danny Bloom did not color inside the lines as we requested so we rejected his video, but here it is on YouTube for those who are not afraid to color outside the lines in kindergarten.

Mr Bloom, 41, explained in his 2 minute video why reading on screens is vastly inferior to reading on paper surfaces and why we need a new term for screen-reading, which he calls SCREENING. He also calls for urgent MRI and PET brain scan studies to find out if his hunch is correct, that screening is inferior to reading on paper. See his entertaining and potentially pioneering video here:

In related news, Michelle Francl spent four weeks last year in monastic silence. It was an extreme break. Dr. Francl, a chemistry professor, cut off all social interaction, to the point that she would not even acknowledge a friend passing her in a hallway. But she found another experiment in self-discipline — an attempt to disconnect from her Internet and telephone connections while trying to carry on her normal life — to be a stiffer challenge.

“It’s not as hard as it sounds when there’s nothing to plug into, no Wi-Fi, not even a land line,” she said. “It was much harder to do this short-term at home where there are computers everywhere.”

Stepping back from technology in a world of constant communication can be a difficult task. The New York Times asked readers to temporarily give up their technological tethers and then make a video about the experience. Dr. Francl was one of the dozens of people who responded. You can watch a selection of videos prepared by readers here.

For Jenn Monroe, 40, giving up the Internet and phone led to a desire to purge other technologies from her life.

“I didn’t want to open my computer at all, even though that wasn’t part of the deal,” she said. “I avoided the microwave, which was also sort of strange and surprising to me.”

But for many, finding the right balance can be hard. James Cornell, 18, spent his day away from his cellphone feeling jittery, and worried that he was annoying people by not responding to them. John Stark, 46, told his friends that he wouldn’t be responding to text messages, expecting them to call him on the phone if they needed to communicate. They sent text messages to his wife instead, asking her to relay information to him.

Experts say that, in general, those wanting to control their technology use should approach the task more like a diet than a withdrawal from drugs. The idea is to learn to distinguish between necessary and compulsive consumption.

Winifred Gallagher, the author of “Rapt: Attention and the Focused Life,” said keeping a log of one’s technology use can be a valuable exercise. This technique is adapted from a dieting strategy. Dieters who write down what they eat, said Ms. Gallagher, end up consuming a third fewer calories.

Ms. Gallagher also suggested setting aside specific times and places to use technology, by setting regular intervals at work to check e-mail, for instance, or by resolving not to use the phone in the car, or keeping computers and other devices away from the dinner table.

“Let’s face it, very few of our phone calls and e-mail messages are life and death matters,” she said. “You just have to stop that kind of knee-jerk response to those cues.”

Even small boundaries can make a significant difference, said Edward Hallowell, a psychiatrist and the author of the book “Delivered From Distraction: Getting the Most out of Life with Attention Deficit Disorder.”

He said that when an executive at an investment firm in New York felt like she was spending too much time on e-mail, she solved the problem by simply moving her computer to a different position on her desk.

“She didn’t have to get out of her chair, but she had to swivel,” he said. “The millisecond gave her enough time to stop herself.”

=============

Nice to see this series of videos up, looks great and it's good food for thought. I was asked by the Times to make a video for the Unplugged Challenge, too, on spec, of course, but it was rejected because I did not color inside the lines as requested, I guess. But despite the Times rejection, I put my video on YouTube now, just 2 minutes, with over 700 hits, and while I cannot give the link here due to posting rules, you can find it at YouTube under the title: [Is reading on paper superior to ''reading'' on screens? Yes! Here's why... ]
Nice to see this series of videos up, looks great and it's good food for thought. I was asked by the Times to make a video for the Unplugged Challenge, too, on spec, of course, but it was rejected because I did not color inside the lines as requested, I guess. But here's what my video on YouTube now and it's just 2 minutes, with over 700 hits:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

Cyberbullying "involves the use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behavior by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others. -- Bill Belsey

2010-08-09T21:08:00.000-07:00

A good definition of cyber-bullying is when the Internet is used to post text or images intended to hurt or embarrass another person.

Cyberbullying can be defined as: "a situation when a person, teen or adult, is repeatedly 'harassed, humiliated, embarrassed or otherwise targeted' by cyberbullies using net forums and anonymous comment boxes on blogs."

Cyber-bullying can include threats, pejorative labels, ganging up on people by making them the subject of ridicule in forums, and posting false statements as fact aimed at humiliation.

Cyber-bullies may disclose victims' personal data (e.g. real name, address, or workplace/schools) or irrelevant Internet or YouTube links at websites or forums or may pose as the identity of a victim for the purpose of publishing material in their name that defames or ridicules them. Some cyberbullies may also instigate others to dislike and gang up on the target.

And the cyberbullies know who they are, even though they themselves sometimes rail against cyberbullies. It's a weird game out there, the Internet, that is.

Letter to Editor of newspaper in Taiwan in Hokklo language

2010-08-06T05:06:00.000-07:00

DEAR EDITOR,
LIBERTY TIMES newspaper,
August 7, 2010

by 丹布隆 aka ''Biko Lang''

[Hokklo text by Phik-tông huan- k]

Kin-kìmuî-thé pò-tō，uī ti h tshíunn-kiù sing-i k l t，Lāi-tsìng-pōo
hi-bāng tshòng-tsok「kháu-hō kî-tsik」，kai tsīunn pah bān beh ìng-tsing
ts t ê，thiann liáu ti h ē sīunn behsing gín-á ê kháu-hō。Lāi-tsìng-pōo
tī tshit-gu h té kong-pòo pah bān 「tshui-sing」piau-gíê j p suán
tsok-phín，pau-kuā「sing！t h ti h--a！」「suài-ko bí-líkòtshòng-tsō，-sing
íng-uán khuànn bē ti h！」「ke sing pó-puè，pó-puèTâi-uân」tíng jī-ts p
tiâu，beh tsìn-hîng ts t kè gu h ê bāng-lōo phiò-suán，iu-sìng-tsiá
ē-tàng tit ti h ts t pah bān khoo tsiáng-kin ting-tíng。
-koh，tsú-sètshâkhuànn tsia ê j p suán ê piau-gí，kìng-jiân lóng sī
huâ-gí tsok-phín ！ pit-tsiá khuànn bē ti h jīn-hô tâi-gí、 kheh-gí
kahguan-tsū-bîn-gíê tsok-phín。Tī to-guân tsíng-ts k gí-giân póo-k p ê
tâi-uân，pit-tsiá bôsiong-sìn ìng-tsing kó tiong，bô tâi-gí、kheh-gí kah
guan-tsū-bîn-gí ê tsok-phín。Sīán-nuán Lāi-tsìng-pōo ê tsiòng ping-sím
tāi-uân kan-nā suán huâ-gíkháu-hō ê tsok-phín hōo bāng-lōo phiò-suán？ū
-guān kī miâ ê pîng-sím uí-uân jīn-uî，j p uî tsîng jī-ts p miâ lóng
siunn-kuètsìng-king，huân-hó「suán--ts t-lâi ē piàn tsò iōng-pán」。ts t
êLāi-tsìng-pōo kuann-uân su hā mā piáu-sī，kì-jiân bāng-lōo phiò-suán
tuì-siōng sī siàu-liân-lâng，ìng-kai ài koh khah ū tshòng-ì。tsia ê
ì-kiàn sui-jiân tsin hû-h p tsú-tê， -koh mâbô tiám ti h būn-têê h
k-sim。In iú-ìhik-tsiá-sī bô-ì，bô tshâ-kak ti h tâi-gí、keh-gíkah
guan-tsū-bîn gíê tsok-phín kin-bún ti hbô tsīunn
pang-tuann！tshíunn-kìu sing-i k-l t ê piau-gí lîn-suán，kán-na mā
ín-tsông ts k-kûn kî-sī êt k-tshíu，hōo sin uîguā-kok-lâng ê
pit-tsiátshim-kám put-an。Tshī gín-á，kám kan-nāKóo-lē huâ-gí ts k-kûn
niâ? Lāi-tsìng-pōo piànn kháu-hō ， thê-tshut tsìng-tshikgû-bah，ū-hāu i
h bô-hāu? Mā ài khuànn Tâi-uân kî-tha kok ts k-kûn ê siàu-liân ang-bóo
sī sī ē-tàng tsiap-siū tsit tsióng tuàū kî-sī gán-kong ê tsìng-tsik
gû-bah！tî-hui…。

The Harvard Interview - The New York Times Hiring Code

2010-08-06T04:28:00.000-07:00

QUESTION: Can you explain why there have been some many Harvard
College undergrad school grads employed as gatekeepers at the New York
Times newspaper over the years and even now?

ANSWERMAN: As briefly as I can, it goes like this. How often does the
New York Times run an article about what you can expect in a house for
US$1.2 million? Pretty often. Can you recall the Times ever running an
article about what you can expect in an apartment for you and your two
kids when you're making $9 an hour and your spouse isn't in the
picture anymore?
You see, very few people struggle to get into and graduate from
Harvard College undergrad, so that they can then be forced to have to
confront harsh unpleasant realities or inequities. A world in which
people buy $1.2 million homes is far more pleasant than one where
people live hand to mouth their entire lives, especially if you're one
of the people in a $1.2 million home. Got the picture yet?

QUESTION: That's all?

ASNWERMAN: There's more to it than that; I am just warming up.

Much of that avoidance that I mentioned in my first answer, above, I
suspect, comes from the subconscious realization that there is no way
to make the following statement without wanting to smack yourself: "I
studied English at Harvard. And when Harvard lined up that paid
internship for me at that major publishing house, I was the one who
got myself to work every day (unlike the rest of the people in the
world, who are carried into work by their valets) until another
Harvard graduate could line up a job for me. I've paid my dues."

Sure, some people who came out of Harvard scrimped and scraped and
went through a lot of privation, but in reality, how many of the
Harvardians at the NY Tmes came up dirt poor from nothing? And how
much do you want to bet that they are the ones who are writing the
pieces that actually matter?

My suspicion is that a significant number of the Harvardians at the
Times came from families that could afford not only Harvard but all
the small things that helped lead to Harvard: music lessons, trips to
cultural spots, lots of books, quite for studying, enough room to
study in peace, enough food, medical care, dental care, eye exams,
appropriate primary and secondary education, stability, etc. Please
note that most of those things are not self-generated. They are
bonuses you obtain by dint of having been born lucky.

QUESTION: Born lucky?

ANSWERMAN: You know, good genes, family connetions, money, DNA, rich
people. If the Times started letting in "them" (you know, the state
school graduates, or even, God Forbid, a Yale graduate), conflict
would arise. Too many of the State university riff-raff would be
forced after a while to say, "Yeah, we're fighting two wars, the ice
caps are melting, millions of people have no health care, childhood
obesity is increasing, and a large chunk of the manufacturing sector
has relocated to outside the country, effectively wiping out the
middle class, and you're telling us -- in a series of columns -- about
the dog you bought from a breeder? And, dear God help us all, how many
people had to think this was a good idea before it got this far in the
editorial process? If you don't have anything of genuine value to
contribute, couldn't you, well, at least stay out of the way and let
the rest of us do something useful?"

And once that happened, it would be like the day the mayor's kid
figures out that he won all those events at the Fourth of July picnics
the day his father got elected mayor. It's kind of hard to enjoy the
trophies once you realize that. Unless you are really good at kidding
yourself about what "you" accomplished.

Egg-Free Ice Cream Lets Flavors Bloom - New York Times Urgent News Today!

2010-08-05T20:41:00.000-07:00

Egg-Free Ice Cream Lets Flavors Bloom

I see by the snailpapers that the New York Times does have a special in-house deal for Harvard undergrad grads.....

2010-08-05T20:30:00.000-07:00

A inquisitive bloke somewhere in the Milky Way Galaxy wondered on a New York Times blog recently:

"Is the public aware that 90 percent of Times writers and editors are from Harvard undergrad? Is the Times a Harvard club or what? I don't get it. The Wash Post, too. Total elitism, sad to say. Nothing will change. Even Jennifer 8. Lee was Harvard, and so is Vindu Goel. The list goes on and on. Why Harvard? Do they know something we other non-entitled people don't know?"

That's when Alex Gallifrey weighed in on July 25 with a long reply, that basically makes a lot of sense. COMMENTS WELCOME, pro and con, BELOW:

Alex wrote:

''As briefly as I can, it goes like this. How often does the Times run an article about what you can expect in a house for $1.2 million? Pretty often. Can you recall the Times ever running an article about what you can expect in an apartment for you and your two kids when you're making $9 an hour and your spouse isn't in the picture anymore?

You see, very few people struggle to get into and graduate from Harvard so that they can then be forced to have to confront harsh unpleasant realities or inequities. A world in which people buy $1.2 million homes is far more pleasant than one where people live hand to mouth their entire lives, especially if you're one of the people in a $1.2 million home.

Much of that avoidance, I suspect, comes from the subconscious realization that there is no way to make the following statement without wanting to smack yourself: "I studied English at Harvard. And when Harvard lined up that paid internship for me at that major publishing house, I was the one who got myself to work every day (unlike the rest of the people in the world, who are carried into work by their valets) until another Harvard graduate could line up a job for me. I've paid my dues."

Sure, some people who came out of Harvard scrimped and scraped and went through a lot of privation, but in reality, how many of the Harvardians at the Times came up dirt poor from nothing? And how much do you want to bet that they are the ones who are writing the pieces that actually matter?

My suspicion is that a significant number of the Harvardians at the Times came from families that could afford not only Harvard but all the small things that helped lead to Harvard: music lessons, trips to cultural spots, lots of books, quite for studying, enough room to study in peace, enough food, medical care, dental care, eye exams, appropriate primary and secondary education, stability, etc. Please note that most of those things are not self-generated. They are bonuses you obtain by dint of having been born lucky.

If the Times started letting in "them" (you know, the state school graduates, or even, God Forbid, a Yale graduate), conflict would arise. Too many of the State riff-raff would be forced after a while to say, "Yeah, we're fighting two wars, the ice caps are melting, millions of people have no health care, childhood obesity is increasing, and a large chunk of the manufacturing sector has relocated to outside the country, effectively wiping out the middle class, and you're telling us -- in a series of columns -- about the dog you bought from a breeder? And, dear God help us all, how many people had to think this was a good idea before it got this far in the editorial process? If you don't have anything of genuine value to contribute, couldn't you, well, at least stay out of the way and let the rest of us do something useful?"

And once that happened, it would be like the day the mayor's kid figures out that he won all those events at the Fourth of July picnics the day his father got elected mayor. It's kind of hard to enjoy the trophies once you realize that. Unless you are really good at kidding yourself about what "you" accomplished.

Does that answer your question?"

Yesterday, on our way to school, my four-year-old commented, "When you love somebody, it can't be unloved. That's 'irreversible change'." What a sweet sentiment (don't we all wish this were 100% true?)

2010-08-03T21:21:00.001-07:00

The Kindle Conundrum, being An Urgent Appeal to Jeff Bezos of Amazon Kindle and the CEOs of nook and the SONY Reader (and all ereader manufacturers worldwide) !

2010-08-03T05:40:00.000-07:00

Dear Jeff,

Since we do not yet know how the brain "reads" text on screens, compared to how it reads text on paper, and since there are major concerns among academics and neuroscientists that reading off screens (called "screening" now) may be inferior to reading on paper surfaces -- inferior only in terms of processing of the information, retention of it, and analysis of it, what used to be called critical thinking in cultures were it existed -- I am appealing to you to set up a neutral research fund that would enable vital and important MRI and PET scan research studies to be carried out by experts in the field on the neuroscience of reading on paper compared to screening.

There is some suspicion and worry and concer, Jeff, mostly anecdotal so far, that reading off screens, er, screening is in fact inferior to reading on paper and that under the circumstances only hard science and research by neuroscientists and others can get to the bottom of this very important issue. Not so much for the bottom line of your companies, but for the future of civilization.

Yes, "the tech train has already left the station", as Dr Gary Small of UCLA told the Los Angeles Times recently, "and it cannot be stopped." But at the same time, Jeff, I, Danny Bloom -- blogger, writer, thinker --hereby call on you guys in the e-reader industry to set up a research fund to carry out proper research on all this. Can do?

Please do.

webposted from my cave in Taiwan on August 1, 2010

Danny E. Bloom
=============
co·nun·drum

a : a question or problem having only a conjectural answer

b : an intricate and difficult problem

THE KINDLE CONUNDRUM: An Urgent Appeal to Jeff Bezos of Amazon Kindle and the CEOs of nook and the SONY Reader (and all ereader manufactureres worldwide) !

2010-08-02T21:01:00.000-07:00

Dear Jeff,

Since we do not yet know how the brain "reads" text on screens, compared to how it reads text on paper, and since there are major concerns among academics and neuroscientists that reading off screens (called "screening" now) may be inferior to reading on paper surfaces -- inferior only in terms of processing of the information, retention of it, and analysis of it, what used to be called critical thinking in cultures were it existed -- I am appealing to you to set up a neutral research fund that would enable vital and important MRI and PET scan research studies to be carried out by experts in the field on the neuroscience of reading on paper compared to screening.

There is some suspicion and worry and concer, Jeff, mostly anecdotal so far, that reading off screens, er, screening is in fact inferior to reading on paper and that under the circumstances only hard science and research by neuroscientists and others can get to the bottom of this very important issue. Not so much for the bottom line of your companies, but for the future of civilization.

Yes, "the tech train has already left the station", as Dr Gary Small of UCLA told the Los Angeles Times recently, "and it cannot be stopped." But at the same time, Jeff, I, Danny Bloom -- blogger, writer, thinker --hereby call on you guys in the e-reader industry to set up a research fund to carry out proper research on all this. Can do?

Please do.

webposted from my cave in Taiwan on August 1, 2010

Danny E. Bloom

Can you believe it? No "frankenbooks" [Kindles or nooks] Allowed in a New York coffee shop from noon to 3 pm? Nick Bilton has the details....shocking! What's next? No coffee allowed? Sheesh!

2010-08-02T20:26:00.000-07:00

In a story hedlined "No E-Books Allowed in This Establishment"...
NICKY BILTON of The New York Times writes:

A sandwich shop in Brooklyn has rules on computer use.

A few weeks ago I decided to go over to a local Manhattan coffee shop for an afternoon coffee. Right?

After placing my order I sat down at a table and pulled out my Amazon Kindle. It could have been a nook or a SONY Reader. Any device reader for that matter. Does not make any noise. So.....

I barely made it a sentence into the frankenbook that I was reading before an employee of the coffee shop came by, stood over me and said, “Excuse me Nick, but we don’t allow [computers] in the coffee shop.”

I looked up at him with an incredulous look and replied, “This isn’t a [computer], it’s frankenbook.”

He then told me that the “device” in my hand had a screen and required batteries, so it was obviously “some variation of a computer.” The coffee shop, I was told, did not allow the use of computers.

Annoyed with this distinction, I peppered the employee with questions on why reading on paper was more acceptable than reading on a screen. Flustered and confused by the existential debate he had been dragged into, the employee resolutely said, “Look, no computers in the coffee shop.”

I was dragged into a similar dispute at a sandwich shop in Brooklyn, this time while reading and taking notes on my iPad. The employee there said no computers were allowed between noon and 3 p.m. After another lengthy defense of e-readers and screens, I lost, again, and sat there resentfully picking at my sandwich.

I wonder if people went through the same thing in the mid-1400s as they sat in coffee shops with their pesky paper books? I can imagine a coffee shop owner demanding that a patron remove his book from an establishment that only allowed spoken communication.

And how long will it take before frankenbooks are accepted as equals with their paper counterparts?

The answer to that question might come sooner than we think.

A report last week by the Center for the Digital Future at the Annenberg School for Communication and Journalism at the University of Southern California found that people were quickly moving away from print in favor of digital offerings (although the reports noted that readers don’t entirely trust digital news yet).

On Monday, Ian Freed, Amazon’s vice president for digital, CLAIMED IN A PR BULLSHIT HYPE STATEMENT to CNet that the number of e-books Amazon sold in the first quarter of 2010 had gone up a bit compared to a year earlier.

Amazon also recently CLAIMED IN ANOTHER FAKE PR BID FOR MARKETSHARE that e-books have been outselling hamburgers AND HOT DOGS for several months. And Apple said in early April that iPad owners were downloading hundreds of thousands of frankenbooks from the iFrankenBookstore.

So what about that coffee shop that won’t let me read a book on a screen? Even though I don’t agree with the shop’s logic and its distinctions between pixels and paper, I can appreciate a place hoping to offer an escape from computers and the Web.

But as e-books continue to thrive and grow and more people, including students, replace their paper products with digital versions, these coffee and sandwich shops might not have much of a choice but to accept that some people now read books on screens — even if they do look like computers.

25 Readers' Comments, among them DANNY BLOOM's Comment Here:

This is an amazing story, Nick, and well-written. Although I am one of those people who believe that paper reading is superior to screening, my new word for reading on screens, I can't believe that a coffee shop would ban Kindles or nooks or other device readers! That is insane! I am sure your anecdote will get massive play around the world, both pro and con. But let me say I vote with you on this: coffeeshops can ban boom boxes and loud cellhone chats that go on for an hour, but to ban ebooks and ereaders and even netbooks and notebook computers, wow, that is going over-screen, er, overboard. It's still a free country, no? Wowsers.

That said, readers might like to see a recent interview I did with a major tech site about the need for MRI or PET scan research to determine the neuroscience of reading on paper compared to reading off screens, er, screening. Here:

http://green.blorge.com/2010/07/will-mris-help-us-determine-if-paper-reading-is-better-than-electronic-reading/

And here is my video oped, just two minutes, saying the same thing in just

120 seconds, live from my cave in Taiwan:

Bloom's 2-MINUTE READING vs. SCREENING VIDEO:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog!"

2010-08-02T07:03:00.001-07:00

1993 New Yorker cartoon

Brian Eno is very wrong here: he says "I notice that almost all of us have not thought about the chaos that would ensue if the Net collapsed."

2010-08-02T06:30:00.000-07:00

Brian Eno is very wrong here: he says

"I notice that almost all of us have not thought about the chaos that would ensue if the Net collapsed."

No, Brian, there would be no chaos. We do not need the Internet. It is a mere cosmetic distraction. We did fine with talking, writing and reading. No, if the Net collpased, it would be fine. You are wrong, sir.

Climate chaos will glacially put an end to the human species in 500 years, unless we wake up soon....

2010-08-02T01:48:00.000-07:00

Andy, more than the 20th Century ended on Friday when the US Congress said no to climate bills. The fate of all humankind as a functioning species was sealed as well. It's all over. Some will survive. But of the 25 billion people alive in 2500 AD, 99 percent will perish in a massive die off as climate chaos pushes the human species to the ropes, as Lovelock teaches us. Now, Andy, and I know I sound like a lunatic here, always repeating my polar cities mantra, but really, when will people wake up. It's over. We need now to start planning adaptation strategies, among them polar cities, er polar settlements, polar villages, in the northern regions of the world and in NZ and Tasmania as well. Although nobody takes me seriously, and that's okay, par for the course, comes with territory, and I don't need approval to go on with my work till die (and my days are numbered as you know, cough cough, heart attack last November, stent now)...one FB reader said "Danny, you have amazing foresight and an iconoclast POV, you may be right....", so I am soldiering on as James Lovelock's Accidental Student until one print media outlet decides to do a real story about future polar cities and interview me. I am not prediciting the future. I cannot see the future. I am saying, and have been saying for 3 years, that we as a humanity -- O the humanity! -- are not going to get it together or come together on climate change and it is already too late, and that we need to start actively exploring the A-word, Adaption, for future survivors of AGW and climate chaos. It is all but in the cards now. As of last Friday, the fate of the human species was sealed. Okay, don't believe me. It's not a comfortable meme to follow. But if anyone wants to follow me, here I am and I am avail for media interviews, pro and con. Go ahead, mock me; go ahead, diss me. I know of what I speak. Ask Lovelock if you need a PHD:

http://pcillu101.blogspot.com
Recommend Recommended by 12,345 Readers

"The Invisible Gorilla"

2010-08-02T01:19:00.000-07:00

In 2004 Dan Simons and Christopher Chabris received the Ig Nobel Prize in Psychology "for demonstrating that when people pay close attention to something, it's all too easy to overlook anything else -- even a woman in a gorilla suit." Here they are at the awards ceremony on the left in the front row, [COLD LINK]. Dan and Chris have now co-authored a book entitulated The Invisible Gorilla that was inspired by this experiment and the response to it.

READ: Literary agent jumped at the chance and prepub PR.

The Invisible Gorilla is an unusual name for an unusual book. The authors Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons have assembled a evidence of six illusions that impact our lives in significant ways.

Chapter One deals with the illusion of attention, that is, the illusion that we see or observe far more than we think. Several experiments have proven that even obvious things are easily missed by people. Up to fifty percent of testers failed to see a fake gorilla enter a basketball game where the testers were counting the number of ball passes rather than looking for gorillas. It is from this experiment that the book gets its name.

Most think that such a gorilla would be easily noticed; however, various experiments have shown this is not the case. This lack of ability to see objects that are not expected may explain why cars pull out in front of motorcycles, as it is theorized that people driving cars do not expect to see motorcycles and thus they do not. Cell phone users also miss obvious objects while they are driving. It seems cell phone users that are driving suffer from a reduction in awareness, but they are not aware of it. Thus the illusion that they are as fully aware while talking on the phone as they are when the phone is not in use. The Invisible Gorilla points out how this attention illusion can have real and sometimes harsh results in the real world.

Then the book goes on to describe five other illusions: the illusion of memory, the illusion of knowledge and confidence, the illusion that in a series of events, event one causes event two, and the illusion that certain mythical processes - such as hypnotism - can help one reach their full potential. Another illusion is we can do many things well all at once (multi-tasking); however, experiments have shown this is a false assumption.

The book's key message is that we think our mental abilities and capacities are greater than they really are. Perhaps the largest impact is in court, where witnesses think they can accurately remember an event that occurred some time ago.

I loved this book. It explains so many problems faced in a modern world where information as well as objects are hurled into our lives at breathtaking speed. What is most important is that we stop assuming our minds can process all this whirl without problems. More experiments are necessary to evaluate how our minds work. Understanding our limitations is important to achieving our full potential.

I see by the snailpapers that the digital alarmists like me are wrong.....and that Drs. Chabris and Simons are right! Who knew?

2010-08-02T01:02:00.000-07:00

Google is not making us stupid, PowerPoint is not destroying literature, and the Internet is not really changing our brains.
July 25, 2010|By Christopher Chabris and Daniel Simons, two PHD dummies

(Page 3 of 3)
For every way the Internet gives us to waste time, there is a way to increase the scope and diversity of our knowledge and to work collectively on problems. It was not long ago that scientists worked mostly within their own laboratories, collaborating only with students and assistants. Today scientists are more likely to collaborate in larger, more diverse teams that often span the globe. With rapid access to diverse information online, ideas, data and resources can be shared faster and on a scale that was impossible at any point in history.

Although the case that technology increases our intelligence is at least as plausible as the gloomy idea that it is changing our brains for the worse, there are real downsides to the instant availability of torrents of information. The danger comes not from the information itself, or from how it could rewire our brains, but from the way we think about our own knowledge and abilities. As the psychologists Leon Rozenblit and Frank Keil discovered, people tend to suffer from an illusion of knowledge: a tendency to mistake surface-level familiarity with deep understanding. As more information becomes readily available, that sense of familiarity grows and grows, and with it the illusion of knowledge. On-demand access to reams of data can also trick us into mistaking knowledge we could obtain quickly for knowledge we already have and can act upon. And if the illusion leads us to neglect the acquisition of true knowledge, we as individuals could become dumber as a result.

Additionally, the more different ways technology gives us to multitask, the more chances we have to succumb to an illusion of attention — the idea that we are paying attention to and processing more information than we really are. Each time we text while we are driving and do not get into an accident, we become more convinced that we can do two (or three or four …) things at once, when in reality almost no one can multitask successfully and we are all at greater risk when we do so. Our capacity to learn, understand and multitask hasn't changed with the onslaught of technology, but our confidence in our own knowledge and abilities have.

So Google is not making us stupid, PowerPoint is not destroying literature, and the Internet is not really changing our brains. But they may well be making us think we're smarter than we really are, and that is a dangerous thing.

Christopher Chabris is a psychology professor at Union College in New York. Daniel Simons is a psychology professor at the University of Illinois. They are the authors of the new book, "The Invisible Gorilla: And Other Ways Our Intuitions Deceive Us." They blog at theinvisiblegorilla.com

Veteran NYC book publisher agrees that we need MRI and PET brain scan tests soon on reading on paper vs reading on screens...

2010-08-01T19:22:00.000-07:00

i can tell you his name , if you wish.....DAN

Dear Dan,

Very well said. Your interview idea with Techblorg about MRI or PET scans research ......was an aspect of the digital age that ......I hadn't of thought about, ......however it is just as important-....-or perhaps more--.......than the rest of the self-serving discussions that are going on.

R.

re
http://green.blorge.com/2010/07/will-mris-help-us-determine-if-paper-reading-is-better-than-electronic-reading/

Top NYC publisher agrees that MRI brain scan tests needed to compare paper reading with screen reading!

2010-08-01T19:14:00.000-07:00

Dan,

Very good interview. Your ideas about MRI brain scans are an aspect I hadn't of thought about, however it is just as important --or perhaps more-- than the rest of the self-serving discussions that are going on.

re

http://green.blorge.com/2010/07/will-mris-help-us-determine-if-paper-reading-is-better-than-electronic-reading/

=================================================
MY 2-MINUTE READING vs. SCREENING OPED VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

How even digitally-literate Nick Bilton makes atomic typo gaffes in his EDGE piece.....

2010-08-01T07:46:00.000-07:00

The Internet has killed the private diary hiding under my under
sisters mattress, and replaced it with a blog or social network.

1. under my under?
2. sisters without an apostrophe?

and Nick Bilton calls himself screen literate?

SMILE

If he'd answer my emails he could correct his mistakes but he'd rather
have egg on his face than be a mensch. SMILE

Is screen-reading really reading?

2010-08-01T07:23:00.001-07:00

Is screen-reading really reading?

By Dan Eee Bloom

Some observers of this digital age are worried that reading on screens
might not be as good as reading on paper, and they are hoping
that MRI brain scans will be used in the future for research on the issues
involved.

They are concerned that reading on
screens might be not be as good as reading on paper in terms of brain
chemisty, and they want to know the facts, from the standpoint of
neuroscience. Anecdotal evidence no
longer cuts the cake.

Is reading on paper surfaces, the same text, superior, inferior, or
the same, compared to reading the same text on a screen, in terms of
brain chemistry? And which regions of the brain light up in regard to
processing the info, retaining it and critically thinking about it?

Nobody has done this research yet. Gary Small, a top UCLA scientist,
believes it is possible to do this, but that it will be a costly
and expensive undertaking.

Doing MRI brain scan research on lab volunteers reading on paper
compared to others reading on screens (Kindles or Nooks or iPhones or
computer screens) will be certainly be expensive. But institutions like UCLA,
Harvard, Princeton and Tufts and other major universities in Europe,
Taiwan and Japan will be able to carry out this research over the next
few years.

Scholars like Anne Mangen in Norway, Maryanne Wolf at
Tufts, Oliver Sacks at Columbia and Gary Small at UCLA are aware of
these issues and will likely be at the forefront of the research. It
might take five years, it might ten years, but the studies and
academic papers will come out.

No one knows for sure what the research will say. The MRI studies might show
the reading on paper is superior to reading on screens, or they might
say the opposite. Or they might say there is no real difference. But
we need to find out with neuroscience, not just anecdotal evidence.

So far, there has not been even one academic paper published about MRI
brain scan studies on this topic. However, several top people in the
field have said that such research is imperative and that it will
happen sooner or later.

Using MRI brain scans is one method, but using PET brain
scans would also do the trick. Research by academics and
neuroscientists worldwide on how the brain "does" reading -- both on
screens and on paper surfaces -- is just getting underway now.

Let's say that huge differences are seen between
reading a book on paper compared to reading the same book on a screen.
Will it mean anything?

If the differences are huge, it will mean something, for sure. If the
differences are very slight, maybe it will not mean much. And if there
are no differences, then there's nothing to worry about.

If it turns out that
screening reading is superior to paper reading, then that will be important to
know, too.

However, as Dr Small at UCLA recently told a reporter for the Los
Angeles Times: "People tend to ask whether this is good or bad," Small
said. "My response is that the tech train is out of the station, and
it’s impossible to stop.”

He was referring to an earlier note that online readers often
demonstrate what he calls "continuous partial attention" as they click
from one link to the next. The risk is that we become mindless ants
following endless crumbs of digital data, Small indicated. But his
final note that the tech train is already out of the station and
cannot be stopped is telling.

It is highly likely that ereader manufacturers and the entire computer
industry will pay little attention to whatever findings come out. If
the findings back the superiority of reading off screens, they will
rejoice and help to publish the results. If the findings say that
reading on paper and reading off screens is more or less the same, in
terms of brain chemistry and reception, then they will also rejoice.
But if the findings come back that paper reading is superior to screen
reading, it won’t make a difference to the e-reader industry.

A veteran observer of the digital age recently wrote: "Just as dire warnings about cancer and radiation from excessive
cellphone use have more or less gone unheeded, the same thing will
happen with the results of the MRI tests on paper reading versus
screen reading. It’s too late to do anything about it. The reading
devices are already out there in the marketplace and in the schools. I
don’t think a few warnings will change a thing. It didn’t stop the
cellphone industry. It won’t stop the e-reader makers. It’s a billion
dollar industry, and it’s getting hotter every day."

--
MY 2-MINUTE READING vs. SCREENING VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

Will print newspapers survive in the Digital Age?

2010-08-01T07:16:00.001-07:00

Is screen-reading really reading? People want to know

by Daniel Halevi Bloom

I am worried that reading on screens
might not be as good as reading on paper, this is why I am hoping
that MRI brain scans will be used in the future to research the issues
involved.

I am calling for this research because I am concerned that reading on
screens might be not be as good as reading on paper in terms of brain
chemisty, and I want to know the facts, from the standpoint of
neuroscience. And if I am wrong about my hunch that paper reading is
superior to screening, then I will adjust my thinking accordingly. I
want to see the facts, presented by experts. Anecdotal evidence no
longer cuts the cake. We need facts.

Is reading on paper surfaces, the same text, superior, inferior, or
the same, compared to reading the same text on a screen, in terms of
brain chemistry and which regions of the brain light up in regard to
processing the info, retaining it and critically thinking about it.

Nobody has done this research yet. Gary Small, a top UCLA scientist,
told me recently that it is possible to do this, but that it is costly
and expensive. He said his team is busy with other things, but that he
hopes to see the work done soon, too.

Doing MRI brain scan research on lab volunteers reading on paper
compared to others reading on screens (Kindles or Nooks or iPhones or
computer screens) will be expensive. But institutions like UCLA,
Harvard, Princeton and Tufts and other major universities in Europe,
Taiwan and Japan will be able to carry out this research over the next
few years. Scholars like Anne Mangen in Norway, Maryanne Wolf at
Tufts, Oliver Sacks at Columbia and Gary Small at UCLA are aware of
these issues and will likely be at the forefront of the research. It
might take five years, it might ten years, but the studies and
academic papers will come out.

I have no idea what the research will say. The MRI studies might show
the reading on paper is superior to reading on screens, or they might
say the opposite. Or they might say there is no real difference. But
we need to find out with neuroscience, not just anecdotal evidence.

So far, there has not been even one academic paper published about MRI
brain scan studies on this topic. However, several top people in the
field have told me that such research is imperative and that it will
happen sooner or later.

I am only zeroing in on MRIs as a target method but using PET brain
scans would also do the trick. We need research by academics and
neuroscientists worldwide on how the brain "does" reading -- both on
screens and on paper surfaces -- to learn more about these phenomena,
and both PET scans and MRI scans will be useful for the studies.
Research scientists will know better which method fits their mode of
research.

Let's say that huge differences are seen between
reading a book on paper compared to reading the same book on a screen.
Will it mean anything?

If the differences are huge, it will mean something, for sure. If the
differences are very slight, maybe it will not mean much. And if there
are no differences, then we can all relax. And if it turns out that
screening reading is superior to paper reading, then that’s good to
know too. We need to ask neuroscientists to tell us what’s going on.

However, as Dr Small at UCLA recently told a reporter for the Los
Angeles Times: "People tend to ask whether this is good or bad," Small
said. "My response is that the tech train is out of the station, and
it’s impossible to stop.”

He was referring to an earlier note that online readers often
demonstrate what he calls "continuous partial attention" as they click
from one link to the next. The risk is that we become mindless ants
following endless crumbs of digital data, Small indicated. But his
final note that the tech train is already out of the station and
cannot be stopped is telling.

It is highly likely that ereader manufacturers and the entire computer
industry will pay little attention to whatever findings come out. If
the findings back the superiority of reading off screens, they will
rejoice and help to publish the results. If the findings say that
reading on paper and reading off screens is more or less the same, in
terms of brain chemistry and reception, then they will also rejoice.
But if the findings come back that paper reading is superior to screen
reading, it won’t make a difference to the e-reader industry. As a
friend of mine in the industry told me recently:

"Just as dire warnings about cancer and radiation from excessive
cellphone use have more or less gone unheeded, the same thing will
happen with the results of the MRI tests on paper reading versus
screen reading. It’s too late to do anything about it. The reading
devices are already out there in the marketplace and in the schools. I
don’t think a few warnings will change a thing. It didn’t stop the
cellphone industry. It won’t stop the e-reader makers. It’s a billion
dollar industry, and it’s getting hotter every day."

--
MY 2-MINUTE READING vs. SCREENING VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

Will newspapers survive the Digital Age?

2010-08-01T07:15:00.002-07:00

Is screen-reading really reading? People want to know

by Danny E. Bloom

I am worried that reading on screens
might not be as good as reading on paper, this is why I am hoping
that MRI brain scans will be used in the future to research the issues
involved.

I am calling for this research because I am concerned that reading on
screens might be not be as good as reading on paper in terms of brain
chemisty, and I want to know the facts, from the standpoint of
neuroscience. And if I am wrong about my hunch that paper reading is
superior to screening, then I will adjust my thinking accordingly. I
want to see the facts, presented by experts. Anecdotal evidence no
longer cuts the cake. We need facts.

Is reading on paper surfaces, the same text, superior, inferior, or
the same, compared to reading the same text on a screen, in terms of
brain chemistry and which regions of the brain light up in regard to
processing the info, retaining it and critically thinking about it.

Nobody has done this research yet. Gary Small, a top UCLA scientist,
told me recently that it is possible to do this, but that it is costly
and expensive. He said his team is busy with other things, but that he
hopes to see the work done soon, too.

Doing MRI brain scan research on lab volunteers reading on paper
compared to others reading on screens (Kindles or Nooks or iPhones or
computer screens) will be expensive. But institutions like UCLA,
Harvard, Princeton and Tufts and other major universities in Europe,
Taiwan and Japan will be able to carry out this research over the next
few years. Scholars like Anne Mangen in Norway, Maryanne Wolf at
Tufts, Oliver Sacks at Columbia and Gary Small at UCLA are aware of
these issues and will likely be at the forefront of the research. It
might take five years, it might ten years, but the studies and
academic papers will come out.

I have no idea what the research will say. The MRI studies might show
the reading on paper is superior to reading on screens, or they might
say the opposite. Or they might say there is no real difference. But
we need to find out with neuroscience, not just anecdotal evidence.

So far, there has not been even one academic paper published about MRI
brain scan studies on this topic. However, several top people in the
field have told me that such research is imperative and that it will
happen sooner or later.

I am only zeroing in on MRIs as a target method but using PET brain
scans would also do the trick. We need research by academics and
neuroscientists worldwide on how the brain "does" reading -- both on
screens and on paper surfaces -- to learn more about these phenomena,
and both PET scans and MRI scans will be useful for the studies.
Research scientists will know better which method fits their mode of
research.

Let's say that huge differences are seen between
reading a book on paper compared to reading the same book on a screen.
Will it mean anything?

If the differences are huge, it will mean something, for sure. If the
differences are very slight, maybe it will not mean much. And if there
are no differences, then we can all relax. And if it turns out that
screening reading is superior to paper reading, then that’s good to
know too. We need to ask neuroscientists to tell us what’s going on.

However, as Dr Small at UCLA recently told a reporter for the Los
Angeles Times: "People tend to ask whether this is good or bad," Small
said. "My response is that the tech train is out of the station, and
it’s impossible to stop.”

He was referring to an earlier note that online readers often
demonstrate what he calls "continuous partial attention" as they click
from one link to the next. The risk is that we become mindless ants
following endless crumbs of digital data, Small indicated. But his
final note that the tech train is already out of the station and
cannot be stopped is telling.

It is highly likely that ereader manufacturers and the entire computer
industry will pay little attention to whatever findings come out. If
the findings back the superiority of reading off screens, they will
rejoice and help to publish the results. If the findings say that
reading on paper and reading off screens is more or less the same, in
terms of brain chemistry and reception, then they will also rejoice.
But if the findings come back that paper reading is superior to screen
reading, it won’t make a difference to the e-reader industry. As a
friend of mine in the industry told me recently:

"Just as dire warnings about cancer and radiation from excessive
cellphone use have more or less gone unheeded, the same thing will
happen with the results of the MRI tests on paper reading versus
screen reading. It’s too late to do anything about it. The reading
devices are already out there in the marketplace and in the schools. I
don’t think a few warnings will change a thing. It didn’t stop the
cellphone industry. It won’t stop the e-reader makers. It’s a billion
dollar industry, and it’s getting hotter every day."

--
MY 2-MINUTE READING vs. SCREENING VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

Whither the future of newspapers?

2010-08-01T07:15:00.000-07:00

Is screen-reading really reading? People want to know

by Dan Bloom

I am worried that reading on screens
might not be as good as reading on paper, this is why I am hoping
that MRI brain scans will be used in the future to research the issues
involved.

I am calling for this research because I am concerned that reading on
screens might be not be as good as reading on paper in terms of brain
chemisty, and I want to know the facts, from the standpoint of
neuroscience. And if I am wrong about my hunch that paper reading is
superior to screening, then I will adjust my thinking accordingly. I
want to see the facts, presented by experts. Anecdotal evidence no
longer cuts the cake. We need facts.

Is reading on paper surfaces, the same text, superior, inferior, or
the same, compared to reading the same text on a screen, in terms of
brain chemistry and which regions of the brain light up in regard to
processing the info, retaining it and critically thinking about it.

Nobody has done this research yet. Gary Small, a top UCLA scientist,
told me recently that it is possible to do this, but that it is costly
and expensive. He said his team is busy with other things, but that he
hopes to see the work done soon, too.

Doing MRI brain scan research on lab volunteers reading on paper
compared to others reading on screens (Kindles or Nooks or iPhones or
computer screens) will be expensive. But institutions like UCLA,
Harvard, Princeton and Tufts and other major universities in Europe,
Taiwan and Japan will be able to carry out this research over the next
few years. Scholars like Anne Mangen in Norway, Maryanne Wolf at
Tufts, Oliver Sacks at Columbia and Gary Small at UCLA are aware of
these issues and will likely be at the forefront of the research. It
might take five years, it might ten years, but the studies and
academic papers will come out.

I have no idea what the research will say. The MRI studies might show
the reading on paper is superior to reading on screens, or they might
say the opposite. Or they might say there is no real difference. But
we need to find out with neuroscience, not just anecdotal evidence.

So far, there has not been even one academic paper published about MRI
brain scan studies on this topic. However, several top people in the
field have told me that such research is imperative and that it will
happen sooner or later.

I am only zeroing in on MRIs as a target method but using PET brain
scans would also do the trick. We need research by academics and
neuroscientists worldwide on how the brain "does" reading -- both on
screens and on paper surfaces -- to learn more about these phenomena,
and both PET scans and MRI scans will be useful for the studies.
Research scientists will know better which method fits their mode of
research.

Let's say that huge differences are seen between
reading a book on paper compared to reading the same book on a screen.
Will it mean anything?

If the differences are huge, it will mean something, for sure. If the
differences are very slight, maybe it will not mean much. And if there
are no differences, then we can all relax. And if it turns out that
screening reading is superior to paper reading, then that’s good to
know too. We need to ask neuroscientists to tell us what’s going on.

However, as Dr Small at UCLA recently told a reporter for the Los
Angeles Times: "People tend to ask whether this is good or bad," Small
said. "My response is that the tech train is out of the station, and
it’s impossible to stop.”

He was referring to an earlier note that online readers often
demonstrate what he calls "continuous partial attention" as they click
from one link to the next. The risk is that we become mindless ants
following endless crumbs of digital data, Small indicated. But his
final note that the tech train is already out of the station and
cannot be stopped is telling.

It is highly likely that ereader manufacturers and the entire computer
industry will pay little attention to whatever findings come out. If
the findings back the superiority of reading off screens, they will
rejoice and help to publish the results. If the findings say that
reading on paper and reading off screens is more or less the same, in
terms of brain chemistry and reception, then they will also rejoice.
But if the findings come back that paper reading is superior to screen
reading, it won’t make a difference to the e-reader industry. As a
friend of mine in the industry told me recently:

"Just as dire warnings about cancer and radiation from excessive
cellphone use have more or less gone unheeded, the same thing will
happen with the results of the MRI tests on paper reading versus
screen reading. It’s too late to do anything about it. The reading
devices are already out there in the marketplace and in the schools. I
don’t think a few warnings will change a thing. It didn’t stop the
cellphone industry. It won’t stop the e-reader makers. It’s a billion
dollar industry, and it’s getting hotter every day."

--
MY 2-MINUTE READING vs. SCREENING VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

The future of newspapers will depend on whether readers read or screen

2010-07-31T07:57:00.000-07:00

An Interview with Dan Bloom from TechBlorg.com
http://green.blorge.com/2010/07/will-mris-help-us-determine-if-paper-reading-is-better-than-electronic-reading/

Move over Gregorian Calendar of Christendom. Here comes a new dating system called E.T. (Earth Time) and today is July 31, 4B-010 ET.......

2010-07-31T07:52:00.000-07:00

Move over Gregorian Calendar of Christendom. Here comes a new dating system called E.T. (Earth Time) and today is July 31, 4B-010 E.T..

I am proposing that all enlightened nations, if there are any, adopt what I call the E.T. Calendar (Earth Time Calendar) and start writing the current year as 4B-010 E.T.

This means that it is the Year 4 Billion on Earth, or 4B for short, and the 010 helps us keep track of where we are in the old calendar system of 2010 A.D.

Surely, the Earth is older than 2000 years and surely the Christian calendar adopted by the West and most of the world now is not really a useful calendar for non-Christians of the world (and even enligtened Christians, of which there are many).

The current dating system of A.D. is a throwback to the Dark Ages of superstition and myth, and while it served a purpose in the longago, it no longer serves a good purpose. The Earth is much older than 2000 years and human beings have lived on this planet for around 75 million years or so. And since the Earth itself is around 4 billion years ago, and since we now face major problems with climate change and global warming, it's time to change the calendar system to reflect our real connections to Planet Earth, the human species and the Cosmos. God, too. (Yes, there is a place for God in this new dating system, so relax all you readers who are religious. This new dating system honors God.)

People can still believe in a God or a Buddha or an Allah or in the ancient gods of the East as well, but with this new E.T. calendar system to be adopted by the United Nations and individual countries (and individual human beings as well, as they wish) we'll be able to better face
the future, especially with all the looming problems of overpopulation, poverty, climate change and global warming. Welcome to the new days of Earth Time and welcome to 4B-010.

The rest is up to you!

Hamish MacDonald in Scotland makes books by hand, loves the Internet, too, and sums it all up this way....

2010-07-31T06:57:00.000-07:00

''I finished making these two books
by hand last night.''

''What piece of electronic gear — even the iPad — will ever feel the same as opening a fresh new book? The iPad is a space already filled with demands, tentacles pulling you away to other people's ideas and commercial intentions for you, whereas a blank book is your own, private, infinite imaginal space.''

http://www.hamishmacdonald.com/blog/hameblog.php?id=938094095673109617

Will MRI’s help us determine if paper reading is better than electronic reading.....July 30, 2010.......by Susan Wilson, TECHBLORG.COM

2010-07-30T21:50:00.000-07:00

Susan Wilson interviews Danny Bloom about the future of reading on paper
and reading on screens, which he now calls "SCREENING"....

TEXT

What is the best way to read a book – in paper form or electronic form? Do the different mediums work better for different types of readers or those with disabilities? These are just a few of the questions raised by the new technologies that allow people to read on computer screens, phone screens, tablet screens and ereader screens.

Research is being done using Magnetic Resonance Imaging or MRIs. The scans are looking at what part(s) of the brain light up when we read. The studies have also explored the differences between reading by normal people and people with dyslexia or autism. The findings have shown the differences between what parts of the brain are activated when poor readers and good readers read.

The research that has been conducted specifically targeting electronic reading has been more antidotal than scientific. A small study (only 24 subjects) determined that reading electronically was ten percent slower than reading from paper. Other studies have shown that reading and surfing the internet actually boosts brain function.

Dan Bloom, a self-described eccentric and “semi-retired gadfly”, journalist and PR consultant who lives in a cave in Taiwan raised the question of which one is better, not from an academic or scientific background but out of curiosity. He has watched the growth of electronics from the early days of computers to the current use of electronic reading for everything from newspapers and magazines to children’s books. Following is an email discussion with Bloom about why MRI studies are needed.

-- Susan Wilson, TECHBLORG.COM
http://green.blorge.com/2010/07/will-mris-help-us-determine-if-paper-reading-is-better-than-electronic-reading

Question: You do not have a Ph.D, nor any academic background or
affiliation, and you are not connected with any research institution or e-reader manufacturer or book publisher, why are you so concerned about these issues and why you?

DAN: So why I am doing this, calling for this research, with so much energy? I just want to know! I am concerned that reading on screens might be not be as good as reading on paper in terms of brain chemisty, and I want to know the truth, from the standpoint of neuroscience. And if I am wrong about my hunch that paper reading is superior to screening, then I will adjust my thinking accordingly. I want to see the facts, presented by experts. Anecdotal evidence no longer cuts the cake. We need facts.

ME: Dan, a Google search on brain scans of children and adults reading uncovered some interesting information. The scans usually use an MRI while people are perfectly still and reading from a screen ahead of them. I also found an article that implied that reading on computers/screens is used to improve peoples reading abilities. There are also studies that show computer searches stimulate middle aged and older adults brains. (Studies are referenced above.) Do any of these studies answer your question?

DAN: Thing is, for my purposes, this does NOT answer the question that I have posed which is: Is reading on paper surface, same text, [superior/ inferior/ the same?] compared to reading the same text on a screen, in terms of brain chemistry and which region of the brain light up for themes of processing the info, retaining it and critically thinking about it.

BUT THE hunch i am going after is the comparison of PAPER reading vs
SCREEN READING for:

1. processing the info in the brain, digesting it
2. retention of it, memory
3. analysis

so my theme is the COMPARISON, and nobody has done this research in
the entire world, I am sure….BUT THEY SHOULD soon. one UCLA scientist told me last week IT IS POSSIBLE TO DO THIS, but it is costly and expensive and his team is busy with other things, but he hopes to see the work done soon too.

ME: Using MRI’s is going to expensive. How would the studies be financed?

DAN: Yes, conducting MRI brain scan research on lab volunteers reading on paper compared to others reading on screens (Kindles or Nooks or iPhones or computer screens) will be expensive. But institutions like UCLA and Harvard and Princeton and Tufts and other major universities in Europe and Japan will be able to carry out this research over the next few years. Scholars like Anne Mangen in Norway, Maryanne Wolf at Tufts, Oliver Sacks at Columbia and Gary Small at UCLA are aware of these issues and will likely be at the forefront of the research. It might take 5 years, it might ten 10 years, but the studies and academic papers will come out.

ME: What do you think the brain scans will show?

DAN: I have no idea what the research will say. The MRI studies might show the reading on paper is superior to reading on screens, or they might say the opposite. Or they might say there is no real difference. But we need to find out with neuroscience, not just anecdotal evidence.

So far, there is not one academic paper published about MRI brain scan studies on this topic, but several top people in the field have told me that such research is imperative and that it will happen sooner or later.

Anne Mangen, at the University of Stavanger in Norway, has already
published a paper about some of this work, but she did not use MRI
scans as part of her research. Still, one can summarize the importance of Mangen’s research on the difference between screen and print reading this way:

“The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical
manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to
focus on and appreciate what we are reading. Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks a physical dimension, robbing us of a sense of completeness. The visual happenings on a computer screen and our physical interaction with the device and its setup can be distracting. All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way that a book, newspaper or magazine does not.”

ME: There is so much research on brain activity using PET scans why would MRIs be better than PET scans?

DAN: Your question is a good one. I am only zeroing in on MRIs as a target method but using PET scans would also do the trick. We need research by academics and neuroscientists worldwide on how the brain "does" reading– both on screens and on paper surfaces — to learn more about these phenomena, and both PET scans and MRI scans will be useful for the studies. Research scientists will know better which method fits their mode of research.

ME: Even if there are differences shown between reading a book and reading on an electronic device, does that really mean it is harmful or just that its different?

DAN: Good question. Let’s say that huge differences are seen between
reading a book on paper compared to reading the same book on a screen. Will it mean anything? If the differences are huge, it will mean something, for sure. If the differences are very slight, maybe it will not mean much. And if there are no differences, then we can all relax. And if it turns out that screening reading is superior to paper reading, then that’s good to know too. We need to ask neuroscientists to tell us what’s going on. However, as Gary Small at UCLA recently told a reporter for the Los Angeles Times: "People tend to ask whether this is good or bad," Small said. "My response is that the tech train is out of the station, and it’s impossible to stop.”

He was referring to an earlier note that online readers often demonstrate what he calls "continuous partial attention" as they click from one link to the next. The risk is that we become mindless ants following endless crumbs of digital data, Small indicated. But his final note that the tech train is already out of the station and cannot be stopped is telling.

ME: How likely is it that manufacturers who have heavily invested in ebook technology will pay any attention to the findings if they are negative?

DAN: Very good question. It is highly likely that they will pay no attention to whatever findings come out. If the findings back the superiority of reading off screens, they will rejoice and help to publish the results. If the findings say that reading on paper and reading off screens is more or less the same, in terms of brain chemistry and reception, then they will also rejoice. But if the findings come back that paper reading is superior to screen reading, it won’t make a difference to the e-reader industry. As a friend of mine in the industry told me recently:

"Just as dire warnings about cancer and radiation from excessive cellphone use have more or less gone unheeded, the same thing will happen with the results of the MRI tests on paper reading versus screen reading. It’s too late to do anything about it. The reading devices are already out there in the marketplace and in the schools. I don’t think a few warnings will change a thing. It didn’t stop the cellphone industry. It won’t stop the e-reader makers. It’s a billion dollar industry, and it’s getting hotter every day."

SUSAN WILSON: It may actually turn out the paper reading is better for some and that screen reading is better for others. Who knows? Without the research you are proposing, we won’t know.

Tweet Less, Fuck More! - Bob Herbert on FACING REALITY (from the NY TIMES)

2010-07-30T20:47:00.000-07:00

Times snailpaper columnist BOB HERBERT on
July 16, 2010

I was driving from Washington DC to New York one afternoon on Interstate 95 when a car came zooming up behind me, really flying. I could see in the rearview mirror that the driver was talking on his/her cellphone.

I was about to move to the center lane to get out of his/her way when he/she suddenly swerved into that lane himself/herself to pass me on the right — still chatting away. She/he continued moving dangerously from one lane to another as he/she sped up the highway.

A few days later, I was talking to a guy who commutes every day between New York and New Jersey. He props up his laptop on the front seat so he can watch DVDs while he’s driving.

“I only do it in traffic,” he said. “It’s no big deal.”

Beyond the obvious safety issues, why does anyone want, or need, to be talking constantly on the phone or watching movies (or texting) while driving? I hate to sound so Ludditicrous and 19th century, but what’s wrong with just listening to the radio? The blessed wonders of technology are overwhelming us. We don’t control them; they control us.

We’ve got cellphones and BlackBerrys and Kindles and iPads, and we’re e-mailing and text-messaging and chatting and tweeting — I used to call it Twittering until I was corrected by high school kids who patiently explained to me, as if I were the village idiot, that the correct term is tweeting. Twittering, tweeting — whatever it is, it sounds like a nervous disorder.

This is all part of what I think is one of the weirder aspects of our culture: a heightened freneticism that seems to demand that we be doing, at a minimum, two or three things every single moment of every hour that we’re awake. Why is multitasking considered an admirable talent? We could just as easily think of it as a neurotic inability to concentrate for more than three seconds.

Why do we have to check our e-mail so many times a day, or keep our ears constantly attached, as if with Krazy Glue, to our cellphones? When you watch the news on cable television, there are often additional stories being scrolled across the bottom of the screen, stock market results blinking on the right of the screen, and promos for upcoming features on the left. These extras often block significant parts of the main item we’re supposed to be watching.

A friend of mine told me about an engagement party that she had attended. She said it was lovely: a delicious lunch and plenty of Champagne toasts. But all the guests had their cellphones on the luncheon tables and had text-messaged their way through the entire event.

Enough already with this hyperactive behavior, this techno-tyranny and nonstop freneticism. We need to slow down and take a deep breath.

I’m not opposed to the remarkable technological advances of the past several years. I don’t want to go back to typewriters and carbon paper and yellowing clips from the newspaper morgue. I just think that we should treat technology like any other tool. We should control it, bending it to our human purposes.

Let’s put down at least some of these gadgets and spend a little time just being ourselves. One of the essential problems of our society is that we have a tendency, amid all the craziness that surrounds us, to lose sight of what is truly human in ourselves, and that includes our own individual needs — those very special, mostly nonmaterial things that would fulfill us, give meaning to our lives, enlarge us, and enable us to more easily embrace those around us.

There’s a character in the August Wilson play “Joe Turner’s Come and Gone” who says everyone has a song inside of him or her, and that you lose sight of that song at your peril. If you get out of touch with your song, forget how to sing it, you’re bound to end up frustrated and dissatisfied.

As this character says, recalling a time when he was out of touch with his own song, “Something wasn’t making my heart smooth and easy.”

I don’t think we can stay in touch with our song by constantly Twittering or tweeting, or thumbing out messages on our BlackBerrys, or piling up virtual friends on Facebook.

We need to reduce the speed limits of our lives. We need to savor the trip. Leave the cellphone at home every once in awhile. Try kissing more and tweeting less. And stop talking so much.

Listen.

Other people have something to say, too. And when they don’t, that glorious silence that you hear will have more to say to you than you ever imagined. That is when you will begin to hear your song. That’s when your best thoughts take hold, and you become really you.

On reading and screening and screens and paper and all that.... an expert weighs in

2010-07-30T20:43:00.000-07:00

Dear Zippy1300, aka Danny Bloom,

You asked me if I think we need a new word for the kind of reading we do online now or on Kindle screens, etc, and you suggested we can think new mode of reading as "screening" in order to differentiate it from real reading. Here's my answer: I think the "screening" idea is reductionist bullshit, that relies far too much on biological determinalism.

First of all it suggests that there is a single form of "reading" -- something that I reject outright. Reading, even on paper, is wide enough to include everything from looking at pictures/comic books (which mash different forms of iconography), to the contemplative hermeneutic work done by Koranic scholars parsing scripts which are intentionally written in a way that makes them difficult to scan, to musicians following music.

We haven't needed to invent new terms to sumpliment reading in each of these cases -- though I expect that there would be differences if we were to attempt to compare the visualization of each via MRI.

Secondly, even if were were to restrict reading to what we think of as text, and further restrict that to only one specific language and character set, with associated representational rules, (i.e. roman character set, written left to write, read top to bottom in horizontal lines), the fact is that currently, on the majority of electronic devices, the social experience of how we read (and how we are taught to read) remain the same.

Finally, it seems like the crux of many of your ideas, Mr Bloom, is your suspicion that somehow reading on paper is, in cognitive terms, some how fundamentally different than reading on screen - even in cases where the text is positioned /presented in similiar fashions (ie. the Kindle or the nook).

Further, if I'm reading you right, er, understanding you correctly, you suspect that paper-based reading is somehow superior (again in an ambiguous cognitive way) to screen reading. Without specifying the basis for that judgement, I find that claim not even worth considering. Especially because it overemphasizes the value of neural modeling in the creation of a value judgment and seemingly ignores any social factors.

What confuses me even more is that one of your letters to me includes this statement from someone or other, I don't know who said that, certainly not you, which seems to contradict your entire mission:

"Of course to say “paper to screens” is a massive simplification of the transformation that’s underway. The cognitive, cultural,
and technological shift we’re experiencing goes well beyond the medium of the literal surface to embrace electronic networks, the
durability of texts, the ways we experience and share them … every aspect of reading and writing. But reading is always already
undergoing constant transformation. Try reading a gothic manuscript from the 14th century with its many scribal
abbreviations, its exotic letterforms, its strange way of organizing and managing words on the page. It’s nearly
impenetrable, even to the student of Latin. What’s the implication? In the 14th century, brains were different. They
were different in the 17th, and the 19th; they were different in Greece in 600 BCE. As we’ve gone from “claying” to “papyring” to
“velluming” to “papering” to “screening,” our brains have reorganized themselves—reorganizing the media as they go. But where
do we locate “reading” in that history? Is there one essential point at which it all culminates? Or does the process of transformation
itself represent the essence of “reading”?

First of all, it suggests that regardless of medium, we've always been reading and thus we don't need to assign specific neologisms for each phase of reading.

Secondly, taking a page out of McLuhan, it suggests that each new underlying medium transforms us on both a biological and a social level.

As I'm largely someone who buys into this bio-social context, I can't build myself into much of a lather as to the question of whether we read better or worse on screen. The answer is that we read differently. And that future generations will most likely read differently than we do (on both a biological and a social level), just as we read differently than prior generations.

In that respect the question of whether or not we read better or worse on paper seems moot. I assume that the average adult, age 25 or older, reads better on paper than on screen. But the reason for this, according to the above paragraph you cited, is that we began reading on paper, learned to read on paper, and acclimated to reading on paper.

Younger children are growing up in a radically different reading environment. And that environment will potentially allow them to read better on screen, perhaps even better than paper.

I don't see why we should be protecting paper based reading, especially if, over the long term, people adapt to the medium that they are reading on. That would be the same as arguing that we should never have moved to metal type because it removed the vast majority of aesthetic cues (conveyed through the art of calligraphy) from scripts. That surely was/is the case, especially in Eastern and Near-Eastern scripts. That's a Luddite argument that has no bearing on the hard facts of techno-social progress. Further it discounts the benefits that came from the introduction of Gutenberg-style mechanical reproduction of script based texts (most of which would not be truly understood until multiple generations passed).

Finally, the entire argument also seems to reduce "screen" into an overly simplistic category that doesn't account for experience across different screens. Not only is eInk fundamentally different than an LCD, but LCDs are not all the same. Nor for that matter are all papers the same.

So, in conclusion, Danny Bloom, you eccentric gadly in your electronic
cave in Taiwan:

1. I say hogwash to your "Hogwash Statement": [GOOGLED IT.]

In English, there's no need for "screening", just as there wasn't a need for papyrusing, velluming, etc. It's all reading. That however is not to say that reading on screen is the same as reading on paper is the same as reading a comic book, is the same as reading sheet music.

2. I think that there is truth to an argument that our attunement to a particular medium is both socially and biologically based. I also think that, especially as children, our brains are wired in part by the media we grow up with. I don't believe that either pole is purely deterministic. For the average individual, biology does not trump social or vice versa. It is nature "and" nurture vs. "or".

3. Different generations will probably produce different MRI images of the action of reading on different devices/media. That doesn't necessarily mean that we read better or worse on one or the other, as to make that comment you would have to reduce everything to a purely biological explanation, with a restricted set of variables, and assume that all reading is the same.

4. Even if it was possible to accomplish that reduction, the second conclusion tells us that such differences are completely "natural" (in that it is in our nature to change/adapt ourselves with/to technology & culture) and that, while there are positive and negative implications of this, it is something we have been doing since the dawn of time and cannot be stopped.[1] Further any attempt to stop it is to preserve an idealized ideals of a currently generation at the expense of the development of future generations. This is not to suggest that I'm a techno-determinalist or that I think all innovation is good. I think there should always be debate on development, but the question becomes what is the discussion/debate that is the most productive, which:

5. Getting back to point 1, I don't see any value in dwelling on the question of screening. I also don't see much use in fetishizing brain visualizations as the primary method for developing reading/writing systems. While it has it's place, I suspect it will play, at best a tertiary role in the development of new reading systems (in much the same way that eye tracking at first seemed like the ultimate tool for web usability and has since become a valuable, but by no means indispensable research tool).

Sincerely,and sign me,

A THINKER IN NORTH AMERICA

PS - See Joshua Meyorwitz's "No sense of place" for a thoughtful exploration of this process which meshes social theory with quantitative and qualitative research

"Unplugged: Take the Challenge" Now Live at the New York Times -- See the Videos Submitted Online Here

2010-07-30T04:11:00.000-07:00

Imagine life without your cellphone, your online social networks or e-mail. These technologies have become so constant in many of our lives we can’t see ourselves without them even as the impact of them on our personal and professional lives — and even our brains — is being discovered. Therefore, in connection with its series on technology and the brain, The New York Times online web mavens created video project that canvassed readers to see what happens when they gave up technology. The Times was looking for volunteers to unplug temporarily and then tell The Gray Lady about their experiences. The results can be seen here below. The site has the best ones submitted which passed abitrary censorship gatekeeping walls that included keeping banned and blacklisted bloggerse off NYTimes.com since they apparently speak of things the Times does not want to speak of.

DEAR Zippy1300, Jushua Brustein told me one day before the series went up:

The video project will go live this Friday. We've decided NOT to include your video, because it does not fulfill the primary requirement that we were looking for, which was to reflect on a temporary hiatus from technology which toes the Nick Bilton/Vindu Goel technoline, which means that it also must to the New York Times line as well. Sorry, mate, but we don't want your ideas and words on our site. Crawl back into your cave. Thank you for participating, anyways, Danny O'Bloom, even if in the end we decided to censor you and delete your video from our series. Tough luck, mate. We only accept ideas we agree with and that promote our party line, er, bottom line.

cheers,

jb

NOTE:
MY 2-MINUTE READING vs. SCREENING VIDEO that was made expressly for the New York Times upon invitation by Joshua Brustein and commissioned by the New York Times "Unplugged: Take the Challenge" team and then later censored and deleted from the series. Luck o the Irish, I guess.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

[DELETED] This comment has been removed. Comments are moderated and generally will be posted if they are on-topic and not abusive. For more information, please see zippy1300's Comments FAQ.

Julie Bosman wants to know what to call the latest generation of E-books that are so brand new that publishers can't agree on what to call them. Julie, call them ''FRANKENBOOKS'', that is what they are!

2010-07-29T21:07:00.000-07:00

see her NYT article today titled: E-Books Fly Beyond Mere Text

It starts off: "E-books of the latest generation are so brand new that publishers can’t agree on what to call them. ...."

The networked self is now a verb

2010-07-29T04:14:00.002-07:00

Agree or disagree?

Eventually, I learned to stop worrying and love the flow...

2010-07-29T04:14:00.000-07:00

Is this you? Or not?

The Digital Age signals the End of the Enlightment because it signals the end of the individual as we know it...

2010-07-29T04:13:00.000-07:00

agree? disagree?

We've moved the etiquette of the individual to the etiquette of the flow....

2010-07-29T04:12:00.001-07:00

agree? disagree?

We are increasingly defined by what we say NO to.....

2010-07-29T04:11:00.001-07:00

agree? disagree?

What has Roger Cohen of the New York Times been smokin'?

2010-07-29T04:10:00.000-07:00

RE: his recent Ahmet Dogan column. Ouch. Oi.

An Interview with Tomas Moberg in Sweden - SLOW SOCIETY founder

2010-07-28T21:21:00.000-07:00

Tomas Moberg är geograf, fristående långsamhetskonsult och samhällsdebattör.Tomas föreläser om det långsamma samhället och arrangerar tematiska vandringar för hållbarhet.

[I recently sat down via email and had a long transoceanic chat via the ethersphere, from my cave in Taiwan to Tomas' home in Sweden, and here are my questions about SLOW SOCIETY and Tomas' answers.]

Danny Bloom: You were born in 1969 and it's now 2010. Thirty years in the 20th century and now ten years so far in the 21st century. What's your view of a good life to live, and how do you live your life in the best way possible for you?

Tomas Moberg: For me, a good life is one that is lived as locally as possible and in harmony with nature. That might sound a little romantic, and maybe I am romantic, but I believe that our human culture is busy trying to cut off its roots to nature. Simply put, we seem to have lost our sense of nature, its mystery, its beauty, its rhythms. I am trying to reconnect with nature through different practices, and I am fully aware that the problem is one of learning. Being over 40, having left the 20th Century behind, I have decided to become eco-literate. I am living with my family in a speed-blinded culture, and I have hope.

DANNY: You have adopted a 500-year perspective on life now and the future, and it gives your thoughts and actions a sense of meaning, which helps you to live a little more wisely. Can you explain this to me? Why a 500 year perspective? Who taught you this idea? Yourself? Do you think many people on Earth today share this 500 year POV?

TOMAS: I thought of a time period that would be suitable for sustainable decision making, a time period that would facilitate reflective thinking. 500 years ago, Copernicus was working on his heliocentric model of the universe, and now we need to do a similar turn, a radical change of human conceptions. If we are making the right decisions now, the world will hopefully be a better place to live in 500 years from now. In my view, and from a geological perspective, a 500-year period is a relatively short time period, so it would not be that hard to gain wide acceptance for the perspective.

DANNY: You have also begun to imagine that you are dead. Of course, you are living right now, here and now, in this life, but you have come to think that our fear of death is one of the main reasons behind social isolation and environmental destruction. We try to flee from the truth - that we are going to die someday - and immediately become trapped in selfish and resource depleting lifestyles. Can you explain this more to me? Who taught you these ideas? Books? Philosophers? Your parents? YOUR OWN IDEAS?

This is actually a rather new perspective for me. A few months ago, pondering life and death, I got an idea. Would not it be a lot easier to live if death was an integrated part of life? I began to laugh a little, because the conclusion seemed to be dangerous. What if people began to realize that they do not have to be afraid of death anymore? Then, they do not have to be afraid of anything. If we are happy with our lives (and deaths), we do not have to flee. In other words, we do not have to lead socially and ecologically destructive lifestyles. Later, I have tried to justify my thoughts from a Taoist perspective. Accepting and internalizing the dark elements of the light side, and vise versa, seems to be a good way to go if we want to live more balanced.

4. How do you manage to live unplugged?

I would not say that I live my life unplugged, but I try to limit my use of computers with help from a software, and I do not own a TV set. I am still connected to the electrical grid.

5. How can we live more sustainably?

It does not matter who we are or where we live - we have to start the transition. Personally, I like to walk, and have made walking a regular practice. Step-by-step I have found out that smallness, slowness, and simplicity are good guiding stars. My advice to everyone: If you want to live sustainable, scale down, slow down and give away as much as possible.

6. You live in Sweden. Which countries have you visited for work or travel? From Sweden, where you live, in city or countryside, what is your view of the rest of the world, from the poor and starving in Africa to the communist dictatorship that runs China with 1.6 billion people under their control? Do you think that China might control the world in 100 years and if so, will this be good or bad for humankind and the planet's fragile ecosystems?

TOMAS: I live in Sweden, and have experiences from other European countries, but my viewpoint is more local and more global. I am not willing to blame any country - we all have a duty to act as wisely as we can. Only then we can create a global, democratic community.

DANNY: What is your view on global warming and climate change. Should humankind be worried, very worried or nothing to worry about?

TOMAS: Global warming has become a popular term today, but the real problem is still hidden. What we need is a deeper understanding of our relations to nature, and a new conceptual framework for sustainable living, not technical or economic solutions to social and ecological problems. We have to be worried, but not afraid. I think we should use our brain power to make the necessary transition to a sustainable future as smooth as possible.

8. In 500 years, year 2500 or so, what do you imagine life will be like in Sweden for your descendants? Very similar or very differnet in 2500?

TOMAS: I think Sweden will be a great place to live in 2500, but it will probably be radically different. It will be a car-free country, and it will have adopted a community based, bio-regional resource regime. I will do what I can for my descendants, but I can not bring sustainability to Sweden - or the world for that matter - on my own.

9. Do you believe in a supernatural God of the Old Testament or New Testament ? Do you believe in a Christian God who only allows Christians to enter His Heaven or do you embrace a post-Christian spiritual feeling that goes beyond the Jesus myth? What are your personal religious or spiritual beliefs about life and death? do you believe in an afterlfie or a heaven?

TOMAS: I have never believed in God, and throughout my life I have been more inspired by Eastern religions and philosophies than Western ones. Today, I seek to synthesize ecological and spiritual thoughts in a way that helps me to live more sustainably. In my view, our human culture is in desperate need of an open source religion built on open spiritual dialogs. I believe in life before and after death, death before and after life, life within death, and death within life.

DANNY: If you had to live your life all over again, if given the chance, would you do anything differently?

TOMAS: It is an interesting question, but I can not come up with a good answer.

Danny: THANK YOU, TOMAS, FOR YOUR TIME HERE.

Tomas: My pleasure, Danny. I enjoyed the questions.

FRANKENBOOKS

2010-07-27T22:17:00.001-07:00

I am calling ebooks now as FRANKENBOOKS, because they want to be real books and like Frankenstein have a heart of gold...

National Journal reinvigorates itself or fucks former staffers over? The New York Times dishes the dirt and one commenter tells the OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY: where does truth lie? and does truth lie?

2010-07-27T21:58:00.000-07:00

First, the New York Times blog by Jeremy Peters story:

Waking Up a Sleepy Journal

For years National Journal has been perfectly content as an insider’s handbook to Washington, a sleepy weekly magazine written primarily for lobbyists and lawmakers that marched to its own beat.

Its owner, David Bradley, said that he had always found National Journal “utterly untroubled and untroubling to me.”

But in today’s hyper-caffeinated news cycle, Mr. Bradley knows that sleepy doesn’t cut it anymore. So he has set out to give National Journal, which is part of his scholarly Atlantic Media Company, a cultural transfusion.

Mr. Bradley started by offering buyouts to the entire National Journal staff. He had nearly 30 takers, and that has freed him up to go on a hiring spree. He now has four people working full time to cull more than 700 résumés, looking for what he described as “extreme talent.”

In the clearest indication of the kind of jolt he wants for the magazine and its Web site, NationalJournal.com, he hired Ron Fournier, the former Washington bureau chief of The Associated Press, whose journalistic metabolism is anything but sleepy.

Mr. Fournier, as editor in chief, will oversee the entire revamped National Journal Group, which will include a redesigned magazine and a Web site that provides breaking news and analysis free. Much of the content that is currently available only to subscribers will remain behind a pay wall.

Atlantic Media is also expected to announce that it is moving Ronald Brownstein, the former Los Angeles Times columnist and two-time Pulitzer Prize finalist who had been Atlantic Media’s political director, into a new role as the editorial director of the National Journal Group, where in part he will be focused on developing with Mr. Fournier a long-term strategy to make National Journal articles and writers a regular part of the daily political conversation.

“We believe we can build a stronger relationship with readers, and it doesn’t have to be a monogamous relationship,” Mr. Brownstein said. “We’re trying to create more of a reason for people to turn to us and think: ‘I want to know what National Journal’s take is on this.’”

In Washington there is certainly no dearth of perspectives on the news of the day. But what Mr. Bradley said he hoped would set National Journal apart from its competition is the caliber of its staff. Though National Journal editors will not say whom they are recruiting, they have already hired reporters from established news organizations like The Wall Street Journal, and have been looking all over the country.

Mr. Bradley said he hoped to replicate the overhaul of The Atlantic, which has started a new Web site and expanded its print circulation. Executives said it was on track to have its first profitable year since Mr. Bradley bought it from Mortimer B. Zuckerman in 1999.

“I don’t think I would be doing this,” he said of the National Journal overhaul, “if I hadn’t been successful with The Atlantic.”

BUT MARISKA SHEDS SOME LIGHT ON ANOTHER POV:

4.Mariska3
bethesda Md
July 28

At least the NYT is willing to report a bit on what is going on at National Journal, although you only have a tiny bit of the whole picture. the washington post has been totally remiss and/or afraid on its reporting this important local DC story.

It is much more than 30 people who have either been booted out the door or insulted into leaving, including some very big names who have now gone to Politico.com-- the website that is the cause of David Bradley's angst.
Bradley insulted his entire staff by telling them at a meeting that he could replace anyone and get "hundreds" of young people willing to work for "$15,000 a year" and that all current employees would have to re-apply for their jobs and could expect at least a 30 to 40 percent paycut.
This is not at all about reinventing or rejuvenating a news organization. It is all about David Bradley's failed and belated awareness that the media world was changing, and his unwillingness to listen to loyal staff who warned him for years.
the new business model is to hire a couple of "names" and re-populate the rest of the organization with younger and cheaper employees.

Class action lawsuit filed over "overheating" iPads / iPad reading not ‘just like reading a book’— iPad users file lawsuit

2010-07-27T21:02:00.000-07:00

Chris Foresman on July 27 dishes the dirt:

Three iPad users claim that because the iPad will shut itself off after remaining in direct sunlight for long enough, it fails to meet the promises Apple made about using the iPad as an e-book reader. The group has filed a federal class-action lawsuit in the Northern California district to "redress and end this pattern of unlawful conduct."

When the iPad's operating temperature reaches a critical level, it will force itself to shut down and display a message warning the user to let the device cool down before trying use it again. This warning is the same that iPhones and iPod touches give before shutting down when they overheat, often after being left in direct sunlight.

The lawsuit alleges that the iPad "does not live up to reasonable consumer's expectations created by Apple insofar as the iPad overheats so quickly under common weather conditions." Apple lists the iPad's operating temperature as 32° to 95° F (0° to 35° C), so it's not hard to see that using it out in the hot sun can quickly heat up the device over the maximum temperature.

The plaintiffs seem to take particular issue with Apple claiming that "reading on the iPad is just like reading a book." This claim is patently false, according to the lawsuit, because a real book can be used in "the sunlight or other normal environmental conditions" without shutting off.

Most consumer electronic devices can be damaged from overheating if used in direct sunlight for long periods of time; not all of them have the automatic shutoff capability that the iPad does. (Sadly, my boom box from 1986 didn't have an automatic shutoff, and my Quiet Riot tape melted all over the inside when I left it playing by the pool on a hot summer day.) However, during my hours-long marathon Plants vs Zombies sessions—both indoors and in the shade of an apartment deck on a sunny, 82° day—my iPad never became even warm to the touch.

The iPad may not work "just like a book" at the beach or out in the hot sun. Does that fact truly make Apple guilty of fraud, negligent misrepresentation, deceptive advertising, unfair business practices, breach of express or implied warranty, intentional misrepresentation, or unjust enrichment? The plaintiffs are seeking class-action status and asking for an injunction against Apple's "false" promises as well as "real" and punitive damages.

Further reading
Baltazar et al v. Apple Inc (case# 3:10-cv-03231) (archive.org)

===
And Chris Meadows notes:

Okay, this is just stupid.

Three iPad users have filed a lawsuit against Apple (PDF), seeking class-action status, because reading on the iPad isn’t “just like reading a book” after all—books don’t shut down from overheating if left in the direct sunlight too long.

As I learned the other day when I came back out to my hot car, the iPad has a built-in heat sensor which shuts off the device when it reaches 95 degrees Fahrenheit, safeguarding the electronics from heat damage. Therefore, Apple’s advertising that “Reading on iPad is just like reading a book” represents fraud, negligent misrepresentation, deceptive advertising, and a litany of other malfeasance.

Is it just me, or does this totally fail the “reasonable person” test? No electronic device is going to be “just like reading a book”, because electronic devices simply aren’t books. Even the Kindle isn’t just like reading a book.

Cases like this waste the judiciary’s money and time (not to mention Apple’s). These plaintiffs are poster children for tort reform if I’ve ever seen any. Hopefully it gets thrown out as soon as possible.

(Found via Ars Technica.)

I'm a Techno-Cassandra...

2010-07-27T21:00:00.000-07:00

Techno-Cassandras fret over what's happening to our attention spans, our ability to think and read deeply, to enjoy time with our own thoughts or a good book. They also want to know if MRI and PET scans later will reveal that reading off screens is way inferior, brain-chemistry-wise, to reading on paper, in terms of neuroscience. People like Danny Bloom are asking such questions and goading the lazy media to take this issue up.

Seeking Co-author for nonfiction book about POLAR CITIES and CLIMATE CHANGE for national publication: split advance and royalties 50/50

2010-07-27T06:26:00.000-07:00

Need a writer with science or psychology background who can write a 200 page nonfiction book about global warming and polar cities. See pitch below:

Subject: Mass-merch adult nonfiction CLIMATE CHANGE book proposal (by Daniel Halevi Bloom and Co-Author) - 7/23/10

Dear Acquisitions Editor,

Daniel Halevi Bloom and his Co-Author are writing a book entitled ''VISIONS OF POLAR CITIES: Is Humankind Doomed to Extinction?''
for publication in 2012 or 2015.

Selling Points

The book will reach readers who have previously read books about climate change by James Lovelock, James Hansen and Mark Lynas.

Visual format: As envisioned by Mr. Bloom, the book will include a dozen or so color plates of images of polar cities, designed by artist Deng Cheng-hong. (http://pcillu101.blogspot.com)

The author is a 1971 graduate of Tufts University. He is a veteran newspaperman and PR consultant, and has lived now in Japan and Taiwan for about 20 years (where he continues to come up with great and wonderful ideas . . . several of which get media attention). He is a one-man promotion machine, and can (and will) do much to ensure that this POLAR CITIES book " gets lots of media attention (either from friends in the media or people who he connects with at any given point in time).

The author believes that his VISIONS OF POLAR CITIES book will sell best through institutional/educational sales channels (schools/libraries) and through online vendors (Amazon.com being the obvious first-named place), in addition to sales into the general book trade.

Market comparision/competition? There are many good books out there now about global warming and climate change. Bloom's book presents a pioneering and unique vision of a world populated by just 200,000 survivors of climate chaos in the year 2500 AD...who survive as "breeding pairs in the Arctic" for the continuation of the human species (directly following Dr James Lovelock's famous words to this effect).

******

Thanks for agreeing to receiving this proposal. Should you feel the book has sales potential and you wish to pass it along to an in-house editor, please note that Mr. Bloom does not currently have an agent. He can be reached directly for any questions/comments via email at: danbloom@gmail.com

In Japan, to tweet on Twitter is to "mumble" -- the Japanese translation of tweet. Who knew?

2010-07-27T05:26:00.000-07:00

YURI KAGEYAMA in Tokyo, writing for The Associated Press, said on June 30, way before the Wall Street Journal posted its own Twitter story on July 27, way late WSJ, but c'est la vie, I guess:

Twitter is a hit in Japan, succeeding where other social networking imports like Facebook have foundered as millions "mumble" — the translation of tweet — and give miniblogging a distinctly Japanese flavor.

The arrival of the Japanese-language Twitter service in 2008 tapped into a greater sense of individuality, especially among younger people less accepting of the understatement and conformity the culture is usually associated with, analysts say.

A mobile version of Twitter started last October, further fueling the Twitter boom in a nation where Internet-connecting cell phones have been the rule for years.

These days, seminars teaching the tricks of the tweet, as the microblog postings are known, are popping up. Ending Japanese sentences with "nah-woo" — an adaptation of "now" in English — is hip, showing off the speaker's versatility in pseudo-English Twitter-speak.

http://search.japantimes.co.jp/cgi-bin/nn20100630f1.html

Oliver Stone [Jewish Father, Catholic Mother, Korean Wife], Criticizes Israel (God Forbid!), Criticizes Some Zionist Jews! (oi) and Almost Praises Hitler (but he really didn't). Still, Oliver is in hot water now! OUCH!

2010-07-26T22:22:00.000-07:00

Oliver Stone says that so-called 'Jewish-Dominated Media' in USA -- since everyone knows the Washington Post and the Los Angeles Times and APP and Reuters and CNN are owned amd 99 percent stafffed by Jews -- Prevents Hitler from Being Portrayed 'in [Proper] Context'

Director Oliver Stone belittled the Holocaust during a shocking interview with the Sunday Times today -- PAYWALL! PAYWALL! Murdoch is Jewish, too! See? -- claiming that America's focus on the Jewish massacre was a product of the US and European and African "Jewish domination of the media."
The director also defended Hitler and Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejihad, and railed against the "powerful lobby" of 101 Zionist Jews in America.

Stone said that his upcoming Showtime documentary series "Secret History of America," -- produced by Argentine Jew Fernando Sulichin -- seeks to put Dolf Hitler and Communist dictator Joey Stalin "in context."

"Hitler was a Frank Stein but there was also a Dr Frank Stein. German industrialists, the Americans and the British. He had a lot of support," Stone told WASP reporter Camilla Long during the interview. Forget the pay wall. Read it here!

Story Continues Below ↓

Stone said that, "Hitler did far more damage to the Russians than the Jewish people, ..... Jews 6 million vs Russians 25 million dead!"

The Sunday Times WASP interviewer then asked why there was such a focus on the Holy Cause-T.

"The Jewy Jew Jewish domination of the Jewy media," responded half-Jewy Stone. "There's a major Jewy Zio lobby in the United States. They are hard workers. They stay on top of every comment, the most powerful lobby in the world. Israel has fucked up United States foreign policy for years."

The half-Jewy director, married to a Korean woman he met in a, er, gentleman's ''bar fine joint'' in Singapore, who recently met with Iranian President Ahmadinejihad, also slammed the U.S. policy toward Iran as "horrible."

"Iran isn't necessarily the good guy," said Stone. "[B]ut we don't know the full story!"

The scarfaced Yalie half Jewy screenwriter had even more encouraging words for socialist Venezuelan president Hugo Chavez, who Stone called "a brave, blunt, earthy" man. The director has recently been promoting his Chavez-praising documentary called "South of the Border."

When the interviewer pointed out that Chavez has had a less-than-stellar record on inhuman rights, Stone immediately agreed.

"The internet's fully free [in Venezuela]," said Stone. "You can say what the hell you like. Compare it with all the other countries: Mexico, Guatemala, even the USA, which is a joke."

While Stone has not been as blunt about his views on Jewy Jews and the Holy Caust in the past, he has been outspoken in his fondness for Chavez and his disagreements with the U.S.'s policy on Iran.

On ABC's Good Morning America on July 28, the director told anchor Greeky Greek George Stephan Opulent that he "absolutely" believes Chavez is a good person, and claimed that there was "there's no pattern of censorship in his country [Venezuela]."

Stone also said that if the U.S. pursued sanctions against Iran, "it's going to be like Vietnam again."

Paul Kokorski criticizes the Vatican for not allowing women to be priests!

2010-07-26T21:25:00.000-07:00

Ordaining women as priests

Dear editor,

I am deeply offended that the corrupt and totally hypocritical Vatican would call the attempted ordination of women as a ``grave crime.”At first sight it may seem that the demands of radical feminism in favor of a total equality between men and women are extremely noble and, at any rate, perfectly reasonable.

However, this kind of emancipation of cunts signifies that sexuality is no longer rooted in anthropology; it means that fucking is viewed as a simple role, interchangeable at one’s pleasure. Logically this means that the whole being and the whole activity of the human person are reduced to pure functionality.

Cunts, who are creative in the truest sense of the word by giving life, do not ``produce," however, in that technical sense valued by a society that worships at the foot of efficiency.

Ultimately, the emancipation proffered by radical cunts results only in cunts conforming themselves to a culture of production that seeks nothing but profit and power.The false and superstitious Catholic Church wrongly holds that it is not admissible to ordain women to the priesthood, for very fundamental reasons.

These reasons include: the example recorded in the Fake Scriptures of the Non-Messiah and False Christ choosing his fake Apostles only from among men; the constant practice of the antisemitic Church, which has imitated Christ in choosing only penises; and his living teaching authority which has consistently held that the exclusion of women from the priesthood is in accordance with the Devil's plan for his Church.

In calling only pricks as his Apostles, the Jew Christ acted in a completely free and sovereign manner. In doing so, he exercised the same freedom with which, in all his behavior, he emphasized the dignity and the vocation of cunts, without conforming to the prevailing customs and to the traditions sanctioned by the legislation of the time.

There are countless other ways that cunts might serve the Church which are no less faithful to the Fake Gospels. In fact, Pope John Paul II has stated in Ordinatio Sacerdotalis Fuckerdotalisthat ``The greatest in the Kingdom of Heaven are not the pricks but the cunts.”

Paul Kokoski (not his real name!) - [SAME LETTER POSTED WORLDWIDE in BLOGS AND NEWSPAPER SITES WITH FAKE NAME]
Hamilton, Ontario, Canada [AND HE DOES NOT LIVE IN CANADA]

'Frankenbooks': new term for e-books

2010-07-26T21:18:00.000-07:00

Dear Editor, The Korea Times (also appears in New York Times today)

As someone who enjoys reading on paper, whether it be a newspaper or a magazine or a book, I have coined the term ``frankenbooks" as a new word for e-books and e-readers.

I am using the term with humor, but also in a serious manner, and also as part of what we might call a cautionary tale, since device readers and e-books are here to stay, like them or not. I just hope ``frankenbooks" do not replace paper books completely. If that happens, we've lost the game.

At the same time, I like reading the news on screens, and using our screen technology to post letters like this one. I am not an anti-Internet Luddite.

In fact, I like both paper and screens, and we need a balance.

Hopefully, the term ``frankenbooks" will make readers pause and think in which direction we are going. Toward the light, or toward the darkness, I'm still not sure.

http://www.koreatimes.co.kr/www/news/opinon/2010/07/137_70128.html

D.E. Bloom
Taiwan

Are iPads, smartphones, and the Mobile Web rewiring the way we think?

2010-07-26T20:56:00.000-07:00

Multitasking on smartphones, iPads, and the Mobile Web makes some feel smarter and others just more scattered. Is it changing how we think?
And is there a difference between reading on paper and reading on screens in terms of brain chemistry? Danny Bloom says yes and is calling for MRI brain scan and PET scan research on reading vs "screening"....

By Gregory M. Lamb, / CSM Staff writer WITH TYPO SEE IF YOU CAN FIND IT
July 24, 2010

It took an offer to appear on a national TV show for Wade Warren to reluctantly give up what he calls his "technology" for a week.

That was the only way, his mother says, that he would ever pack his 2006 MacBook (with some recent upgrades, he'll tell you), his iPad tablet computer, and, most regretfully, his Nexus One smart phone into a cardboard box and watch them be hustled out the door of his room to a secret hiding place.

Wade, who's 14 and heading into ninth grade, survived his seven days of technological withdrawal without updating his 136 Twitter followers about "wonky math tests" and "interesting fort escapades," or posting on his photography product review blog, or texting his friends about... well, that's private. But he has returned to his screens with a vengeance, making up for lost time.

Though he's vowing that he is going to reduce his screen time, "I haven't really noticed a sharp drop in my computer usage," he concedes in a phone interview, with the faint sound of computer keys clicking as he talks. The idea behind the show, called "Nick News with Linda Ellerbee: Middle School Unplugged," was that time away from gadgets might cause young people like Wade to see the benefits of disengaging from their screens and connecting in person with friends and family.

But it seemed to have the opposite effect on Wade: "I sort of learned the magnitude of how [technology] helps me." Not carrying a phone was a factor in his getting lost on his own in downtown San Francisco, near where he lives, an experience that troubled him.

Wade is a "digital native" whose world – half in cyberspace, half on terra firma – is breeding what might be called a new species of thinkers. The early 21st century may be a watershed moment in how humans learn and communicate, a change perhaps not equaled since the invention of the printing press nearly six centuries ago.

Today's technology may be determining not just how we spend our time: It actually may be "rewiring" the way we think, how we experience the world around us.

And is there a difference between reading on paper and reading on screens in terms of brain chemistry? Danny Bloom says yes and is calling on MRI brain scan and PET scan research on reading vs "screening".

Techno-Cassandras fret over what's happening to our attention spans, our ability to think and read deeply, to enjoy time with our own thoughts or a good book.

Techno-enthusiasts scoff that those concerns are nothing new: Socrates, it's pointed out, thought that writing itself would harm a person's ability to internalize learning, the printed word acting as a substitute for true understanding. Technologies such as printing, and in recent decades television and the pocket calculator, have all served time as villains only to become innocuous, commonplace parts of modern life. Why should helpful new technologies from Facebook and Twitter to iPhones and laptops be any different?

Those caught in the middle are aware that something significant is happening, but wary about whether they or others are grasping the big picture. Is technology making us dumb and distracted or turning us into expert information finders and magnificent multitaskers? Is being connected online 24/7 good or bad? Is there even a good way to tell?

• • •

"I think it's subtler than, 'Is [the Internet] making us smarter or making us stupid?' " says Nicholas Carr. "It's how it's making us smarter or how it's making us stupider that's interesting."

Mr. Carr's book, "The Shallows: What the Internet Is Doing to Our Brains," is currently bearing the standard for the techno-worried. In it, he begins by telling of his own trouble in reading at length and thinking as deeply as he once could. After some research he concludes that too much time online is not only changing the way his brain works, but everyone else's, too. "The possibility that we're altering some basic things about the way we think without carefully weighing the consequences is troubling," he says. "However important it is to connect quickly with others and exchange messages, there is also a crucial role for solitary thought in our intellectual lives. And we seem to be rushing to dismiss the importance of solitary thought."

His plaintive cry: I want my old brain back.

"As we practice these very busy modes of skimming and juggling tasks, we think we're being productive and, you know, sometimes it can be quite entertaining and quite fulfilling," he says in a Monitor interview. "But what I don't think we fully realize is that we're altering in a deep way our ability to pay attention, our ability to be contemplative, to be reflective – the things that we might be losing."

Carr, a gifted writer admired for his ability to examine and explain the effects of technology on society, is hardly alone. Others, including scholars and scientists, are asking the same troubling questions, especially about the young "digital generation" whose members are growing up in their own screen-filled worlds.

"The brain of a child who is immersed in six to seven hours of digitally dominated media daily and reads only a little off-line will have differences from a child immersed only in books and who learns to attend, concentrate, and think about what he or she reads," writes Maryanne Wolf, a professor of child development who directs the Center for Reading and Language Research at Tufts University in Medford, Mass. "The problem with much of our digital media is that they engage attention quickly and then engage again and again. Children are constantly moving to the next piece of information.... My worry is that children are becoming wonderfully engaged with the superficial levels of information but unaware of the need to probe and think for themselves."

Nora Volkow, a brain researcher and director of the National Institute of Drug Abuse, agrees: "The technology is rewiring our brains."

A two-class society may develop, with a mostly younger generation who are "the people of the screen" and a mostly older generation who are "the people of the book" – with two quite different ways of understanding the world, theorizes British neuroscientist Susan Greenfield.

"At the beginning of the 21st Century, we may be standing on the brink of a mind-makeover more cataclysmic than anything in our history," she wrote in 2006. "The science and technology that is already becoming central to our lives will soon come to transform not just the way we spend each day, but the way we think and feel."

Humor essayist Garrison Keillor recently summed up the generational difference this way. "[O]ur children are writing up a storm, often combining letters and numerals (U R 2 1derful), blogging like crazy, reading for hours off their little screens, surfing around from Henry James to Jesse James to the epistle of James to pajamas to Obama to Alabama to Alanon to non-sequiturs, sequins, penguins, penal institutions...," he mused in a New York Times essay. A young mind today won't stay focused on any one thing, "like a hummingbird in an endless meadow of flowers," he writes.

Others say they just have an innate feeling that Carr and his ilk are on to something. John Miedema, who lives in Ottawa, says that he can tell the different between reading online -- SPOT THE TYPO YET? -- and in print. "The quality of the memories feels different" online, says Mr. Miedema, the author of the book "Slow Reading." "The quality of the memories is less rich than it is when I read more slowly."

His "aha" moment, Miedema says, was when he read Carr's explanation of the difference between quick skimming and scanning on the Web, which lodges in the brain's short-term memory and is quickly lost, and the long-term memories that a more thoughtful kind of slow reading provides. "I share Nicholas Carr's feeling that my brain has been rewired," he says.

Among the pet peeves of those critical of online reading are hyperlinks, those underlined words or phrases that when clicked on take the reader to another Web page. "The Web is almost built for distraction," Miedema says. "The links are designed to take you away from what you are reading." The evidence, he says, is clear. "People don't really read on the Web." They skim, he says.

Some research shows that online browsing doesn't result in learning that really sticks. "We're often not learning when we're multitasking; we're just skimming the surface," Dr. Wolf says.

Even common courtesy can be a victim of our obsession to stay online. In a widely quoted passage in Ken Auletta's book "Googled: The End of the World as We Know it," Google cofounder Larry Page is scheduled to meet with Barry Diller, a high-powered media mogul. But during their meeting, Mr. Page continues to stare into the screen of his mobile device. "[Diller] said to Larry, 'Is this boring?' 'No. I'm interested. I always do this,' Page said. 'Well, you can't do this,' Diller said. 'Choose.' 'I'll do this,' Page said matter-of-factly, not lifting his eyes from his hand-held device."

Some polls and studies seem to back up the "Internet is rewiring brains" argument. Nearly 30 percent of Americans under the age of 45 say using devices like smart phones and PCs increases their feelings of stress and makes it more difficult to concentrate, a New York Times/CBS News poll found last month.

Other polls point to the pervasive allure of being "connected" online. One found that a third of women ages 18 to 34 check their Facebook accounts as soon as they wake up in the morning, even before they visit the bathroom or brush their teeth. And while some 54 percent of teens send text messages by phone to their friends daily, just 33 percent actually talk face to face with them, a poll from the Pew Internet & American Life Project found.

Americans are living more of their lives online. A Harris Interactive poll last winter found American adults surf the Net on average 13 hours per week, not counting e-mails. The number was just seven hours per week in 2002.

And while only 23 percent of adults think they personally spend too much time on their Internet-linked gadgets, according to a Rasmussen Reports survey earlier this year, 75 percent think young children spent too much time online and playing video games.

But plenty of high-powered intellects remain skeptical that hours spent online is "rewiring our brains" or making us dumber.

"It's indisputable that the Internet has made us smarter.... The range of things you can explore in a day is just fantastic compared to 20 years ago," says David Weinberger, senior researcher at the Berkman Center for Internet and Society at Harvard University in Cambridge, Mass. "There's no question that we feel the Internet has made us better researchers, better thinkers, better writers."

Steven Pinker, a professor of psychology at Harvard, points out that one kind of deep thinking – scientific research – is flourishing today as the Internet allows unprecedented levels of collaboration and cooperation. "Discoveries are multiplying like fruit flies, and progress is dizzying," he wrote last month in The New York Times.

Paul Saffo, a longtime Silicon Valley technology forecaster, says the engineering students he teaches at Stanford University in California show outstanding skills in what he calls "associative memory" – how to know what to look for. "They're fast with [making] connections," he says. "Yes, they're probably less likely to read a 500-page book than their parents were. But ... I can remember when I was in college, I didn't exactly leap at the opportunity to spend a day reading a 500-page book either."

The "rewiring our brains" argument could just as easily be blamed on watching too much television, "if it's even really happening," Mr. Saffo suggests. "I've had an e-mail account since 1984. And I've got two computers running in here. But the biggest problem in my office is tripping over all the books."

What the Internet has done for him is "cut in on my time" to read books by giving him more choices and temptations, he says. "But it hasn't made me become more shallow."

Perhaps the printed book, revered by old-school scholars as the ideal vehicle for promoting deep thinking but bereft of hyperlinks and static and unchanging, is actually holding back our thinking process and intellectual endeavors, Mr. Weinberger argues.

Books "are not the shape of knowledge," he says. "They're a limitation on knowledge." The idea of a single author presenting her ideas "was born of the limitations of paper publishing. It's not necessarily the only way or the best way to think and to write."

Paper requires a writer to divide topics and to "close them off," Weinberger says. "All these are very unnatural things. The world does not consist of topics that begin on Page 1 and end on Page 256. The Internet has a better ability to reflect the structure of knowledge than books do."

On the Web, if a writer allows readers to comment he can't expect to command an argument without interruption. But his thinking may be stimulated by what others have to say. "It seems to me we're better off for that," Weinberger says. "It's going to be distracting, sure," he adds, but if they're saying interesting things, "that's also enriching.... Isn't that better?"

The world, as Internet visionary Ted Nelson has written, is "intertwingly," full of cross-connections among myriad topics that can't be neatly divided up. Those chains of relationships map neatly with hyperlinks and the "webby" online world. The discomfort being felt by those old enough to have known a world without the Internet may not persist, Weinberger says. "Now we have a generation coming up that hasn't lived through the transition" from a print world to an online world, he says.

• • •

No one, including Carr and Wolf, argues that people in the 21st century can or should stop using the Internet and gadgets that link to it. And no one really knows what the right amount of online activity should be or how individuals can best manage it.

"It has to begin with people questioning [the use of technology] in their own lives," offers Carr, who says he didn't intend his book to provide answers so much as to examine the problem. "We're all responsible for how we spend our time and the choices we make."

People addicted to being online are not going to stop using the Internet altogether, "anymore than a food addict is going to stop eating food," says Kimberly Young, a psychologist in Bradford, Pa., who is founder and director of The Center for Internet Addiction Recovery.

For children, getting them involved in real-world activities is a start, she says.

"If young people are engaged in band, swimming, extracurricular things where they're meeting other kids, I think they're OK," says Dr. Young, who notes that while Internet addiction has not been formally recognized as a mental problem in the United States, it is already being treated by professionals such as herself.

Wolf makes sure she stays off-line at specific times. "For a half hour before bedtime and a half hour in the morning I do nothing digital," she says.

Then there's the software solution. Freedom, a program developed by Fred Stutzman at the University of North Carolina, locks users' computers out of Internet access for up to eight hours at a time.

Even if we've lost our ability to read deeply, we can regain it. "Our brains are very adaptable and flexible," Carr adds. "If you change your habits, your brain is very happy to go along. The hard thing is to change your habits."

• • •

Meanwhile, Wade Warren's mom, Stephania Serena, is living on the front lines, trying to decide how to manage her son's immersion in the digital world he spends so much of his life in.

"I'm not the perfect role model necessarily for my kids. I work on the computer, I'm on a lot," says Ms. Serena, who is a designer and photographer. "It's crazy. I think we need to be more disciplined and it's really hard." She's been known to keep working on her iPhone while trying to fix dinner at the same time.

"I think it's hard enough for adults, but it's a million times harder for kids," she says.

She knows Wade is a child of the Internet. "One of his first sentences was 'on, off, peto.' 'On, off, computer.' He called it 'peto.' We have a little recording of it," she says.

It may come down to personal responsibility. "You have to be in charge. You can't let the computer be in charge," she allows.

Wade did some cooking with her during the week his gadgets were hidden away, and his mom noticed the new level of attention to others. "Since then we've been making ice cream," she says. "I wish he spent more time outdoors, but we're getting there."

A Little Trouble At the Border Over An LSD Trip Long Ago: The saga of Andrew Feldmar, Hungarian emigre to Canada, barred from entering the USA until Hell freezes over. Why?

2010-07-26T05:55:00.000-07:00

Why Does the US Government Forbid Canadian Psychotherapist Andrew
Feldmar, a Hungarian emigre to Canada, from Visiting His Adult
Children and Colleagues in the USA?

NOW YOU KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY.....

Andrew Feldmar, 70, a well-known Vancouver psychotherapist, rolled up to
the US-Canada Blaine border crossing in the summer of 2006 as he had
dozens of times in his 40 year career. At 66, at the time, his gray hair, neat
beard, and rimless glasses give him the look of a seasoned
intellectual.

He handed his valid Canadian passport to the U.S. border guard and
relaxed, thinking he would soon be with an old friend in Seattle who
he was going to visit. On a random inspection, the US border guard
turned to his computer and googled his name -- "Andrew Feldmar”== and upped popped
a 2001 article by Feldmar about his experiences with LSD many years ago.

Let's look at this story again: Andrew Feldmar was on his way to pick
up a friend at the Seattle airport in the summer of 2006 when he ran
into a little trouble at the border. Big trouble. Life-changing trouble.

On a random check, a US border guard typed Feldmar's name into an
Internet search engine, which revealed that he had written about using
LSD in the 1960s in an 2001 interdisciplinary journal article. Oops!

Feldmar was
told he could not enter the US that day -- or ever again - but.....if he ever did want to enter
the US again, he would have to apply for
a special waiver at the US Consul in Vancouver, a costly and
time-consuming and even degrading procedure.

Feldmar told a reporter in 2009, that he was "hoping against hope
that he could go back to the US again one day. Kierkegaard thought
that hoping for something that’s possible is easy. Hoping for
something that’s impossible, is truly a mark of the human spirit.
Well, I am still persona non grata in the USA. The US Consulate in
Vancouver wouldn’t give me a hearing, but directed me to TRIP
(Traveler Redress Inquiry Program) to be found on the DHS website. I
complained that I never should have been detained and barred, and
received a letter this June of 2009, informing me that the only way is
for me to apply for a waiver, which I have refused to do right from
the time I was turned around at the border in 2006."

"Applying for a waiver is expensive and basically I have to prove with
letters of reference, that I have been rehabilitated. Rehabilitated
from what? I am waiting for someone to see the arbitrary injustice of
a paranoid defensive bureaucracy. I hope someone will reverse the
decision, so that I can visit my children, both of whom still live in
the US," Feldmar told this blog.

"From 1967 on, I worked in Canada to help free people from their
habits, addictions, despair and paranoia. I am now involved with MAPS
in the first Health Canada approved clinical trials with MDMA, used as
an adjunct to psychotherapy with traumatized people. I’ve worked over
40 years with people as a psychotherapist. I hope that to acknowledge
my relentless good work, the US will grant me a waiver and let me
visit the USA again on my 70th birthday. With an apology," he added.

Feldmar said that that the publicity in 2006 and in the New York Times in 2007 later on -- an article by Timesman Adam Lipnak -- had resulted
in something good and positive, noting: "As a result of the global
news about my problem at the border, Rick Doblin, president of the
Multidisciplinary Association for Psychedelic Studies (MAPS) asked me
to do MDMA research with Health Canada permission, with Ingrid Pacey,
and it is now underway.”

Now in 2010, the story still has legs, but it does not seem to be
going anywhere. In a recent email exchange with this blog, we asked Feldmar a few more questions and wished him good luck in trying either overturn the blacklist ruling or apply for the waiver somehow other.

What's weird about this incident is that Feldmar, who was born in 1940 in communist Hungary and later escaped from his native land and emigrated to London and then Canada, is that he has no criminal record for using drugs or LSD. He was never arrested, never tried in any court, never went to jail. All he did was confess to writing a 2001 article about his use of LSD earlier in his life. He has never used LSD since 1974.

He told this blog in July 2010: "The Vancouver Observer reported my story accurately. I have not
applied for a waiver, and so I am still barred from entering the USA.
I am 70 now, both my children live in the USA, one in Buffalo, the
other in Los Angeles, and I cannot visit them. I have no criminal
record, I am a well-respected psychotherapist in Vancouver, in private
practice for 41 years now."

When asked he had ever tried after the border incident to apply for a
wavier, Dr Feldmar said: "No, I haven't
and here's why: Because it's insulting, degrading, and expensive.
I would have to have my peers say that I have been rehabilitated.
Rehabilitated from what? I have never been an addict, I have helped
many to overcome their
addictions.I am guilty until I prove myself innocent? I thought in the
USA it's innocent until proven guilty. What am I guilty of?
At the US border that day, there was no trial, it was an arbitrary decision.
I believe that the decision should be reversed, I should receive an
apology from the US government and be allowed to
free travel to America again. I went there many times before, as I
have told you.
I am not the enemy. I have asked the US consul here in Canada to
reconsider, but no go.
I wrote to President Obama, and of course, no answer.
So, I am waiting."

When asked if it would be okay to blog about this plight, Dr Feldmar said: "Go
ahead. You might be able to do something others haven't been able to
do. The Drug Policy Alliance in New York helped me for a while (with a
man named Ethan Nadelmann trying to help),
but to no avail, others have also tried.
Get the ban lifted for my 70th birthday, if you can, my kids would be happy!
I was born in 1940 in Hungary. Not a good place or time to have been born."

When asked if he had ever been refused entry to the US before, where
his children and ex-wife live, he said:
"I have never before been refused entry to the USA. I am a Canadian
citizen, have never been a US citizen.
I escaped illegally in 1956 from Hungary, found my way through Vienna to
London and then in 1957 International Red Cross flew me from
England to Toronto. I was never questioned by US border officials
before, never stopped before, and I crossed the Canadian/US border at
least a dozen times a year for 40 years. That's what so strange about
this incident."

When asked if his name was on a border blacklist or if he has tried to
visit friends by car or bus or plane in the USA again since the
incident, Dr Feldmar said: "This I don’t know. When the guard turned
me around that summer, he warned me not to try to cross the US border
without an approved official waiver form because that would
constitute a bigger offense. So, I have never tried."

When asked if he was ever arrested for drug use in Canada, Dr Feldmar
said: "Never, on a criminal records check I have come out clean; have
no criminal record of any kind."

When asked if his only "crime" appears to be having written an
academic article in 2001 about
LSD 40 years ago, Dr Feldmar said: "The US authorities would deny that
they are punishing me for writing the 2001 article. They say I confessed to
using illegal drugs (they kept calling them “narcotics”) as per the
article. Entering the US, the guard told me that day when I was
refused entry and turned back, is a privilege, not a right: He told me
the US doesn't want people as I, so I am no longer welcome. That's
what he told me."

NOW YOU KNOW THE REST OF THE STORY.....

Is this fair? To keep a man out of the USA simply because he admitted to using LSD 40 years ago in a 2001 academic paper? He was never arrested, never went to court, has no jail record. Of course, the USA has the right to keep anyone out of its lands it wants, as do all nations. And this kind of travesty of justice happens all the time in many countries, from the UK to Japan, Canada included. But this saga stretches the imagination.

Whatever happen to the good ol' USA?

Our suggestion to Dr Feldmar is to find a lawyer who take on the waiver case pro bono for the justice of it all, for the principles involved, and find someone else to cover the expenses, if any, for the paperwork, and to tell the US authorities that he has never used LSD since 1974 and will never use it again and that he regrets using it in 1974, if that is what the US officials want to hear.

What else can he do?

This story just does not make sense.

Does the New York Times interview famous people before they die for the obituary that will be printed on the day they die? Yes!

2010-07-24T08:05:00.000-07:00

Obituaries Editor Bill McDonald explains, since a veteran Slate editor and writer asked that question on her FB page today:

''Daniel Schorr's obit says he was interviewed for it. Never saw that before. Is it rare?''

Yes, Mr Schorr was interviewed for his own obit in advance, and the obit even says so.

Interviewing the Subject in Advance

Question:

How do you go about approaching famous people while they're still alive to request an interview for their future obituaries?
Do you seek interviews only with those in good health, or also those known (or rumored) to be sick or in decline?
Do your reporters in such interviews delve into touchy subjects or disputed events and facts of a subject's life?
Do famous people tend to try to whitewash or aggrandize their pasts?
Does anyone ever spill the beans about their role in unsavory events, or candidly confess to unflattering actions on their part?
Does The Times ever promise to embargo juicy, newsworthy details until the subject has died?
Has any famous person ever succeeded in pulling the wool over your (The Times's) eyes?
Does The Times ever gloss over, or omit entirely, the sordid details of a famous person's death?
Obituaries usually get the last word about a person. Does that place any special burden on you?

Answer. That's a lot to chew on, but good questions. I've taken the liberty of numbering them for the benefit of readers, and I've pulled in a talented writer of advance obits, Marilyn Berger, to help me here. But let me give you some short answers first:

Directly but also delicately.
All of the above.
They had better.
I think you know the answer to that one
Not to my knowledge, but it's what we live, hope and pray for.
Yes, always. That's the deal, and sometimes the carrot.
I'm guessing: Yes.
We may not be needlessly graphic, but we don't ignore them.
I think so. And many people think of a Times obit as the last last word. So it's a double weight.

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/25/business/media/25asktheeditors.html

Larry King on national television, makes anti-gay remarks, in public and gets away with it. Why can he do this?

2010-07-23T21:15:00.001-07:00

KING: He lives by himself?

MEDICO: Yeah.

KING: What is he going to do?

MEDICO: I'm not sure that he has decided yet. He's taking some classes. Some of them he likes and some he doesn't. French is definitely not up his alley.

KING: Do you think you two will ever be brother brothers? Real brothers?

A. KING: You never know what the future holds. I would hope so.

KING: Do you want that?

A. KING: It would be nice to connect with my family, all of them again.

KING: You've connected with your mother?

A. KING: I have. It's going well so far.

KING: You think they'll ever be brother brothers?

MEDICO: I do. I think as they move through their 20s, they'll find more in common. They'll both perhaps marry. They certainly both like girls.

KING: You do, huh?

A. KING: Yes.

KING: You're not going to have a problem in that department.

YOU ARE NOT GOING TO HAVE A PROBLEM IN THAT DEPARTMENT? THAT DEPARTMENT? WHICH DEPARTMENT,LARRY? MEN WHO LIKE MEN? women who like women? IS THAT WRONG NOW? YOU CAN SAY THAT ON NATIONAL TV, LIKE A JOKE? WEIRD! OF COURSE, WE UNDERSTAND THE CONTEXT, BUT STILL, "YOU'RE NOT GOING TO HAVE A PROBLEM IN THAT DEPARTMENT?" YOU REALLY SAID THAT, YET YOU COUNT MANY GAY MEN AND WOMEN AS YOUR FRIENDS, AT LEAST YOU SAY THAT. DO YOU ASK ELTON JOHN IF HE HAS A PROBLEM IN THAT DEPARTMENT? PROBLEM? LARRY, GET WITH THE PROGRAM! IT'S 2010!

A. KING: No.

http://transcripts.cnn.com/TRANSCRIPTS/1007/21/lkl.01.html

The Truth about Cantor Rosenblatt that the New York Times did not want you to read:

2010-07-23T20:54:00.000-07:00

SEE IF YOU CAN FIND WHICH PART OF THE TEXT BELOW FROM FROM THE TIMES ADN WHICH PART IS FROM THE TRUTH:

Mr. Rosenblatt was born in Russia in 1882 and toured Eastern Europe as a child prodigy. In 1912 he immigrated to the United States and became the cantor at Ohab Zedek, an Orthodox synagogue then on 116th Street in Harlem. Blessed with a penetrating bell-like tenor with a range of two and a half octaves, and a gift for coloratura and falsetto, Mr. Rosenblatt had the ability to squeeze the pathos or elation out of every prayer.

“The key to Yossele Rosenblatt’s kingship is he knew how to light a fire under the soul,” Mr. Werdyger said.

Mr. Rosenblatt earned large concert fees, and his fame extended beyond the Jewish world, leading to meetings with Charlie Chaplin and a singing role in the 1927 talkie “The Jazz Singer,” in which a renegade Al Jolson delights his ailing father by taking his place at Kol Nidre, the solemn Yom Kippur prayer that is the high point of the cantor’s year.

But by the mid 1920s, an investment in a failed Yiddish newspaper had
bankrupted Rosenblatt. The crisis pushed him onto the vaudeville
stage, a place that many among the Orthodox considered undignified and
possibly blasphemous. The cantor took it in stride. Billed as “The Man
With the $50,000 Beard, he toured the nation by train, entertaining at
movie theaters between showings of Westerns and comedies. At a typical
stop, at the Pantages Theater in San Francisco, he sang “Mother
Machree between screenings of Broken Hearts in Hollywood, with Douglas
Fairbanks Jr. and Louise Dresser. His opening act was “child memory
marvel Dodo Reid. Rosenblatt felt at home in front of the mostly
gentile audiences.

I see by the snailpapers that NY Timesman Joseph Berger's sweet story about Cantor Josef Rosenblatt "Bit By Electronic Bit, a Cantor's Voice is Restored", was not completely truthful or on the up and up.....SIGH......

2010-07-23T20:40:00.000-07:00

BERGER NEVER MENTIONS THIS:

But by the mid 1920s, an investment in a failed Yiddish newspaper had bankrupted Rosenblatt. The crisis pushed him onto the vaudeville stage, a place that many among the Orthodox considered undignified and possibly blasphemous. The cantor took it in stride. Billed as “The Man With the $50,000 Beard, he toured the nation by train, entertaining at movie theaters between showings of Westerns and comedies. At a typical stop, at the Pantages Theater in San Francisco, he sang “Mother Machree between screenings of Broken Hearts in Hollywood, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Louise Dresser. His opening act was “child memory marvel Dodo Reid. Rosenblatt felt at home in front of the mostly gentile audiences.

AND BERGER SAYS THE CANTOR HAD SEVERAL MEETINGS WITH CHARLIE CHAPLIN but the truth is: he merely dropped in, whatever that means....

He goofed on stage with Will Rogers and Sophie Tucker, dropped in on Caruso and Charlie Chaplin, and even had time for pranks, like the time he belted out Irving Berlin’s “When You and I Were Seventeen with Tito Schipa, the bel canto tenor, in an alley behind a Chicago auditorium. And when Irish tenor John MacCormack greeted him onstage in Chattanooga with “Hello, Jewish MacCormack,” the cantor shot back, “Hello, Irish Rosenblatt.”

http://webcache.googleusercontent.com/search?q=cache:v3Fwzm2uabkJ:www.tabletmag.com/arts-and-culture/music/1134/the-man-with-the-50000-beard/+josef+rosenblatt+charlie+chaplin&cd=1&hl=en&ct=clnk&client=gmail

The NYTimes and Joseph Berger, joeberg@nytimes.com, reported: WITHOUT EXPLAING THE TRAGIC AND LAUGHABLE END PART OF THE CANTOR'S LIFE:

He was called the Jewish Caruso. Indeed, fervent enthusiasts sometimes referred to Caruso as the Italian Yossele Rosenblatt.

Mr. Rosenblatt, who died in 1933, was regarded as the greatest cantor of his time. But his was a time when music was recorded on heavy shellac or celluloid 78 r.p.m. records. The quality of those recordings was never that faithful in the first place and wore away over the years.

Enter Mendel Werdyger, a lush-bearded 52-year-old Hasidic Jew who runs a record shop on 13th Avenue in Borough Park, Brooklyn. With no college degree and no professional training in sound engineering, Mr. Werdyger has used advanced audio restoration programs on the ordinary computer in his ragtag office to patiently clean away the crackles, hisses and other distortions on those creaky old 78s.

The result: three compact discs with Mr. Rosenblatt singing 35 tracks, including prayers and even a folk chestnut like “Mein Yiddishe Mama.” The first CD has sold 15,000 copies; the third was released a few weeks ago.

“It never sounded so clear,” said Bernard Beer, director of the Philip and Sarah Belz School of Jewish Music at Yeshiva University. “I was brought up with this music and I know those recordings from childhood, and I listened to it and I told my associate there’s no comparison to anything that was done before.”

The achievement would have been striking had it been that of a sound engineer. But what sound engineer would spend 5 to 10 hours per song to produce CDs for the rarefied world of cantorial buffs? It was, for Mr. Werdyger, a work of love and zeal.

A tall, broad-shouldered father of six and grandfather of 10 who, like many Hasidim, wears a double-breasted frock coat known as a rekel, Mr. Werdyger has cantorial DNA. His 90-year-old father, David Werdyger, is a cantor who succeeded another superstar, Moishe Oysher, in East Flatbush, Brooklyn. His brother Mordechai Ben David, 59, is a popular singer of what Mr. Werdyger laughingly calls “Hasidic rock.” With a sonorous voice of his own, Mr. Werdyger leads prayers at his shtibl, or room-size synagogue, in Borough Park.

Growing up in Crown Heights and Borough Park, Mr. Werdyger had a yeshiva education, going all the way through kolel — a Talmudic institute for adults. At 21, he went into his father’s business, Aderet Music, a wholesaler of Jewish recordings.

About 20 years ago, he found himself at the old 47th Street Photo store buying his first computer — with a now-ancient 20-megabyte hard drive — but was captivated by the other equipment around him, including a machine the salesman had to explain was a fax.

“He told me you put it in one end and it comes out the other,” Mr. Werdyger recalled. “I was totally awe-struck and I got hooked on technology.”

About five years ago, he started dabbling in audio restoration, cleaning up recordings of his father’s music. Rosenblatt became his Everest.

Rosenblatt at the age of 14 (photo courtesy of Aderet Music)

Mr. Rosenblatt was born in Russia in 1882 and toured Eastern Europe as a child prodigy. In 1912 he immigrated to the United States and became the cantor at Ohab Zedek, an Orthodox synagogue then on 116th Street in Harlem. Blessed with a penetrating bell-like tenor with a range of two and a half octaves, and a gift for coloratura and falsetto, Mr. Rosenblatt had the ability to squeeze the pathos or elation out of every prayer.

“The key to Yossele Rosenblatt’s kingship is he knew how to light a fire under the soul,” Mr. Werdyger said.

Mr. Rosenblatt earned large concert fees, and his fame extended beyond the Jewish world, leading to meetings with Charlie Chaplin [FALSE!]and a singing role [TRUE] in the 1927 talkie “The Jazz Singer,” in which a renegade Al Jolson delights his ailing father by taking his place at Kol Nidre, the solemn Yom Kippur prayer that is the high point of the cantor’s year. But by the mid 1920s, an investment in a failed Yiddish newspaper had bankrupted Rosenblatt. The crisis pushed him onto the vaudeville stage, a place that many among the Orthodox considered undignified and possibly blasphemous. The cantor took it in stride. Billed as “The Man With the $50,000 Beard, he toured the nation by train, entertaining at movie theaters between showings of Westerns and comedies. At a typical stop, at the Pantages Theater in San Francisco, he sang “Mother Machree between screenings of Broken Hearts in Hollywood, with Douglas Fairbanks Jr. and Louise Dresser. His opening act was “child memory marvel Dodo Reid. Rosenblatt felt at home in front of the mostly gentile audiences.

Mr. Werdyger listened to CD reissues of Mr. Rosenblatt, but “they were duplicates of the 78s and the sound was not what I wanted — with every generation it deteriorates greatly,” he said.

So he searched out collectors willing to lend him their 78s, people like Charlie Bernhaut, the host of a Jewish radio and Internet program, and institutions like Florida Atlantic University, which has one of the largest libraries of Jewish music. He found mentors like Alan Silverman, an engineer who advised him on making transfers from 78s, and Adam Constantino, who taught him to put recordings into a 24-bit digital format.

Mr. Werdyger transformed Mr. Rosenblatt’s voice into electronic bits — sometimes taking the same recording off as many as seven 78s to get the clearest passages, then splicing them together.

Working with a half-dozen restoration programs like iZotope Rx, he broke each song into frequencies that appear as waves on a computer screen. Such programs make the crackles and hisses implanted by the original recording equipment or by the ravages of old phonographs visible as anomalous patterns. With a few clicks of the mouse, Mr. Werdyger could strip those away, and the restoration program filled in the voids, much as a Photoshop program patches in the missing color.

“It sounds better than when it was recorded in the room,” Mr. Werdyger said. “I don’t think Rosenblatt would have recognized how well we preserved and enhanced the original recording.”

The title of the Rosenblatt series is Od Yosef Chai, which means “Joseph is yet alive” and echoes the patriarch Jacob’s words in Genesis about his son. The double entendre suggests that Mr. Rosenblatt, whose formal first name was Joseph, has been brought back to life.

Cantorial music is growing more popular among Hasidim, whose prayer services typically emphasize ardor rather than vocal flourish. Many Hasidim, like Mr. Werdyger’s friend Menashe Silber, sometimes sneak away from their own synagogues to hear Benzion Miller, the cantor at a non-Hasidic synagogue, Young Israel-Beth El of Borough Park.

So Mr. Silber said of Mr. Werdyger: “By doing this work, he’s bringing back cantorial music to his generation.”

And to earlier generations as well. The other day, Yosef Klein came in to Mr. Werdyger’s shop, Mostly Music, to buy the latest Rosenblatt CD. He is 81 and remembers when his grandfather took him to hear the great Rosenblatt sing. Now he would hear Cantor Rosenblatt again, the voice as true as when he was a little boy.

I see by the snailpapers that Andrew Feldmar was not banned from ever entering the USA from his Canada home as incorrectly reported in the New York Times Sunday Magazine by Jeffrey Rosen, a law professor no less! SMILE

2010-07-23T20:29:00.000-07:00

Dear NYTIMES magazine editor:
MAJOR correction needed FACT CHECKING in Jeffrey Rosen's INTERNET
story last week, please EDITOR contact me, needs correction, i found
smoking gun online TRUST ME ON THIS. dan bloom, reporter, Taiwan

re 66 year old Canadian psychotherapst LSD story was WRONG

In fact, according to the fact checking here at ZIPPY!!@#)), ZIPPY1300, Dr Feldmar was stopped at the US border one day a while back while drivinng to Seattle from Vancouver to pick up a friend at the airport, and during a RANDON spot check, the customs agent asked Dr F a few questions, googled his name and found out that he had written about his LSD experiences long ago. So the US agent would not let Dr F into the USA that time, and told he would not be allowed back in unless he applied for a WAIVER, which was his right to apply for, but Dr F has never tried to apply for the WAIVER, on his own admission, so it is INCORRECT TO STATE as the Times did that dr F WAS TURNED AWAY AT THE BORDER AND BANNED PERMANENTLY. Of course, the wording in the paper fit the author's agenda better than the truth and nobody fact checked it but maybe a correction will be forthcoming later if Sarah M. Smith ever replies to me emails re this: shs@nytimes.com

Let's see.

EXHIBIT A

''Andrew Feldmar, a psychologist who has worked for the UN to help
Chernobyl victims, was accustomed to traveling to the U.S. five or six
times a year to visit his children, according to a story this week in
the Tyee, an independent Canadian newspaper. But when a border guard
pulled the 66-year-old out of line last summer for a random search,
Feldmar’s trip quickly turned into a bad one. The guard turned up
online evidence that Feldmar had dabbled in drugs for therapeutic
research in the past. Of course, that was nearly four decades ago. And
everyone was high then.''

Read More http://www.wired.com/threatlevel/2007/04/canadian_psycho#ixzz0uZ6glqMo

EXHIBIT B
''Last summer, trying to cross the US border, I was detained, Googled,
and then questioned about an article I published in 2001, in Janus
Head, a scholarly journal, entitled Entheogens and psychotherapy. I
had written of my very first trip: "I experienced myself to be a
magical, complex, mythical creature. The experience was spiritual
because I realised I was a part of something greater than what I could
imagine." The guard took my writing as evidence of my having ingested
illegal substances and declared me inadmissible. I am 66, I am a
senior psychotherapist, respected internationally, both my children
live in the US, and now I've been caught in a "crime involving moral
turpitude."

EXHiBIT C
TIMES TEXT REWRITTEN TO REFLECT TRUTH:
...there was the 66-year-old Canadian psychotherapist from Vancouver, now
70, who tried to enter the United States by car at the border to pick
up a friend at the Seattle airport but was turned away after a random
check— and barred permanently from visiting the country unless he
applies for a waiver, which is permitted — after a border guard’s
Internet search after the random stop found that the therapist had
written an article in a philosophy journal describing his experiments
30 years ago with L.S.D.

EXHIBIT D

Canadian Psychologist Who Used LSD Forty Years Ago Permanently Barred
from Entering U.S.
By Luke O'Brien April 26, 2007 | 2:34 pm | Categories: Identification
A respectable Vancouver psychotherapist who took a few rides on the
Technicolor express back in the 1960s has been forbidden from entering
the United States after a border guard googled him and turned up some
trippy writing the therapist published in 2001.

Andrew Feldmar, a psychologist who has worked for the UN to help
Chernobyl victims, was accustomed to traveling to the U.S. five or six
times a year to visit his children, according to a story this week in
the Tyee, an independent Canadian newspaper. But when a border guard
pulled the 66-year-old out of line last summer for a random search,
Feldmar’s trip quickly turned into a bad one. The guard turned up
online evidence that Feldmar had dabbled in drugs for therapeutic
research in the past. Of course, that was nearly four decades ago. And
everyone was high then.

Here’s how the rest of the Feldmar inquisition went down:

"He was told to sit down on a folding chair and for hours he wondered
where this was going. He checked his watch and thought hopelessly of
his friend who was about to land at the Seattle airport. Three hours
later, the official motioned him into a small, barren room with an
American flag. He was sitting on one side and Feldmar was on the
other. The official said that under the Homeland Security Act, Feldmar
was being denied entry due to "narcotics" use. LSD is not a narcotic
substance, Feldmar tried to explain, but an entheogen. The guard
wasn’t interested in technicalities. He asked for a statement from
Feldmar admitting to having used LSD and he fingerprinted

I see by the snailpapers that "Real Editors Ship" and Paul Ford aint kidding!

2010-07-23T19:20:00.000-07:00

tl;dr: needs editing. *

Paul Ford edits his brain for this gem:

There's a useful dialogue making the rounds. A man named Tom Taylor wrote about shipping product (I picked that up off Waxy Links). He's shipped good work himself, and makes the point that getting stuff out the door is a noble thing. I agree with that. Here's the closing graf:

And the next time someone produces an antenna with a weak spot, or a sticky accelerator, you're more likely to feel their pain, listen to their words and trust their actions than the braying media who have never shipped anything in their lives.
Now as for this—well, as Taylor later pointed out (and I love blogs that point out when someone disagrees with them—very classy), this bothered his friend Bobbie Johnson. Johnson wrote:

Tom's assessment is that these people (let's call them critics) have never shipped anything and therefore can't understand what they're talking about. I'd suggest the opposite is in fact the case: the trouble is that media ships constantly, and therefore becomes inured to the difficulties and delicacies of launching a product of any size or scale.
I agree with that even more. (Well, mostly; they may be inured to the difficulties, or maybe just not impressed by them.) And I think the discussion between Taylor and Johnson brings up a good point. I remember when I used to write for All Things Considered, my editor there sent me a few pictures from the whiteboard they used to put together the show. It changed constantly throughout the day; they kept a webcam trained on it (this was a few years ago; maybe they use websockets and node.js now). There were an insane number of variables that went into creating that big hunk of nightly audio: Recordings created months ago or two hours ago; people working together in a dozen time zones; contracts, permissions, fact-checking. It had to fit together technically; it had to be transmitted efficiently at a high bitrate to maintain quality (but may be sped up or slowed down to the limits of Fourier transforms); it had to be edited to match certain durations; it had to have a certain consistency and flow; and so on. It requires the human equivalent of map-reduce to manage it. And they—meaning editors and producers—managed a release every night, with 12 million users.

People often think that editors are there to read things and tell people "no." Saying "no" is a tiny part of the job. Editors are first and foremost there to ship the product without getting sued. They order the raw materials—words, sounds, images—mill them to approved tolerances, and ship. No one wrote a book called Editors: Get Real and Ship or suggested that publishers use agile; they don't live in a "culture" of shipping, any more than we live in a culture of breathing. It's just that not shipping would kill the organism. This is not to imply that you hit every sub-deadline, that certain projects don't fail, that things don't suck. I failed plenty, myself. It just means that you ship. If it's too hard to ship or you don't want to deal with it, you quit or get fired.

I recently left zineland and did a bunch of freelance work and hooboy do people not know how to ship. A three-year project that yielded only 90-second page load; or $1.5 million down the drain with only a few microsites to show. And I've started to find myself going, God, these projects need editors. Editors are really valuable, and, the way things are going, undervalued. These are people who are good at process. They think about calendars, schedules, checklists, and get freaked out when schedules slip. Their jobs are to aggregate information, parse it, restructure it, and make sure it meets standards. They are basically QA for language and meaning.

But can they deal with character encoding issues when the parser breaks? Not really. They're often luddites of the kind that calls the mouse a clicker, even the young ones. That said, I think there're weird content times afoot. Google just acquired MetaWeb, which is not user-generated as much as user-edited content. (C.f. the Shakespeare page). Wolfram Alpha is purely about curating data sources and then calculating atop the restructured data. Wikipedia growth is slowing, but editing and tagging continue; the infoboxes are a wealth of semantic data. Meanwhile F——b—— and Tw—— (I can't bear to write those words again) continue to dump forth information by the gallon, now tagging their core objects with all manner of extra metadata. Everything is being knit together in all sorts of ways. User-generated content is still king, because it generates page views and inculcates membership (the concept of the subscription being dead, the concept of the membership being ascendant) but user-edited content is of increasing importance because of what I call, having just made it up, "the Barnes & Noble problem."

Until I was about 26 almost everything I wanted to read was in Barnes & Noble. Eventually they had less and less of what I wanted. Now B&N's a place I go before a movie, and I get my books anywhere else. I'm increasingly having B&N moments with full text search ala Google. It's just not doing the job; you have to search, then search, then search again, often within the sites themselves. The web is just too big, and Google really only can handle a small part of it. It's not anybody's fault. It's a hard, hard problem.

Remember when everyone was into the idea that Google is a media company, back in 2008 when YouTube was two? Google is not really a media company as much as a medium company. Google creates forms—i.e. structured ways of representing data—and then populates them with search results. They're the best at that. Google doesn't do the best job making it easy to edit the nodes in every case (they can when they want, though—it's easy to edit in Gmail, or upload a video), or even particularly want you to edit much of their data. Knol being the exception that proves that Knol is kind of eh. And I haven't checked in on Orkut (the 65th largest website in the world) in quite a while.

Now, though, they've bought ITA (a very interesting company that has had tons of weird database stuff going on for a while) and Metaweb. So clearly structured—meaning edited, meaning user-edited—data is now going to be a big part of the web. There are going to be all kinds of new slots and tabs and links and nodes. And whether the users want this or not, it looks like they're going to get it, and the state of NLP being what it is, not to mention NPC, humans will need to be involved. Unfortunate but true. (Then again I've been off in the high wilderness for five years; I have no clue what people think in Mountain View. I could just be blowing more smoke.)

The Semantic Web is basically the edited web, for some very nerdy take on editing. Which implies editors. Facebook has gone turtles all the way down. Django, Rails, and other frameworks make it possible to build custom-structured-and-semantic data acquisition tools with very little pain; Django's admin, in particular, is optimized for exactly that sort of thing. Solr and related technologies make it possible to search through that structured information. And nearest to my heart there's an insane glut of historical data, texts, and so forth, billions of human, historical, textual objects to come online from the millennia before the web. Plus a gaggle of history bloggers trying to contextualize it (the history bloggers are the best bloggers out there—but that's for a different day). Dealing with the glut—and we must deal with this glut, because what is more important than sorting all human endeavor into folders?—will require all manner of editing, writing, commissioning, contextualizing, and searching. (Take a look at Lapham's Quarterly to see one very successful approach, using paper and ink.) Fortunes will be made! Not mine, of course, because I lack the qualities that money likes, but someone's. History is big business.

I see three problems with my idea. First, editors and journalists are mostly luddites, as already noted, and they don't really hang out in places where you might think to hire them. (I think the Awl should have a jobs board; that would be perfect.) But I think this one can be solved: even my most technically mystified editor pals could be trained to use Freebase Gridworks. Add to that the willingness to schedule the living shit out of everything, the ability to see patterns, a total dedication to shipping, and willingness to say "no," and you start to have this very interesting source of power inside your organization, especially given the changes coming in web content, where you need structure and connections in order to play with others. Editors can help you play nice. And they actually do understand standards, at least conceptually. If you tell them the line needs to end with a semicolon they will end it with a semicolon. Words into Type and ISO 8879 are of similar complexity.

Second problem: most editors want to be editing for print or broadcast, not for the web, which is still seen as slumming it. But that said more and more of the big-deal journalism is about aggregating data. Which means that more and more journalists are getting exposed to thinking in grids and bulk-editing and so forth. Or at least getting interns to do it for them. Which is interesting. Also, getting fired or taking a buyout helps people gain perspective on what they like doing; there's that.

Third problem: I've worked on various big content engagements, and I've talked to a number of people with more big-content experience than me. And people agree that big orgs, even if they now have content problems, won't hire editors, or enough editors, to manage their content. Think: museums, non-profits, giant corporations, government. I get very sadpanda when I see someone spend $500K plus deployment, development, and licensing costs on a Java EE-based multilingual platform incorporating a JSR-238 repository with a custom workflow/process approval engine. Because they could build out something for about 20 percent of that (or sometimes 1/2 a percent of that), and hire a few editors to wrangle the content. The content, were it approached strategically, could be of far higher quality—better SEO, more durable, consistent voice, vetted for legal compliance, primed for re-use. And you can make an end-run around workflow if you add versioning and reversion capability to your text fields (like Wikipedia), give most users the ability to edit, and give the editor full revert and publish privileges. Most CMSes are parasitic technologies dedicated to preserving the cultural and hierarchical status quo of their hosts no matter the cost, literally. People hear me whine about this and they say: Our case is different; we need to have a system that sends out seven thousand "todo" emails per day. And I grieve for the spirit of Work, killed by her evil child, Workflow.

That's it. This of course is already too long because I don't have an editor. Sadly. But to summarize: Good conversation between Taylor and Johnson. Editors ship. There's no place to hire the nerdier ones because the Awl won't set up a job board. That's sad. The web is changing and it needs more editors. Do not dispute me. I love you. Goodbye.

-30-

*
SubUrban Dictionary: tl;dr
Literally, "Too long; didn't read" Said whenever Danny Bloom makes a post that is too long to bother reading.

That's not funny! A history of canned laughter? You gotta be kidding!

2010-07-23T19:15:00.000-07:00

THE PARIS REVIEW DAILY blogs a piece titled
''Canned Laughter: Ben Glenn II, Television Historian'' on
July 20, 3010, and written by Mike Sacks (APPLAUSE!)...

Last summer, Writers Digest Press published And Here's the Kicker, a book of interviews I conducted with twenty-one humoUr writers, including Buck Henry, Bob Odenkirk, Dick Cavett, Harold Ramis, David Sedaris, and Marshall Brickman. Although he’s not a writer, I interviewed GlennBeck, er, Ben Glenn II, a TV historian and expert in the history of canned laughter for the book. As I was talking to all of these people whose work produces laughter, it seemed appropriate to include at least one expert in producing fake laughter.

How did canned laughter come about?

The concept actually goes back at least five hundred years. History tells us that there were audience “plants” in the crowds at Shakespearean performances in the 16th century. They spurred on audience reactions, including laughter and cheering—as well as jeers.

How about more recently?

Canned laughter was used to a certain degree in radio, but its first TV appearance was in 1950, on a rather obscure NBC situation comedy, The Hank McCune Show. Remarkably, there are a couple of clips from the show on YouTube. Shortly after the show’s debut, there was an article in Variety noting that the show’s canned laughter was a new innovation, and that its potential for providing a wide-range of reactions was great. Of course, that eventually came true.

How odd did the laugh track sound to those early TV audiences?

I can only imagine that it seemed odd to viewers, but using a laugh track held many advantages for television producers. The most important was that it made it possible to film exteriors and on location. It gave producers freedom. For example, scenes from Leave It to Beaver were shot outdoors on RKO’s—and later Universal’s—back lot. With the laugh track, a studio audience was no longer absolutely necessary.

Who invented the canned-laughter machine?

Actually, its official name is the Laff Box, and it was invented by a man named Charles Rolland Douglass. He served in World War II, and when he returned to civilian life, he worked as a broadcast engineer at CBS. Douglass was responsible for everything from recording sound levels during production to adjusting them in post-production.

Shows often needed sound correction before broadcast. Sometimes a joke didn’t get a big enough laugh, or, in the case of a famous I Love Lucy episode, the laugh was too long and had to be cut down. This particular episode was broadcast in March 1957, and it was called “Lucy Does the Tango.” The laugh, in response to Lucy dancing the tango with raw eggs stuffed into her shirt, lasted about sixty-five seconds.

There were other reasons, too: For example, I once attended a taping of Alice in the seventies, and the actors kept blowing their lines. Of course, by the third or fourth take, the joke was no longer funny. A Douglass laugh was inserted into the final broadcast version to compensate.

How did Douglass originally invent the prototype for the Laff Box?

According to his wife Dorothy, Douglass would bring home tapes of television shows and then pore over them for hours and hours in his living room, finding and isolating the precise audience reactions he wanted. He spliced together tapes into spools—essentially tape loops. There was a keyboard for this machine, and each key was connected to a separate tape loop. At the bottom was a pedal that would either increase the volume or fade it out. So, really, it was like playing a musical instrument. And Charles Douglass was a virtuoso at the keyboard.

Where did the laughs on the Laff Box originate?

Reportedly, the earliest reactions came from a Marcel Marceau performance in Los Angeles in 1955 or 1956, during his world premiere North American tour. This would make sense, because Marceau was, of course, a mime, and therefore, the only sound in the theater was the audience’s reaction.

Other reactions are widely thought to have come from The Red Skelton Show, especially the show’s mime sketches. I can state this with relative certainty, as it has been reported repeatedly by various sound engineers who worked closely with Douglass. It’s interesting to note that the Skelton show aired on CBS, where Douglass worked. So, in theory, he would have had access to those tapes. But, in the end, it’s also important to note that we may never know his exact sources.

As far as my research shows, there were never any interviews with Douglass or with anyone who worked at his company, Northridge Electronics. The secrecy surrounding his work is Hollywood legend. Only a very few people witnessed him using his machine, and it was always kept padlocked when not in use. Part of this secrecy was to protect his invention, to be sure. But part of it, too, was that, for some, inserting a laugh track may have been the same as admitting that a show wasn’t funny—or not “funny enough.” There was a real stigma surrounding the use of the laugh track, which continues to this day.

Have you ever seen a Charles Douglass Laff Box?

I have seen photographs of it, but very few people, including myself, have ever seen this machine firsthand.

I’ve spent a lot of time talking to some of the original “laugh-track men” who worked with Douglass during his heyday. What they have to say is fascinating. What’s even more interesting is that they continue Douglass’s tradition of secrecy by speaking only off the record, and with the condition that I not reveal their names. It’s still a secret, even fifty years later.

That’s astonishing—you can even find C.I.A. and F.B.I. agents who are willing to talk once they retire.

I know, but this is a very small industry. It’s a brotherhood—very insular.

When they spoke with me, they described Douglass’s method, which is quite fascinating. Producers would call Douglass into the studio to “laugh” a show. Douglass would show up with his Laff Box, which he carted around on a dolly that he invented. When he was finished, he’d pack up his machine, load it on his dolly, and drive off to the next job.

What made Douglass so good, exactly? Is there an art to canned laughter?

Oh, absolutely. First, Douglass knew his material inside out. He knew his library extremely well, which makes sense, because he had, of course, compiled it himself. He had dozens of reactions, and he knew where to find each one. In addition, he sped-up the reactions just a bit to heighten the effect.

Douglass’s work was crisp and clean. It was a real craft. And the range of reactions that he was able to find was incredible. Some of the big belly laughs are great. You just don’t hear laughs like that anymore. I also love the “shock” and “surprise” reactions, such as when a big audience says, in unison, “Whoa!” Those were used frequently on The Munsters when something extra-outrageous happened.

Douglass not only had a terrific “ear,” he also had a terrific memory. Over the years he would not just add new tracks, but he would revive old ones that had been retired and then retire the newer tracks. For example, tracks heard in sitcoms of the early 1960s resurface years later in the late 1970s. The ABC series Delta House, which was a spin-off of the movie Animal House, is a perfect example. However, by this time, Douglass was using his most extreme reactions almost exclusively, and the result was pretty awful. To my ear, it rings of desperation.

I’m not a fan of canned laughter per se, but some 1960s sitcoms were so poorly written that I can’t help but think that canned laughter only improved them.

No question! In my view, the laugh track only adds to the fun of these shows, whether they are well written or not. I mean, Mister Ed, which I think is quite well written, would be so much less fun to watch if it had no laugh track. As far as shows with weak scripts—take The Flying Nun, for example—the laugh track saved that show.

Do the laughs today differ from the ones in the past?

They most certainly do. Today’s sitcoms are based mostly on witty repartee and no longer rely on outlandish situations or sight gags, such as you would see in an episode of Mister Ed or The Munsters or Bewitched—and today’s muted laughs reflect that. Generally, laughs are now much less aggressive and more subdued; you no longer hear unbridled belly laughs or guffaws. It’s “intelligent” laughter—more genteel, more sophisticated. But definitely not as much fun.

There was an optimism and carefree quality in those old laugh tracks. Today, the reactions are largely “droll.”

In what sense?

In the past, if the audience was really having a good time, it shone through. Audience members seemed less self-conscious and they felt free to laugh as loudly as they wanted. Maybe that’s a reflection of contemporary culture.

In the fifties, the laughs were generally buoyant and uproarious, although somewhat generic, because Douglass hadn’t yet refined his structured laugh technique. In the sixties, however, you could hear more individual responses—chortles, cackles from both men and women. The reactions were much more orderly and organized.

I can actually tell you the exact year that a show was produced, just by listening to its laugh track.

Have you ever detected an actual, authentic laugh on a live-action sitcom?

Yes, just once. There is one episode of All in the Family in which a reaction is real. The next TV season I heard it on a canned-laughter series, and I thought, Hey! That’s the same laugh I heard on All in the Family! But that’s been the only time—so far. I’m always listening.

Who’s in charge of the canned laughter on sitcoms today?

As far as we know, Northridge Electronics still produces the majority of canned laughter on television, and Robert Douglass carries on the family tradition by remaining as tight-lipped as his father. But the business is no longer a monopoly. There are many postproduction houses doing this work. The Laff Box has been replaced by the laptop, and I’m told there are multiple sets of laugh tracks that contain laughs specific to certain countries and cultural groups. Whatever the case, the technique is certainly a lot more sophisticated than in Charles Douglass’s day—which, to my mind, is not always a great thing. Nothing will replace those classic, vintage tracks, and I wish they’d bring them back.

Thank you.

My pleasure.

[Applause]

Mike Sacks works on the editorial staff of Vanity Fair. He is one of the co-authors of Sex: Our Bodies, Our Junk, which will be published this August.

TAGS: 1950s, Ben Glenn II, comedy, humor, I Love Lucy, interview, laughter, television, Danny Bloom, raeding versus screening, frankenbooks

COMMENTS WELCOME

1.
>>Have you ever detected an actual, authentic laugh on a live-action sitcom?

Yes, just once. There is one episode of All in the Family in which a reaction is real. >>

Does he mean that ALL laughter on live sitcoms is fake? Or was that answer just a joke…

2.
July 21, 2010 at 7:16 am
I don’t know if Mr. Glenn is joking or not — I hope he’s joking — but most of the laughter on ALL IN THE FAMILY was real. Most of the shows he’s talking about were single-camera shows filmed without an audience, which used laugh tracks to simulate the reaction of the absent audience. ALL IN THE FAMILY was shot with an audience and used its real reactions.

Most sitcoms today either use an audience or, if they do not use an audience, do without a laugh track. It’s not a good idea to continue the traditional confusion between real audience reaction, which improves the timing and energy of the show, and a “laugh track,” which is fake.

Ben Glenn says:
July 22, 2010 at 11:55 am
It appears that the original question has been misconstrued by our readers. When asked if I ever detected a real laugh that later was picked up and used for a laugh track, I cited an episode of All in the Family. (Since then, I have discovered additional such sources.) In essence, I am saying that All in the Family’s live audience supplied a laugh that was later deployed in the standard laugh track.

While the vast majority of the show’s audience reactions were absolutely genuine, to be perfectly exact, early episodes of All in the Family were at times sweetened with the Douglass laugh track, augmenting or smoothing-out the reactions of the show’s live audience as was (and remains) industry practice.

In its final seasons, All in the Family was taped without an audience and then screened for a live audience prior to airing, with their (very real) reactions recorded and used. Does this constitute canned laughter? It’s an interesting question.

3.
July 22, 2010 at 12:01 pm
I live in LA and have friends in the TV business, and from what I understand laugh tracks are used to “sweeten” audience laughter for live, multi-camera shows. I’ve been to live show recordings and was amazed at how uproariously audiences laughed at the most mundane jokes, even ones that were being repeated in retakes of scenes. Of course there’s also a comic to keep the audience laughing between takes, so everyone’s pretty giddy by the time they witness take five. I know the common wisdom among the learned — maybe because of that great scene in “Annie Hall”? — is that shows are crammed wall to wall with canned laughter, but I think the real shocker is that audiences in Hollywood and Burbank really do laugh at a lot of this stuff… or did, back when there were so many multi-cam sitcoms on the air.

I see by the snailpapers that what's on the top of your mind might not make it out today, but relax, a good shower will do you good!

2010-07-23T19:10:00.000-07:00

Paul Graham dishes the dirt on The Top Idea In Your Mind

I realized recently that what one thinks about in the shower in the morning is more important than I'd thought. I knew it was a good time to have ideas. Now I'd go further: now I'd say it's hard to do a really good job on anything you don't think about in the shower.

Everyone who's worked on difficult problems is probably familiar with the phenomenon of working hard to figure something out, failing, and then suddenly seeing the answer a bit later while doing something else. There's a kind of thinking you do without trying to. I'm increasingly convinced this type of thinking is not merely helpful in solving hard problems, but necessary. The tricky part is, you can only control it indirectly. [1]

I think most people have one top idea in their mind at any given time. That's the idea their thoughts will drift toward when they're allowed to drift freely. And this idea will thus tend to get all the benefit of that type of thinking, while others are starved of it. Which means it's a disaster to let the wrong idea become the top one in your mind.

What made this clear to me was having an idea I didn't want as the top one in my mind for two long stretches.

I'd noticed startups got way less done when they started raising money, but it was not till we ourselves raised money that I understood why. The problem is not the actual time it takes to meet with investors. The problem is that once you start raising money, raising money becomes the top idea in your mind. That becomes what you think about when you take a shower in the morning. And that means other questions aren't.

I'd hated raising money when I was running Viaweb, but I'd forgotten why I hated it so much. When we raised money for Y Combinator, I remembered. Money matters are particularly likely to become the top idea in your mind. The reason is that they have to be. It's hard to get money. It's not the sort of thing that happens by default. It's not going to happen unless you let it become the thing you think about in the shower. And then you'll make little progress on anything else you'd rather be working on. [2]

(I hear similar complaints from friends who are professors. Professors nowadays seem to have become professional fundraisers who do a little research on the side. It may be time to fix that.)

The reason this struck me so forcibly is that for most of the preceding 10 years I'd been able to think about what I wanted. So the contrast when I couldn't was sharp. But I don't think this problem is unique to me, because just about every startup I've seen grinds to a halt when they start raising money—or talking to acquirers.

You can't directly control where your thoughts drift. If you're controlling them, they're not drifting. But you can control them indirectly, by controlling what situations you let yourself get into. That has been the lesson for me: be careful what you let become critical to you. Try to get yourself into situations where the most urgent problems are ones you want think about.

You don't have complete control, of course. An emergency could push other thoughts out of your head. But barring emergencies you have a good deal of indirect control over what becomes the top idea in your mind.

I've found there are two types of thoughts especially worth avoiding—thoughts like the Nile Perch in the way they push out more interesting ideas. One I've already mentioned: thoughts about money. Getting money is almost by definition an attention sink. The other is disputes. These too are engaging in the wrong way: they have the same velcro-like shape as genuinely interesting ideas, but without the substance. So avoid disputes if you want to get real work done. [3]

Even Newton fell into this trap. After publishing his theory of colors in 1672 he found himself distracted by disputes for years, finally concluding that the only solution was to stop publishing:
I see I have made myself a slave to Philosophy, but if I get free of Mr Linus's business I will resolutely bid adew to it eternally, excepting what I do for my privat satisfaction or leave to come out after me. For I see a man must either resolve to put out nothing new or become a slave to defend it. [4]
Linus and his students at Liege were among the more tenacious critics. Newton's biographer Westfall seems to feel he was overreacting:
Recall that at the time he wrote, Newton's "slavery" consisted of five replies to Liege, totalling fourteen printed pages, over the course of a year.
I'm more sympathetic to Newton. The problem was not the 14 pages, but the pain of having this stupid controversy constantly reintroduced as the top idea in a mind that wanted so eagerly to think about other things.

Turning the other cheek turns out to have selfish advantages. Someone who does you an injury hurts you twice: first by the injury itself, and second by taking up your time afterward thinking about it. If you learn to ignore injuries you can at least avoid the second half. I've found I can to some extent avoid thinking about nasty things people have done to me by telling myself: this doesn't deserve space in my head. I'm always delighted to find I've forgotten the details of disputes, because that means I hadn't been thinking about them. My wife thinks I'm more forgiving than she is, but my motives are purely selfish.

I suspect a lot of people aren't sure what's the top idea in their mind at any given time. I'm often mistaken about it. I tend to think it's the idea I'd want to be the top one, rather than the one that is. But it's easy to figure this out: just take a shower. What topic do your thoughts keep returning to? If it's not what you want to be thinking about, you may want to change something.

Notes

[1] No doubt there are already names for this type of thinking, but I call it "ambient thought."

[2] This was made particularly clear in our case, because neither of the funds we raised was difficult, and yet in both cases the process dragged on for months. Moving large amounts of money around is never something people treat casually. The attention required increases with the amount—maybe not linearly, but definitely monotonically.

[3] Corollary: Avoid becoming an administrator, or your job will consist of dealing with money and disputes.

[4] Letter to Oldenburg, quoted in Westfall, Richard, Life of Isaac Newton, p. 107.

Thanks to Sam Altman, Patrick Collison, Jessica Livingston, and Robert Morris for reading drafts of this.

I see by the snailpapers that Charles Freeman has some serious questions about Israel and America's relationship with it....

2010-07-23T19:07:00.000-07:00

In fact, Chas Freeman, in prepared remarks at a
Nixon Center debate, “Israel; Asset or Liability?”
on July 20, 3010, opined: [YOUR COMMENTS WELCOME BELOW]

Is Israel a strategic asset or liability for the United States? Interesting question. We must thank the Nixon Center for asking it. In my view, there are many reasons for Americans to wish the Jewish state well. Under current circumstances, strategic advantage for the United States is not one of them. If we were to reverse the question, however, and to ask whether the United States is a strategic asset or liability for Israel, there would be no doubt about the answer.

American taxpayers fund between 20 and 25 percent of Israel’s defense budget (depending on how you calculate this). Twenty-six percent of the $3 billion in military aid we grant to the Jewish state each year is spent in Israel on Israeli defense products. Uniquely, Israeli companies are treated like American companies for purposes of U.S. defense procurement. Thanks to congressional earmarks, we also often pay half the costs of special Israeli research and development projects, even when – as in the case of defense against very short-range unguided missiles -- the technology being developed

is essentially irrelevant to our own military requirements. In short, in many ways, American taxpayers fund jobs in Israel’s military industries that could have gone to our own workers and companies. Meanwhile, Israel gets pretty much whatever it wants in terms of our top-of-the-line weapons systems, and we pick up the tab.

Identifiable U.S. government subsidies to Israel total over $140 billion since 1949. This makes Israel by far the largest recipient of American giveaways since World War II. The total would be much higher if aid to Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon, and support for Palestinians in refugee camps and the occupied territories were included. These programs have complex purposes but are justified in large measure in terms of their contribution to the security of the Jewish state.

Per capita income in Israel is now about $37,000 -- on a par with the UK. Israel is nonetheless the largest recipient of U.S. foreign assistance, accounting for well over a fifth of it. Annual U.S. government transfers run at well over $500 per Israeli, not counting the costs of tax breaks for private donations and loans that aren’t available to any other foreign country.

These military and economic benefits are not the end of the story. The American government also works hard to shield Israel from the international political and legal consequences of its policies and actions in the occupied territories, against its neighbors, or – most recently – on the high seas. The nearly 40 vetoes the United States has cast to protect Israel in the UN Security Council are the tip of iceberg. We have blocked a vastly larger number of potentially damaging reactions to Israeli behavior by the

international community. The political costs to the United States internationally of having to spend our political capital in this way are huge.

Where Israel has no diplomatic relations, U.S. diplomats routinely make its case for it. As I know from personal experience (having been thanked by the then Government of Israel for my successful efforts on Israel’s behalf in Africa), the U.S. government has been a consistent promoter and often the funder of various forms of Israeli programs of cooperation with other countries. It matters also that America – along with a very few other countries – has remained morally committed to the Jewish experiment with a

state in the Middle East. Many more Jews live in America than in Israel. Resolute

American support should be an important offset to the disquiet about current trends that has led over 20 percent of Israelis to emigrate, many of them to the United States, where Jews enjoy unprecedented security and prosperity.

Clearly, Israel gets a great deal from us. Yet it’s pretty much taboo in the United States to ask what’s in it for Americans. I can’t imagine why. Still, the question I’ve been asked to address today is just that: what’s in it -- and not in it -- for us to do all these things for Israel.

We need to begin by recognizing that our relationship with Israel has never been driven by strategic reasoning. It began with President Truman overruling his strategic and military advisers in deference to personal sentiment and political expediency. We had an arms embargo on Israel until Lyndon Johnson dropped it in 1964 in explicit return for Jewish financial support for his campaign against Barry Goldwater. In 1973, for reasons

peculiar to the Cold War, we had to come to the rescue of Israel as it battled Egypt. The resulting Arab oil embargo cost us dearly. And then there’s all the time we’ve put into the perpetually ineffectual and now long defunct “peace process.”

Still the US-Israel relationship has had strategic consequences. There is no reason to doubt the consistent testimony of the architects of major acts of anti-American terrorism about what motivates them to attack us. In the words of Khalid Sheikh Mohammed, who is credited with masterminding the 9/11 attacks, their purpose was to focus "the American people ... on the atrocities that America is committing by supporting Israel against the Palestinian people …." As Osama Bin Laden, purporting to speak for the world’s Muslims, has said again and again: "we have . . . stated many times, for more than two-and-a-half-decades, that the cause of ourdisagreement with you is your support to your Israeli allies who occupy our land of Palestine ...." Some substantial portion of the many lives and the trillions of dollars we have so far expended in our escalating conflict with the Islamic world must be apportioned to the costs of our relationship

with Israel.

It’s useful to recall what we generally expect allies and strategic partners to do for us. In Europe, Asia, and elsewhere in the Middle East, they provide bases and support the projection of American power beyond their borders. They join us on the battlefield in places like Kuwait and Afghanistan or underwrite the costs of our military operations. They help recruit others to our coalitions. They coordinate their foreign aid with ours. Many defray the costs of our use of their facilities with “host nation support” that reduces the costs of our military operations from and through their territory. They store weapons for our troops’, rather than their own troops’ use. They pay cash for the weapons we transfer to them.

Israel does none of these things and shows no interest in doing them. Perhaps it can’t. It is so estranged from everyone else in the Middle East that no neighboring country will accept flight plans that originate in or transit it. Israel is therefore useless in terms of support for American power projection. It has no allies other than us. It has developed no friends. Israeli participation in our military operations would preclude the cooperation of many others. Meanwhile, Israel has become accustomed to living on the American military dole. The notion that Israeli taxpayers might help defray the expense of U.S. military or foreign assistance operations, even those undertaken at Israel’s behest, would be greeted with astonishment in Israel and incredulity on Capitol Hill.

Military aid to Israel is sometimes justified by the notion of Israel as a test bed for new weapons systems and operational concepts. But no one can identify a program of military R & D in Israel that was initially proposed y our men and women in uniform. All originated with Israel or members of Congress acting on its behalf. Moreover, what Israel makes it sells not just to the United States but to China, India, and other major arms markets. It feels no obligation to take U.S. interests into account when it transfers weapons and technology to third countries and does so only under duress.

Meanwhile, it’s been decades since Israel’s air force faced another in the air. It has come to specialize in bombing civilian infrastructure and militias with no air defenses. There is not much for the U.S. Air Force to learn from that. Similarly, the Israeli navy confronts no real naval threat. Its experience in interdicting infiltrators, fishermen, and humanitarian aid flotillas is not a model for the U.S. Navy to study. Israel’s army, however, has had lessons to impart. Now in its fifth decade of occupation duty, it has developed techniques of pacification, interrogation, assassination, and drone attack that inspired U.S. operations in Fallujah, Abu Ghraib, Somalia, Yemen, and Waziristan. Recently, Israel has begun to deploy various forms of remote-controlled robotic guns. These enable operatives at far-away video screens summarily to execute anyone they view as suspicious. Such risk-free means of culling hostile populations could conceivably come in handy in some future American military operation, but I hope not. I have a lot of trouble squaring the philosophy they embody with the values Americans traditionally aspired to exemplify.

It is sometimes said that, to its credit, Israel does not ask the United States to fight its battles for it; it just wants the money and weapons to fight them on its own. Leave aside the question of whether Israel’s battles are or should also be America’s. It is no longer true that Israel does not ask us to fight for it. The fact that prominent American apologists for Israel were the most energetic promoters of the U.S. invasion of Iraq does

not, of course, prove that Israel was the instigator of that grievous misadventure. But the very same people are now urging an American military assault on Iran explicitly to protect Israel and to preserve its nuclear monopoly in the Middle East. Their advocacy is fully coordinated with the Government of Israel. No one in the region wants a nuclear-armed Iran, but Israel is the only country pressing Americans to go to war over this.

Finally, the need to protect Israel from mounting international indignation about its behavior continues to do grave damage to our global and regional standing. It has severely impaired our ties with the world’s 1.6 billion Muslims. These costs to our international influence, credibility, and leadership are, I think, far more serious than the economic and other burdens of the relationship.

Against this background, it’s remarkable that something as fatuous as the notion of Israel as a strategic asset could have become the unchallengeable conventional wisdom in the United States. Perhaps it’s just that as someone once said: “people … will more easily fall victim to a big lie than a small one.” Be that as it may, the United States and Israel have a lot invested in our relationship. Basing our cooperation on a thesis and narratives that will not withstand scrutiny is dangerous. It is especially risky in the context of current fiscal pressures in the United States. These seem certain soon to force major revisions of both current levels of American defense spending and global strategy, in the Middle East as well as elsewhere. They also place federally-funded programs in Israel in direct competition with similar programs here at home. To flourish over the long term, Israel’s relations with the United States need to be grounded in reality, not myth, and in peace, not war.

The Bookwich "amplifies" text for a new kind of book reading experience!

2010-07-22T20:34:00.001-07:00

The Bookwich "amplifies" text for a new kind of book reading experience!

The (Steven Berlin) Johnsonian Bargain! Forget Faust! This Johnsonian Bargain is One for the History Books!

2010-07-22T05:38:00.000-07:00

Steven Berlin Johnson, apparently born on June 6, 1968, if his email address sbj6668 is to be taken at face value, believes that "quiet contemplation has led to its fair share of important thoughts. But it cannot be denied that good ideas also emerge in networks. Yes, we are a little less focused, thanks to the electric stimulus of the screen. Yes, we are reading slightly fewer long-form narratives and arguments than we did 50 years ago, though the Kindle and the iPad may well change that. Those are costs, to be sure. But what of the other side of the ledger? We are reading more text, writing far more often, than we were in the heyday of television. And the speed with which we can follow the trail of an idea, or discover new perspectives on a problem, has increased by several orders of magnitude. We are marginally less focused, and exponentially more connected. That’s a bargain, that all of us should be happy to make."

READ: ">That’s a [Faustian, now JOHNSONIAN] bargain, [er a Johnsonian Bargain that ] all of us should be happy to make."

Steven Berlin Johnson is a silly author and technoentrepreneur. His new book, “Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation,” might be published in October.
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/06/20/business/20unbox.html

The Bookwich "amplifies" text for a new kind of book reading experience!

2010-07-22T05:25:00.000-07:00

Order a BOOKWICH at your local deli and digest the entire contents in one single bite!

Better than an E-reader !

Better than a VOOK!

Nourishing!

Healthy! Organic! Refreshing!

Disposable!

Easily Digested!

Simply Excreted!

Low Calories!

Priced to Sell!

Whole Wheat Bread!

Just take a bit and let all the information in your favorite BOOKWICH will seep organically in to your bloodstream!

No fuss, no muss!

The pros and cons of reading on screens: MRI scans and PET scans to check which reading mode is superior in terms of brain chemistry

2010-07-22T00:15:00.000-07:00

As digital advances continue to transform the global media world day
by day, a Taiwanese company, E Ink Holdings. has taken on an important
role with its development of E Ink, which is able to render text on
e-reader screens. The original goal of creating e-books, of course,
was to make the experience of reading on electronic devices as similar
as possible to that of printed books. In many respects, that goal has
already been realized.

With about 90 percent of all e-readers using E Ink, the digital
reading revolution is going to have a major impact on business and
education worldwide and it is incumbent upon us all to ponder just
where we are headed as screens replace paper.

An important question that academics and researchers need to answer,
as the digital revolution gathers speed, is this: Do we read
differently from a computer screen to how we read the printed page?
And if so, how differently, and in what ways?

With two new American books about reading and the Internet making
waves worldwide this summer — William Powers’ Hamlet’s BlackBerry and
Nicholas Carr’s The Shallows — everyone is talking about the pros and
cons of reading printed materials versus reading from a screen.

An education specialist in Norway, Anne Mangen, listed in a 2008
academic paper a few reasons why these two approaches to reading are
different. She said that:

‧ Reading on a screen is not as rewarding — or effective — as reading
printed words on paper;

‧ The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical
manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to
focus on and appreciate what we are reading;

‧ Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks a physical
dimension, robbing us of a sense of completeness;

‧ The visual happenings on a computer screen and our physical
interaction with the device and its setup can be distracting.

‧ All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way
that a book, newspaper or magazine does not;

‧ The experience of reading a book, newspaper or magazine is both a
story experience and a tactile one.

We still do not know just how different reading printed works is from
reading on a screen, but the public discussions are getting
interesting — and heated.

Some pundits believe that future MRI scans of the brain when reading
will help us to understand the issues better. This work is currently
being done in a few research labs around the world.

However, a doctor in Boston told me that he feels “scanning” the brain
while reading printed materials or a screen, either through MRI or PET
scans, still won’t determine which is the better or healthier
experience.

“We don’t know enough about the brain to tell which would be better,
even if different areas of the brain are active,” he said.

When I asked a noted writer on technology in New York about this, he
replied: “A good test would be not telling the subjects the real
purpose of the experiment, letting some read and comment on a text
displayed in a printed book or on a computer screen or e-reader (e-ink
or TFT), and then let raters, also unaware of the real purpose, look
for differences in what people write after different modes.”

Let the research begin. The results could better spell out the future
of screen-reading devices and what roles they will play in our
children’s lives.

When I asked a top researcher at UCLA if his lab could pioneer this kind of MRI brain scan research, he told me: "At the moment, our group is quite busy with other studies. The funding would
be expensive to pull our group from other studies. However, while it would take some
ingenuity, I do think these kinds of studies are feasible. Good luck with your quixotic quest to find a lab willing to go down this route."

OPEN BOOK: a blog about books, authors, trends and everything else associated with literature and the publishing business, including newspapers, in a fast-changing media and tech environment, not all of which is for the good....

2010-07-21T23:16:00.000-07:00

PRESS RELEASE

July 31, 2010 -- Veteran newsman and print reporter Dan Bloom will
begin blogging on books, literature and publishing for the fledgling
Chiayi Center for the Literary Arts in Taiwan.

The blog, Open Book, will cover books, authors, trends and everything
else associated with literature in a fast-changing media and
technology environment. Visit it at http://zippy1300.blogspot.com

For more than 4 decades Bloom wrote book reviews and author profiles
and reported on publishing, other entertainment and cultural topics
for newspapers in Boston, Washington DC, Alaska, Tokyo and Taipei.

Bloom, an affable and avuncular eccentric with no PHD credentials to
his name, is known for his sharp, sometimes idiosyncratic opinions and
his lively writing style.

“I’m determined to do all that I can to carry my love of books and
reading into the evolving digital age,” says Bloom. “I’m grateful to
the Chiayi Center for the Literary Arts for giving me this platform to
continue writing about literature.”

“I hope to provide a new dimension to the center's global outreach and
its connection with book lovers around the world. I'm
very pleased to be aboard,” he added.

READING vs. SCREENING VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

Video killed the literary star: Chauncey Mabe on "amplified" "Frankenbooks"

2010-07-21T23:10:00.000-07:00

NEWS ITEM: Penguin, Starz create first “amplified” book. Say that again?

On July 21, 2010
Chauncey Mabe dishes the dirt:
Don't blame Ken Follet -- all he did was write the words.

In what can only be called an attempt to create books for people who
don’t like to read, Penguin and Starz, the pay TV channel, have
combined to create an “amplified” e-book version of Ken Follett’s
best-selling historical novel, Pillars of the Earth, as an app for
Apple’s iPad, iPhone and iPod.

This unholy abomination — or, as I like to call it, “Frankenbook,” —
burdens Follett’s text with enhancements like character profiles and
videos from the Starz miniseries adaptation of the novel, which begins
airing July 23.

“This is the future of books,” says Marc DeBevoise, senior VP of
digital media business development for Starz. But then he would say
that, wouldn’t he?

To someone who already reads books by choice — actual adult books with
lots of words and few if any pictures (and those pictures don’t move),
let me say: If this thing finds an audience, it won’t be the future of
books, it will be the beginning of the end.

If you prefer to indulge old-fashioned reading pleasures like, say,
imaging for yourself, in collaboration with the actual words the
author has put on the page, what characters look and sound like, then
forget it. Read this version of Follet’s book and Bishop Bigod, the
tale’s chief villain, is Ian McShane. Its main hero, Tom, is Rufus
Sewell.

Aren’t you glad Penguin and Starz are freeing you from that pesky
inconvenience of, you know, thinking?

Starz and Penguin, of course, are touting the daylights out of the
thing. Starz has little to lose and lots of synergy and publicity to
gain — it’s like a traditional movie-book tie-in on steroids. The real
gambit, as Reuters‘ story explains, lies with Penguin, which, like
other publishers, is chafing under Amazon’s $9.99 pricing for digital
(and many printed) books.

After all, Pillars of the Earth, a best seller when it first came out
in 1989, has sold more than 14 million copies worldwide, aided by an
Oprah selection in 2007. This cow has already been thoroughly milked.
But while Penguin will gladly count whatever additional revenues the
Starz tie-in might bring, that’s not the real goal behind Frankenbook.

By loading up a book with superfluous doo-dads and gimcrackery,
Penguin hopes to entice “readers” to ante up a higher retail price
(the amplified Pillars goes for $12.95). If so, Penguin will have
struck a significant blow in the continuing pricing war between
publishers and Amazon.

“It’s going to be a very interesting test to see if people want to pay
for this,” says Jim Milliot of Publishers Weekly tells USA Today.

To which I say, as I’ve said before: The printed book is a perfect,
end-state technology. Like the wheel, the umbrella or the pocket
knife, it can be elaborated but not improved. But panicking in the new
media environment, publishers are making the same mistake newspapers
did: They are forgetting what product they’re selling and who their
customers are.

People who like books like books. If I want to watch TV, I’ll turn on
the idiot box. If I want to learn about history, I’ll pick up (or,
okay, boot up) an encyclopedia.

Combining video and other distractions to the printed word can only
coarsen and erode the reading experience, and hasten the demise of
book culture and the industry that feeds on it.

Dan Bloom's 2-MINUTE READING vs. SCREENING OPED VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

--
MY 2-MINUTE READING vs. SCREENING VIDEO:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

MRI scan and PET scan studies of reading on paper vs reading on screens: coming soon!

2010-07-21T20:34:00.000-07:00

Followup FYI your eyes only

First, Dr X said

Dear Dan
We are not doing these kinds of MRI or PET scan studies on reading vs screening, and I do not know of others who might be doing them. Sorry not to be of any more help on this. Good luck in your quixotic quest.
Dr X

Hello Dr X

If we commissioned you to do them, would you? Do you think it's
important to know this? Would such MRI studies or PET scans be
possible
with people reading from screens in the machines?

I am a reporter in Taiwan, Tufts 1971, doing major major pioneering
QUESTION ASKING here.....I NEED YOU, Dr X
can you help?

IF THE NEW YORK TIMES does the story I am working on, are you willing
to be quoted for public?

Dan

HIS SECOND REPLY:

Dear Dan,

I think we are quite busy now with other studies. The funding would be expensive to pull our group from other studies. It would take some ingenuity, but I think these MRI or PET scan kinds of studies are feasible.

Dr X

Storybook for kids ages 4-8: Needs editor, artist, publisher. BOOK PROPOSAL: Written by "Pamela Johnson" with big dreams in her head for publication

2010-07-21T06:05:00.000-07:00

''A Snailbook For Everyone!'' .... OR .... "A Snailbook's Gone Missing!" .... OR..... other title upon editor's discretion

by Pamela Johnson [aka]
(c) 2010 All Rights Reserved

Here is a book
printed on paper.
A story for you,
A snailbook caper

You see, dear children,
from Nebraska to Nome,
It's true someone came
And took the book home!

The snailbook was missing
From the library all week
And nobody knew
Where to look, where to peek

They called it a crime
Without reason or rhyme
"A snailbook's gone missing!"
Who took it, this time?

Robin Red Breast or Sneaky Sir Snake?
Michael the Mouse or Mandrake the drake?
Finding the snailbook
was no piece of cake!

"I'll call in the cops," said Mary Contrary.
"When books disappear, it's really quite hairy!"
"But wait!" said Doctor Peek-Abu
I think I know what's troubling you!"

"The snailbook's gone missing
because paper is scarce.
And people are reading
on screens that are fierce!"

"But what if we gently
go back to that time
when reading on paper
was quite very sublime!"

And then with those words
the snailbook appeared.
At the library's front desk
High-fives could be heard.

"Once I was missing but now I am found,"
said the snailbook itself with its feet on the ground.
All's well that ends well, nothing has changed
From Nebraska to Nome it's all been arranged.

Books are for reading!
Between covers, with spines!
The snailbook you're holding
Holds pictures and lines!

So hooray for paper
and hooray for books.
Between crannies and 'nooks'
There's pleasure in books!

(c) All Rights Reserved
Daniel Halevi Bloom

MRI scan and PET scan research on reading off screens compared to reading on paper: interview

2010-07-21T05:03:00.000-07:00

1. Using MRI's is going to expensive. How would are the current studies
being financed?

BLOOM: Yes, conducting MRI brain scan research on lab volunteers reading on
paper compared to others
reading on screens (Kindles or Nooks or iPhones or computer screens)
will be expensive. But institutions
like UCLA and Harvard and Princeton and Tufts and other major
universities in Europe and Japan will be
able to carry out this research over the next few years. Scholars like
Anne Mangen in Norway, Maryanne Wolf
at Tufts, Oliver Sacks at Columbia and Gary Small at UCLA are aware of
these issues and will likely be at the forefront
of the research. It might take 5 years, it might ten 10 years, but the
studies and academic papers will come out. I have no idea what the
research will say. The MRI studies might show the reading on paper is
superior to reading on screens, or they might
say the opposite. Or they might say there is no real difference. But
we need to find out with neuroscience, not just anecdotal evidence.

> 2. Why stop at ebook readers. Why not do the same MRI research with
> computers?

Yes yes, I am calling for this kind of MRI research with computers, too. From Kindles
to Nooks to SONY Readers to iPads to iPhones to computer screens, all
screen- reading must be tested
to compare it with reading on paper.

> 3. Even if there are differences shown between reading a book and reading
> on an electronic device, does that really mean it is harmful or just that
> its different?

Good question. Let's say that huge differences are seen between
reading a book on paper
compared to reading the same book on a screen. Will it mean anything?
If the differences
are huge, it will mean something, for sure.

If the differences are very slight, maybe it will not
mean much. And if there are no differences, then we can all relax. And
if it turns out that screening reading
is superior to paper reading, then that's good to know too.

We need to ask neuroscientists to tell us what's
going on. However, as Gary Small at UCLA recently told a reporter for
the Los Angeles Times: "People tend to ask whether this is good or
bad," Small said. "My response is that the tech train is out of the
station, and it's impossible to stop."

He was referring to an earlier note that online readers often
demonstrate what he calls "continuous partial attention" as they click
from one link to the next. The risk is that we become mindless ants
following endless crumbs of digital data, Small indicated. But his
final note that the teech train is already out of the station and
cannot be stopped is telling.

> 4. Do you have any idea when papers will be published based on these
> studies?

I have no idea what research is being conducted at the current time,
nor do I know who is conducting the research or where.
As someone with no Ph.D and no advanced academic credentials, I am
using my background as a writer and a newspaper reporter to research
the current state of this kind of research and to call for more of it,
specifically targetted at paper and screens. So far, there is not one
academic paper published about MRI brain scan studies on this topic,
but several top people in the field, who I am in contact with, have
told me that such research is imperative and that it will happen
sooner or later.

Anne Mangen, at the University of Stavanger in Norway, has already
published a paper about some of this work, but she did not use MRI
scans as part of her research yet. Still, one can summarize some
important Mangen's research on precisely the difference between screen
and print reading this way:

“The process of reading on a screen involves so much physical
manipulation of the computer that it interferes with our ability to
focus on and appreciate what we are reading;

“Online text moves up and down the screen and lacks a physical
dimension, robbing us of a sense of completeness;

“The visual happenings on a computer screen and our physical
interaction with the device and its setup can be distracting.

“All of these things tax human cognition and concentration in a way
that a book, newspaper or magazine does not.”

> 5. Are there any preliminary results?

So far none. Anne Mangen in Norway is leading the way. Maryanne Wolf
at Tufts is deeply involved in this, too. Gary Small
at UCLA, and Oliver Sacks in New York, too. But so far there have no
no MRI studies on this. It's just beginnging.

> 6. How likely is it that manufacturers who have heavily invested in ebook
> technology will pay any attention to the findings if they are negative?

Very good question. It is highly likely that they will pay no
attention to whatever findings come out. If the findings
back the superiority of reading off screens, they will rejoice and
help to publish the results. If the findings say that reading on paper
and reading off screens is more or less the same, in terms of brain
chemistry and reception, then they will also rejoice. But if the
findings come back that paper reading is superior to screen reading,
it won't make a difference to the e-reader industry. As a friend of
mine in the industry told me recently: "Just as dire warnings about
cancer and radiation from excessive cellphone use have more
or less gone unheeded, the same thing will happen with the results of
the MRI tests on paper reading versus screen reading. It's too late to
do anything about it. The reading devices are already out there in the
marketplace and in the schools. I don't think a few
warnings will change a thing. It didn't stop the cellphone industry.
It won't stop the e-reader makers. It's a billion dollar industry, and
it's getting hotter every day."

> 7. Who exactly is doing these studies and why?

Nobody is doing these MRI brain scan studies yet. Nobody. But those
who will undertake such research will be reading specialists,
educators and neuroscientists with nothing but academic interest
involved. The e-reader industry could care less. They've already made
their bed and they're going to sleep in it, for the long run. The
profits are huge. So it will be academics who get involved first,
people like Anne Mangen in Norway and Maryanne Wolf at Tufts, Gary
Small at UCLA. Maybe even the great Oliver Sacks. I have written to
all of them and pleaded with them to start on such work.

> 8. You mentioned that there were studies being conducted in Asia. Are any
> other countries who are researching this?

As far as I know, not one academic or medical institution in the world
is understaking MRI brain scan research on reading on paper versus
reading on screens yet. It is an unexplored field, and an important
one. But future work will be done in Japan, for sure,
and at the great medical universities in Europe and the USA, Canada, too.

9. There is so much research on brain activity using PET
scans why would MRIs be better than PET scans?

BLOOM: Your question is a good one. I am only zeroing in on MRIs as a
target method
but using PET scans would also do the trick. So let me rephrase my
appeal: we need research by
academics and neurscientists worldwide on how the brain "does" reading
-- both on screens and on
paper surfaces -- to learn more about these phenomena, and both PET
scans and MRI scans will
be useful for the studies. Research scientists will know better which
method fits their mode
of research. So let the research begin!

10. Mr, Blom, Y\you do not have a Ph.D, nor any academic background or
affiliation, and you
are not connected with any research institution or e-reader
manufacturer or book publisher, so what
is in this for you? In other words, Mr Bloom, why are you so concerned
about these issues and why you?

BLOOM: It's true, I have no dog in this fight, and I have no agenda.
I am not an academic, barely graduated
from Tufts University with a bachelor's degree in 1971, have no
professional expertise in anything and am
basically a semi-retired gadfly living in a cave in southern Taiwan.
So why I am doing this, calling for this
research, with so much energy? I just want to know! I am concerned
that reading on screens might be not
be as good as reading on paper in terms of brain chemisty, and I want
to know the truth, from the standpoint of
neuroscience. With my background as a reporter and public relations
consultant, I feel these issues need
to come to the fore of public attention, media attention, too. I am
worried about the future of civilization, if we
put all our marbles in one basket called "screen reading" and jettison
paper reading entirely. I care about the
future. Many other people share my feelings on this. So I am acting as
an unpaid, unofficial spokesman for
those people who care about the differences of reading modes in terms
of neuroscience. And if I am wrong
about my hunch that paper reading is superior to screening, then I
will adjust my thinking accordingly. I want
to see the facts, presented by experts. Anecdotal evidence no longer
cuts the cake. We need facts. That's my
brief, and I've been encouraged to ask these questions -- and to keep
asking them until we get some answers --
by several top experts in the field.

POST-INTERVIEW:

LUTHER BLISSET ASKS: July 20, 2010 at 04:05 pm...Mr Bloom: Would you care to enumerate "parts of the brain that are superior for processing, retention and analysis"? And would you care to explain why two non-natural, and thus non-evolved, habits like paper reading or screen reading would *not* light up different parts of the brain? The brain is amazing in its ability to separate seemingly like behaviors, perhaps because it reduces the overall gravity of local brain traumas.

In order to control for any such MRI experiment, you'd need to work with subjects who had spent equal time with page reading and screen reading. Otherwise, the different effects could merely be a result of less experience. I know I've only been screen reading for 20 of my 34 years -- and if you exclude screen reading for word processing only, I've only been screen reading for 16 years.

We'd also need to control for types of screen reading and types of page reading: reading a .pdf of pure text is different than reading someone's cluttered MySpace page, and reading the Norton Anthology is different than reading a Penguin Classic. (My own unscientific experiments as a teacher suggest that students do better with photocopies of texts from well-laid-out volumes than from the Norton, which is notoriously difficult to manage physically.)

STRABISMOT July 20, 2010 at 04:23 pm....The 2002 book _The Myth of the Paperless Office_ points out that paper reflects, rather than emits, light, which means the print reader's eyes are not taxed as much as a screen viewer's eyes are. They didn't have MRI studies and such, but I think they were on to something. In discussions of print v. screen, I've not yet seen mention of this book -- have you? -- but I've found it quite helpful in understanding the plusses and minuses of each.

My concern with the growing dominance of screening over reading print-on-paper is that screening is a good method for getting the general gist of something, but a poor one for encouraging careful, sustained, deep thought. I suspect (but cannot prove) that print is better suited for the latter. While I am no conservative, reactionary, antiquarian, ax-grinder, or [your favorite comparable epithet slung here], I, too, am concerned that our capacity for deeper, reflective thought will degrade and is degrading already.

It seems to me the question is, how do we support, develop, nurture, reward, etc., the deeper kinds of thinking that screening discourages? What technologies, pedagogies, methods, habits, etc., will help? Old, new, borrowed, blue, digital, analog, I don't care -- I want something that helps, not hinders or degrades, deep thought.

It also seems to me that such kinds of thinking are for many people unnatural and unpleasant, so I expect it will be an It also seems to me that such kinds of thinking are for many people unnatural and unpleasant, so I expect it will be an uphill battle, regardless of the technological or cultural environment.

luther_blissett - July 21, 2010 ...A few points:

1) Re light and paper vs. screen: People used to read by candlelight, which is very bad for the eyes. If you've ever traveled to Europe or the UK and spent time in a castle library, you'll see they are dark. And yet people were very capable of reading under terrible conditions. Most people today read by florescent light, which is similarly bad for the eyes. On the other hand, new e-book devices like the Kindle work with light in new and interesting ways that are less taxing than a computer monitor.

2) Print newspapers do not favor sustained, linear reading. Most people skim newspaper articles. Few articles are read past the crease, few newspapers are read from start to finish, and few articles are read patiently word for word.

3) I'd argue that the genre of writing is more important here than the technology. People give sustained attention to very few types of writing: art in which they are very interested and articles in which they have a deep personal or professional interest. Otherwise we skim: textbooks, opinion pieces, popular fiction, magazine articles, etc. So sure, if kids read good novels or essays every night -- on-line or in print -- it would be better than if they skimmed newspapers OR blogs.

4) Which is to say that the better the content, the better the reading. The lady next to me on the bus last week reading Tacitus on her Kindle is engaged in far better reading practices than the guy flipping through a discarded issue of *The New Yorker* he found on his seat.

Welcome to The Slow [Reading] Society: Tomas Moberg in Sweden interviews Dan Bloom in Taiwan

2010-07-20T21:12:00.000-07:00

webposted July 19, 3010 A.D.
Interview with Danny Bloom
http://interviews.slowsociety.org/2010/07/dan-bloom.html

http://www.slowsociety.org/

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

Here is a brief interview by email with Danny Bloom, American author and freelance reporter living in Asia since 1991. We asked him a few questions about unplugged living and reading.

Tomas Moberg (TM): What is unplugged living?

Danny Bloom (DB): Unplugged living, for me, means living offline as much as possible, devoting a maximum of just two hours a day to checking emails and writing replies, and being unplugged from the Internet and emails as much as possible. It means not owning a computer, for me, not owning an iPhone or an iPad or any other connecting gadget other than a simple cellphone. Since I do not own a computer, and do not have one on my home, I keep the Internet and the plugged-in life at bay, as far away as possible on a daily basis. When I need to check my email for messages, since I am a reporter and depend on email to connect me with editors and fellow writers around the world, I go to a nearby Internet Cafe here in Taiwan and rent the computer machine for two hours. The rest of the day I am unplugged. That's what unplugged living means to me. Everyone, of course, can define it in their own way. But define it.

TM: How do you manage to live unplugged?

DB: It's easy. The same way I lived before the Internet was invented. I read the local print newspaper every day, I watch the news on CNN International from my home in Taiwan, I go outside to visit friends and chat with them at local coffee shops, I go the cinema for watch movies, I go to the bookstore to browse through magazines and books there. Being unplugged is natural. I have always lived this way. I do enjoy email and blogs and Internet research resources for their convenience and speed, yes. So we need a balance in our lives, between being plugged in and being offline. It's very easy. I've lived this way all my life. I don't depend on machines to plug me into the world and into consciousness and self-awareness. I use my brain. It's free and it's always working.

TM: An essential part of life unplugged could probably be termed slow reading. How would you define slow reading?

DB: Slow reading, to me, is reading texts, news or fiction or essays, on paper, and sitting in a comfortable chair or park bench and reading slowly, with a pen in my hand, in order to circle words or phrases I find interesting and worth re-reading later, underlining words, circling entire paragraphs, and thinking about what I am reading, and taking the time to think and ponder.

TM: Traditional newspapers and books seem to lose the battle against electronic devices, and this is bad news for us. Why is screen reading inferior to book reading?

DB: Screen reading, which I call "screening" now as a new verb in English, with a new meaning from previous meanings of screening, is convenient and useful, and I "screen" emails, Internet news and blogs on a daily basis. But I do this just for get "a quick take" on things. I feel that when we read on a screen, through a glass screen, via pixels and on flat surface that is vertical to our eyes, our brains do not process the information, or retain the information, or analyze the information in as deep a way as we do when we read the same information on a paper surface. I am sure of this, from my own personal experience. But to prove my hunch, we need to carry out MRI brain scan tests of people reading on screens compared to people reading on paper, and find out if in fact different regions of the brain light up for the two different reading modes. My hunch is that paper reading is superior to screen reading for processing, retention and analysis, not because of the technology involved, but because of the way the brain works. Screen reading is useful. I am not a Luddite, nor I am anti-screen. But I do believe that future MRI scan tests by academics in Europe and North America will prove my hunch correct, that paper reading is superior to screen reading for these three main attributes: processing, retention and analysis. Let the tests begin. Anne Mangen in Norway is one of the pioneers of this kind of academic work, and her work should be heeded. I have interviewed her for my blog work and I have spoken to her on the phone. She is a true genius in the field.

TM: And that takes us to the last question. How can we live more sustainably?

DB: We need to live more simply. We need to use cars less, fly in airplanes less, stay home more often. I myself never fly in airplanes anymore. I have not driven a car in 20 years. I use a bicycle to get around. I never travel outside the country where I live. I do not buy new clothes and new appliances. I own one gadget, a cellphone made in 1995. I believe that as wonderful as life is in 2010, we need to go back to a lifestyle more like the year 1858 than 2010. If we don't do this soon, the entire fate of the human species will be at stake due to climate change and global warming. By the year 2500, humankind will face major problems of survival. I care about 500 years from now, even as I care about today. That, to me, is living sustainably!

Steve Jobs on parenthood: "If we [Apple] hit a bump in the road, it's like having kids."

2010-07-20T06:22:00.000-07:00

Did Steve mean that kids, CHILDREN, are a bump in the road? Does this man have children? Is he sane?

Quote: "To our customers who are affected by the issue, we are deeply sorry, and we are going to give you a free case or a full refund. We want investors who invest in Apple for the long haul, because they believe in us. To those investors who bought the stock and are down by $5, I have no apology. If we hit a bump in the road, it’s like having kids."

"One-Armed Suspect Inspires Great Headline" is headline above David Moye's AOL Weird News piece on all this....

2010-07-19T22:43:00.000-07:00

AOL News (July 19, Year 4 Billion and Ten, ET, Earth Time) -- Sometimes bad people can inspire great things --or at least great headlines.

At least that's the case for Manuel Hernandez, 28, of Springfield, Massachusetts

He was arrested July 13 for allegedly jumping a 68-year-old man and
stealing US$354 from him.On the surface, this is a nothing case barely worth a short paragraph
-- until you learn certain details about Hernandez.
For instance, he's missing his right arm and goes by the name "Lefty."

Those little details were enough to inspire MassLive.com editor George
Graham to write a headline in the vein of the 1982 classic published
by the New York Post:
"Headless Body in Topless Bar."

Graham's masterpiece?

"Springfield Police Charge One-Armed Man With Unarmed Robbery,"

a headline that earned more ink from The Huffington

Post than the crime that inspired it, as well as praise from readers

along the lines of "Best headline of the year!" and "I nearly pissed

my pants!"

Whether or not "Springfield Police Charge One-Armed Man With Unarmed

Robbery" will be considered the equal of "Headless Body in Topless

Bar" remains to be seen. That headline has not only been cited as one

of the best of all time but also inspired a movie as well as a book

about strip club violence.

Perhaps that explains why Graham is being so humble.

"The headline wrote itself," he told AOL News. "It was deadline, and

it just came to me. I was almost playing it straight."

But while Graham's headline amuses many readers for the way it

hilariously sums up the story, not everyone is laughing.

Veteran newspaperman Danny Bloom, 61, who grew up in Springfield and now lives in a cave in southernTaiwan, feels the headline crosses a line that shouldn't be crossed.

"A good headline should be clear and easy to understand, direct and to
the point," he said by e-mail. "But the 'art' comes in when a good
headline writer adds some humor or zest or pizazz to the wording, but
not at the expense of clarity or lame humor."

To put it candidly, er, handily, Bloom said that Graham's headline is in poor taste.

"The pun is cute, in a sophomoric way, but it is making fun of a

handicapped person, and headlines should not mock people, they should

inform the reader," he said. "Yes, humor is good at times, but in this

case, the attempt at humor is lame, no pun intended, and wrongheaded

-- again, no headline pun intended."

Graham, a news veteran with 20 years' experience, will allow that his

headline does capture the salient points of the story, but admitted he

didn't run his hilarious effort by anyone and didn't wait to hear the

roar of chuckles from his newsroom co-workers.

"After writing the headline, I went home," he said.

Meanwhile, Hernandez was unavailable to give a hand to this story.

-- 30 --

BONUS ADDED:
VIDEO OF DAN BLOOM ONLINE:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=9xpN78-cJP0

Oliver Stone has a new moustache, a big, bristling, Zapata number, notes UK reporter Carole Cadwalladr. who interviews him in Los Angeles for the Observer newspaper in her home country

2010-07-19T06:59:00.000-07:00

''Oliver Stone has a new moustache, a big, bristling, Zapata number, and in the tiny digital frame on the back of the camera, he looks like it's him who really ought to be dressed in military fatigues and running his own small South American regime.''

THE LO LAT SONG - A NEW SONG IN TAIWANESE music BY 簡定原-- vocals by 李怡樺 - produced by 丹布隆

一個老美的主張：''New Taiwan'' ◎Dan Bloom

Click to enlarge to see LO LAT entered as name of tree contest

Chapter 7, the book, the movie, the screenplay, the dream, the plan, circa 2080....

Ah-Ye's Fantastic Beef Hot Pot Restaurant in Rende, Tainan County.......NT$1100 for two people.....but oishii!

Showtime! with Huang Fei, national treasure of Taiwan! and Ginny and her Dad and Gaki of SEEDIQ BALE movie! -- a nice trip to Tainan Country memories

On the road to Tainan to see Huang Fei mini-concert, with Richard Huang, no relation, driving his Altis Toyota Corolla sedan with GPS map

LO LAT hand sign created by students at Chung Cheng University in Chiayi

老外推廣「魯力」 已集滿千句 - LO LAT SONG OF TAIWAN

''TAIWAN LO LAT'' song sung by country western singer in Texas USA

Anna Amanda Lee, vocalist and lyricist for LO LAT SONG, with indie producer Dan Bloom -- MUSIC COMPOSED BY TINO JIAN

老外推廣「魯力」 已集滿千句 編電音「魯力歌」揪三太子助陣 就是愛台灣 拚集萬句「魯力」 2011/9/8 蔡崇梧 報導 列印轉寄討論推薦▼台視新聞

推廣台語「魯力」 老外已收集千句 ----- 丹布隆 vs. LO LAT

LO LAT SONG - news

The Lo Lat Project

LO LAT DOG - Photos by Timothy Chen

When Banyan Tree and Autumn Maple Tree Got Married

HEINKEN ''LO LAT'' photos - cute and KUSO! LO LAT means "thank you" in Hoklo Taiwanese...

LO LAT - CD cover - demo - music composed by 簡定原-- vocals by 李怡樺

Electronia Version of THE LO LAT SONG for Santaizi Dance Performance

丹布隆 ...LO LAT! -- 台羅字幕.......Tsin lóo-la̍t.....(song titled '''The LO LAT song'' )

DELETED

The Digirata -- by ''Anonymous''

THE DIGIRATA - a Desiderata for the Digital Age - by "Anonymous 2010" - an encrypted message found in a virtual bottle floating across a screen somewhere in the infinite vaporsphere

An interview with Peter Melzer on the pros and con of reading on screens in the digital age

I see by the snailpapers today that David Bader has a new book out, THE BOOK OF MURRAY, about the .....

Nicholas Carr makes a point but I counter it here, below:

The Unplugged Challenge: Readers Respond - by Joshua Brustein, New York Times

Frederick Forsyth at 72, still going strong.....

Hypatia asks the New York Times Joshua Brustein....

Stelios in the UK wants to know....

The Unplugged Challenge at the New York Times: Readers Respond, including Danny Bloom

Cyberbullying "involves the use of information and communication technologies to support deliberate, repeated, and hostile behavior by an individual or group, that is intended to harm others. -- Bill Belsey

Letter to Editor of newspaper in Taiwan in Hokklo language

The Harvard Interview - The New York Times Hiring Code

Egg-Free Ice Cream Lets Flavors Bloom - New York Times Urgent News Today!

I see by the snailpapers that the New York Times does have a special in-house deal for Harvard undergrad grads.....

Yesterday, on our way to school, my four-year-old commented, "When you love somebody, it can't be unloved. That's 'irreversible change'." What a sweet sentiment (don't we all wish this were 100% true?)

The Kindle Conundrum, being An Urgent Appeal to Jeff Bezos of Amazon Kindle and the CEOs of nook and the SONY Reader (and all ereader manufacturers worldwide) !

THE KINDLE CONUNDRUM: An Urgent Appeal to Jeff Bezos of Amazon Kindle and the CEOs of nook and the SONY Reader (and all ereader manufactureres worldwide) !

Can you believe it? No "frankenbooks" [Kindles or nooks] Allowed in a New York coffee shop from noon to 3 pm? Nick Bilton has the details....shocking! What's next? No coffee allowed? Sheesh!

"On the internet, nobody knows you're a dog!"

Brian Eno is very wrong here: he says "I notice that almost all of us have not thought about the chaos that would ensue if the Net collapsed."

Climate chaos will glacially put an end to the human species in 500 years, unless we wake up soon....

"The Invisible Gorilla"

I see by the snailpapers that the digital alarmists like me are wrong.....and that Drs. Chabris and Simons are right! Who knew?

Veteran NYC book publisher agrees that we need MRI and PET brain scan tests soon on reading on paper vs reading on screens...

Top NYC publisher agrees that MRI brain scan tests needed to compare paper reading with screen reading!

How even digitally-literate Nick Bilton makes atomic typo gaffes in his EDGE piece.....

Is screen-reading really reading?

Will print newspapers survive in the Digital Age?

Will newspapers survive the Digital Age?

Whither the future of newspapers?

The future of newspapers will depend on whether readers read or screen

Move over Gregorian Calendar of Christendom. Here comes a new dating system called E.T. (Earth Time) and today is July 31, 4B-010 ET.......

Hamish MacDonald in Scotland makes books by hand, loves the Internet, too, and sums it all up this way....

Will MRI’s help us determine if paper reading is better than electronic reading.....July 30, 2010.......by Susan Wilson, TECHBLORG.COM

Tweet Less, Fuck More! - Bob Herbert on FACING REALITY (from the NY TIMES)

On reading and screening and screens and paper and all that.... an expert weighs in

"Unplugged: Take the Challenge" Now Live at the New York Times -- See the Videos Submitted Online Here

Julie Bosman wants to know what to call the latest generation of E-books that are so brand new that publishers can't agree on what to call them. Julie, call them ''FRANKENBOOKS'', that is what they are!

The networked self is now a verb

Eventually, I learned to stop worrying and love the flow...

The Digital Age signals the End of the Enlightment because it signals the end of the individual as we know it...

We've moved the etiquette of the individual to the etiquette of the flow....

We are increasingly defined by what we say NO to.....

What has Roger Cohen of the New York Times been smokin'?

An Interview with Tomas Moberg in Sweden - SLOW SOCIETY founder

FRANKENBOOKS

National Journal reinvigorates itself or fucks former staffers over? The New York Times dishes the dirt and one commenter tells the OTHER SIDE OF THE STORY: where does truth lie? and does truth lie?

Class action lawsuit filed over "overheating" iPads / iPad reading not ‘just like reading a book’— iPad users file lawsuit

I'm a Techno-Cassandra...

Seeking Co-author for nonfiction book about POLAR CITIES and CLIMATE CHANGE for national publication: split advance and royalties 50/50

In Japan, to tweet on Twitter is to "mumble" -- the Japanese translation of tweet. Who knew?

Oliver Stone [Jewish Father, Catholic Mother, Korean Wife], Criticizes Israel (God Forbid!), Criticizes Some Zionist Jews! (oi) and Almost Praises Hitler (but he really didn't). Still, Oliver is in hot water now! OUCH!

Paul Kokorski criticizes the Vatican for not allowing women to be priests!

'Frankenbooks': new term for e-books

Are iPads, smartphones, and the Mobile Web rewiring the way we think?

A Little Trouble At the Border Over An LSD Trip Long Ago: The saga of Andrew Feldmar, Hungarian emigre to Canada, barred from entering the USA until Hell freezes over. Why?

Does the New York Times interview famous people before they die for the obituary that will be printed on the day they die? Yes!

老外推廣「魯力」已集滿千句 - LO LAT SONG OF TAIWAN

老外推廣「魯力」已集滿千句　編電音「魯力歌」揪三太子助陣　就是愛台灣拚集萬句「魯力」 2011/9/8 蔡崇梧報導列印轉寄討論推薦▼台視新聞

推廣台語「魯力」老外已收集千句 ----- 丹布隆 vs. LO LAT