Bookraft

So called Creative Disruption will be taking place in Scrabble this July as a new British version of Scrabble called Trickster debuts. Will this be "gaga" - allowed or "Lady Gaga" - now allowed too? This all comes about as as Mattel, "Makers of Scrabble" for the rest of the world outside of North America [Hasbro is so far saying "no thank you" for its North American edition of the game], changes the rules of Scrabble to allow Proper Nouns. Yes, this means Samoa and Brontosaurus are now to be admitted onto the Scrabble board. This is simply Mind Boggling[Boggle, the popular word unscrambling game, has long had a much broader dictionary than Scrabble, but even Boggle does not allow Proper Nouns or abbr.]. What happens with proper nouns like "Isthmus of Panama" or "Dark Matter"? Will blanks be allowed? And whats this about stealing others letters. Oh Joe, say it aint so!

How will legitimate proper nouns be decided - if you can Wikipedia or Google or Yahoo it - its a proper noun ? And what is this about drawing a card to decide whether one can use proper nouns, spell a word backwards or steal an opponent's tile. One of the charms of Scrabble has been its comparative simplicity of rules. The new Scrabble Trickster puts this by the side. Thus, me-thinks this Trickster Disruptive Innovation, this Expedient Expanding of the Franchise, this Mattelish Scrabbling of the Rules will become the British Edsel of the Game.

The opening letters in the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie  Society hardly seemed like an auspicious start to a novel experience. And then upon discovering that those opening letters were not just part of the preface but were to be the whole content of the book - and my reading allegiance was shaken. But I soldiered on. The method of telling a story by a series of letter and notes is called an epistlatory style [Something that I had just encountered in A Presumption of Death but Jill Walsh had used  letters as opening markers at start of  chapters and not as the  exclusive narrative mechanism].

In short I was a bit dubious about the Potato Peel Pie Society.

And then to have in the audiobook  an ingenue voice for Juliet ... the only reason I continued to read=listen to the book was the fact that I was on a long trip into Toronto and I didn't want to hear the 680 News for the umpteenth time. Lucky me!

First I discovered that Juliet had some pluck - managing to navigate to the end of the World War II writing a series of  columns for the Spectator magazine as Izzy Bixedorf  which turned out to be very popular. So the columns were collected into a book and Juliet was traveling all over England in early 1946 promoting the book when she receives a letter from a Guernsey islander requesting information about  the 118th century English writer Charles Lamb.

That is the second catch - the book is about the recovery in England and Guernsey from the World War 2 where Guernsey is a small British island off the coast of France. Guernsey was invaded and taken by the Germans early in the War. Guernsey acts as a proxy for all of Europe and the ravishes on the island reflect what happened in Europe.

The third hook in the book is the almost invisible contest for Juliet's heart between Prince Mark of the USA and Dawsey, the Charles Lamb admirer from Guernsey. This is the not uncommon contest between business success and discovering and being with the people who love the things that you do. And that introduces the fourth character, Juliet's alter ego or moral better-half, Elizabeth McKenna. Finding out about Elizabeth, first through letters and then by visiting Guernsey in pursuit of a her book story is also about Juliet discovering herself.

And self-discovery could hardly be better than the cast and crew of the Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Pie Society. This is where the audiobook triumphs. There are five readers for the many voices in the story. Its as if you are at a top English theater/staging company and each reader does not miss an opportunity to give a unique voice to their character. The result is that the audiobook has a leg up on the printed one. When I first read the book [I had received a copy as a Christmas gift]I sort of in-mind voiced a difference in the letters of each character - the writing helped. But I had become distracted and so I took up the audiobook at the library. And I am glad I did because hearing the audio rendering causes the characters to literally come to life. If you can - choose the audiobook.

But also choose this book for the many and engrossing character sketches. Reading the letters is like watching a very good sketch artist . Isola, Christian, Adelaide Addisson, and dozens of other England and Guernsey goers are drawn with such deft strokes- sometimes humorous, other times tragic - you will laugh and cry out loud at their shades of humanity. It is a good read and a great audio performance.

The New York Times Business section has a review of the book Green Gone Wrong in which the reviewer finds the book partially on target. Much like Bill Maher's salient thesis in If You Drive Alone, You Drive With Bin-Laden, the major complaint with Green Gone Wrong is that it does not level with the reading public on the major environmental issue - US consumption of 20-25% of the world's resources given only 5% of the World's population, cannot continue. This elephant-in-the-room echoes Bill Maher's argument, the American public is not being told unpalatable, 'you-must-sacrifice' truths.

In Maher's case, US dependence on Foreign Oil from unsavory sources was not matched by calls for sacrifice and retrenchment in how we consumed oil until prices reached $100++ per barrel. Now the economic downturn has given an artificial reprieve in oil consumption and therefore prices; but only slowly is the move to alternative energy sources being made and that is being "fuelled" by global warming as much as as the depleting domestic oil stocks. But the broader issues of reining in conspicuous, wasteful energy consumption by the public still gets soft-pedalled.

Likewise Heather Rogers complains that much of the Green Revolution has been been co-opted by increasingly vacuous symbolism as in the Worldwide Earth Hour when people gather for 60 Minutes of turning off the lights [ and then back on again for the 23 hours and 364 days of the year]. These events like Earth Day are mostly one-shot reminder salves rather than cumulative efforts at environmental improvements.

Yes, as reviewer Devin Leonard points out, Rogers is right these symbolic efforts and the move of large capital businesses towards Green are being dissipated by the economic downturn. But the more fundamental problem is Sustainability versus an American economy built on Consumption. Sustainability says that the US cannot afford Conspicuous Consumption, Planned Obsolesence, and even Disruptive Innovation without incurring unsustainable environmental injuries and basic attacks on human livability. That is Today's Conundrum. There is a basic contradiction that will get only worse as China and India with 40% of the the World's population adopt US style consumption patterns [China now has more new car sales than the US and they are growing by 20% per year contributing to ever more severe pollution problems in China]. The US has prospered by means of Conspicuous Consumption - now that the whole World is moving rapidly to that consumption-driven economic model , basic human Livability is in danger. It is this wrong or missing emphasis, only glancingly covered in Green Gone Wrong, that reviewer Leonard finds fault with author Rogers. This is precisely where Green Has Gone Wrong, Again.

The News is Wikipedia being used for Breaking News. Over the past few years Wikipedia has become a more accepted source for historical fact and scientific reference. Although open to editing by anyone, an IP address is recorded and registering is encouraged. In this and other ways Wikipedia has been able to setup a system of guidelines, rules and governance that has managed to steadily improve the perceived quality of the encyclopedia. See this example of Updaters of Company Brand wikip-postings for an example of how circumspect wiki-editors must be.  The net result is that Wikipedia is gaining increased credibility as a reference source.

However, with breaking news, Wikipedia's control mechanisms appear to be at a disadvantage versus news organizations with their decades of refinement of editorial control over breaking stories. The wiki-editing and governance is likened to the delays incurred by stock markets to adjust for over- or under-valuation of breaking business news - sometimes it takes not just hours but days for the stock  markets vaunted efficiency to appropriately correct.

The currently debated topic is how good is wikipedia at controlling the authenticity of breaking news. And the appraisal is first more sanguine than expected The key point being  that only  "respected editors" are allowed to make postings - this to prevent vandalism and sabotage of the evolving story. And a more recent posting argues as news has been influenced by Twitter, Facebook and other Crowd-sources on breaking stories, Wikipedia with its many inherent curating controls and divergent contributors should be considered as the better "crowd source" of news:

While Pantages argues that "Wikipedia should not be a source, it should be a starting off point," we would have to argue the same for news media in general. In this crowd-sourced news environment we've entered, blindly consuming news and content, from any source, is an ill-advised path to follow.

With that said, if we are willing to take crowd-sourced content - whether tweets, Facebook updates, blogs, videos or whatever else - as valid sources for information about our world, then a collection of these same media as carefully poured over and curated as found in a Wikipedia article should be even more trusted, not less, than those bits on their own.

This party likes the more conservative "starting-off-point" usage of Wikipedia for breaking news.

But the more telling point is that Wikipedia may be as influential as Craigslist.org and free postings of newspapers and magazines on the Web in determining the economics of news organizations - already economically challenged - now to be even more so if Wikipedia for Breaking News becomes a major trend.

The April issue of Scientific American is crammed with good articles this month. There are the 8 Wonders of the Solar System and a superior article on how the many deep problems of psychology and psychiatry can now be traced to improper wiring, relative to the norm, of various brain areas. Thus such problems as Obseeive Compulsive Disorder and Depression have unique and different maps circuitry and functioning which can lead to better diagnoses and treatment. But I digress.

The Fundamental attraction of this issue is the cover story - Managing Earth's Future.

Now I was worried because I have become World Climate Change Weary. All the articles proclaiming "here is what to do" sort of like Earth Day - turn off all the lights at Dundas and Yonge [or your 60 location] for 60 minutes and then turn them blazingly back on for 364 days 23 hours until the next year.

But I persevered and I am glad I did because what Scientific American did in two articles was to set the table brilliantly to real climate change debate and policy making. This is no small feat.

The first article, Boundaries for a Healthy Planet, list 9 key environmental processes and threshold measures which should not be crossed without critically endangering the Earth's Habitability. As might be expected, Climate Change with associated with Global Warming is one of those key factors - and the threshold has already been crossed.

Now of course this point will be subject to debate - but by an ever diminishing minority of observers. What the article does is make crystal clear what standards are being used to measure Climate Change and 8 otherkey environmental livability factors and challenge Science and/or rival viewpoints to deliver alternative measures and thresholds - and to justify them in open debate. Yes. it resembles Martin Luther's 95 Theses on why the Catholic Church needed Reformation. Now when I discuss climate change and other issues of environmental sustainability , this is my point of reference. I first ask, do you agree with these measure - and if not, why not and what evidence do you have for something better.

The second article is actually an excerpt from the book Eaarth: Making Life on a Tough New Planet. Yes, that is the correct misspelling of Earth - the author has done so to emphasize that within the last 200 years Man has altered the livability of the planet - and has irrevocably changed the rules on how it can be safely lived on. The key and controversial argument is that growth - economic growth which has been the key to development of Western Societies now has much tighter constraints as to what can be safely done without disturbing the whole world's eco- and socio-adaption systems. Of course, the World has been presented by the US and Western Europe triggered Long Recession of 2007-2010, a dramatic example of those limits to growth. This gets at the heart of the Sustainability Issue which is the ElephantTitus in the room on medium and long term top government debates. How to tell 4% of the World's population they can no longer  consume 20-25% of the World's resources.

In sum, Scientific American has produced a Must Read issue- hopefully Planet Earth will be able to preserve itself so that  the issue's 8 Wonders of the Solar System will not have Earth Remnants as the 9th mute monument in this quadrant of our Milky Way Galaxy.

Newspapers have long lead the parade with cartoons and pictures as integral parts of their papers. The Web has changed that just a bit and now a broad set of media are starting to show up in the websites of newspapers and magazines. The problem of course, is that new media such as slideshows, animated cartoons and video can only be translated back to their print publications either as a link or one or two image grabs - a few of many images.

With that in mind, here is how one paper, the NYTimes is coping with the reality that online allows the "newspaper" to be more real - provide more context, more realistic sounds and images in videos, and more expressive opportunity.

Cartoons are alive and sort of well

Cartoons in the Times appear episodically, Frank Rich's column almost always has a cartoon but other columnists like David Pogue have cartoons sometimes.

But the Times has a whole section of their website devoted to photography. It is called the Lens and features not just NYTimes photographers but a broad range of outstanding lens men :

Here is another from the Lens.

This image is from a series about Bedroom War Memorials for soldiers killed in action in Afghanistan and Iraq. It is a most powerful piece.

Video is alive and well even though it is hard to reproduce faithfully in the print edition. There is a lot of sports action but also a broad range of topics in the Video section - you just have to look carefully:

Try the videos from the Opera, its great stuff.

Perhaps the best use of multimedia was the NYTimes depiction of the margin of victory in the recent Winter Olympics using sounds to beep the difference between first and tenth - absolutely wonderful.

Summary

So still images, cartoons and arts still prosper among the print media. But with the rise of iPads, Kindles and other eReaders do expect the move to electronic "reading" and therefore media to continue apace. After all with television and video this transition to full motion reality is already well under way.

Good and True History is important so that past mistakes are not repeated - or false excuses for what was done are exposed. Good history is very important in the case of the financial meltdown of 2007-2009. Hopefully it does not linger or outbreak with greater virulence in 2010 to 2012

So with that in mind here are 5 recommendations on what happened and who-dunnit in the Great Financial Meltdown:
Paul Krugman - NYTimes blog - The Irish Mirror. Small piece casts light on how the mortgage flu bug afflicted Ireland even though the Irish did not have some of the key US symptoms.
Andrew Sorkin - 539 page book - Too Big to Fail: The Inside Story of How Wall Street and Washington Fought to Save the Financial System---and Themselves. The book's title says it all and even as a reporter at the NYTimes, the access to key players and events is astonishing. Good chronology, but low analysis.
John Cassidy - 400 page book - How Markets Fail : The Logic of Economic Calamities- is a step above the Justin Fox book on the Myth of Rational Markets because it has a broader viewpoint on the economic factors shaping markets - not just financial markets.
Bailout Nation - 400 page book - Bailout Nation: How Greed and Easy Money Corrupted Wall Street and Shook the World Economy documents in clear terms some of the key political and economic trends that produced the Financial Meltdown.
Charles Morris -260 page book - The Two Trillion Dollar Meltdown: Easy Money, High Rollers, and the Great Credit Crash describes easy money, high rollers and how they produced the great credit crash. But even better, the book came out before Bears Stearns collapse and then Lehman Brothers followed by $700Billion and counting bailout. In effect, US had an early warning much like the ignored signals at Pearl Harbor or "unconnectable dots of " 9/11.

The key point in all these books is that a)financial markets simply were not even close to working perfectly and efficiently as the Chicago School described and counted on so that the next stopper, b)financial regulators and statutory controls, which had been largely disarmed/disbanded, were not available to effectively control the excesses which generated the bubble and ensuing collapse and c)the top banksters were only too happy to take advantage of Taxpayer-funded Moral Hazard Insurance because through a series of incidents from Resolution Trust, the CMO intercessions to Long Capital Management, through 3 Greenspan lowering of interest rates in the 2000's - they had seen the Federal Reserve act to preserve US Financial markets - and not let the markets be "efficient and clearing" by themselves.
So now as basic Financial Reform is delayed and is being stewed and depleted by very powerful financial lobbies, the question of how soon and how long the US and World economies get to be immunized against a repeat virulent financial bubble is still in the air. To help deflect the financial lobbyists it is important to understand how badly distorted financial markets were and still are.

What made this book a delight for me were two things. First, there is the simple fact that I had never read any of Dorothy

Whats was this? Here at the Port Hope Library - a bastion of good reading and literary standing. Jane Austen for Dummies???!! Tell me this is a mistake. Or maybe a bit of Bob Newhart-like absurdist humor.

Could it be the library is catering to the Coles Notes or illicit "thesis paper" trade ? Trinity College School [undoubtedly a stalwart source of Austen-philes]is just up near Croft Street and might be the source of a few all-nighter needs. Perhaps there might be a Trinitian or two needing some insight into Pride and Prejudice or just a little Persuasion.

I could not ignore the book. It was right in the stacks, right smack in front of my face. And I had just praised Jane to a friend and now ... but no Dummies for me. Really what could one expect from a book craving to serve the at-best curious and more likely the simply vacuous and clueless? Besides, hadn't Jane already proved more than enough times that we are all uncivil enough [currently the US Congress seems to have a corner on the contemporary Uncivil Market], so just let it be.

Well I had to at least - horrors - confirm the worst and be done with it. So with great discretion worthy of Captain Wentworth I furtively picked up J.A. for Dummies. I was embarrassed to see it was by Joan Klingel Ray, PhD an obvious catering to the Coles Notes set. And the cover - here was an image of an eighteenth century English gala party with women dressed to the nines, men in great boots, uniforms, and frock coats. But the rouge! Such an excess of rouge make all the party goers look badly overdone.

Oops - whats this here. A colleague come to visit with me. Better cover-up J.A. for D. right away. There will be no end of ribbing and trouble if Cory discovers that I am a J.A. fan. We discuss the hockey playoffs and the Olympics and agree that US and Germany had done remarkably well. Oh, the hockey had gone well and Canada at least Owned the Golden Podium . Cory seems to want to find out what I am reading. So I casually toss J.A. for D. with a book Fables on top over by the Please Do Not Reshelve Books sign and complain that the library is a mess since they instituted this policy.

A few minutes later I quickly pickup J.A. for D. and right away discover the incriminating evidence on pages 2 and 3 no less. Cheat Sheets! Well there you go. Now wait a second, describing Darcy of Pride and Prejudice as the extremely wealthy hero is hardly satisfactory. What is this Joan Klingel Ray trying to do?

Okay a simple glance at the table of contents is all I need to make this a shut and closed case for pandering to the eager-to-remain-uneducated masses. Hmmmmm.
Getting to Know Jane Austen, Lady and Novelist
Austen Observes Ladies and Gentlemen
Living Life in Janes World
Enjoying Austen and Her Influence Today
Now whats this? - a section on Playing the Dating game, Courtship, Austen Style. I'll just glance into this. Well I'll be darned I did not know that ... well just a small matter. Okay whats this then - Following Religion and Morality for Jane Austen and Her Times. How could that be much different than contemporary circumstances. Maybe a bit more important then. I'll just peruse this quickly.

Well by the time I come to Marrying, a Serious Business for Jane and Her Characters it finally dons on me - I have a problem. I will have to figure some way of checking out this book without attracting too much attention. Maybe I should try "I am getting it for my friends daughter who is reading Persuasion for her English class. Not to worry, the Port Hope Librarians are Discretion at its Best.

The Vancouver Winter Olympic Games have been a delight despite the warm weather; and NBC is probably the most delighted. And the coverage in the Press around the world has been a lot more than aided by the relatively even distribution of medals. What really surprised was the mixed coverage and usage of social media such as Twitter, Facebook and various blogging commentaries and forums. However, on the use of media such as video, graphics, and image slideshows the world media showed off mixed competence.

A perusal of various websites covering the games found a lot of media coverage and even some how-to articles available going beyond the immediate results and describing the challenges of various Game events. Anybody interested in finding out how and why and maybe some of the physics and science behind an event had a wealth of articles to choose from. Here is our ranking of the top five Winter Olympic Pages for their use of Web media.

5th Place - Google Earth 3D Map of the Games

Use of Google Earth and its special viewing files of the Olympic venues requires a free download of the Google Earth program if users don't already have it downloaded. But Google Earth [and Google Mars for that matter] are well worth the while because they give such wonderful views of places and cities throughout the World. And Google has pulled out the stops for a great look see at Vancouver, the games sites, and the great BC countryside.

4th Place - HowStuffWorks How the Luge Works

HowStuffWorks is a website devoted to explaining how things work with pictures and explanations. This coverage of the Luge Event is typically thorough [although the map of the Whistler Luge Track is strangely missing given that maps of the luge runs in Torino 2006 and Salt Lake City 2002 tracks are shown]. After reading this article I have a much better feel for the equipment, speed and danger of luge racing.

3rd Place Bronze - NBC/NSF Science of the Winter Olympics

The NSF-National Science Foundation worked with NBC to put out a 16 part series of videos describing the science of some of the more popular Olympic events. What is novel is that they look not just at the physics but also the biochemistry and fluid dynamics that turn out to be crucial for the many different sports. These are wonderful learning exercises that I wish I would have had for my Science classes in grade or junior high school. Not only are they very instructive but also they are very motivational. Imagine seeing a sport up close and then getting the basic science behind the event. What a motivator for understanding and/or participation. The illustration at times is uneven, but the overall quality is high.

2nd Place Silver - NYTimes Tie - Inside the Action and Interactive Action

The New York Times has set a standard for coverage of the Games that just blows away the competition for savvy use of graphics, video and blogs. They are consistently a level above the sports media - using video window in video, graphics, direct illustration on video and competitor's own dubbed commentary to add great insights into the intricacies of the sports. I looked at a number of sites including TheStar, GlobeandMail, ESPN, CTVOlympics, NBCOlympics, BBC/Sports, LeMonde/Sports, LATimes, DerSpeigel, among others - and none offered the range of sports or the insights of the written and video coverage that could match the NYTimes.

1st Place Gold - NYTimes - Fractions of a Second: An Olympic Musical

Edward Tufte who is to communication graphics as Josef Albers is to Color Theory or J.K.Rowling is to childhood fiction - I suspect Tufte would give his seal approval to this musical graphic that shows in sing song tunes how close the finishes were in a number of the Olympic events [you must visit the site for the benefit of audio playback - its better than a blink of the eye]. The musical tones tell the story in sonorous fashion of just how close the finishes were. This is a gold medal triumph of Web media "illustration" and gives more credence to the NYTimes as the savviest of the old Press Corps in the new Web Media World.