"Candelária Massacre" in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil: "On a cold night in 1993, police had fired machine guns at a group of 72 street children sleeping together on the steps of the main church in downtown Rio, killing eight and wounding many others. … At the time of the Candelária Massacre there were 1,200 street children in Brazil and now [2003] there are 20,000" [New York Times]

"On June 12, 2000, a bungled robbery aboard a bus led a 21-year-old [Sandro do Nascimento] to hold a dozen passengers hostage for four hours before he and one of his captives, a young woman nearly the same age, were killed in a confrontation with the police. A quarter of Brazil's 175 million people are believed to have watched the episode, which was broadcast live and uninterrupted on television … Nascimento repeatedly shouted, 'This isn't a movie, this is the real thing,' to the police and to the television cameras pointed at him. He was drugged and he knew he was going to die, but he made that bus a platform for the things he wanted to say, and incredible as it seems, there was a lucidity and a truthfulness to much of what he said to the cameras. … Sandro do Nascimento was strangled on his way to the hospital, but the four officers charged with his murder were later acquitted." [New York Times]

"Like other financial institutions in the summer of 1815, the House of Rothschild—owned by the London businessman's family—realized that its future depended on the outcome of the Battle of Waterloo. Holding bonds from the winning side guaranteed success; holding the debt of the losers meant ruin.

The difference between the Rothschilds and everyone else, however, was that the family had built and honed its own rapid courier system. When it became clear that Napoleon was facing defeat, the company's encrypted messages began to wing their way from the battlefield in Belgium to London, reaching Rothschild on June 18, 1815—beating the official courier.

Armed with this knowledge, the financier began selling British bonds. The value of British notes plummeted, while French bonds, which Rothschild was selling through agents, began to rise. Secretly, the company then began sweeping up British securities at rock-bottom prices. [para] Within three days, the Rothschilds controlled the financial fate of nations." [CNET News.com]

"Seventeen miles off the coast of Kauai lies the small island of Niihau. Like the rest of Hawaii, the Forbidden Island, as it has come to be known, is part of the United States. Its roughly 200 residents pay taxes and vote in elections; some serve in the US military. But there integration ends: Niihau has no telephones, no running water, no paved roads, and only four cars. The islanders have radios and some own TVs and VCRs, but even then connection to the outside world is difficult. The island has no electrical grid. Residents rely on gas generators and solar power.

There is one explanation for how Niihau has remained isolated from modern society. For nearly 150 years, it has been under the private ownership of a single family, the Robinsons, descendants of Scottish settlers who bought the island from King Kamehameha IV in 1863 for $10,000 in gold. An intensely private family of strict Calvinist Christians, the Robinsons established the social and moral rules that all Niihauans agree to abide by if they want to stay. There is no smoking, no drinking, no adultery. Most important is a rule that's proved to be Niihau's most effective defense—no outsiders can visit Niihau without the Robinsons' permission." [Wired]

John Patterson purchased National Cash Register Company for $6500 in 1884. In order to sell cash registers to saloon & general store owners, he created innovations in sales. "Before Patterson came along, most goods were sold by wholesale 'drummers,' who would travel on their own for months at a time before returning to the central office, perhaps with a pile of orders and perhaps not. Patterson had a better idea. He gave salesmen exclusive territories, which enabled them to develop a core of regular customers, and he gave them sales quotas based on the size of the territory. He held the first sales conventions. And he gave his salesmen blueprints for selling, the first of which, 'How I Sell National Cash Registers,' was a word-for-word transcript of his best salesman's standard pitch to customers. Patterson did for selling what Frederick Winslow Taylor and Henry Ford would do for manufacturing, and the results were just as impressive." [The New Yorker (17 July 2000): 30]

From an article about copying ("Beyond File-Sharing, a Nation of Copiers")—music, designer clothing & bags, homework, movies: "Ms. Frank, the MTV executive, noted the limitations of unlimited customization, even amid unlimited access. For young Americans, she said, 'because of the way they've trained themselves to use media, they never have to be exposed to an idea, an artist, or anything that they did not select for themselves.'" [The New York Times]

Neil Gaiman on the difference between reviewers & critics: "I tend to think that the job of a reviewer and the job of a critic are two very different things, and the job of a reviewer is a pretty simple one, or it was when I did it. It's to read the book, and then to write something that says This is what this thing is. If you're the kind of person who likes this sort of thing then this is something you will/won't like.

The job of a critic—a real critic, not just a reviewer who uses a few long words, or has 2000 words to fill instead of 200—is to illuminate the work you read. A good critic should make you want to go back and read whatever they're talking about again—even if they are tearing it apart—because you want to see it through their eyes. A good critic hands you a key to a book you thought you understood, and gives you a way of reading it.

Some reviewers are also critics."

Last month the researchers agreed to collaborate on 'mapping' the Internet for such blockages, whether they are imposed by governments, Internet service providers, corporations or even public libraries. The project will involve the enlistment of thousands of volunteers around the world, organizers say. …

The volunteers will be recruited to lend their personal computers to an effort called distributed computing, allowing the processing of millions of bytes of data while the computers are turned on but not in active use. …

Mr. Zittrain said the Web censorship project would check millions of Web pages worldwide, asking, 'Can I get there from here?' If the blocking of the Web page is related to the Internet service provider's network (as opposed to a computer glitch), that intelligence will be sent 'upstream to the mother ship,' the home base of the computer program distributed to the volunteers, he said. …

He envisions using the data to create a Web site and world map that would immediately identify new Web barriers, which can arise quickly during times of war and other political stress. 'If China decides to block www.uscourts.gov,' the Web site of the American federal court system, 'the entire world will know it automatically within an hour of the block happening,' he said. [The New York Times]

She took up fencing at 85, and still rode a bicycle at 100. She liked her port wine, her olive oil, her chocolate and her cigarettes, and she released a rap CD at 121. No wonder Jeanne Calment, at 122 the world's oldest person until her death Monday, said she was 'never bored.'

She lived through France's Third and Fourth Republics, and into its Fifth. She was 14 when the Eiffel Tower was completed in 1889. …

Though blind, nearly deaf and in a wheelchair, she remained spirited and mentally sharp until the end. …

Born Feb. 21, 1875, Mrs. Calment eventually became the greatest attraction in the southern city of Arles since Vincent Van Gogh, who spent a year there in 1888. She met him that year when he came to her uncle's shop to buy paints, and later remembered him as 'dirty, badly dressed and disagreeable.'

She gave up cigarettes in 1995, and her doctor said her abstinence was due to pride rather than health—she was too blind to light up herself, and hated asking others to do it for her. …

Mrs. Calment had no direct descendants, having survived her husband, her daughter and grandson.

In her later years, she lived mostly off the income from her apartment, which she sold cheaply more than 30 years ago to a lawyer, Andre-Francois Raffray. He had agreed to make monthly payments on the apartment in exchange for taking possession when she died, but never got to do so. He died more than a year ago at 77; his family was required to keep making the payments.

Just the same, his widow, Huguette, said Monday she was saddened by Mrs. Calment's death. [Lubbock Avalanche-Journal]

"STOCKHOLM (Reuters)—Tourists have been left scratching their heads in disbelief after finding 70 pairs of shoes filled with butter on an isolated mountain top in northern Sweden, local news agency TT has reported. … Locals have been debating the artistic merit of the shoes and officials are considering what to do with them." [Yahoo! News]

"As far as the government is concerned, they're dead—and they're not at all happy about it. Calling themselves 'the Living Dead,' two dozen people held a last rites Hindu ceremony outside the State Assembly to draw attention to their plight. All say unscrupulous relatives fraudulently had them declared dead in order to steal their property. They've been struggling for years to get the government to rectify their official standing.

India's bureaucrats are notorious for doing little work, and corruption is rampant. Many officials and clerks refuse to accept a claim or even talk to a petitioner without receiving a bribe. The 'living dead,' having been cheated out of their property, cannot afford to pay bribes or even legitimate fees to get their cases dealt with. Lal Bihari, president of the Association of the Living Dead, estimated 35,000 people in Uttar Pradesh state have been wrongly certified as dead." [Transparency International]

"In East Germany before the Communist collapse, a zone where topography prevented the penetration of radio and television signals from the West was known as a 'valley where they have no idea.' All of North Korea is such a zone, not because of its mountainous landscape but because every radio and TV set is made to receive only one signal, Pyongyang's propaganda channel …" [The New Yorker (8 September 2003): 62]

"In 1919, a Goodyear blimp took off on a demonstration of the craft's peacetime potential. It erupted into flames and crashed into the roof of a bank in Chicago, killing thirteen people, including two reporters who had gone along to record the flight. A mechanic, Henry Wacker, fell to the street and, miraculously, survivied." [The New Yorker (9 June 2003): 73]

Evidence from the last 20 years of work in cognitive psychology indicate that we use the letters within a word to recognize a word. … Some have used the term bouma as a synonym for word shape …

Model #1: Word Shape

The word recognition model that says words are recognized as complete units is the oldest model in the psychological literature, and is likely much older than the psychological literature. The general idea is that we see words as a complete patterns rather than the sum of letter parts. …

… lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. …

… it is difficult to read text in alternating case. …

Model #2: Serial Letter Recognition

The shortest lived model of word recognition is that words are read letter-by-letter serially from left to right. …

… word recognition takes more time with longer words.

Model #3: Parallel Letter Recognition

The model that most psychologists currently accept as most accurate is the parallel letter recognition model. This model says that the letters within a word are recognized simultaneously, and the letter information is used to recognize the words. …

The first step of processing is recognizing the features of the individual letters, such as horizontal lines, diagonal lines, and curves. The details of this level are not critical for our purposes. These features are then sent to the letter detector level, where each of the letters in the stimulus word are recognized simultaneously. The letter level then sends activation to the word detector level. …

Much of the evidence for the parallel letter recognition model comes from the eye movement literature. …

It has been known for over 100 years that when we read, our eyes don't move smoothly across the page, but rather make discrete jumps from word to word. … These movements are called saccades and usually take 20-35ms. Most saccades are forward movements from 7 to 9 letters,* but 10-15% of all saccades are regressive or backwards movements. … Fixations never occur between words, and usually occur just to the left of the middle of a word. Not all words are fixated; short words and particularly function words are frequently skipped. …

The fovea, which is the clear center point of our vision, can only see three to four letters to the left and right of fixation at normal reading distances. Visual acuity decreases quickly in the parafovea, which extends out as far as 15 to 20 letters to the left and right of the fixation point.

… there are three zones of visual identification. Readers collect information from all three zones during the span of a fixation. Closest to the fixation point is where word recognition takes place. This zone is usually large enough to capture the word being fixated, and often includes smaller function words directly to the right of the fixated word. The next zone extends a few letters past the word recognition zone, and readers gather preliminary information about the next letters in this zone. The final zone extends out to 15 letters past the fixation point. …

… letter information is being collected within the fixation span even when the entire word is not being recognized. …

This demonstrates that it is not visual information about either word shape or even letter shape that is being retained from saccade to saccade, but rather abstracted information about which letters are coming up. …

Evidence for Word Shape Revisited

So far I've presented evidence that supports the word recognition model, evidence that contradicts the serial word recognition model, and eye tracking data that contradicts the word shape model while supporting the parallel letter recognition model. In this section I will reexamine the data used to support the word shape model to see if it is incongruent with the parallel letter recognition model. …

Pseudowords are not words in the English language, but have the phonetic regularity that make them easily pronounceable. Mave and rint are two examples of pseudowords. Because pseudowords do not have semantic content and have not been seen previously by the subjects, they should not have a familiar word shape. McClelland & Johnson found that letters are recognized faster in the context of pseudowords (mave) than in the context of nonwords (amve). This demonstrates that the word superiority effect is caused by regular letter combinations and not word shape.

The weakest evidence in support of word shape is that lowercase text is read faster than uppercase text. This is entirely a practice effect. Most readers spend the bulk of their time reading lowercase text and are therefore more proficient at it. When readers are forced to read large quantities of uppercase text, their reading speed will eventually increase to the rate of lowercase text. …

… both words and pseudowords are equally hurt by alternating case. …

Neural Network Modeling

… The other core biological principle is that learning is based on the modification of synaptic connections (Hebb, 1949). When the information coming from a synapse is important the connection between the two neurons will become physically stronger, and when information from a synapse is less important the synapse will weaken or even die off. …

Conclusions

Word shape is no longer a viable model of word recognition. The bulk of scientific evidence says that we recognize a word's component letters, then use that visual information to recognize a word. In addition to perceptual information, we also use contextual information to help recognize words during ordinary reading, but that has no bearing on the word shape versus parallel letter recognition debate. It is hopefully clear that the readability and legibility of a typeface should not be evaluated on its ability to generate a good bouma shape.

Source: Larson, Kevin. "The Science of Word Recognition: or how I learned to stop worrying and love the bouma." Microsoft (July 2004). http://www.microsoft.com/typography/ctfonts/WordRecognition.aspx. Accessed 9 January 2005.

"… we not long ago had a vision of something better that could be achieved through technology. This was the cypherpunk dream of ubiquitous information security, perfect secrecy and anonymity, untraceable e-cash serving to enhance democracy, protect the small guy, circumvent censorship, form a parallel economy beyond the taxman's reach, reducing the power of states. That was yesterday's news." [Robert X. Cringely: "Changing the Game"]

"David Atkinson spent 18 years designing an experiment for the unmanned space mission to Saturn. Now some pieces of it are lost in space. Someone forgot to turn on the instrument Atkinson needed to measure the winds on Saturn's largest moon. …

The mission to study Saturn and its moons was launched in 1997 from Cape Canaveral, Fla., a joint effort by NASA, the European agency and the Italian space agency. Last Friday, Huygens, the European space probe sent to the surface of Saturn's moon Titan, transmitted the first detailed pictures of the frozen surface." [Professor's Saturn Experiment Forgotten]

"A man might write the works of others, adding and changing nothing, in which case he is simply called a 'scribe' (scriptor). Another writes the work of others with additions which are not his own; and he is called a 'compiler' (compilator). Another writes both others' work and his own, but with others' work in the principal place, adding his own for purposes of explanation; and he is called a 'commentator' (commentator) … Another writes both his own work and others ' but with his own work in the principal place and adding others' for purposes of confirmation, and such a man should be called an 'author' (auctor)." [St. Bonaventura, writing in the thirteenth century about the four ways to create a book (The Construction of Authorship, Woodhouse, Jaszi, 1994)]

"On the idea of keeping television out, let me quote from an unexpected source. During the late 1950s, South Africa was the only wealthy country in the world that did not have a national television service. The minister in charge of broadcasting adamantly refused to permit one. 'Television will mean the end of the white man in Africa,' he said. That was an extremely perceptive remark. From his point of view, the minister was perfectly right.

If the pen is mightier than the sword, the camera can be mightier than both. No wonder that all governments, whether they are liberal or otherwise, make some attempt to control—or manipulate—what appears on television. But comsats [communication satellites] and Internet have made it a lot harder for governments to engage in censorship.

But we cannot strive for an information society without allowing the free flow of information which is a pre-requisite. We just have to become better managers, navigators and users of information—let's just say we need information maturity.

The Information Age has opened many doors for our eager minds to explore. Now the question is not so much 'What information do I want?' as 'What information do I not want?'. Never before in our history have we been able to enjoy such a tremendous amount of that simple human freedom—choice.

We are now faced with the responsibility of discernment. Just as our ancestors quickly realised that no one was going to force them to read the entire library of a thousand books, we are now overcoming the initial alarm at the sheer weight of available information—and coming to understand that it is not the information itself that determines our future, only the use we can make of it. …

There are many who are genuinely alarmed by the immense amount of information available to us through the Internet, television and other media. To them, I can offer little consolation other than to suggest that they put themselves in the place of their ancestors at the time the printing press was invented. 'My God,' they cried, 'now there could be as many as a thousand books. How will we ever read them all?'

Strangely, as history has shown, our species survived that earlier deluge of information, and some say, even advanced because of it. I am not so much concerned with the proliferation of information as the purpose for which it is used. Technology carries with it a responsibility that we are obliged to consider." [Arthur C. Clarke: "Humanity will survive information deluge"]

"A 59-year-old retired builder from Yorkshire has been shocked to discover he is in fact a tribal chief with a claim to thousands of acres of land in Canada, newspapers have reported.

Mick Henry, the son of an English mother and a Canadian soldier over in Britain during World War Two, was recently tracked down via the Internet by his long-lost Native Canadian relatives from the Ojibway tribe in the province of Manitoba. …

Henry is also apparently hoping to cash-in on his new-found heritage and sudden celebrity status.

When contacted by telephone by Reuters, a Henry family spokeswoman said: 'He is not speaking to the media about his story any more without a fee'." [Reuters: "Yorkshireman discovers he's a Canadian chief"]