Thanks to commenter David Carson, I was directed to the Wikipedia Project on Countering Systemic Bias. This official Wikipedia project not only acknowledges the biases that I noted a couple of years ago, and ongoing, it greatly expanded the view of biases, from many different perspectives, using current global population and internet usage statistics . The Project has already begun to work on improving a broad range of different areas of Wikipedia. The Wiki Project shows a full awareness of biases and systemic factors, some of which Wikipedia can actively work to counteract, and some of which are impossible for it, or any other volunteer-based organization, to purposely work to counteract.
The Project is sophisticated, responsive - and it represents a giant leap forward for Wikipedia, in my estimation. Its existence alone means that Wikipedia is aware of its limitations, and has set up a framework for expanding and moving beyond them toward greater inclusiveness.
I guess the question is - is what is important about Wikipedia the compendium of often-useless, sometimes useful, and more-often just-plain-stuff it contains, or is it the people who work on it as volunteers, who they are, and how they work as volunteers, both alone and together? Sometimes internet commentators call this "a community" or "an online community." Certainly Wikipedia represents diverse, dispersed global community. It's not perfect; nothing is.
All real Wikipedans should be praised for working on this excellent project on countering systemic bias. As Aesop, I believe, said, "You are known by the company you keep." The group that is working on this project has truly brought Wikipedia some excellent company. Today for the first time, I saw a female as the subject of the featured article on the front page, in random and sporadic visits over the past several years. Granted, this female could be thought of as illustrative of child marriage, substance abuse, and limited mortality in the 19th century. But Virginia Clemm Poe was also one of literature's most enduring and beautifully-memorialized women, and her tragic and short life, was the stuff of undying poetry. She was Edgar Allan Poe's wife, who died so very young.
It was a big decision to carry ads on my blog. But I was paying for Typepad Pro and my main goal was to cover the monthly costs, which I have achieved!!! Whooo Peee!!
So, I have written a few posts about blogging and made it clear that I didn't know what I was doing two years ago, and I blatantly went out and asked for advice. I am pretty sure that John Scalzi (congrats on Hugo) and Toby Buckell (hope you are better!!!) both said that regular writing was important. If they didn't, I know that they meant to, because it is.
Brenda Clough pointed at an article in the Washington Times about blogging being meh or feh these days.
I'm going to have to change this blog (due to writing more for children). Any changes I make will be for the better no matter what.
What is it that I offer? I'm not SELF OBSESSED! Do you know what I've been eating? Oh, let me SHARE. I ate at the Grinder yesterday and it was filled with older folks. I then took Meredith to Foster's Freeze and it's her birthday today. So she got a banana split and I got some type of fudgy parfait. Totally froze my teeth. I also bought two new pair of shoes, both very beautiful sandals.
And Badger is in the animal hospital due to apparently, a very bad doggy flu!! (he is coming home today).
OK, ready to forgive me now? Bleh - me - bleh - me - me - me. This is all about ME! This is why my writing is GREAT! Read only about ME!! You are mesmerized by the cult of my Personali-Tee! You don't have a LIFE, you are reading my blog because you think it will somehow get YOU a publishing contract for YOUR crappy sci fi novel, right? Or, you are reading this because some of my sci fi awesome awesomeness will rub off on . . .
According to Matt Goodman, a former blogger and advertising executive, he took out Craigslist ads to advertise his blog called "Things My Dog Ate." At one point, he had 50,000 readers a month, and he still has flashing banners and badges and all manner of "involvement" there. As the proud owner of Badger, who's in doggy hospital due to some unknown something that he ate - I know that dogs do this. Thanks, Matt. Why would someone think that this content is worthy of months and months and years of effort from himself as a writer or "creator" and from others as readers? Bzzzt! Eh? One thrilling tale is about how a lady's yellow Lab ate her cleaning lady's sandwich (liverwurst).
Well, I'll do ya one better! Before I moved from Redlands to Playa, I became inspired and made a nice grilled cheese sandwich for myself, using nice bread and good cheese. I took my time and cooked it Julia Child-style.
Mmmmmm. Mmmmmm! I took my little plate into my room and sat cross-legged on my bed, and raised the sandwich to my mouth. Mmmmm - one delicious, crunchy bite. Yum-yum-yu-
Badger, who was lurking behind my pillows, leapt forth from behind my right shoulder, and in a single bound, jumped over my lap, the plate, and grabbed the sandwich out of my hand and landed gracefully on the floor, scuttling to the farthest corner where he wolfed the sandwich down in three greedy gulps.
I was afraid he was going to choke due to inhaling the crusty sandwich completely unchewed.
This was even bolder than the "chicken trick" and somewhat worse than his inhaling of the contents of my large meat, bean and rice burrito back in the day (I foolishly left the burrito uneaten and partially unwrapped on the coffee table, easily accessible, while I answered a delivery at the front door, only to return to find the tortilla unwrapped and the insides completely scraped clean - like Howard Carter unwrapping King Tut).
THAT'S WHAT THE DOG ATE. It doesn't matter whether a blog is written by one person or several. It needs to have content and style. And yes, it requires an investment of time, thought and commitment.
According to the article, I'm one of the 50,000 to 100,000 blogs that are "generating most of the page views." Well, duh! This is one of the bloggers that was interviewed in the Washington Times article. It looks like she is repurposing her old blog to her new blog. Nancy is a lovely person and she's got a lot of online experience under her belt.
Maybe now she can go and learn how to write. Or spend more time thinking about what to write about and why.
Well, cleared the room now! LOL! What are YOU adding to the discourse today?
This is how to fix the error when you close Word. Don't reinstall Word or Microsoft Office. Follow the instructions below.
There's nothing more horrifying to a writer than the suspicion their computer will crash and everything they ever did will be destroyed.
It's difficult enough to endure "docx" vs. "doc" tensions, and to look at "the ribbon" and deal with it. One improvement of Word 2007 over previous versions is the ease with which one does hanging indents. Otherwise . . .
Friday, I received the horrible message upon trying to close Word that "Microsoft Office Word Has Stopped Working" and "Nanny Nanny Net Nanny" (Windows Vista) was searching for a solution. None such was found despite a couple of wasted hours on my part. I even considered uninstalling and reinstalling Microsoft Office.
But then, I decided to look through the Knowledge and Support Base (Google) and came upon this solution.
This is a very common problem, it seems, Microsoft doesn't care (What else is new?) and here's what to do about it, including the backstory, from user Tom Watson:
It tooked nearly 60 minutes - 4 people at Microsoft - the last one in India - - to solve the problem, even though we told them that this problem appears to be common and the 'addins' needed to be fixed. Still, the tech support person when through a bunch of steps, said the master template was corrupted (how did that happen with only one Word document created ???), but the final fix... ta dah... was to rename two files, through the following path:
Start button/All programs/Accessories/Run and type in 'regedit' and then follow the path HKEY_CURRENT_USER/Software/Microsoft/Office/12.0/Word . . . . and then change the folder called 'data' to 'olddata' and change the folder called 'options' to 'oldoptions'.
YES it works! Very quickly, too. This is the registry editor, so be VERY careful. Do NOT rename any other files or do anything - be certain that the directory written above is where you are when you do this. You can always change these folders back to their previous state as this is presented.
So, the Harry Potter trailer has nearly four times the number of views than Peanut Butter Jelly Time.
At Book View Cafe, we have been discussing the ideas raised in Cory Doctorow's Guardian UK review of Free: The Future of a Radical Price, by Chris Anderson. So, that's a book review, and therefore, this is commentary on the review, and not the original book, whose ideas may be quite different than those presented in the review. The review is illustrated by a photo of a lovely Anthony Bourdain-worthy grouping of fruit at an open-air market, with the caption, "Stalls at Borough Market in London have vastly different characteristics to online service markets." That caption is not only worthy of one of my academically-oriented nonfiction books for schools and libraries, it's also WTF???
The main gist of the review is a discussion of creative products, and their distribution and sales - i.e., books and music. The main argument is that "it's impossible to exclude people from stealing these creative products," and "the cost of inventory at big online stores like Amazon and iTunes is next to nothing, or nothing," so - in Cory Doctorow's opinion, this type of "information" or "product" is easily distributable for free, and that people who pay for these products are essentially paying for convenience, i.e., "the banana one buys at at the cafe for eight times what it sells for at the grocers next door." Other than the convenience factor, for which people will theoretically pay, Cory sees no way in which people would pay for those products.
My reaction to this is - books aren't bananas. Movies aren't bananas. Television shows, of which only a few are premium products for which people pay subscription prices, aren't bananas. Recorded music isn't a banana. Or, to put it another way, Beekeeping for Dummies (a real book) isn't the same as Twilight. A few people who want to become beekeepers are going to buy Beekeeping for Dummies. I'm willing to bet that fewer still would be interested in downloading a pirated copy. The Dummies books are, after all, heavily reliant on their type design and illustration. There is no way that the Dummies people or the author of Beekeeping for Dummies figured it would suddenly leap off the shelves and outsell Stephanie Meyer. On the first day of its sales, the last book in the Twilight series sold 1.3 million copies. As I explained to a friend the other day, even a moderately-popular TV show has more viewers in a week than most movies have in their first run in a theater. Enormously popular books like the Twilight series and Harry Potter, sell more book copies than the films do tickets.
Later in the review, Cory discusses distribution of resources and stuff one can get for free, which, to this day, no matter how much PR occurs, is still more along the lines of Beekeeping for Dummies than Twilight.
Then, he addresses the ideas of Malcolm Gladwell, who's apparently made a simple point regarding online services that rely upon free contributions of members, asking "How is You Tube making money?"
Some, such as Malcolm Gladwell, have faulted Anderson for failing to be sceptical enough of the businesses enabled by free, pointing out that services such as YouTube lack any sustainable revenue model (something that Anderson states in Free, contrasting it with its rival Hulu and making some shrewd observations about the potential future for both). Gladwell's criticisms ring hollow to me, blending a hand-wringing grievance about "theft" of information with special pleading for Gladwell and his fellow journalists.
Actually, I think Malcolm's point was more like - Who's going to be enough of a dumbass to pay for Peanut Butter Jelly Time? Malcolm Gladwell doesn't have to worry about massive copies of Outliers being pirated. Unlike other smarter people than me, I don't have daily access to BookScan numbers, but I can take a wild guess and say that between Outliers and the Tipping Point, Malcolm won't be worrying about how much he pays for bananas any time soon. Reason being: these are GREAT BOOKS.
All this discussion of "free information, freely provided" - it isn't just information. It's not "just words." It isn't solely-created product, given away freely. And, in the absence of some sort of structure or cultural influence, one gets whatever. Among the whatever, certainly there may be, and likely will be, some "gems". But the person who is supposedly the "editor" is not the only one who plays a key role in what used to be the traditional publishing process. There are also sales, design, art, accounting, management . . . and more. The lack today is not only "the distributor". And all of these things are misnomers. It's a business, and every segment plays an important part. I have yet to see any of these online discussions about payment for creative work addressing those who know how to market and sell that work to the public - for real.
Wikipedia is free. What is some of the effect that it is having? Well, despite the rampant promotion and everyone "working together," Wikipedia kind of sucks more often than not. Just one example of its suckitude in its English version is its weakness in literature. It's a horrible resource for literature and I would flog any student using Wikipedia in preference to primary sources that are easily available through heir online library databases, and many different college and university resources, and I hesitate to mention it, but . . . real books. One aspect of all this free information is a relatively small group of people telling each other stuff they already think they know, and then reinforcing it. That's like, awesome for them. But they're not buying Twilight too much, or Outliers. Millions of other dumbasses are, not realizing they could download pirate versions and read them for free on their computer screens. Or maybe, not wanting to.
In another way, this idea of "free" vs. "something people will pay for" is like the difference between a free ballpoint pen from the Holiday Inn (which is low-cost, long-term advertising for them) and a Waterman pen. There is nearly an infinite number of Holiday Inn pens out there. Every business has some type of free pen or pencil. If you wanted to never pay for another writing implement again, you could easily do so, or you could take the pirate mentality approach and just steal 'em from your work! Anywhere from 18 to 67 percent of office workers admit to having done so, according to various surveys. This being the case, it can easily be seen that since these materials are easily accessible for free, and office thieves can't realistically be excluded, no pens of any type are sold to private individuals. However, for some strange reason, Waterman continues to successfully make and sell their beautiful writing instruments. Bic even sells pens to regular people that don't say "Holiday Inn." Little girls still buy special colored paper and gel pens. I'm sure there are some "open source" glittery gel pens and fancy paper and stickers out there. Aren't there?
Oh, I forgot. Open source software people don't write with glittery gel pens or draw ponies. They are busy using their new ASUS and downloading stuff for free.
It's as simple as this: the old paper publishing models had important parts of their business -- the sales force. Who's the Amazon sales force? It's pretty passive, rudimentary selling. Regarding genre and other fiction writing efforts - people are still buying books in large numbers. More and more people are buying Kindles and acquiring eBooks and reading them in that somewhat different way that device works. The giant inventory models work by selling large numbers of a few items, and then being able to stock and sell over time, a vast number of additional items with a smaller, sporadic demand. Some people view that this makes it "bad" for the people who are creating the material in the large, sporadic inventory section. That's a problem that is going to find a solution for itself over time.
Right now, yes, it isn't rewarding to write a book that sells 5,000 paper copies, and then 1,000 eBook copies. But, that's kind of a product of false expectations, because I just did an overview of "A Distant Episode" by Paul Bowles, and I am doubting that 750-copy cloth cover Black Sparrow editions made stampeding amounts of cash; they were and are also not free. There has never been any great, stampeding number of people making a working living writing fiction - and most certainly not making the type of $$ I make by not writing genre fiction. I recall Cassie Edwards, the bestselling romance author who plagiarized the ferret descriptions from the nature writer for her Native American romance books? I took Cassie's large number of titles and divided their number into her self-stated amount earned over her 20-year romance writing career. It came out to less than $7,000 per book. With that amount of money being made per-book, I'd probably cut-and-paste ferret action myself after a while.
If one is doing it for the money, of course, and that's an entirely different conversation.
Oh, and by the way, all 7 billion people on this planet don't want to "create" in preference to "consuming." What nimwit thought up that? When somebody invents matter compositors, we'll all just design and make our own clothes, too. Or paint ourselves up in bioreactive glowpaint and walk around like cuttlefishes. Ugh.
This is the best job I could do getting a picture of Mr. Hammy last night. As a nocturnal animal, Hammy does his personality things after dark. This includes running madly on his wheel all night long. Meredith bought a "noise no more" wheel for him, and you might think that wouldn't be important.
It is.
Mr. Hammy is Meredith's hamster and he was jealous that Meredith and her friend Nazareth were petting the dogs and not him. He stood up on his hind legs like a person and gestured beseechingly.
Not kidding!
It's hard to believe, but even a tiny animal like Hammy has a personality, and even feelings. If what Hammy was doing was some "other" instinctive behavior, I'm just not getting it.
Another funny thing that Hammy did was, when we got a particular sort of food that he really liked, he filled his ENTIRE HEAD with it. You know how they fill their cheeks? He put so much of the food in his mouth that it expanded the cheeks to make his head almost as large as his body. I should have taken a picture of that!
I had heard that American hamsters are all descended from a single family of rodents that were found in Syria in the 1950's. This is not precisely true. Syrian hamsters are a common variety, but there are also Russian, Chinese, and Roborovski hamsters. Each type is slightly different, and beyond ordinary brown and white spotted fellows like Hammy, there are long-haired, silky, and small and quick types of hamsters to be found. And just in case you thought I didn't want to enrich everyone's lives with an irreplaceable cultural experience, here is a link to the original "hampster dance." The "Hampster Dance" website is now totally commercial, with cartoon-like characters for the hampsters (which we originally saw as one of the old-school internet forwarding memees). And for good measure, here is also a link to what they say is the original Dancing Internet Baby. I think by the time I saw it, it had better music. The music on that link is awful. If you haven't seen these before - do comment! Both the hampsters and the baby were like - EVERYWHERE when they first came out.
OK, here's one of America's most-famous NASCAR fans. This dude shaved "3" for Dale Earnhardt into his back.
A while back, somehow I got on the Zogby survey and poll list. At first, it was pretty cool. Over time, the surveys got less basic and more and more detailed, filled with "leading" questions. The surveys focused on politics basically forced the survey-taker to choose beween two extremes - otherwise known as a false dichotomy. Questions sometimes ran up into two and three sentences worth, including double-negatives.
I'm someone who continues to be confused by the California ballot initiatives where "No means Yes" - such as last Fall's Proposition 8 (a "no" vote meant "yes," you supported gay marriage - and vice-versa). Therefore, I get to the end of one of these long Zogby questions and have no clue as to what it's really asking. I'll usually guess based on the general thrust of the questions and might well be answering opposite to what the question is actually trying to convey.
Well, this survey in particular seemed to focus on the Second Amendment. It asked many questions about the right to bear arms and gun ownership. It had ludicrously-phrased questions with hypothetical people (Mr. Smith and Mr. Jones, I think). It seemed to be promoting the Canadian gun ownership approach, which is basically "it's a privilege, not a right".
I'm sure anyone visiting here can see I'm as evolved as Dale Earnhardt's biggest fan pictured above. I can sympathize, because if you think his back is hairy . . . (just kidding). So, I get to the end of this survey and it asks, "ARE YOU A NASCAR FAN?" Previously, it had asked me how much I shopped at WalMart! Well, I had to answer "yes," because I am a NASCAR fan and have been for years. I don't attend races any longer, but I've sen more than a few in my day. I used to watch the stock cars with my grandfather, and Lloyd Ruby was my favorite at that time (because his name was "Ruby" - get it?). This was the generation of Richard Petty and David Pearson, also. Then came Cay-ull (Cale) Yarbrough. And then it was Darrell (Darl) Waltrip and #3 - Rest in Peace, Dale (Day-ull). Now, there are not just second, but third-generation racers, and I don't follow the series closely any more.
I wrote Zogby and said, "Drop this question" because it's ridiculous. Some people might think it's funny, and they may think there's some type of validity to the question, but NASCAR remains the most popular viewing sport in America, with an estimated 80 million fans. I will guarantee that not all 80 million of those fans can, and would want to, shave "#3" into their backs. And if I were asked the question a different way, which would be, "Which racing series do you prefer?" I would say "I prefer Formula 1." Now everyone knows that I had the Union Jack and "Mansell" tattooed onto my lower back. Or wait - was that Keke Rosberg and the Finnish flag? Ugh. Are Yew a NASCAR Fan? Yay-up. I shure am, Mister Zog-Bee. I gradiated frum Grade Skool Too, Mister Zog-Bee. Let's see: Which term do you think best applies to the person that writes these Zogby Surveys:
I didn't know what to expect when I installed Lijit on my blog. I liked the idea, but I had no idea how it would work.
I see readers using it all the time now, to find more content on my blog. They can also use it to find content in other networks.
Some of us are verbal, some of us are visual, and others are combinations of both. I guess a few of us still experience the world by putting everything we come across into our mouths (PS: if you've never had a child, that means "babies" - that's what babies do). Lijit is providing a great online experience for just about everybody.
And what does Lijit do for me?
Lijit is one big Quarter Map!
Look at that! Is that not one of the best quarter maps ever? One of my most favorite childhood memories was filling in the quarter map. Now, some kids probably got pre-bought sets of state quarters. Not me! I had to get mine the hard way - I know. Some of you are thinking, "By stealing from your older brother?" Um. Well maybe.
I never filled in all 50 states. I was still super-confused as to Vermont, New Hampshire and all the other hard-to-jam-the-quarter-in original former colony states. But Lijit's visitors map gives me the full quarter map experience every day. Go to the right and click on it. Right now, I've got "quarters" for Bogota, Barbados, Bangkok and Stone Mountain, Georgia. Where else could I learn world geography except Lijit? It isn't showing right now, but last month, I popped in the last quarter - Greenland. Greenland!!! OMG, it's better than Tony Bourdain.
As usual, through a weird series of interruptions and oddities, I saw an older post of Kathryn Cramer's regarding "What is a blog for?"
This is Kathryn - like, for sure.
So, I still don't know "what a blog is for." Kathryn's post gives 25 answers ca. 2006. Today, those answers could well be "Stonehenge Blog 1.2" or something.
There's a large snowy white egret outside having an "issue" of some type, being dramatically vocal. Living by the Ballona wetlands, beautiful, large sea and estuary birds frequent my area all the time. In the city, there are millions of people who have no idea of the value of this natural area. The Ballona wetlands are the last coastal estuary and wildlife preserve in Los Angeles County, and they are now only 25% of their original extent. However, for the last 30 years, they have been protected and preserved. I'm now in my second summer season and I see more wildlife this year than last, so these efforts are paying off.
Despite my youth experience working at the San Bernardino County Museum, I am anything but a bird expert (I don't know, having not been inside the building for a long time, but those kid paintings I did of birds and eggs might very well still be in the giant egg exhibit). I can recognize basic types of birds, but have no idea about fine points of identification. However, I'm pretty sure the terror fish birds are double-crested cormorants, due to the yellow coloration on their beaks. I was able to recognize "cormorant" due to the unique shape of their beaks and moderate size (big to anybody who just sees pigeons, crows and finches on a daily basis). A little Anna's hummingbird was coming around my patio fairly often, too, and I know from asking Gene the Bird Man about the tiny little eggs and freeze-dried bird bodies that Anna's is more a Mexican than a California bird. I've seen and heard a number of doves, and also owls - of the smaller seaside variety.
Common sense tells me that where there are many birds, seemingly thriving, there must be a lot of life in general. I truly did see the pair of ringtail cats moving sinuously across the road into the reedy marsh last year. Ringtail cats are rare and very precious.
So, for me, after about two and a half years, my blog is where I do near-daily "easy" writing. I combine it with my personal interests, and use it to keep my chops where they should be - at the top of the game. As we are writers in various "communities," such as the SF/F community, with which I have such a strange love-hate relationship, we all take various approaches. My blog is exactly who I am. I see no point, and have no desire, to pretend to be anything other than I am. I connect to nature so that I can connect others to it via my blog posts. As to my fiction projects, I suppose I'm moving back toward a type of discipline. With the ups and downs of my fiction writing, this too is a strange feeling. However, being able to have this daily dialog via the blog has definitely kept me connected. And, oh now, to the Sublime. Those at BVC are very excited about the hot possibilities of the steampunk anthology shortly to be announced. To me - this means that I must write something about one of my other long-time interests and areas of study: the Romantic era. The world seems to have gotten out of the Ada Lovelace era steampunk keyboards and etched Altoid tins. That is not, of course, at all what I see.
What we have today, is a very strange way to connect to each other. I think it encourages broader and shallower connections, whereas in Ada Lovelace's day, one came to know the people that one knew, far better. Even such secretive INFJ's such as myself would well be revealed to their intimates, eventually, in the 1840's. But the things we have today - are the things we have today. And that's what blogs are for.
With many thousands of readers, Book View Cafe has reached an important milestone: 1,000 registered members, who are eligible to access special content, including premium content available nowhere else on the internet.
BVC also welcomed Sarah Smith as its newest member yesterday.
It seems like such a long time since I was fooling around with images and banners, but it has still been less than a year! Thanks especially to Sarah Zettel, Phyl Radford, Vonda McIntyre, Sue Lange, Maya Bohnhoff, Nancy Jane Moore, Laura Anne Gilman, and all of our other fantastic BVC members for the success we have all enjoyed. What started as a funny suggestion has become something that so many readers can enjoy - more and more every day!
Look forward for more exciting news about upcoming BVC projects - in particular, a high-concept project that has the creative stamp of Sarah, Laura Anne, and . . . well gee . . . I guess maybe me.
This is Cornell University professor Jeff Hancock in 2006. Prof. Hancock has studied online behavior; in particular - the tendency to lie on social networking sites, online dating sites, and, I think, the tendency to lie a little less on online peer-network sites such as LinkedIn, where one's peers, coworkers and business associates will quickly determine if someone is exaggerating or misrepresenting work experience.
In a 2008 NPR interview, Prof. Hancock discussed some research-identified clues to online deception. Some of the research was sponsored via a $680,000 National Science Foundation grant for research in the social sciences. Unlike some research projects, in which the results may be of mysterious, or arcane benefit, it sounds like the research of Dr. Hancock and his students may illuminate important aspects of human, social behavior.
In terms of identifying online lies, Dr. Hancock said things about language that I found fascinating, and which immediately rang true to me. First, he said, one language construction that statistically correlates to lies written on the internet, is, as he described it, "dropping the first person". Or from a grammarian's perspective, the liar, in typing the lie, literally leaves out "who" did whatever the action is.
In other words:
TRUTH: We (or I) flew into town last night.
LIE: Got into town last night.
Dr. Hancock also mentioned online ruses in recent years that involved professionals seeming to be amateurs, from political campaign videos (probably "Obama Girl" and "Hillary Girl" - I know they were performers trying to get attention) to "lonelygirl15" on YouTube, who was an actress. So is "Crazy German Kid" and who knows how many others.
Dr. Hancock also commented that people may not be aware that they are being told a lie online, but that the way they compose their written responses to lies does indicate there is some difference in the effect of the liar's words. People tend to write longer responses to dishonest statements or assertions. Even if they do not consciously recognize that "it's a lie," subconsciously, the difference in syntax in response seems to show that there's something being triggered, somewhere.
It's all really cool stuff. Prof. Hancock has been working in automated linguistic analysis for a few years now. As a writer, I became aware of my language a long time ago. In what lies the "honesty" of any fictional work? It can only be in the words. I think most writers have a sense of when the work is going well, and we are being "true" to the story. I am fairly certain that some of these patterns would show up in any mathematical analysis. So, in answer to the question, if "good" writing is that which is "true" to the story and characters, and "bad" writing is that which goes through the motions (i.e. - sort of writing lazily or hastily around a story, not directly to it), someday there might very well be an objective analysis of this. I believe that people do not want to read the most ENTIRELY uncompromisingly "true" fiction - just as Dr. Hancock mentioned in his radio interview, that he didn't believe that he'd lied YET that day. Of course we all tell little white lies, and there are social lies that are very important.
But as to plain, dishonest liars? No, that is not the most essential thing in our world. And yes, I think we move ever closer to determining when these behaviors go over the top, and something (ostracism) should be done about it. Looks like there are more new studies and researchers as well.
bookviewcafe.com - Home An ever-changing daily feast of fictional opportunities for your hearts and minds. Featuring Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff Brenda Clough Katie Daniel Laura Anne Gilman Christie Golden Anne Harris Sylvia Kelso Katharine Eliska Kimbriel Sue Lange Ursula K. Le Guin Rebecca Lickiss Vonda N. McIntyre Nancy Jane Moore Pati Nagle Darcy Pattison Irene Radford Madeleine Robins Amy Sterling Jennifer Stevenson Susan Wright Sarah Zettel
Virginia Baker Ginny Baker is a super writer and this is an exciting, original, extremely cool Jack the Ripper piece of mysterious Victoriana.
Algis Budrys: Hard Landing (Questar Science Fiction) My adored A.J. - passed away June 9, 2008. This is my personal favorite book of his, and is the novel most recently published (1993). You will need to order a used copy of this small Warner paperback. It is of the highest literary quality. I am so grateful that I told him that in hard, solid writing - as soon as I'd read it.
Amy Sterling Casil: Imago (Alan Rodgers Books) My first novel. Compared in reviews to "the best spirit of primo early Philip K. Dick" and "Amy writes like Ray Bradbury on real sci-fi."
Amy Sterling Casil: Without Absolution My first collection - short fiction and poetry - from 1998 to 2000. Does not include "To Kiss the Star," but does include "Jonny Punkinhead." With introduction by James P. Blaylock.
Book View Cafe Authors: Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls The mind tells the story--but the heart inspires it with dreams of what might be waiting Out There. With evocative stories of lost comrades, alien first contacts, and strange, often unexpected confrontations with evolving science, Rocket Boy And The Geek Girls embraces both our pulp-dream past and cutting-edge future.
Thirteen authors (fifteen if you count pseudonyms) from the Book View Café got together one rainy Saturday afternoon with a big bowl of popcorn and reruns of Buck Rogers. They started comparing short stories and a new anthology took form.
Rare reprints, hard-to-find favorites and new tales all combine in this one-of-a-kind story collection, available exclusively from Book View Press.
What happens when thirteen authors get to giggling over implausible titles for the collection? They choose the most illogical and then they have to write something to go with it. So, yes, there are three flash fiction versions of Rocket Boy and the Geek Girls.
Stories by: Vonda N. McIntyre, Brenda W. Clough, Katharine Kerr, Judith Tarr, P.R. Frost, Pati Nagle, Madeleine Robins, Nancy Jane Moore, Sarah Zettel, Amy Sterling Casil, Maya Kaathryn Bohnhoff, Jennifer Stevenson, Sylvia Kelso, C.L. Anderson, and Irene Radford
