Thursday 3 September 2009

Today's reading:

Internet addiction center opens in US
FALL CITY, Wash. (AP) - Ben Alexander spent nearly every waking minute playing the video game "World of Warcraft." As a result, he flunked out of the University of Iowa.
Alexander, 19, needed help to break an addiction he calls as destructive as alcohol or drugs. He found it in this suburb of high-tech Seattle, where what claims to be the first residential treatment center for Internet addiction in the United States just opened its doors.
Google's Book Search: A Disaster for Scholars
By Geoffrey Nunberg
For example the BISAC Juvenile Nonfiction subject heading has almost 300 subheadings, like New Baby, Skateboarding, and Deer, Moose, and Caribou. By contrast the Poetry subject heading has just 20 subheadings. That means that Bambi and Bullwinkle get a full shelf to themselves, while Leopardi, Schiller, and Verlaine have to scrunch together in the single subheading reserved for Poetry/Continental European. In short, Google has taken a group of the world's great research collections and returned them in the form of a suburban-mall bookstore.
(links thanks to that widely read scholar, my pal Bob Morales)

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3 Comments:

Anonymous Kane Lynch said...

What a travesty! How am I supposed to find continental European poetry about skateboarding?

3 September 2009 at 20:53:00 GMT-5  
Anonymous Anonymous said...

This comment has been removed by a blog administrator.

4 September 2009 at 01:14:00 GMT-5  
Blogger Eddie Campbell said...

(on account of trying to sell us something)

4 September 2009 at 01:18:00 GMT-5  

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