Start the week right with a few more links:
A few more links for Monday:
In all this debate over what e-books should cost, here’s an interesting look at what consumers think. Many people (understandably) can’t see why an e-book should cost almost as much as a hard copy of the same book.
But it’s not as simple as “there’s no paper so it should cost way less.” A publisher still needs to pay the author (hurray for writers getting money!) and pay the salaries of everyone working on the book (editors, marketers, graphic designers, etc.). Even though you’re not paying for physical assembly and shipping, there’s still a lot that goes into making a book. As someone who’s worked in publishing, I have to agree that making a book involves much more than putting pages together, and the people doing that work (which is necessary for both e-books and hard copies) deserve to be paid fairly.
Does that mean the debate about e-book pricing is over? Not even close. But I think it’s good to keep in mind that just because it’s digital doesn’t mean there was no effort in the creation process.
You know those essay questions on tests like the SATs or GREs? Turns out the ideal reader/scorer is a computer:
“Turns out, though, that standardized test essays are so formulaic that test-scoring companies can use algorithms to grade them. And before you get worried about machines giving you a bad score because they’ve never taken an English class, said algorithms give the essays the same scores as human graders do, according to a large study that compared nine such programs with humans readers. The team used more than 20,000 essays on eight prompts, and you can see in the figure to the right, the mean scores found by the programs and the people were so close that they appear as one line on a chart of the results.”
Says a lot about how we evaluate students’ writing ability, doesn’t it? Ugh.
Ending the week on lots of great links:
A few more links to round out Monday:
A little fun for your Friday: typographic matchmaking!
Designer Aura Seltzer has created Type Connection as her MFA thesis project. It lets you learn the design history of particular fonts and explore the potential connections between two different sets. A fun game, typographical design, and print history? Coolest thesis ever!
Get started here. Are you bold with your matches, or would you rather play it safe with similar styles?
Last weekend, Walt and I went to see Company One’s production of Hookman by Lauren Yee. The synopsis, from Company One’s page:
“Being a freshman in college is hard when your roommate is weird, home is far away, and Hookman is everywhere! What’s Lexi to do when her old high school friend, Jess, gets killed…I mean – has an accident, a car accident, I think? Not even Facebook stalking the dead can calm the creepy feelings spilling out of the shadows in this existential comic horror slasher – a new play by Lauren Yee.”
I never watch scary movies, so I wasn’t sure how I’d like this play. It ended up being fantastic–a nice blend of comic and horror, matched with moving themes of loss, guilt, and growing up. The cast did a great job, especially since most of the dialogue was very grounded in the experience of being eighteen and just starting college. My favorite exchanges came from Lexi and Jess; they really felt like they were old friends who were trying to maneuver the fact that they were now in college on different coasts. Although this wasn’t a play for young adults, it managed to hit an almost YA vibe–it played with genre, wasn’t afraid to be funny, and focused on growing up. (Or maybe I can just connect anything with YA.) If you’re in the Boston area and are an adult/very mature teen, I’d check out Hookman.
Part of the play also dealt with how we find out about death via networks like Facebook. Like other life events, you can find out personal information about people even if you haven’t seen them for years. And if someone dies suddenly, you might find out that they’re gone (via lots of “we miss you, so sad you’re gone, etc.” wall posts) but find no information about what actually happened to that person. I think this is going to become increasing more common, especially for young people who don’t tend to experience the loss of friends very often.
At the Atlantic, there’s an interview with Patrick Stokes about death and Facebook. One part I found interesting was this mention of Facebook walls becoming online memorials:
“What’s interesting about it is that offline we physically create places, specially demarcated places, where we put dead people, but on Facebook these aren’t demarcated—they exist side by side with living profiles. So in that sense, what we have now is not so much like an online graveyard or cemetery; instead we just have these dead people among us.”
This reminded me of Hookman’s look at what it means to survive someone and how we connect. I’m curious to see how teens now and in future generations will deal with having these kinds of memorials among us. It can be a huge help in the grieving process, but I wonder if it would also make it harder to let that person go. Whenever you go online, there’s a reminder that you’ve lost someone. And not necessarily someone you were very close with, either. Are teens going to grow up in a world of virtual ghosts?
I would call it cheating, but it’s just too awesome: a computer programmer wrote an algorithm to find the elusive Waldo:
“Heike’s algorithm narrows down the places Waldo could be hiding by searching for the colors of his signature shirt.
First, it filters out all colors but red. Next, it identifies parts of the image with alternating lines of red and white. Finally, it puts a white circle around the part of the image that most closely matches the famous sweater.”
Very clever, Heike! Your next challenge: find Carmen Sandiego.
(image: Indiebound)