The evolution of publishing from print to digital has caused a schism in the reading world. There are now two constituencies: readers (and writers) on the one hand, and the publishing world on the other. And they don’t want to hear each other. Readers want books that are plentiful and cheap, publishers want to preserve their profit, and authors want a larger share of revenue. The conflict has created a strident internecine battle inside the publishing industry. At issue are the price and timing of e-books, and who owns the rights to backlist titles. While publishers, agents and Amazon.com bicker, there is little time for conceiving new content that satisfies customer demand. If the book business doesn’t tune in to that demand, it could wind up as a transitional source for the e-readers. We know that readers want content, because it’s clear they’re not dazzled by the device. Consumers have made Amazon’s limited and rudimentary device a hit, which speaks to their desire for books that are cheaper and easier to obtain. It surely isn’t the device’s design or functionality. Both are closer to the computer aesthetic of the 1980s than today’s digital world. The Kindle may have […]
ATLANTA — The oft-cited credo that more guns equal more crime is being tested by facts on the ground this year: Even as gun ownership has surged in the US in the past year, violent crime, including murder and robbery, has dropped steeply. Add to that the fact that many experts had predicted higher crime rates as the US grinds through a difficult recession, and the discrepancy has advocates on both sides of the Second Amendment debate rushing to their ramparts. After several years of crime rates holding relatively steady, the FBI is reporting that violent crimes – including gun crimes – dropped dramatically in the first six months of 2009, with murder down 10 percent across the US as a whole. Concurrently, the FBI reports that gun sales – especially of assault-style rifles and handguns, two main targets of gun-control groups – are up at least 12 percent nationally since the election of President Obama, a dramatic run on guns prompted in part by so-far-unwarranted fears that Democrats in Congress and the White House will curtail gun rights and carve apart the Second Amendment. Pro-gun groups jumped at the FBI report, saying it disproves a […]
Forty-two years ago, the biologist Paul Ehrlich warned in The Population Bomb that mass starvation would strike in the 1970s and 1980s, with the world’s population growth outpacing the production of food and other critical resources. Thanks to innovations and efforts such as the ‘green revolution’ in farming and the widespread adoption of family planning, Ehrlich’s worst fears did not come to pass. In fact, since the 1970s, global economic output has increased and fertility has fallen dramatically, especially in developing countries. The United Nations Population Division now projects that global population growth will nearly halt by 2050. By that date, the world’s population will have stabilized at 9.15 billion people, according to the ‘medium growth’ variant of the UN’s authoritative population database World Population Prospects: The 2008 Revision. (Today’s global population is 6.83 billion.) Barring a cataclysmic climate crisis or a complete failure to recover from the current economic malaise, global economic output is expected to increase by two to three percent per year, meaning that global income will increase far more than population over the next four decades. But twenty-first-century international security will depend less on how many people inhabit the world than on how the […]
Researchers found that around one in three people actually feel physical discomfort when they see someone else in agony. The findings could explain why some people are more empathetic to other people’s misery. Dr Stuart Derbyshire, a psychologist at the University of Birmingham, made the discovery after inviting 123 university students to watch video clips and photographs of patients and sports stars in painful situations. The videos included a footballer breaking his leg, a tennis player turning over his left ankle and a patient getting an injection in the hand All the students said that, for at least one of the images or videos, they had an ’emotional reaction’ – such as feeling sad, disgusted or fearful. But a third, also claimed to feel real pain in the same part of the body as the victim they were watching. Some experienced tingling or aching, others felt a heavy or stabbing pain. For some the pain was fleeting – others complained that it lasted for several seconds. A picture of an athlete running on a racetrack with a clearly broken leg generated the most physical pain in the students, the researchers reported in […]
SAN JOSE, Calif. — Their job prospects battered by a deep recession, fewer immigrants are being caught trying to cross illegally into the United States than at any time since the 1970s, say two reports based on new federal data. But it remains unclear whether many illegal immigrants already here are heading back home. Apprehensions of illegal immigrants at the U.S.-Mexico border are down 34 percent over the past two years, according to new U.S. Department of Homeland Security data — on pace to be even lower in fiscal 2009. With record removals of unauthorized migrants in the U.S. and increased spending on border security, the economic and enforcement barriers to crossing into California and other Southwestern states have rarely been higher, federal officials and immigration experts say. ‘It’s far riskier to cross the border, it costs more, and the rewards are simply not there — the jobs that have driven people here for 40 years,” said Al Camarillo, a Stanford historian who follows Latin American immigration. A new Pew Research Center report estimates that for the 12 months ending in February 2009, the net migration between Mexico and the U.S. — the number of people […]
Remote Viewing the Year 2060
