Accurate, Focused Research on Law, Technology and Knowledge Discovery With Daily Postings Since 2002
Slate – “If I wanted to borrow A Better Man by Louise Penny—the country’s current No. 1 fiction bestseller—from my local library in my preferred format, e-book, I’d be looking at about a 10-week waitlist. And soon, if the book’s publisher, a division of Macmillan, has its way, that already-lengthy wait time could get significantly …
Washington Post – “Cruise Instagram or Pinterest, and you’ll find numerous examples of warm, cushy reading areas decked out with twinkling string lights and endless built-in shelves. How do you evoke the feeling of having your own library in a small space with a small budget? We surveyed some experts for advice…” [this article made …
Atlas Obscura – Reuniting stumped readers with the books from the edges of their memories. “The carpet was khaki, the lights yellow, the walls a dishwater beige. The basement computer lab in Midtown Manhattan didn’t have much ambience. But 20 librarians from the New York Public Library were seated in the room—and they were there …
Atlas Obscura – 257 small steps for our human cousins, one giant leap for paleoanthropology. “Of the variety of ancient hominins who have roamed this planet, Neanderthals are among the most recently departed. Long stigmatized as lumbering, backwards versions of us—think “caveman” and all that implies—scholarship is increasingly overwriting this view. Neanderthals, it turns out, …
MIT Technology Review – “Perhaps the biggest hurdle to humankind’s expansion throughout the solar system is the prohibitive cost of escaping Earth’s gravitational pull. So say Zephyr Penoyre from the University of Cambridge in the UK and Emily Sandford at Columbia University in New York. The problem is that rocket engines work by jettisoning mass …
The New York Times – “We recently told you about a study that looked at how many more trees could grow on Earth and how much carbon they could absorb from the atmosphere. The answer: The planet has room for about 2.5 billion acres of forest, and all those trees could suck up an additional …
Wired – Deep learning excels at learning statistical correlations, but lacks robust ways of understanding how the meanings of sentences relate to their parts. “…drill down into tools like Google Talk to Books (GTB) and you quickly realize we are nowhere near genuine machine reading yet. When we asked GTB, “Where did Harry Potter meet …
Pew – Trust and Distrust in America – “Many Americans think declining trust in the government and in each other makes it harder to solve key problems. They have a wealth of ideas about what’s gone wrong and how to fix it. Trust is an essential elixir for public life and neighborly relations, and when …
BookRiot: “Anyone who has ever tried to organize their bookshelves can tell you that books are not a standard size. In fact, even books that fall under the same category (mass market paperbacks, trade paperbacks, hardcovers) can vary wildly. It makes a perfectly matched shelf very difficult. Despite all of those different sizes, though, almost …
