12/29/2012
11/23/2012
The week in tech: 5 must-know things on USAToday.com:
The Week in Tech: 5 Must-Know Things
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| Wii U has 30 launch titles, including Hulu Plus.(Photo: Jae C. Hong AP) |
3:39PM EST November 23. 2012 - It's the most wonderful time of the year! For tech companies, at least. Black Friday kicks off the holiday selling season with deals in stores for all sorts of tech gadgets, including the Wii U and Samsung's Galaxy Camera. Here are five things you need to know about this week in Tech:
The Wii video game console is expanding into mobile with the Wii U, available now in stores.
USA TODAY's Brett Molina played around with the new console and said its GamePad 6.2-inch tablet controller "presents several intriguing possibilities" for gameplay. It looks bulky at first, but "feels comfortable to handle for even the most complex video games."
The new Wii system is still pretty bare, with a limited selection of apps and games. The Wii U offers 30 launch titles, and users must wait until next month to download Nintendo TVii. Video app Hulu Plus just became available this week.
But the Wii U's current offerings are still pretty good — the system has a revamped online hub, Nintendo Network, an eShop for purchasing games, a Web browser and a social "Miiverse."
If you're looking to upgrade to a new TV, now is the time. USA TODAY's Mike Snider took a look at the best TV deals for the holiday season.
Here's what you need to know before you head out to Best Buy, Target or other electronics retailers:
Small TVs are getting cheaper. Small HDTVs are priced at a new low of $97 or less at Kmart, Sears and other retailers, but quantities will be limited at stores.
The bigger the better. 50-inch flat-panel TVs are a hot-ticket item this year, with an average retail price of $631. Some 60-inch displays regularly priced at $999 could come in below $900 in the coming weeks. And if you're willing to shell out the big bucks for a really big TV, Sharp is selling a 90-inch set for $10,999.99.
Get smart. Most TV sets on the market right now can stream video from Hulu, YouTube and other programs. If you want to save money and buy a TV set without video-streaming capabilities, you can always buy add-on devices such as a Blu-ray Disc player or an Apple TV box to connect your TV to the Internet.
Is it a smartphone? Is it a camera? Samsung's new Galaxy Camera from AT&T looks and operates much like one of the company's Galaxy smartphones. To be clear, though, this is not a phone.
The camera has a 4.8-inch high-definition screen and a touch-screen display on the rear. Users can connect to the Internet on Wi-Fi or a 4G network to share pictures on a social network or e-mail them to friends. AT&T also offers 5 GB of cloud storage, roughly 5,000 photos.
But be warned — connectivity doesn't come cheap. The Galaxy camera itself cost $499.99, plus $10 a month for the 4G network. Additional data for the camera costs $15 a month for 250 megabytes and up to $50 a month for 5 GB of storage space.
Twitter's most popular mayor is taking on a new medium: video.
Newark, N.J., Mayor Cory Booker is a one-third partner in #waywire, kind of a "socially conscious YouTube" that lets users watch a small collection of videos and recommend videos to their friends. The startup has media partners such as Reuters and MTV, and the site counts Lady Gaga and women's health advocate Sarah Brown among contributors. It also has a daily news recap show, TweetTap.
USA TODAY's Jefferson Graham talked to the folks at #waywire and its supporters to find out what makes the site worth the hype. They said the site's small video library, a stark contrast to YouTube's supersized video collection, gives users a more personalized experience.
Sarah Pena, the founder of YouTube star management company Big Frame, sums it up best when she says finding videos on YouTube is "THE problem." Pena says about the site: "Discoverability is a huge challenge. I go to YouTube.com, then what? Hopefully, places like #waywire can help cut through all the noise with curation."
Scientists got a rare look at a dwarf planet near Pluto last year, but they are still trying to make sense of the planet's odd features.
Makemake, a planet that orbits at 4.85 billion miles from the sun, has an oblong shape and no atmosphere. Scientists believe any atmosphere on the planet likely froze out some time ago.
Makemake is one of three planets in the Kuiper belt. Scientists hope that this trio can help them better understand dwarf planets and the farthest edges of the solar system.
10/11/2012
China’s Mo Yan Wins Nobel Literature Prize
LONDON — Mo Yan, a wildly prolific and internationally renowned Chinese author who considers himself nonpolitical but whose embrace by the ruling Communist Party has drawn criticism from dissident writers, was on Thursday awarded the 2012 Nobel Prize in Literature.
In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy — animal narrators, the underworld, elements of fairy tales — that evoke the techniques of South American magical realists. His work has been widely translated and is readily available in the West, but he is perhaps best known abroad for “Red Sorghum” (1987; published in English in 1993) which takes on issues like the Japanese occupation, bandit culture and the harsh lives of rural Chinese, and which in 1987 was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou.
“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the Swedish Academy said in the citation that accompanied the award.
Mr. Mo has not been shy of lacing his fiction with social criticism, but at the same time he has carefully navigated whatever invisible line the government considers unacceptable. He has also appeared at times to embrace the establishment, and serves as vice chairman of the party-run Chinese Writers’ Association. Yet when the émigré novelist and critic Gao Xingjian won the literature prize in 2000 and was criticized for having given up his Chinese citizenship, Mr. Mo publicly defended him.
He is the just the second Chinese resident citizen to win a Nobel; the first was the jailed dissident writer and political agitator Liu Xiaobo, who won the peace prize two years ago. But in contrast to the Chinese government’s anger over that award, which included refusing to allow Mr. Liu to accept it and exacting diplomatic penalties against Norway, the country that awards the peace prize, Beijing reacted to this one as an international vindication.
The announcement was celebrated on the China Central Television evening news broadcast, which took the unusual step of breaking into its regular news coverage for a special report. The populist state-run Global Times newspaper immediately placed a “special coverage” page, clearly prepared in advance, on its English-language Web site.
When the organizers contacted Mr. Mo, said Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, “he said he was overjoyed and scared,” The Associated Press reported.
The son of farmers, Mr. Mo was born in 1955 in Shandong Province, in the east, where much of his fiction is set. He became a teenager during the tumult of Cultural Revolution, leaving school to work first on a farm and then in a cottonseed oil factory. He began writing, he has said, a few years later while serving in the People’s Liberation Army. His first short story was published in 1981.
The author’s given name is Guan Moye; Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak,” is actually a pen name that reflects, he has said, the time in which he grew up, a time when criticizing those in power could be ruinous.
“At that time in China, lives were not normal so my father and mother told me not speak outside,” he said during a cultural forum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. “If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and did not speak.”
Critics in the West have lavished praise on Mr. Mo. “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” a huge, ambitious work narrated by five successive animals who are themselves reincarnations of a man controlled by Yama, the lord of the underworld, “covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience,” almost like a documentary of the times, the Chinese scholar Jonathan Spence wrote in The New York Times in 2008.
“Yet although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, ‘Life and Death’ remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary,” Mr. Spence wrote, calling the work “harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny.”
In its citation, the Swedish Academy noted that many of Mr. Mo’s works, including “The Garlic Ballads” (1988, published in English in 1995) and “The Republic of Wine” (1992, published in English in 2000) “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.”
Other works include “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” (1996, published in English in 2004) — which was briefly banned before going on to become a huge best seller in China — and “Sandalwood Death” (2004, to be published in English in 2013). Mr. Mo’s most recent published work, called “Wa” in Chinese (2009) “illuminates the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy,” the academy said.
Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, said that Mr. Mo was part of a generation of post-Cultural Revolution writers who began looking at Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, through new, nonparty-line eyes.
“For a very long time Chinese realism was of a socialist realist persuasion, so it had to be filled with ideological and political messages,” Mr. Hockx said in an interview. “But instead of writing about socialist superheroes,” Mr. Mo has filled his work with real characters with real frailties, Mr. Hockx continued, while at the same time portraying rural China as a “magical place where wonderful things happened, things that seemed to come out of mythology and fairy tales.”
But fellow writers, especially those outside the establishment, mistrust Mr. Mo’s failure to take a political stand. Last summer, he was criticized for joining a group of authors who transcribed by hand a 1942 speech by Mao Zedong. The speech, which ushered in decades of government control over Chinese writers and artists, has been described as a death warrant for those who refused to subsume their talents in the Communist Party.
He was also criticized for attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 after Beijing barred a number of dissident writers.
Mr. Mo later gave a speech at the fair that provided a window into his complex thinking.
“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression,” he said. “Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”
Sarah Lyall reported from London and Andrew Jacobs from Beijing. Edward Wong contributed reporting from Beijing.
In his novels and short stories, Mr. Mo paints sprawling, intricate portraits of Chinese rural life, often using flights of fancy — animal narrators, the underworld, elements of fairy tales — that evoke the techniques of South American magical realists. His work has been widely translated and is readily available in the West, but he is perhaps best known abroad for “Red Sorghum” (1987; published in English in 1993) which takes on issues like the Japanese occupation, bandit culture and the harsh lives of rural Chinese, and which in 1987 was made into a movie directed by Zhang Yimou.
“Through a mixture of fantasy and reality, historical and social perspectives, Mo Yan has created a world reminiscent in its complexity of those in the writings of William Faulkner and Gabriel García Márquez, at the same time finding a departure point in old Chinese literature and in oral tradition,” the Swedish Academy said in the citation that accompanied the award.
Mr. Mo has not been shy of lacing his fiction with social criticism, but at the same time he has carefully navigated whatever invisible line the government considers unacceptable. He has also appeared at times to embrace the establishment, and serves as vice chairman of the party-run Chinese Writers’ Association. Yet when the émigré novelist and critic Gao Xingjian won the literature prize in 2000 and was criticized for having given up his Chinese citizenship, Mr. Mo publicly defended him.
He is the just the second Chinese resident citizen to win a Nobel; the first was the jailed dissident writer and political agitator Liu Xiaobo, who won the peace prize two years ago. But in contrast to the Chinese government’s anger over that award, which included refusing to allow Mr. Liu to accept it and exacting diplomatic penalties against Norway, the country that awards the peace prize, Beijing reacted to this one as an international vindication.
The announcement was celebrated on the China Central Television evening news broadcast, which took the unusual step of breaking into its regular news coverage for a special report. The populist state-run Global Times newspaper immediately placed a “special coverage” page, clearly prepared in advance, on its English-language Web site.
When the organizers contacted Mr. Mo, said Peter Englund, the secretary of the Swedish Academy, “he said he was overjoyed and scared,” The Associated Press reported.
The son of farmers, Mr. Mo was born in 1955 in Shandong Province, in the east, where much of his fiction is set. He became a teenager during the tumult of Cultural Revolution, leaving school to work first on a farm and then in a cottonseed oil factory. He began writing, he has said, a few years later while serving in the People’s Liberation Army. His first short story was published in 1981.
The author’s given name is Guan Moye; Mo Yan, which means “don’t speak,” is actually a pen name that reflects, he has said, the time in which he grew up, a time when criticizing those in power could be ruinous.
“At that time in China, lives were not normal so my father and mother told me not speak outside,” he said during a cultural forum at the University of California, Berkeley, in 2011. “If you speak outside, and say what you think, you will get into trouble. So I listened to them and did not speak.”
Critics in the West have lavished praise on Mr. Mo. “Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out,” a huge, ambitious work narrated by five successive animals who are themselves reincarnations of a man controlled by Yama, the lord of the underworld, “covers almost the entire span of his country’s revolutionary experience,” almost like a documentary of the times, the Chinese scholar Jonathan Spence wrote in The New York Times in 2008.
“Yet although one can say that the political dramas narrated by Mo Yan are historically faithful to the currently known record, ‘Life and Death’ remains a wildly visionary and creative novel, constantly mocking and rearranging itself and jolting the reader with its own internal commentary,” Mr. Spence wrote, calling the work “harsh and gritty, raunchy and funny.”
In its citation, the Swedish Academy noted that many of Mr. Mo’s works, including “The Garlic Ballads” (1988, published in English in 1995) and “The Republic of Wine” (1992, published in English in 2000) “have been judged subversive because of their sharp criticism of contemporary Chinese society.”
Other works include “Big Breasts and Wide Hips” (1996, published in English in 2004) — which was briefly banned before going on to become a huge best seller in China — and “Sandalwood Death” (2004, to be published in English in 2013). Mr. Mo’s most recent published work, called “Wa” in Chinese (2009) “illuminates the consequences of China’s imposition of a single-child policy,” the academy said.
Michel Hockx, professor of Chinese at the School of Oriental and African Studies at the University of London, said that Mr. Mo was part of a generation of post-Cultural Revolution writers who began looking at Chinese society, particularly in the countryside, through new, nonparty-line eyes.
“For a very long time Chinese realism was of a socialist realist persuasion, so it had to be filled with ideological and political messages,” Mr. Hockx said in an interview. “But instead of writing about socialist superheroes,” Mr. Mo has filled his work with real characters with real frailties, Mr. Hockx continued, while at the same time portraying rural China as a “magical place where wonderful things happened, things that seemed to come out of mythology and fairy tales.”
But fellow writers, especially those outside the establishment, mistrust Mr. Mo’s failure to take a political stand. Last summer, he was criticized for joining a group of authors who transcribed by hand a 1942 speech by Mao Zedong. The speech, which ushered in decades of government control over Chinese writers and artists, has been described as a death warrant for those who refused to subsume their talents in the Communist Party.
He was also criticized for attending the Frankfurt Book Fair in 2009 after Beijing barred a number of dissident writers.
Mr. Mo later gave a speech at the fair that provided a window into his complex thinking.
“A writer should express criticism and indignation at the dark side of society and the ugliness of human nature, but we should not use one uniform expression,” he said. “Some may want to shout on the street, but we should tolerate those who hide in their rooms and use literature to voice their opinions.”
Sarah Lyall reported from London and Andrew Jacobs from Beijing. Edward Wong contributed reporting from Beijing.
10/04/2012
Top 10 Most Challenged Titles Of The Year
Banned Books Week: Top 10 Most Challenged Titles Of The Year (INFOGRAPHIC)
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/30/banned-books-week-top-10-_n_1926829.html
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2012/09/30/banned-books-week-top-10-_n_1926829.html
8/07/2012
8/02/2012
Into the Nothing, After Something
‘Why Does the World Exist?’ by Jim Holt
Personal anecdotes on subjects as varied as mortality and dining sit amid the philosophical musings in Jim Holt’s new book.
Personal anecdotes on subjects as varied as mortality and dining sit amid the philosophical musings in Jim Holt’s new book.
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The U.S. Airlines Are Moving To Free WiFi with Starlink
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LONDON — Mo Yan, a wildly prolific and internationally renowned Chinese author who considers himself nonpolitical but whose embrace by the r...
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The Week in Tech: 5 Must-Know Things http://usat.ly/SeS5vQ Wii U has 30 launch titles, including Hulu Plus. (Photo: Jae C. Hong AP) 3... -
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