This was the heading in a Press Association release, but Professor Felipe Fernández-Armesto has responded in the Times Higher Education Supplement that this is a "dog's dinner of an idea".
"The real difference between cat-lovers and dog-lovers has nothing to do with income, education or habits of work. It is, I suspect, a matter of morals. Dog-lovers are good. Cat-lovers are morally indifferent or actively evil. The sort of people who like to have dead mice offered to them in sacrifice prefer cats. I can't imagine a labradoodle or westie as a witch's familiar. If you want to make Blofeld's ethics plain, don't put a Jack Russell or a fox terrier in his lap. Batman would never have to save us from Dogwoman. Dogs are the choice of the socially, humanly well adjusted: people who like people like dogs, because you meet other dog-lovers when you take your pet for walks. You engage in conversation with all sorts and conditions. You broaden your horizons, diversify your values. Many Manhattan romances start at dog-walking hour in Central Park. Hundreds of dog-walking clubs have sprung up all over Britain among people who socialise with chains and leads in hand, with no rattle or redolence of sexual impropriety. Dogs demand responsible ownership: I could not have a cat, because I would worry constantly about his or her welfare when my pet was out of the house. Cat-lovers have power without responsibility. We know whose prerogative that is". More here.
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Pew Report: The future of the internet IV
A survey of nearly 900 internet stakeholders reveals fascinating new perspectives on the way the internet is affecting human intelligence and the ways that information is being shared and rendered. The web-based survey gathered opinions from prominent scientists, business leaders, consultants, writers and technology developers. It is the fourth in a series of internet expert studies conducted by the Imagining the Internet Center at Elon University and the Pew Research Center’s Internet & American Life Project. It covers experts' thoughts on the following issues:
•Will Google make us stupid?
•Will the internet enhance or detract from reading, writing, and rendering of knowledge?
•Is the next wave of innovation in technology, gadgets, and applications pretty clear now, or will the most interesting developments between now and 2020 come “out of the blue”?
•Will the end-to-end principle of the internet still prevail in 10 years, or will there be more control of access to information?
•Will it be possible to be anonymous online or not by the end of the decade?
More here.
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Don't touch that dial!
Vaughan Bell in the Slate magazine, ranges over a history of media technology scares, from the printing press to Facebook.
"A respected Swiss scientist, Conrad Gessner, might have been the first to raise the alarm about the effects of information overload. In a landmark book, he described how the modern world overwhelmed people with data and that this overabundance was both ‘confusing and harmful’ to the mind. The media now echo his concerns with reports on the unprecedented risks of living in an ‘always on’ digital environment. It's worth noting that Gessner, for his part, never once used email and was completely ignorant about computers. That's not because he was a technophobe but because he died in 1565. His warnings referred to the seemingly unmanageable flood of information unleashed by the printing press.
Worries about information overload are as old as information itself, with each generation reimagining the dangerous impacts of technology on mind and brain. From a historical perspective, what strikes home is not the evolution of these social concerns, but their similarity from one century to the next, to the point where they arrive anew with little having changed except the label". More here.
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The books most borrowed from UK libraries in 2008-09
John Dugdale in The Guardian writes, "At first glance, the list of the books most borrowed from libraries in 2008-09, released by Public Lending Right (PLR) yes¬terday, is hard to tell apart from a recent annual best¬sellers chart. There's the same mix of romance, crime and thrillers; the presence of authors who were given a turbo-boost by being selected by ¬Richard and Judy; and such top-half fixtures as Maeve Binchy, Patricia ¬Cornwell, Josephine Cox, John Grisham, Ian Rankin and Danielle Steel ...
Why is fiction borrowed so much more than non-fiction? Turnover could be a key factor: a thriller can be read in a day or less whereas history or science books and non-celeb biographies can't generally be finished so fast, and other genres are liable to be retained for ¬extended periods while the borrower tries out recipes, swots for an exam or copes with a new baby. This need to spend more time with non-fiction also makes it more likely that such titles will be bought than borrowed".
More here.
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The age of shorter books?
In this blog post, Ezra Klein suggests that in the digital age readers will find shorter books more acceptable. Klein writes, "The length of the average book reflects the economics of the print trade and educated guesses as to what book-buyers will actually pay for, much more than it does the actual intellectual content of the book itself ... All this may be changing as we move towards an electronic book publishing system. The economics of electronic text production are not the same as the economics of book production (as best as I understand either), and there aren’t the same pressures towards standardisation of length. I suspect that people who would feel cheated if they paid ‘book’ price for a long essay (say around 20,000 words or so) will feel less so if they buy an electronic version". More here.
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Digital books and your rights: a checklist for readers
The Electronic Frontier Foundation has issued a white paper "Digital Books and Your Rights: A Checklist for Readers". They offer a checklist as well as an extended explanation of why the answers to these questions matter. They state, "Our goal is not to tell authors, publishers, vendors, libraries, or anyone else what strategies they must adopt, or tell book purchasers what options they must choose. We hope that a robust marketplace emerges, with various business models and technologies. Instead, this checklist represents the key questions that readers should ask of each new digital book product or service to evaluate whether it adequately protects their interests. That sort of rigorous inquiry will help us decide which digital book future we want — and how to vote with our feet until we get it". The list is here.
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Ten of the best unfinished literary works
John Mullan in The Guardian begins with:
"Don Juan by Lord Byron
Byron composed new instalments of his great mock-epic poem whenever he was inspired or angry or at a loose end without his mistress. Young Juan, his sexually irresistible adventurer, travelled from Spain to a harem in Constantinople to the court of Catherine the Great and then to England, where he was left in mid-episode when the poet died.
Woyzeck by Georg Büchner
The title of Büchner's tragedy, whose protagonist is brutalised in the army and driven by jealousy to murder his mistress, was supplied by later editors. Büchner left four different versions of the play, all incomplete.
More here.
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Odd book title
Crocheting novelty pot-holders. By L. Macho. New York. Dover. 1982. National Library of Australia's Trove, unusually in terms of crocheting in Australia, does not record a title; but WorldCat does here.
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