A federal judge rejected Google’s $125 million class-action settlement with authors and publishers, delivering a blow to the company’s ambitious plan to build the world’s largest digital library and bookstore. (…)

The court’s decision throws into legal limbo one of Google’s most ambitious projects: a plan to digitize millions of books from libraries.

The Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers sued Google in 2005 over its digitizing plans. After two years of painstaking negotiations, the authors and publishers devised with Google a sweeping settlement that would have helped to bring much of the publishing industry into the digital age.

The deal turned Google, the authors and the publishers into allies who defended the deal against an increasingly vocal chorus of opponents that included academics, copyright experts, the Justice Department and foreign governments. (…)

The deal would have allowed Google to make millions of out-of-print books broadly available online and to sell access to them, while giving authors and publishers new ways to earn money from digital copies of their works. Yet the deal faced a tidal wave of opposition from Google rivals like Amazon and Microsoft, as well as some academics, authors, legal scholars, states and foreign governments. The Justice Department opposed the deal, fearing that it would give Google a monopoly over millions of so-called orphan works, books whose right holders are unknown or cannot be found.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

An emerging body of research is suggesting that spending time alone, if done right, can be good for us — that certain tasks and thought processes are best carried out without anyone else around, and that even the most socially motivated among us should regularly be taking time to ourselves if we want to have fully developed personalities, and be capable of focus and creative thinking.

There is even research to suggest that blocking off enough alone time is an important component of a well-functioning social life — that if we want to get the most out of the time we spend with people, we should make sure we’re spending enough of it away from them.

{ The Boston Globe | Continue reading }

photo { Helmut Newton }

(…)

{ A Paradoxical Property of the Monkey Book | Continue reading }

{ The Weather Channel | full story }

In all of negotiation, there is no bigger trap than “fairness.”

This chapter from the Negotiator’s Fieldbook explains why among multiple models of fairness, people tend to believe that the one that applies here is the one that happens to favor them. This often creates a bitter element in negotiation, as each party proceeds from the unexamined assumption that its standpoint is the truly fair one.

For a negotiation to end well, it is imperative for both parties to assess the fairness of their own proposals from multiple points of view, not just their instinctive one – and to consider the fairness of their negotiation procedures as well as of their substantive proposals.

{ Perceptions of Fairness | PDF }

A deterministic universe [is one] in which “Every decision is completely caused by what happened before the decision—given the past, each decision has to happen the way that it does.” After being presented with this description of determinism, one group of participants was asked whether it is possible for anyone to be morally responsible for their actions in such a universe. These participants tended to say that it is not possible to be morally responsible in that universe. That question about moral responsibility is, of course, pitched at an abstract level.

Another group of participants was presented instead with a concrete case of a man who killed his family. That provoked a much different response. People tended to say that the man was fully morally responsible for his actions.

People are pulled in different directions because different mental mechanisms are implicated in different conditions.

{ Science | via Overcoming Bias | Continue reading }

photo { Lauren Edwards }

Over the last few decades many Buddhists and quite a few neuroscientists have examined Buddhism and neuroscience, with both groups reporting overlap. (…)

Neuroscience tells us the thing we take as our unified mind is an illusion, that our mind is not unified and can barely be said to “exist” at all. Our feeling of unity and control is a post-hoc confabulation and is easily fractured into separate parts. As revealed by scientific inquiry, what we call a mind (or a self, or a soul) is actually something that changes so much and is so uncertain that our pre-scientific language struggles to find meaning.

Buddhists say pretty much the same thing. They believe in an impermanent and illusory self made of shifting parts. They’ve even come up with language to address the problem between perception and belief. Their word for self is anatta, which is usually translated as ‘non self.’  One might try to refer to the self, but the word cleverly reminds one’s self that there is no such thing.

{ Seed | Continue reading }

photo { Edward Weston }

At 2:27 p.m. on March 30, 1981, President Ronald Reagan (Secret Service code name: Rawhide) walked out of a Washington hotel and was shot by John Hinckley Jr. In the confused moments that followed, no one was sure exactly what had happened—or if Mr. Reagan had even been hurt. In this excerpt from the forthcoming book “Rawhide Down,” a detailed account of the attempted assassination, Secret Service agent Jerry Parr has just shoved Mr. Reagan into his car after hearing the gunshots.

{ Del Quentin Wilber/WSJ | Continue reading | More }

There is a curious text, of an author who, I don’t know why, isn’t read anymore. A psychiatrist, son of an abominable historian of philosophy of the 19th century. He was called Pierre Janet. He used to be very well-known. He was more or less contemporary to Freud, his career is quite parallel to Freud’s. And neither of them understood the other. It’s very curious, there were endeavors to get them in touch but they didn’t get along. Their starting points were the same, it was hysteria; Janet initiated a very important conception of hysteria and he did a quite curious psychology which he proposed to name “Psychology of the Conduct,” even before Americans propounded the “Behavior Psychology.”

Roughly the method was: a psychological determination given, look for the type of conduct it represents. It was very interesting; he said: memory. The memory. Well it bears no interest, it doesn’t mean anything to me. I ask myself: what is the type of conduct one can hold when one remembers? And his answer was: the narration.

Hence, the famous definition of Janet: the memory is a conduct of narration. The emotion, he said, the emotion, one can’t feel if one can’t set down. You see, he used the conduct as a system of coordinates for all things. Everything was conduct.

I have a childhood memory which has impressed me forever. We all have childhood memories like this. It was during the holidays, my father used to give me Mathematics lessons. I was panic-stricken and it was all settled. That is to say, up to a point, I suspect we both did it already resigned, since we knew what was going to happen. In any case, I knew, I knew what was going to happen beforehand, because it was all settled, regular as clockwork. My father for that matter knew not much of Mathematics but he thought he had, above all, a natural gift for enunciating clearly. So he started, he held the pedagogical conduct, the pedagogical conduct. I was doing it willingly because it was no kidding subject at all; and I held the taught conduct. I showed every signs of interest, of maximal understanding, but all very soberly, and very fast there came a derailment. This derailment consisted in this: five minutes later, my father was yelling, set to beat me and I found myself in tears, I have to say, I was really small, and weeping. What was it? It is clear, there were two emotions. My deep grief, his deep anger. What did they respond to? Two failures. He has failed in his pedagogical conduct, he didn’t manage to explain at all. Of course he didn’t, he wanted to explain it to me with algebra, as he always said, because it was simpler and clearer this way. Then if I protested… and there it derailed. I protested arguing the teacher would never let me do algebra because when a six-year-old is given a problem, he hasn’t got the right, he is not supposed to do algebra. So the other was maintaining that it was the only clear way. Well, therefore, we both got into a tizzy. Misfire in the pedagogical conduct: anger; misfire in the taught conduct: tears.

All right. It was a failure. Janet said: emotion, it’s very simple, it’s a failure of conduct. You are upset when there is, when you hold a conduct and this conduct fails; then there is emotion.

{ Gilles Deleuze, Courses at Vincennes, 1980 | Continue reading }

A dragonfly doji pattern is a relatively difficult chart pattern to find, but when it is found within a defined trend it is often deemed to be a reliable signal indecision among traders and that the trend is about to change direction.

The pattern is formed when the stock’s opening and closing prices are equal and occur at the high of the day. The long lower shadow suggests that the forces of supply and demand are nearing a balance and that the direction of the trend may be nearing a major turning point.

{ Investopedia | Continue reading }

Is narrative in cinema really dead?

Try this experiment: Pick a famous movie—Casablanca, say—and summarize the plot in one sentence. Is that plot you just described the thing you remember most about it? Doubtful. Narrative is a necessary cement, but it disappears from memory.

{ Interview with Peter Greenaway | Continue reading | via Fette }

painting { Chechu Alava, The Romanov, Summer, 2010 }

Even if there was a highly advanced and intelligent alien species out there and it was starved of resources after tens of millions of years of existence in one form or another, we wouldn’t be a likely destination for invasion. We’d probably be too far away and too expensive to attack for a pretty minor payoff.

Everything aliens could find on our planet could be found in greater abundance and higher densities in asteroid belts and comet-rich clouds left over from solar system formation.

{ Weird things | Continue reading }

The Ides of March is the name of 15 March in the Roman calendar, probably referring to the day of the full moon.

The term ides was used for the 15th day of the months of March, May, July, and October, and the 13th day of the other months.

In modern times, the term Ides of March is best known as the date that Julius Caesar was killed in 44 B.C. Julius Caesar was stabbed (23 times) to death in the Roman Senate led by Marcus Junius Brutus, Gaius Cassius Longinus and 60 other co-conspirators.

{ Wikipedia | Continue reading | More: Assassination of Julius Caesar }

related { Each of the suspects stabbed Ratchett once, so that no one could know who delivered the fatal blow. }

painting { Vincenzo Camuccini, Morte di Giulio Cesare (Death of Julius Caesar), 1798 }

When forming first impressions about individuals, we often categorize them as belonging to a specific social group, based on very little information. Certain aspects in the way a person looks, or information about a certain trait they possess, may lead us to identify them as belonging to a high- or low-status social group. (…)

The idea of a correlation between various traits has been demonstrated in the ‘halo effect’ (Thorndike, 1920), showing the tendency to attribute all-positive or all-negative traits to individuals, based on one positive or negative initial trait. (…)

A variety of variables of physical appearance, such as dress, bodily posture, weight and perceived attractiveness have been shown to have an effect on the impression individuals make. Gender schemas are one of the parameters through which we infer personality traits, and have been demonstrated to have a strong influence on the impression formation. Males are generally perceived as possessing more high-status traits, such as assertiveness and competence, than females. (…)

Listening to music is an activity that plays an important role in people’s lives, especially in adolescence and young adulthood. Individuals consider the music they like as an important part of themselves, and believe their taste in music reveals aspects of their own personality, more than preferences for books, clothing, food, movies and television shows. The idea that personal musical taste is related to other aspects of personality has in fact received further confirmation in various studies relating musical preferences and particular personality traits. Thus, for example, liking for rock, heavy metal and punk were found to be positively related to sensation-seeking; extraversion and psychoticism were found to be related to liking for music with ‘exaggerated bass’ such as rap and dance music, and to stimulating music such as rock-and-roll and pop; rebelliousness was found to be related to liking for defiant music. (…)

Studies suggest that knowing a person’s musical taste has a powerful effect on how they are perceived and evaluated.

{ Psychology of Music, The effect of looks and musical preference on trait inference, 2008 | Continue reading | PDF }

Verb tense is more important than you may think, especially in how you form or perceive intention in a narrative.

In recent research studied in Psychological Science, William Hart of the University of Alabama states that “when you describe somebody’s actions in terms of what they’re ‘doing,’ that action is way more vivid in [a reader’s] mind.” Subsequently, when action is imagined vividly, greater intention is associated with it. (…)

Those who read that the defendant “was firing gun shots” believed a more harmful intent of the defendant than those who read that he “fired gun shots”.

{ APS | Continue reading }

screenshot { Cowboys and Aliens, 2011 }

Anyone who sets out to write an essay — for a school or college class, a magazine or even the book review section of a newspaper — owes something to Michel de Montaigne, though perhaps not much. Montaigne was a magistrate and landowner near Bordeaux who retired temporarily from public life in 1570 to spend more time with his library and to make a modest memento of his mind. He called his literary project “Essais,” meaning “attempts” or “trials,” and the term caught on in English after Francis Bacon, the British philosopher and statesman, used it for his own collection of short pieces in 1597. (…)

Oddly, Montaigne learned to speak Latin before he learned to speak anything else, thanks to his father’s strict ideas about schooling. But he chose to write in French, which he expected would change beyond recognition within 50 years, rather than a more “durable” tongue.

{ NY Times | Continue reading }

photo { Annabel Mehran }

John Gapper makes a good point: management consultants in general, and McKinsey consultants in particular, have made their entire business out of exploiting the moral grey zone surrounding confidential information.

The reason you hire McKinsey is that its consultants have seen strategic business issues like yours before, and therefore might have developed good insights into how to approach them. But the reason they’re familiar with those issues is that they’ve been given highly confidential information about your competitors. So when you hire McKinsey you’re essentially trying to acquire, for a very high hourly fee, the kind of corporate intelligence that can only be built up through long exposure to highly-sensitive commercial information. (…)

In this sense, a management consultant is a bit like an art dealer, or anybody else who traffics in valuable information asymmetries. The consultant knows more than the client, when it comes to strategic issues within the industry in question. If the client wants access to that knowledge, he has to open his own kimono to get it, thereby putting the consultant at yet more of an information advantage.

{ Felix Salmon/Reuters | Continue reading }

{ A small number of randomly selected legislators should make parliaments more effective, say a group of IgNobel prize-winning scientists. | The Physics arXiv Blog | full story | Photo: Tim Davis }

Since morals didn’t come from a God, where did they come from?

Nietzsche answered that question in 1887 with his Genealogy of Morals, which is the best, and by far the clearest, introduction to Nietzsche’s overall project. In short, the first essay in the three-part Genealogy argues that morality itself, the whole idea of good versus evil, came about when weak people figured out a way to make strong people feel bad about being strong. The reason we feel that we should take pity on the weak, or feel bad for imposing our wills on others, is that long ago, in some dark, underground workshop of the spirit, the weak had invented “morals” to compensate for their weakness.

Instead of just straightforwardly hating their enemies, they declared that their superiors stood under the judgement of a higher authority, God, whose law condemned them. And then, amazingly, they had convinced the strong to accept these twisted ideals as The Way Things Ought To Be.

{ Fred Sanders | Continue reading }