Keeping up with technology

Blog
Written By Karen Zemanick

A few news items on electronic media:

  • Amazon is now renting textbooks for Kindle readers. After the rental expires, students can still keep any notes they make in the margins while reading. Amazon is promoting rental as a better option than buying books and selling them back to the store.

  • NPR has launched a Twitter feed that will update followers on job opportunities. Follow them at @NPRJobs. NPR also introduced a hashtag for job seekers. When you’re on Twitter, search for #PubJobs to find open positions nationwide at public media outlets.

  • An internet startup, BookLamp, will provide book recommendations based on content, not sales. The company is scanning about 20,000 books to start. They then catalog them according to a broad range of characteristics that readers can select and search. Revenue is expected to come from the publishers, not readers or advertising.

  • Finally, an artificial intelligence technologist describes how leaving his job to pursue a PhD in the Humanities enriched his thinking and, paradoxically, his technical career. Damon Horowitz makes a good point that, "The technology issues facing us today -- issues of identity, communication, privacy, regulation -- require a humanistic perspective if we are to deal with them adequately."

Karen Zemanick

Karen Zemanick, an MFA student at Northwestern University, has published creative nonfiction and video essays. She also practices and teaches psychiatry in Chicago. She sees narrative as a tool to foster listening, community, and understanding.

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