Reading the Times

First, the good news: of the Times"Top Ten Books for 2004", three of the four non-fiction books are histories (including the Shakespeare one, which is more biography than literary analysis).

Other news:

• U Mass will not be allowed to grow marijuana, even for research purposes; they'll have to keep buying it from the Federal Government
• Julliard produces mixed results, and reminds me a lot of Ph.D. programs I know.
• For-profit higher education might be working the system, ahem, for a profit, but the story, despite its headline, doesn't actually address issues of ethics education.
• This is a woefully inadequate survey of the issues (and gets a few things blatantly wrong), but technology really is making a difference in the reading lives of the blind. And some of that technology rebounds to the benefit of the rest of us. One thing the article doesn't say, for example, is that the digital book standards being developed include full word-by-word indexing, so that the user can switch back and forth between the audio and text versions of the book without any loss of position (something that might make audiobooks much more attractive to scholars). And the problem with Bookshare.org isn't that the texts are scanned by computers, it's that they are scanned by members and volunteers [full disclosure: including me] who share their scanning work with the Bookshare membership (and get some credit towards their membership fees for it); submitted texts are rated for quality, but not proofread by a central authority. It's a lot better than nothing: They had the last Harry Potter book up on their site within hours of its release, because a bunch of people shared the work of scanning it; italics read funny, but it was mostly readable and available immediately.
• History, Geology, and Beer

And the other Time: David Adesnick does a nice job critiquing Time Magazine's recent religion coverage.