FanLit occasionally (by arrangement) republish my reviews. This was a book I particularly liked.
Unfortunately, I couldn’t finish the sequel, which was all the angst all the time. Maybe I just wasn’t in the right mood for it.
Originally shared by Fantasy Literature (FanLit)
Magonia: What YA should be like – Readers’ average rating: Magonia by Maria Dahvana Headley Come for the wonderful voice (and attitude) of Aza Ray, the teenage narrator. Stay for a suspenseful plot, vivid characters, and fantastical worldbuilding. Magonia (2015) is one of those books that, while still partway through the sample, I knew I wanted to buy. It’s difficult to create a truly original character voice, but Maria Dahvana Headley pulls it off with Aza Ray. She even pulls it off again…
A friend of mine complained the other day on Facebook (in a joking context, but knowing his politics he was semi-serious) about not getting anything for his rates (city taxes).
This is an otherwise highly intelligent man who drives every day on roads that are not flooded, not full of potholes, and not wandered by stray dogs, leading past buildings that are earthquake-safe, food businesses that won’t give him food poisoning, well-stocked libraries, well-kept parks, clean public toilets, thousands of street trees, and well-used community centres, to give a non-exhaustive list of what he gets for his rates.
The thing is, unless you’ve worked in among that infrastructure, as I have, it tends to be invisible. Nobody thinks about stormwater until it’s flooding their house – nobody, that is, except the stormwater engineers whose daily job is to stop it from flooding your house.
As soon as you see “autonomous wheelchair” you think, “Well, of course.”
Originally shared by Wayne Radinsky
“Lidar-equipped autonomous wheelchairs roll out in Singapore and Japan.” The first is the Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology, or SMART wheelchair. “The robot’s computer uses data from three lidars to make a map. A localization algorithm then determines where the smart chair is on the map. The chair’s six wheels lend stability, and the chair is designed to make tight turns and fit through normal-size doorframes.”
“A second autonomous wheelchair recently premiered at Haneda Airport in Tokyo, designed by Panasonic and Whill, creator of the Model A Whill wheelchair, a sleek, high-tech wheelchair now on the market in Japan and the United States.”
There’s a great short story by Paolo Bacigalupi called “The Gambler” about this exact phenomenon of “news” being diluted and diverted from stories that actually matter by the economics of clickbaiting.
“The real story in this mess is not the threat that algorithms pose to Amazon shoppers, but the threat that algorithms pose to journalism. By forcing reporters to optimize every story for clicks, not giving them time to check or contextualize their reporting, and requiring them to race to publish follow-on articles on every topic, the clickbait economics of online media encourage carelessness and drama. This is particularly true for technical topics outside the reporter’s area of expertise.”
“And reporters have no choice but to chase clicks. Because Google and Facebook have a duopoly on online advertising, the only measure of success in publishing is whether a story goes viral on social media. Authors are evaluated by how individual stories perform online, and face constant pressure to make them more arresting. Highly technical pieces are farmed out to junior freelancers working under strict time limits. Corrections, if they happen at all, are inserted quietly through ‘ninja edits’ after the fact.”
“There is no real penalty for making mistakes, but there is enormous pressure to frame stories in whatever way maximizes page views. Once those stories get picked up by rival news outlets, they become ineradicable. The sheer weight of copycat coverage creates the impression of legitimacy. As the old adage has it, a lie can get halfway around the world while the truth is pulling its boots on.”
The Man Who Was Thursday was one of the inspirations for my City of Masks. Like most of Chesterton’s stuff, it’s odd, but oddly compelling.
This is a good review, from someone who isn’t afraid of a complex sentence.
Originally shared by Kate Sherrod
G.K. Chesterton’s THE MAN WHO WAS THURSDAY
Mention Gilbert Keith Chesterton to most people nowadays, and they’ll probably know him as the author of the Father Brown mysteries and not much else (unless you’re mentioning him to Roman Catholics, who might know him for a lot of excellent apologetics for…
A thing I plan to participate in. It accepts reprint stories formerly published in professional venues, and runs a “pay what you think it’s worth” setup, with the bulk of the revenues going to the author.
Interesting bit in this piece: the EU is working on legislation to enable citizens to demand an explanation of an algorithmic decision made about them.
Someone’s been reading their Kafka, and taking the lessons to heart.
