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Machine Poetry with Feeling

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Researchers at the University of Colorado (UC)- Colorado Springs and Drury University have recently developed a unique language generation system that they claim can produce creative poetry verses infused with emotion. The project focused "more on the content, emotion and creativity of the text, as opposed to the structure or rhythm found in prior poetry generation studies." Combing through large text repositories like Project Gutenberg the researchers looked for words included in EmoLex, an emotion-lexicon dataset developed by the National Research Council of Canada. They also fed the machine  "a combination of dream data and poetry to create what is...

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A night school for working kids in Pakistan

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Founded by Mohammad Rohayl Varind in 2016 Slum School (Slum cleverly stands for Students Learning Under the Moon) is Pakistan's first solar powered night school. There are 23 million kids that do not go to school in Pakistan, many of whom work during the day! Varind's goal is to educate the underprivileged in hopes of one day winning the war against poverty, illiteracy & terrorism. The entire experience is solar powered with classes starting after sunset. Varind teaches the kids English, Urdu, math, and science with a little ethics and etiquette mixed in. Slum School does not purport to take...

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Reading Jane Eyre: All 594 translations in 57 languages

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The project is called Prismatic Jane Eyre and is the brain child of University of Oxford professor Matthew Reynolds. In collaboration with an international team of more than two dozen scholars they dove deep into the publishing history of Charlotte Brontë’s classic 1847 novel, Jane Eyre. Why Jane Eyre? Says Reynolds: The more I thought about and re-read Jane Eyre, the more it came to seem the perfect book for the kind of exploration I wanted to make. It was full of contradictions that were likely to play out differently in different places, times and tongues.  It was a powerfully...

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Here comes Bookshop.org!

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Have we reached the tipping point? Could this finally be the viable independent alternative to Amazon? Have we accepted the reality that cheap and fast does not equal healthy and does little to foster community sustainability? A tall order for sure but the timing might be a bit better than past efforts to compete against the Godzilla of bookselling. Enter Bookshop.org: Bookshop is an online bookstore with a mission to financially support independent bookstores and give back to the book community. We believe that bookstores are essential to a healthy culture of readers and writers. They’re where authors can connect...

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The Cost of Reading in Prison: In West Virginia it’s 5 cents a minute

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It is hard to fathom how they got here but the West Virginia Division of Corrections and Rehabilitation is charging inmates to read! As part of their contract with a private company inmates are provided "free" tablets in which they can access Project Gutenberg, an emporium of free, public domain texts. Sounds great right? Well, seems like free ain't free. From the Appalachian Prison Book Project: The per-minute charge will bring in far more profit than an e-book vendor who charges a set price for downloads, as the cost to read a book far exceeds the cost to purchase one....

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