Entries by anne

Silicon Valley: Creator of a Modern Dystopia?

At my local book club last week, we mused on the fact that one person’s utopia is another person’s dystopia (the club met to scrutinize my novel, which is a dystopia set late in the 21st century). So it’s apposite that Rebecca Solnit should write …

What Motivates Us To Get Up For Work Every Day?

via blog.bufferapp.com In developing the main character, Jayna, in A Calculated Life, I needed to understand more about the nature of emotion, and how emotion differs from feeling. I found enlightenment in Antonio Damasio’s Looking for Spinoza: Jo…

Ugly Fonts Help Proofreading: M J Hyland

via writing.ie Here’s a great tip from MJ Hyland, author of This is How and lecturer in creative writing at The University of Manchester. In a nutshell, she says: Printing off your text in an ugly font will make mistakes show up more clearly. The …

Severn Estuary ‘Wrong Place to Start’ with Tidal

One of the world’s biggest tidal energy turbines being prepared for deployment in Scotland. A Royal Society report says we’re underestimating the amount of electricity that could be generated from tidal sources, says Matt McGrath BBC Environment c…

Authors Tempted to Switch to Self-Publishing

via futurebook.net I didn’t notice this (staggeringly interesting) story in the run up to Christmas and I reckon it’s worth resurrecting. According to the Digital Census by Futurebook, almost half the traditionally published authors responding to …

Climate Change Sceptics – Media Analysis

The Green Alliance blog carried this assessment of media scepticism on climate change in a guest post by James Painter of the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism. In summary: Right wing newspapers in the UK are promoting climate change s…