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For example, they want to be online “books,” “editions,” “encyclopedias,” “bookshelves,” “libraries,” “archives,” “repositories” or (a newer metaphor) “portals.” Such structures are supposed to make intuitive the relation between individual documents and other documents. But, frankly, many of those structures didn’t work too well even in the golden age of print. (Show me one person who has made a serendipitous discovery while wandering the library stacks, and I will show you a thousand whose eyes glazed over at the sheer anomie, inefficiency, and meaninglessness of it all.) They especially don’t work well now when stretched to describe online technologies that actually behave nothing like a book, edition, library and so on. My group thinks that Web 2.0 offers a different kind of metaphor: not a containing structure but a social experience. Reading environments should not be books or libraries. They should be like the historical coffeehouses, taverns and pubs where one shifts flexibly between focused and collective reading — much like opening a newspaper and debating it in a more socially networked version of the current New York Times Room for Debate. The future of peripheral attention is social networking, and the trick is to harness such attention — some call it distraction — well.

Electronic reading has become progressively easier as computer screens have improved and readers have grown accustomed to using them. Still, people read more slowly on screen, by as much as 20-30 percent. Fifteen or 20 years ago, electronic reading also impaired comprehension compared to paper, but those differences have faded in recent studies.

Each young reader has to fashion an entirely new “reading circuit” afresh every time. There is no one neat circuit just waiting to unfold. This means that the circuit can become more or less developed depending on the particulars of the learner: e.g., instruction, culture, motivation, educational opportunity. Equally interesting, this tabula rasa circuit is shaped by the particular requirements of the writing system: for example, Chinese reading circuits require more visual memory than alphabets. This “open architecture” of the reading circuit makes the young reader’s developing circuit malleable to what the medium (e.g., digital online reading, book, etc) emphasizes.

The idea that this world we are building is somehow diminishing communication is all wrong. In fact, it's enhancing communication. It is allowing all kinds of new language.

The Takahashi method is a technique of producing slides for presentations. It is similar to the Lessig method of presentations (credited to professor Lawrence Lessig of Stanford). It is named for its inventor, Masayoshi Takahashi. Unlike a typical presentation, no picture and no charts are used. Only a few words are printed on each slide-- often only one or two short words, using very large characters. To make up for this, a presenter will use of many more slides than in a traditional presentation, each slide being shown for a much shorter duration.

A significant advantage of OLED displays over traditional liquid crystal displays (LCDs) is that OLEDs do not require a backlight to function. Thus, they can display deep black levels, draw far less power, and can be much thinner and lighter than an LCD panel. OLED displays also naturally achieve much higher contrast ratio than LCD monitors

The biggest technical problem for OLEDs is the limited lifetime of the organic materials.[44] In particular, blue OLEDs historically have had a lifetime of around 14,000 hours (five years at 8 hours a day) when used for flat-panel displays, which is lower than the typical lifetime of LCD, LED or PDP technology—each currently rated for about 60,000 hours, depending on manufacturer and model. However, some manufacturers of OLED displays claim to have come up with a way to solve this problem with a new technology to increase the lifespan of OLED displays, pushing their expected life past that of LCD displays.[45] A metal membrane helps deliver light from polymers in the substrate throughout the glass surface more efficiently than current OLEDs. The result is the same picture quality with half the brightness and a doubling of the screen's expected life.[46] In 2007, experimental OLEDs were created which can sustain 400 cd/m² of luminance for over 198,000 hours for green OLEDs and 62,000 hours for blue OLEDs.[47] Additionally, as consequence of the fact that light emitting components of different colors have different lifetimes, it's obvious that the quality of a color picture would degrade over time since emission of each color reduces by a different amount. At some point color picture quality would become unacceptable, so overall display lifetime could be even worse than lifetime of separate components because many uses are putting certain requirements on picture quality. This can be partially avoided by adjusting color balance but this may require advanced control circuits and interaction with user, which is unacceptable for some uses. The intrusion of water into displays can damage or destroy the organic materials. Therefore, improved sealing processes are important for practical manufacturing and may limit the longevity of more flexible displays.[48]

Moore estimates plastic debris—most of it smaller than a fifth of an inch (five millimeters)—is "dispersed over millions of square miles of ocean and miles' deep in the water column.

Pollutants also become more concentrated as animals eat other contaminated animals—which could be bad news for us, the animals at the top of the food chain.

Plastic hits marine creatures with a double whammy, Moore said. Along with the toxic chemicals released from the breakdown of plastic, animals also take in other chemicals that the plastic has accumulated from outside sources in the water.

When different types of plastics are melted together they tend to phase-separate, like oil and water, and set in these layers. The phase boundaries cause structural weakness in the resulting material, meaning that polymer blends are only useful in limited applications.

The music industry whines like little babies - they spent HUNDREDS OF MILLIONS pushing their locked format that NO ONE WANTED. They spent HUNDREDS of MILLIONS trying to create a locked CD that could be defeated by a marker or resulted in a class action lawsuit. NO ONE will buy a TIME INC tablet or a CONDE NAST tablet to read digital versions of the magazine ... they have to come up something better. First of all, they can't even figure put how to get around postage increases or the fact the newstand has changed in 100 years - all they do is complain that they miss a world where only magazines could print in color or 25% of American read LIFE - it's a new world - get used to it. INNOVATE and stop WHINING. Coming up with your own tablet is NOT innovation - that's like coming up with a leather jacket for a print magazine. THINK more and cry less.