Archive for May, 2014
The Jellyfish Brothers
Fun music! Takes me back to my high school and college years late 80s to early 90s!
Metamorphosis of Ortega into Somoza
With each manipulation of the Nicaraguan constitution by Ortega and the Sandinista party, I feel a deep sadness for the impoverished country. I am also dumbfounded at the short-sightedness of the ruling party and the ignorant avarice of Daniel Ortega who will not hand over the political reigns of the country to a new generation. Prosperity has been illusive to this small country that has suffered a long-lasting dictatorship, natural disaster, a popular revolution and seemingly inherent political corruption. If only a true leader would emerge who seeks an end to corruption and the engineering of a society striving for the well-being of all its people. Unfortunately, since the Nicaraguan National Assembly elected to eliminate presidential term limits, an end to poverty and corruption appears as distant as the worst period of the Somoza dynasty. Ortega has effectively become Somoza.
AccioBook – Young Adult Book Finding Site Is Live
AccioBook is a Hunter Honors Thesis Project by Cialina Ngo
Hunter Honors student Cialina Ngo has completed her honor’s thesis – “AccioBook” a book discovery website built on WordPress to discover and learn about young adult literature. What is significant about this literature site is that Cialina along with other editors has created a taxonomy for the site based on the reading of the books and careful consideration of how a book may be indexed and easily found by the site’s users.
As Cialina describes the project:
Unlike other book discovery websites that are based on algorithms, my website will be based on metadata created by a human who has actually read the book. AccioBook will be similar in format to Pandora. Users will be given a list of recommendations based on the title of a book that they recently enjoyed. The list of recommendations will be based on a database of metadata. I will develop a database of book metadata based on plot, characterization, setting, and romance using approximately 100 young adult novels.