In the book, Shirky recounts how social tools such as blogging software like WordPress and Twitter, file sharing platforms like Flickr, and online collaboration platforms like Wikipedia support group conversation and group action in a way that previously could only be achieved through institutions. In the same way the printing press increased individual expression, and the telephone increased communications between individuals, Shirky argues that with the advent of online social tools, groups can form without the previous restrictions of time and cost. Shirky observes that: "[Every] institution lives in a kind of contradiction: it exists to take advantage of group effort, but some of its resources are drained away by directing that effort. Call this the institutional dilemma--because an institution expends resources to manage resources, there is a gap between what those institutions are capable of in theory and in practice, and the larger the institution, the greater those costs." Online social tools, Shirky argues, allow groups to form around activities &#39;whose costs are higher than the potential value,&#39; for institutions. Shirky further argues that the successful creation of online groups relies on successful fusion of a, &#39;plausible promise, an effective tool, and an acceptable bargain for the user.&#39; However, Shirky warns that this system should not be interpreted as a recipe for the successful use of social tools as the interaction between the components is too complex. Shirky also discusses the possibility of &#34;mass amateurization&#34; that the internet allows. With blogging and photo-sharing websites, anyone can publish an article or photo that they have created. This creates a mass amateurization of journalism and photography, requiring a new definition of what credentials make someone a journalist, photographer, or news reporter. This mass amateurization threatens to change the way news is spread throughout different media outlets.

Here Comes Everybody

The story takes place in China during the Down to the Countryside Movement of the late 1960s and early 1970s. The unnamed narrator and the chess master Wang Yisheng are two young intellectuals among many who are sent to a remote farm in the mountains to work. During the train ride to the mountains, Wang Yisheng and his friend talk about how he learned to play Chinese chess, and how he evolved his current strategy. Wang Yisheng tells his friend that his family was very poor, and his mother did not want him to be such a chess maniac, since chess could not earn money. However, Wang Yisheng was very devoted to chess. One day, while gathering garbage to sell, Wang Yisheng meets an old man who is a chess master. Using the principles of Daoism, the old man teaches Wang everything he knows about chess. Wang Yisheng also tells his friend about how his mother always disapproved of his chess habit, but before she died, she painstakingly made him a chess set out of discarded toothbrush handles, because she knew how much he loved chess. The two friends then debark the train and head their separate ways to different farms in the countryside. A couple months later, Wang Yisheng takes a vacation and visits his friend in the mountains. One of the narrator''s friends at the farm, Legballs, happens to be a good chess player. Legballs is very impressed with Wang''s ability, and the two become good friends. After a while of working at the farm, there is a local festival with a chess tournament. The narrator, Legballs, and their friends all take a vacation to attend the festival. Wang Yisheng arrives too late to enter the official chess tournament, but he challenges the winners to an unofficial match after the tournament is over. Word spreads of his challenge, and many people decide to challenge him. He ends up playing 9 people at once without any chess boards in front of him (effectively playing blind), and he beats most of them easily. He eventually defeats the winner of the official tournament, an old man. zh:棋王 (阿城小说)

The Chess Master

Paula Power inherits a medieval castle from her industrialist father who has purchased it from the aristocratic De Stancy family. She employs two architects, one local and one, George Somerset, newly qualified from London. Somerset represents modernity in the novel. In the village there is an amateur photographer, William Dare, who is the illegitimate son of Captain De Stancy, an impoverished scion of the family. Captain De Stancy represents a dream of medieval nobility to Paula. She is attracted to both men for their different virtues but William Dare decides to intervene to promote his father in her affections. He fakes the telegram and photograph to make it appear Somerset is leading a dissolute lifestyle. His subterfuge is discovered by Captain De Stancy''s sister Charlotte who has befriended Paula. She decides to tell Paula the truth and Paula pursues Somerset to the continent where he has gone mistakenly believing Paula and the Captain to have been married. She finds him and they are reunited and marry. The castle burns down and Somerset proposes to build a modern house in its place. The last line has Paula summing up her dichotomy of mind between modernity and romantic medievalism, and thus the two men, also emphasising the title "a Laodicean" (someone indifferent or half-hearted) — "I wish my castle wasn''t burnt; and I wish you were a De Stancy!"

A Laodicean

10-year-old Mandy White is mercilessly tormented at school by three classmates: Kim, Melanie and Sarah. After an incident where she is nearly hit by a bus while crossing a road to avoid the bullies, she is kept at home from school and meets Tanya, a lively older girl being fostered by Mandy''s next door neighbour. Despite disapproval from Mandy''s elderly mother, who is very overprotective of her and treats her as if she were much younger, the girls become fast friends. They dream of a future where they will be older and independent, free from families and foster homes, and can live together and have fantastic adventures. Mandy becomes afraid when she discovers that Tanya is a frequent shoplifter, but decides not to say anything in case they are forbidden from visiting each other. At the end of the book, Tanya and Mandy are caught by police when Tanya steals from an upmarket clothing shop in town. Mandy''s mother is initially angry, but realises she has been too strict with her and allows her to get new glasses and restyle her hair so she won''t look quite as childish. Mandy also gains a new friend in Arthur, a shy boy in her class who is obsessed with fantasy stories. She greatly misses Tanya, who was taken to a new foster home when her previous criminal convictions were discovered, but the novel ends on a happy note as Tanya (who has dyslexia and hates writing) has with great difficulty written a letter to Mandy, assuring her that they are best friends forever and will one day be free to see each other again as they had dreamed about. Melanie, who in the past was Mandy''s friend but had become friends with Kim and Sarah, becomes friends with her again. Tanya makes a brief appearance in another of Jacqueline Wilson''s novels, Dustbin Baby.

Bad Girls

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe opens in a small, isolated Georgia town. The story introduces Miss Smith, a strong character of both body and mind, who is approached by a hunchbacked man with only a suitcase in hand who claims to be of kin. When Miss Smith, whom the townspeople see as a calculating woman who never acts without reason, takes the stranger into her home, rumors begin to circulate that Miss Smith has only done so to take what the hunchback had in his suitcase. When the rumors hit their peak, a group of eight men come to her store, sitting outside on the steps for the day and waiting to see if something would happen. Finally, they enter the store all at once and are stunned to see that the hunchback is actually alive and well. With everyone gathered inside, Miss Amelia brings out some liquor and crackers in hospitality, which further shocks the men, as they have never witnessed Miss Amelia be hospitable enough to allow drinking inside her home. This is essentially the beginning of the café. Miss Amelia and the hunchback, Cousin Lymon, unintentionally create a new tradition for the town, and the people gather inside at the café on Sunday evenings often until midnight. It is apparent, though surprising, to the townspeople that Miss Amelia has fallen in love with Cousin Lymon, and has begun to change slightly as time progresses. When the townspeople see this, they relate it to another odd incident in which Miss Amelia was also involved: the issue of her ten-day marriage. Miss Amelia had been married to a man named Marvin Macy, who was a vicious and cruel character before meeting and falling in love with her. He changed his ways and became good-natured, but reverted back to his old self when his love was rejected after a failed ten-day marriage in which he gave up everything he possessed in hopes of having her return his affections. He broke out into a rage, committing a string of felonies before being caught and locked up in the state penitentiary. When he was released, he returned to the town with the full intention of ruining Miss Amelia''s life the way she ruined his. Upon his return, he takes advantage of Cousin Lymon''s admiration for him, as he views Macy as a true man, and uses him to crush Miss Amelia''s heart, ransack the café, steal her curios and money, and leave Miss Amelia alone by taking Cousin Lymon along with him as he disappears from town. The novella ends with The Twelve Mortal Men, which is a brief passage of twelve men in a chain-gang, whose actions outline that of what happened in the lonely rural town, and highlights the themes of loneliness and isolation.

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

Clifford Stoll (the author) managed some computers at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory in California. One day, in August 1986, his supervisor (Dave Cleveland) asked him to resolve a USD$ 0.75 accounting error in the computer usage accounts. He traced the error to an unauthorized user who had apparently used up 9 seconds of computer time and not paid for it, and eventually realized that the unauthorized user was a cracker who had acquired root access to the LBL system by exploiting a vulnerability in the movemail function of the original GNU Emacs. Over the next ten months, Stoll spent a great deal of time and effort tracing the hacker''s origin. He saw that the hacker was using a 1200 baud connection and realized that the intrusion was coming through a telephone modem connection. Stoll''s colleagues, Paul Murray and Lloyd Bellknap, helped with the phone lines. Over the course of a long weekend he rounded up fifty terminals, mostly by "borrowing" them from the desks of co-workers away for the weekend, and teleprinters and physically attached them to the fifty incoming phone lines. When the hacker dialed in that weekend, Stoll located the phone line, which was coming from the Tymnet routing service. With the help of Tymnet, he eventually tracked the intrusion to a call center at MITRE, a defense contractor in McLean, Virginia. Stoll, after returning his "borrowed" terminals, left a teleprinter attached to the intrusion line in order to see and record everything the cracker did. Stoll recorded the hacker''s actions as he sought, and sometimes gained, unauthorized access to military bases around the United States, looking for files that contained words such as "nuclear" or "SDI". The hacker also copied password files (in order to make dictionary attacks) and set up Trojan horses to find passwords. Stoll was amazed that on many of these high-security sites the hacker could easily guess passwords, since many system administrators never bothered to change the passwords from their factory defaults. Even on army bases, the hacker was sometimes able to log in as "guest" with no password. Over the course of this investigation, Stoll contacted various agents at the FBI, CIA, NSA, and Air Force OSI. Since this was almost the first documented case of hacking (Stoll seems to have been the first to keep a daily log book of the hacker''s activity), there was some confusion as to jurisdiction and a general reluctance to share information. Studying his log book, Stoll saw that the hacker was familiar with VMS, as well as AT&T Unix. He also noted that the hacker tended to be active around the middle of the day, Pacific time. Stoll hypothesized that since modem bills are cheaper at night, and most people have school or a day job and would only have a lot of free time for hacking at night, the hacker was in a time zone some distance to the east. With the help of Tymnet and various agents from various agencies, Stoll eventually found that the intrusion was coming from West Germany via satellite. The Deutsche Bundespost, the German post office, also had authority over the phone system, and they traced the calls to a university in Bremen. In order to entice the hacker to reveal himself, Stoll set up an elaborate hoax (known today as a honeypot), inventing a new department at LBL that had supposedly been newly formed because of an imaginary SDI contract. He knew the hacker was mainly interested in SDI, so he filled the "SDInet" account (operated by the imaginary secretary Barbara Sherwin) with large files full of impressive-sounding bureaucratese. The ploy worked, and the Deutsche Bundespost finally located the hacker at his home in Hanover. The hacker''s name was Markus Hess, and he had been engaged for some years in selling the results of his hacking to the Soviet KGB. There was ancillary proof of this when a Hungarian spy contacted the fictitious SDInet at LBL by mail, based on information he could only have obtained through Hess (apparently this was the KGB''s method of double-checking to see if Hess was just making up the information he was selling them). Stoll later had to fly to Germany to testify at the trial of Hess and a confederate.

The Cuckoo''s Egg

Freedom blends the narrative recounting of actual historical events with fictional events invented by the author. Freedom traces political and military developments over the period from May, 1861 to January 1, 1863, from the point of view of the Union. Military events in which Breckenridge participates are also shown from the Confederate "side of the hill". As Book One opens, Breckenridge is a member in good standing of the US Senate. His opposition to what he regards as Lincoln''s usurpation of power leads him to make speeches that his political opponents construe as treasonous. When the Senate adjourns, his good friend John Forney warns him that "you will follow your doctrine into the Confederate army," and in the end this is what happens. Book Two deals with the plan to invade the South along the Tennessee River. Anna Ella Carroll is portrayed as the creator of the plan, a controversial position among historians. The novel shows Carroll striving both to make the plan a success and to receive credit for it, goals that are often in tension. Book Three shows Edwin M Stanton succeeding Simon Cameron as Secretary of War with the support of General McClellan, whom he secretly intends to depose. Stanton is portrayed as dedicated to the cause of Union victory and convinced that this end justifies any and all means. (Later in the book McClellan bitterly complains that Stanton is "the most unmitigated scoundrel I ever knew, heard of, or read of," and compares him unfavorably to Judas Iscariot.) Book Four is mainly concerned with military developments—execution of the Tennessee Plan and the Confederate response to it—leading up to, and including, the Battle of Shiloh. Its shows how by both sides come to accept the doctrine that the goal of war is the destruction of the enemy''s forces; Confederate commander Albert Sidney Johnson tells Breckenridge frankly, "We deal in death." Books Five and Eight cover McClellan''s military campaigns and the efforts of his political opponents to remove him. He is portrayed as torn between his duty to do his utmost against the enemy and his desire to win the war in such a way as will induce the Southern states to return to the Union voluntarily, with slavery intact. Books Six and Seven focus on the struggle to define the role of abolition in the quest to put down the Confederate rebellion. Book Six shows the conflict that Lincoln''s thoughts about emancipation create for Salmon P. Chase, who wants to receive credit for this step himself. Book Seven describes the enlistment of black regiments in New Orleans by Union General Benjamin Butler. Butler''s thinking is summarized as "Dred Scott, denying blacks their essential humanity, would be a dead letter the moment a black man donned a blue uniform." Book Nine shows the final development of Lincoln''s decision to issue the Emancipation Proclamation. In these sections of the book, Safire generally stays as close as possible to the historical record, in particular wherever contemporaneous records of what was said, such as diaries, letters and transcripts, are available. The main fictional threads of the novel are imagined romances between Breckenridge and Carroll, between John Hay and Kate Chase and, towards the novel''s end, between Carroll and Salmon P. Chase. In each case the romance founders due to an improper political-moral decision made by one of the parties. In regard to the latter two pairings, Safire writes in the underbook, "All four surely had romantic attachments—but with other people. The purpose of making these two fictional connections is to provide a prism through which to examine their characters and a hatrack on which to hang other information, as well as to entertain the fact-laden reader and author."

Freedom

The title is Beckett''s literal translation of the French phrase, comment c''est (how it is), a pun on the French verb commencer or ''to begin''. The text is divided into three parts: 1. "before Pim" - the solitary narrator journeys in the mud-dark until he encounters another creature like himself thereby forming a "couple". 2. "with Pim" - the narrator is motionless in the mud-dark until he is abandoned by Pim. 3. "after Pim" - the narrator returns to his earlier solitude but without motion in the mud-dark. In a letter (April 6, 1960) to Donald McWhinnie at BBC Radio Drama, Beckett explained his strange text as the product of a " ''man'' lying panting in the mud and dark murmuring his ''life'' as he hears it obscurely uttered by a voice inside him... The noise of his panting fills his ears and it is only when this abates that he can catch and murmur forth a fragment of what is being stated within... It is in the third part that occurs the so-called voice ''quaqua'', its interiorisation and murmuring forth when the panting stops. That is to say the ''I'' is from the outset in the third part and the first and second, though stated as heard in the present, already over."

How It Is

Moominmamma and Moomintroll are travelling through a dark and scary forest looking for Moominpappa, who has gone off adventuring with the Hattifatteners. They meet a little creature, who joins them (in later books he is named Sniff). They use a tulip to light their way, and are attacked by a giant snake. They are saved when a beautiful young girl with shining blue hair called Tullipa comes out of the tulip and scares the snake away. They later find the home of an old man, who invites them to live in his garden, which is made entirely of sweets. However when they find out that the sun is made of shiny paper, they leave and continue their journey. Moominmamma is attacked by an ant-lion, but is rescued by the others. They then find the hattifatteners and get onto one of their boats with them. The boat does not appear to be going in any particular direction, so the group invite a sea-troll to come aboard and steer the ship. They reach land, and the hattifatteners and sea troll depart. The group goes in search for Moominpappa and find a lighthouse lived in by a red haired boy. He says that he saw Moominpappa. Moominmamma, Moomintroll and the small creature rush off to search, while Tulippa stays to live with the red haired boy. They soon find that a flood has begun, and they rescue a cat and her kittens before using a chair as a boat to search for Moominpappa. They find a message of help in a bottle from Moominpappa, and with the help of a stork, find Moominpappa stuck up a tree. They rescue him and go to dry land, however, Moominpappa is very upset that he has lost Moominhouse, which he just built for the family, as it has drifted away in the flood. They go for a walk, and in a beautiful valley, find that the blue Moominhouse has been washed up by the flood and landed there.

The Moomins and the Great Flood

Pulp is a pulp fiction novel which acts also as a meta-pulp. Pulp comments on the obsessions of the pulp fiction genre, making fun of itself as stereotypical of the genre in the grimiest form. Bukowski dedicates the story to "bad writing", as Bukowski did not plan his mystery novel well and frequently wrote Nicky Belane into holes from which he could not escape. Bukowski wrote some of his most violent, cynical, sarcastic, and shocking work during the final months of his life. Many critics have agreed this novel exemplifies Bukowski showing an acceptance of his own pending mortality. A convoluted detective story about a hard-boiled private eye who solves his cases by waiting them out, Pulp evokes Raymond Chandler, an author who lived in Los Angeles and set stories there, as did Bukowski. The novel also bears similarity to some works by Dashiell Hammett; and the name of character Nicky Belane rhymes suggestively with the name of author Mickey Spillane as well as Casablanca''s main character Rick Blaine.

Pulp

The story opens as two Nazi soldiers stop Annemarie Johansen and her friend Ellen Rosen and ask them both questions on the streets of Copenhagen. That night, Annemarie reminisces about her older sister Lise, who was hit by a car and killed (it is later revealed that the Nazis intentionally hit her). She also recalls her father seeing a boy tell a Nazi soldier about how all of Denmark is King Christian X''s bodyguard. Soon after, Peter Nielsen (who was Annemarie''s sister Lise''s fiance), a man working in the Danish Resistance, visits Annemarie and her family and tells them that the Germans have started closing Jewish stores. The next day, Ellen and her parents go to the synagogue for a Jewish holiday, but come to find out that the Nazis have demanded lists of the Danish Jews. They will use these lists to arrest and relocate the entire Jewish population. Peter takes Mr. and Mrs. Rosen with him into hiding, and Ellen Rosen (disguised as Lise) comes to live with the Johansens. In the middle of the night, Nazi soldiers arrive at the Rosens'' apartment and demand that they reveal where the Rosen family is. Annemarie rips off the Star of David necklace which belongs to Ellen to conceal her idenity of being Jewish. The Nazi soldiers become suspicious because Annemarie and Kirsti have blond hair, but Ellen has dark brown hair. Mr. Johansen retrieves baby photos of his three daughters, with their names listed, which clearly show that Lise had hair similar to Ellen''s when she was a baby. The soldiers leave. After the Nazis leave, Mr. Johansen calls his brother-in-law, Henrik, and makes encoded arrangements to bring Ellen to him. Later, Annemarie, Ellen, Mrs. Johansen, and Kirsti leave by train for Uncle Henrik''s home in Gilleleje. One peaceful day goes by at Henrik''s, then Mrs. Johansen tells the girls that their Great-aunt Birte has died and they will be having a funeral. However, Annemarie knows that Great-aunt Birte does not exist, and confronts Uncle Henrik. He explains to her that she is right, and says that it is easier to be brave when you don''t know the full truth. Many strangers arrive at Uncle Henrik''s house for the funeral, among them a rabbi and several Jewish families. A group of Nazi soldiers arrive and interrupt the funeral, and Ellen''s parents and Peter Nielsen arrive shortly after. A soldier asks her mother to open the casket. Her mother told the soldier that she would love to do so, since country doctors were not reliable, and it was only the country doctor who told them that opening the casket would spread germs because Great-aunt Birte had died from typhus. The soldier slaps her face and leaves in frustration. Peter reads the beginning of Psalm 147 to the group from the Bible, recounting the Lord God numbering the stars. Annemarie thinks that it is impossible to number the stars in the sky, and that the world is cold and very cruel like the sky or the ocean, which Mrs. Rosen is scared of. Peter opens the casket and distributes warm clothing and blankets to the Jewish families who then depart, splitting up to attract less attention. Annemarie says goodbye to Ellen. In the morning her mother realizes that a package important to the Resistance was accidentally dropped by Mr. Rosen when he tripped on a flight of stairs. Mrs. Johansen, knowing the importance of the package, gives Annemarie a basket filled with food and hides the package inside. Annemarie runs off, onto a wooded path towards her uncle''s boat. When she nears the harbor, she is stopped by German soldiers on patrol, and lies that she is merely delivering lunch to her uncle. The soldiers toss some of the food onto the ground and eventually reach the package, which they tear open, finding only a handkerchief. The German soldiers walk away. Annemarie continues onward to Uncle Henrik and gives him the package. He boards his fishing boat and leaves for Sweden. Uncle Henrik returns to Denmark later that evening and explains that the Rosens and many other Jewish people were hiding in his boat and that the handkerchief contained the scent of rabbit blood and cocaine, to attract the dogs so when they sniffed it, the cocaine would temporarily numb the German dogs'' sense of smell. Two years later, the war ends, and all of Denmark celebrates. Several revelations are made: Peter was captured and executed by the Germans. The Jews who were forced to leave Denmark return and find that their friends and neighbors have kept up their apartments in anticipation of their return. Annemarie finds out how Lise died. Before the Rosens come back, Annemarie asks her father to repair Ellen''s Star of David necklace (which had been broken off the night the Nazis broke into the apartment in order to conceal her identity), wanting to wear it herself in honor of her best friend.

Number the Stars

A few months following the events of Death Cloud, Sherlock Holmes is pleased when Mycroft comes to visit him at Holmes Manor in Hampshire, but Mycroft''s visit has a serious purpose, he has come to let Amyus Crowe know that British Intelligence suspect that John Wilkes Booth has come to England under the alias to John St. Helen. Without any encouragement from Mycroft or Amyus, Sherlock sets off to Godalming where Booth is suspected of hiding out, enlisting Matty Arnatt''s help along the way. Sherlock enters the grounds of the house in Golaming that he suspects Booth is staying in, there he is kidnapped from a brief period of time by a man whose face is scarred by fire on one side, this man may be Booth and is being aided and guarded by three fellow conspirators. Sherlock escapes with Matty''s help and immediately returns to Holmes Manor and lets Mycroft and Amyus know what happened. They are somewhat disappointed that Sherlock has let the conspirators know that they are under investigation. The next morning, the Holmes brothers visit Amyus who concludes that the conspirators will have taken flight and will be heading to America, so he needs to follow them. When they discover that the conspirators have kidnapped Matty, Amyus, Sherlock and Virginia chase them on horseback, but are unsuccessful in rescuing Matty. Given the new turn of events, it is decided that Sherlock will accompany Amyus and Virginia to America as he is the only one who knows what all the conspirators look like. Once they reach America, Sherlock locates where Matty is being held and he and Virginia follow the conspirators (and Matty) on board a train. The conspirators find Sherlock and Virginia, and after a perilous fight on the roof of the train, Sherlock is captured and the train is diverted to the headquarters of the organizer of the conspiracy, Duke Balthassar. In conversation with Balthassar, it becomes clear that the conspirators plan to invade Canada and have it become the Confederate stronghold—a plan which Sherlock is determined to foil.

Over 8000 Takeaways For Your Brain!

Read - Listen - Learn

Here Comes Everybody

By Clay Shirky

The Chess Master

By Zhong Acheng

A Laodicean

By Thomas Hardy

Bad Girls

By Jacqueline Wilson

The Ballad of the Sad Cafe

By Carson McCullers

The Cuckoo's Egg

By Clifford Stoll

Freedom

By William Safire

How It Is

By Samuel Beckett

The Moomins and the Great Flood

By Tove Jansson

Pulp

By Charles Bukowski

Number the Stars

By Lois Lowry

Red Leech

By Andy Lane