This eerily beautiful video features a computer voice reading portions of Tom Boellstorff’s Coming of Age in Second Life. Enjoy!

Even though the cover is reversed, that galley is easily recognizable as Reinventing Discovery by Michael Nielsen. We expect finished books in October, but so far most of the reactions have been, well, you can see for yourself…

Via our friends at Citizen Science Quarterly.

Talk of patents (and of patent reform) has been the hot tech topic this summer, with every outlet from “This American Life” from WBEZ (“When Patents Attack!”) to the Economist weighing in on the patent “arms race.”

Just last week, Google announced it is buying Motorola Mobility (and, by extension, Motorola’s library of an estimated 25,000 patents) for a neat $12.5 billion. Intellectual property scholars James Bessen and Michael J. Meurer, co-authors of Patent Failure: How Judges, Bureaucrats, and Lawyers Put Innovators at Risk, have been all over the news arguing that such deals don’t bode well for future innovation.

Bessen, Meurer, and their path-breaking 2008 title have been mentioned in Corporate Consul magazine, Techdirt, and the San Francisco Chronicle, just to name a few. In an article by Peter Svensson syndicated in the Washington Times, James Bessen sums up the problem, saying, “Patents have become legal weapons–they’re not representing ideas anymore.” Bessen is likewise quoted in a recent article at the Huffington Post, and his comments were picked up in a piece by Rhodri Marsden in the Independent.

If you want to be the most tech-savvy person at your Labor Day BBQ, you can read the first chapter of Patent Failure here.

Over at the Atlantic, Adam Roberts has been writing a fascinating five-part series about contemporary poetry. In the fourth part of the series, Roberts proposes that contemporary verse might take a cue from the Slow Food and other Slow movements and “help us transition away from monocultural reading habits.” He goes on to praise small presses:

In the world of literary culture, the small press is probably the closest equivalent to your local farmer’s market. (The carrots might look funnier, but, after you’re used to it, they taste about five times better.) There are tons of small presses, spread out over the country, and they’re often run at either no-profit or a loss. These are labors of love—not engaged in the production of commodities for consumption, but something closer to Lewis Hyde’s notion of “the gift.” Hand-sewn chapbooks take time to make, the poems in them take time to read, and the poets (most likely) took a lot of time to write them. Their production occurs on a smaller (and less grandiose) scale, and like the Slow Food and broader Slow Culture movement, they want to restore to us a sense of time that our current world system strips away from us. Perhaps they wouldn’t want to be in the airports, even if we let them. But they can, like the local food economy (which is growing at a spectacular rate, nationally), become viable alternatives with our support.

Princeton University Press hasn’t yet made his list of recommended small presses, but with the return of the Princeton Series of Contemporary Poets, which includes Kathleen Graber’s The Eternal City (a National Book Award finalist), and the new Facing Pages series, you can support what Roberts calls “obscure, high-brow lit”–or come spring, the cheeky offerings of Troy Jollimore’s At Lake Scugog and the lush and spiritual poems in Anthony Carelli’s debut collection Carnations!

You can (and should) read his other posts in the series here, and for more information on Slow Poetry visit the Slow Society site. Don’t forget to savor all of your reading experiences!

Dear Friends at NPR -

Finally! You’ve heard our pleas and now you’ve given readers (and book publicists everywhere) the chance to supply you with valuable feedback via this awesome comprehensive survey from today’s post on the Monkey See blog. Well done, Books Editors!

Sincerely,

PUP Publicity

This one goes out to lovers of Pantone and print. A ten-minute film about how ink is made:

Have a good weekend!

Tom Boellstorff (AKA Tom Bukowski) conducted more than two years of ethnographic field research in Second Life before writing the book Coming of Age in Second Life. Here, anthropology and religion editor, Fred Appel asks Boellstorff about the particular challenges he faced during this research project and the future of virtual worlds.

Why did you choose to conduct your research in Second Life?

In January 2004, I decided I’d begin a new research project, one that would focus on virtual worlds. I looked at the press about virtual worlds (which at that point were not nearly as numerous as they are now) and started to explore a couple of them. I actually began by spending some time on The Sims Online (which is now defunct) before trying Second Life. I found Second Life interesting because it was very open-ended, which made it easier for me to imagine doing ethnographic research there. At that point Second Life was very small, with only about 500 people maximum in the world at any one time. I had no idea it would get so much larger, with 50,000 or even 70,000 people online at once (though of course that makes it at best a “medium-sized” virtual world, since some can have millions inworld simultaneously).

What were the challenges you faced in conducting this type of research?

For the most part, it turned out that the challenges I faced in conducting this type of research were no different than conducting ethnographic research anywhere else. These were the typical problems of gaining entry to a community by really devoting the time and energy to become familiar with the community and learn its social norms and practices.

However, it’s true that virtual worlds are very different from the kinds of places most anthropologists study. Prior to my book there had been some ethnographic research on virtual worlds, but very little from anthropology and very little based on extended fieldwork. So I did have to invent my methodology as I went along, but for two reasons this wasn’t a huge issue. First, all ethnographers have to shape their data collection methods to fit their specific fieldsites, and some of this always takes place during the process of the research itself. Second, one of what I see as my most counterintuitive and important findings was that the kinds of methods ethnographers normally use in the physical world also work well in virtual-world contexts.

The book you wrote previous to Coming of Age in Second Life, The Gay Archipelago, was set in Indonesia. How did the research and writing that went into the Second Life book compare with your work on the previous book?

As I noted above, one thing that surprised me has how little I had to change in terms of the research. For instance, I decided not to use “alts,” or additional avatar accounts, in my research because when you’re doing participant observation you’re not hiding who you are—it’s okay that people know you’re an anthropologist, and that’s actually important for building trust. Since I can’t have more than one body in Indonesia, that’s not a decision I had to make with regard to research in that context! I didn’t have to fly halfway around the world to do the Second Life research, which was nice, but I soon learned that I did have to set aside a lot of time for fieldwork, just as in Indonesia.

In terms of writing, Coming of Age in Second Life is actually my third book, because I published a second monograph based upon my Indonesia research (A Coincidence of Desires, Duke University Press, 2007). I am very happy with all three of these books, but one thing about Coming of Age in Second Life is that because it was a new research project, and because I already had a tenured position and thus some job stability, I was able to write it as an organic whole. None of the chapters were published first as journal articles. In fact, if you look at the subsections of every chapter they are between 2,000 and 2,500 words—none are very long or very short. So there’s a kind of pacing to the book that I really like.

Continue reading more with Tom Boellstorff after the jump.

Next week we will launch Princeton Global Science on this blog. Hope you will join us on September 1st for original content from from our science editors and authors. More to come!

Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, tackles questions like “What problems does so-called ‘perfect digital memory’ pose?” and “What kinds of new problems could arise as our lives become archived?”

You can view shorter segments here: http://bigthink.com/viktormayerschnberger

Watch the interview and let us know what you think the future of digital memory will be — is it more peril or promise? Comments below.

Viktor Mayer-Schonberger, author of Delete: The Virtue of Forgetting in the Digital Age, and a host of other guests chime in on memory over at the SETI Institute on the program “Are We Alone?” Happy listening.