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Here is a McGraw-Hill Warning for Authors and Content Providers

In this WordPunk blog, we bluntly talk about the publishing industry, and on being an author, and how to value your work and why you must get paid on time.  Publishers don’t like authors and content providers to talk about contractual specifics because they prefer boilerplate contracts where everybody is paid the same — and nobody should ever blindly sign a boilerplate contract “as is” because there are always protections you need to ask for, and enforce, as an author and content provider that are not included in a boilerplate publisher’s contract.

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Will Bloggers Spread Egyptian News?

A government exists to serve the people it represents, not to oppress that people and to stifle any kind of information exchange that might benefit said people in any way. So it has been in Egypt where, after protesters got together and started angrily demanding that their president step down, the government started shutting down communication with the outside world — from making use of their own internet ‘kill’ switch, blocking access to the internet to normal citizens to completely shutting down mobile cell phone service.

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How Reading Creates Empathy

We read to experience what we do not know.  We write to share what we think we understand.  Learning and sharing constructs leads to literacy and thus begins the formative memes of a shared, and cogent, morality.

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The iEtherpad Review

Sometimes I read something that I wrote weeks ago, or even months or years ago, and I try to remember the writing process — how did I get from the original thought to the finished article? What kind of editing went on while I was writing the article — was it a smooth one take article or did I rewrite and rewrite passage after passage?

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The Functionally Illiterate Governor

David Paterson is the legally blind, outgoing, Governor of the Great State of New York.  He was an abject failure as Eliot Sptizer’s replacement and the residents of New York have been biding their time until he finally disappears from office in the dark of night.

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Leaping from the Continent: Hecuba, Howard Stein and the Last Wehrmacht Push

December 16, 1944, was the last date in history when the United States had its military backbone broken on the battlefield — and then miraculously repaired — all in the span of six, torturous, days.  The last great push of the Wehrmacht to turn the tide of the war one, final, time forever — became infamously known as “The Battle of the Bulge” named for the way the Nazi Army pressed against the Allied lines to “bulge” the defense to the point of bursting — and it is no secret the Allies almost lost WWII right there in those muddy, frozen, trenches.

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Amazon Sells Stolen Gutenberg Books

I remember when I first read about the Gutenberg Project and the many free books that they were giving away. People volunteer for tasks ranging from recording audio versions of the public domain books, entering the text from scans of the books as well as proofreading the books.

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The Sworn City: Thin Blue Line Gets Thinner in Newark

On Tuesday, the city of Newark unconscionably laid off 167 police officers.  That is a stunning amount of shields no longer protecting a killing urban core and we are immediately propelled back to the death days of August 2007 and Murder at Ivy Hill.

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WordPrescience.com is now WordPunk.com!

Owning domain names is one of the few, joyous, pleasures of life.  You have an idea.  You try to congeal that notion into a memorable .com domain — and you always try to then give those ideas a good home.  Today, I am both sad and delighted to share some news with you about my WordPrescience.com domain.

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How to Have a Gentle Thanksgiving

If you want to have a healthy and cruelty-free Thanksgiving — please consider Going Gentle this year.  You can celebrate life instead of biting dead bodies.

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