The Evolution of the Modern Book: Understanding the Future of the Printed Word in the Context of Fine Printing Presses and Artist’s Books

In this digital age, it is easy to predict that print is dead and soon people will be reading nothing but e-books. I wanted to explore the world of fine printing presses and artists’ books, where print is still very much alive, to see what this sector thinks about the future of the physical book. I visited several fine presses and book artists in Northern California and England, as well as some libraries with unique examples of these kinds of books. I read books and articles about the place of the physical book in today’s society. My initial thought was that people who are involved in the process of making books that are works of art will feel very strongly about e-books and the encroachment of technology into the printed world. However, I found a much more varied response than I was expecting: after the press visits and reading relevant literature, there is no overwhelming outcry against e-books from those who love the physical book. Rather, some who spend their lives with books have realized the benefits of e-books and have embraced their possibilities, while others see fine press books and e-books coexisting side by side indefinitely because of their vast disparities. While it does very well to start the research in rare book rooms and fine printing presses, eventually the knowledge gathered in these places must transcend the academic sphere into the everyday one so that the twenty-first century world of publishing maintains a balance between print and digital

Consumer Psychology and the Problem of Fine Print Fraud

This Article investigates consumers\u27 beliefs about contracts that are formed as a result of fraud. Across four studies, we asked lay survey respondents to judge scenarios in which sellers use false representations to induce consumers to buy products or services. In each case, the false representations are directly contradicted by the written terms of the contract, which the consumers sign without reading. Our findings reveal that lay respondents, unlike legally trained respondents, believe that such agreements are consented to and will be enforced as written, despite the seller\u27s material deception. Importantly, fine print discourages consumers from wanting to take legal action, initiate complaints, or damage the deceptive firm\u27s reputation by telling others what happened. We find that the presence of deception during the contract formation process has little effect on consumers\u27 beliefs about whether the contract will be or should be enforced as written. While informing consumers about anti deception consumer protection laws can alter their perceptions of fine-print fraud, we find that such information does not completely counteract the psychological effect of the fine print

animal

Animal is a compilation of information collected from watching surgeries, dissecting cadavers, reading physiology books, and contemplating how we understand and research the human body through art and science. This is a series of woodblock print collages that investigates what makes us human and keeps us alive. These prints probe the complex interplay of tissues that keep our diaphragms contracting and hearts beating.Master of Fine Arts (MFA)School of Art & DesginUniversity of Michiganhttp://deepblue.lib.umich.edu/bitstream/2027.42/91759/1/2012_Lilleston_MFA_Thesis.pd

A Dual-Route Approach to Orthographic Processing

In the present theoretical note we examine how different learning constraints, thought to be involved in optimizing the mapping of print to meaning during reading acquisition, might shape the nature of the orthographic code involved in skilled reading. On the one hand, optimization is hypothesized to involve selecting combinations of letters that are the most informative with respect to word identity (diagnosticity constraint), and on the other hand to involve the detection of letter combinations that correspond to pre-existing sublexical phonological and morphological representations (chunking constraint). These two constraints give rise to two different kinds of prelexical orthographic code, a coarse-grained and a fine-grained code, associated with the two routes of a dual-route architecture. Processing along the coarse-grained route optimizes fast access to semantics by using minimal subsets of letters that maximize information with respect to word identity, while coding for approximate within-word letter position independently of letter contiguity. Processing along the fined-grained route, on the other hand, is sensitive to the precise ordering of letters, as well as to position with respect to word beginnings and endings. This enables the chunking of frequently co-occurring contiguous letter combinations that form relevant units for morpho-orthographic processing (prefixes and suffixes) and for the sublexical translation of print to sound (multi-letter graphemes)

The ‘No-reading’ and Consent in Online Consumer Standard Form Contracting

Like transactions in the paper world, online consumer transactions are dominated by standard form contract terms. The online era has brought with it various mechanisms of entry into agreements, including shrink wrap, click wrap and browse wrap agreements. With increasing alacrity, consumers are mouse-clicking their way into standard form contracts on the internet. A major challenge with the otherwise called  online contracts  of adhesion  is the perception that consumers do  not often read or understand the fine-print terms and this makes it difficult to identify the requisite “meeting of the minds” or “mutual assent” of contract formation. When confronted by a lengthy and incomprehensible standard form contract, the response of many, if not most, consumers is to click “yes”’ – without reading the contract or giving it careful consideration. The paper examines how case law responds to the issues of no-reading and assent in an online consumer standard form environment. The paper recommends some practical guides for implementation of technique of legal agreements in the light of case law. Keywords: consumer, standard form contract, terms and conditions, no-reading, assent DOI: 10.7176/EJBM/11-17-02 Publication date:June 30th 201

Editorialising practices, competitive marketablility and James Thomson's 'The seasons'

The lapse of Andrew Millar's copyright for James Thomson's The Seasons in 1765 resulted in an increasing number of new editions of the poem being published in the late eighteenth century. This article compares the print-cultural make-ups of three editions of The Seasons that were issued in the 1790s. An examination of the print-cultural differences between these publishing ventures reveals distinct editorial practices and marketing strategies. In an attempt to increase the attractiveness of their editions with visual and textual paraphernalia, the producers developed their own versions' of The Seasons and, in the process, fashioned new interpretations of Thomson's poem

Less Than I Wanted To Know: Why Do Ben-Shahar and Schneider Attack Only \u27Mandated\u27 Disclosure?

This essay responds to a new book by Omri Ben Shahar and Carl E. Schneider, entitled MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW: THE FAILURE OF MANDATED DISCLOSURE (Princeton, 2014). The book is an elaborate disclosure of why disclosure fails. It is hard to disagree with the fact that widespread deficits in consumer reading, understanding and decisionmaking undermine the efficacy of disclosures, and the book provides plenty of data to show this. But the authors do not much confront the fact that many mandates for disclosures are a response to what happens when firms are free to design their own fine print. The same consumer decisionmaking deficits the authors here elaborate exist when the disclosure (allegedly contractual) is created by private firms; and firms take advantage of those deficits. If mandated disclosure is abandoned, as the authors recommend, do the authors think recipients of bad boilerplate should just be on their own? The authors did not consider that question as part of their project in this book

Less Than I Wanted To Know: Why Do Ben-Shahar and Schneider Attack Only \u27Mandated\u27 Disclosure?

This essay responds to a new book by Omri Ben Shahar and Carl E. Schneider, entitled MORE THAN YOU WANTED TO KNOW: THE FAILURE OF MANDATED DISCLOSURE (Princeton, 2014). The book is an elaborate disclosure of why disclosure fails. It is hard to disagree with the fact that widespread deficits in consumer reading, understanding and decisionmaking undermine the efficacy of disclosures, and the book provides plenty of data to show this. But the authors do not much confront the fact that many mandates for disclosures are a response to what happens when firms are free to design their own fine print. The same consumer decisionmaking deficits the authors here elaborate exist when the disclosure (allegedly contractual) is created by private firms; and firms take advantage of those deficits. If mandated disclosure is abandoned, as the authors recommend, do the authors think recipients of bad boilerplate should just be on their own? The authors did not consider that question as part of their project in this book

Pre-Trained Language Models Augmented with Synthetic Scanpaths for Natural Language Understanding

Human gaze data offer cognitive information that reflects natural language comprehension. Indeed, augmenting language models with human scanpaths has proven beneficial for a range of NLP tasks, including language understanding. However, the applicability of this approach is hampered because the abundance of text corpora is contrasted by a scarcity of gaze data. Although models for the generation of human-like scanpaths during reading have been developed, the potential of synthetic gaze data across NLP tasks remains largely unexplored. We develop a model that integrates synthetic scanpath generation with a scanpath-augmented language model, eliminating the need for human gaze data. Since the model's error gradient can be propagated throughout all parts of the model, the scanpath generator can be fine-tuned to downstream tasks. We find that the proposed model not only outperforms the underlying language model, but achieves a performance that is comparable to a language model augmented with real human gaze data. Our code is publicly available.Comment: Pre-print for EMNLP 202