Murder Of Indigenous Child Provokes Strong Reaction
A follow up to this story, via the Boundary Sentinel:
The murder of an eight year old child from the Awa-Gwajá indigenous community, allegedly burnt alive by loggers in the state of Maranhão, Brazil, has caused outrage throughout the Internet, as well as disbelief by many in the face of such cruelty.
The Indigenous Missionary Council (CIMI) confirmed that “suspicions indicate that an attack has occurred between September and October against the camp of isolated indigenous” of the Araribóia reserve, and added more information:
The charred body was found in October 2011 in a camp abandoned by the isolated Awá, about 20 km from the Patizal village of the Tenetehara people, a region located in the municipality of Arame (Maranhão). The National Indian Foundation (FUNAI) was informed of the incident in November and no investigation of the case is ongoing.
According to Rosimeire Diniz, CIMI’s coordinator in Maranhão state, “the situation has been reported for a long time. It has…
Loggers Allegedly Burn 8-Year-Old Amazon Tribe Girl Alive
Hey, they need their jobs! Raf Sanchez reports in the Telegraph:
The child was said to have wandered away from her village, where around 60 members of the Awá tribe live in complete isolation from the modern world, and fallen into the hands of the loggers.
Luis Carlos Guajajaras, a local leader from a separate tribe, told a Brazilian news website that they tied to her a tree and set her alight as a warning to other natives, who live in a protected reserve in the north-eastern state of Maranhão .
“She was from another tribe, they live deep in the jungle, and have no contact with the outside world. It would have been the first time she had ever seen white men. We heard that they laughed as they burned her to death,” he said.
Reports of the killing, which was said to have happened in October or November last year, were seconded…
eBook Readers Live in a Different Universe of Books
Amazon’s released their list of 2011’s best-selling books, revealing that 40% of the best-selling ebooks didn’t even make it onto their list of the best-selling print books!
The #1 and #2 best-selling ebooks of the year weren’t even available in print editions, while four of the top 10 best-selling print books didn’t make it into the top 100 best-selling ebooks. “It couldn’t be more clear that Kindle owners are choosing their material from an entirely different universe of books,” notes one Kindle site, which points out that five of the best-selling ebooks came from two million-selling ebook authors — Amanda Hocking and John Locke — who are still awaiting the release of their books in print. And five of Amazon’s best-selling ebooks were Kindle-only “Singles,” including a Stephen King short story which actually outsold another King novel that he’d released in both ebook and print formats. And Neal Stephenson’s “Reamde” was Amazon’s #99 best-selling…
Alberto Villoldo On Ayahuasca
Alberto Villoldo
Disinformation’s sister video label True Mind has just released a documentary film featuring Alberto Villoldo, Amazonia: Healing With Sacred Plants. Dr. Alberto Villoldo writes for True Mind about his film:
I started out in the brain laboratory at San Francisco State University – literally surrounded by hundreds of formaldehyde preserved brains. We were studying how we develop psychosomatic disease, and how we could create psychosomatic health.
One day I realized that I had been looking out of the wrong end of the microscope, becoming caught in the minutiae of neurons and brain chemistry, and missing the larger picture of the mind. I decided to leave my lab and travelled to the Amazon, to work and study with medicine men who had no MRI’s and brain scans, only the power of the mind and local herbs to heal their patients.
For twenty-five years, I apprenticed with extraordinary shamans and healers, and learned the use…
Will Librarians Revolt Over Amazon’s Kindle Lending Program?
A California librarian is urging librarians to complain to Amazon over issues with privacy and advertising in Amazon’s new Kindle ebook lending program for libraries. “In our greedy attempt to get content into our users’ hands, we have failed to uphold the highest principle of our profession, which is intellectual freedom,” she argues in a 10-minute video. (Read the transcript here):
Kindle has allowed Amazon to harvest all of this borrowing data, so it’s an instant violation of all of our privacy policies … [I]f they’re using a Kindle, Amazon’s keeping friggin’ everything. And we haven’t told people that, and we need to tell people that.
She argues Amazon’s retention of your reading history may violate, for example, California’s Reader Privacy Act, and she also complains that the check-out and renewal process include unacceptable promotional content about Amazon’s for-sale ebooks. Though she owns a Kindle and loves ebooks, she’s urging librarians to speak…
Selling Wikipedia Pages As Kindle eBooks
This article identifies a supposed ebook “author” whose 887 different ebooks were all apparently cut-and-pasted directly from Wikipedia entries!
The “WikiFocus” series targets obscure niches with few competing ebooks, like Hello Kitty, Aquaman, or the comic strip Archie.
“Of the 887 ebooks, all but 10 earned terrible reviews, averaging one star or less,” this article notes, “or received no reviews at all.”
A typical review? “This ‘book’ is just a word for word copy of the Wikipedia page.”
(And a least one other “author” has attempt the same trick, trying to pass off a Wikipedia page about Charlie Sheen as an $18.95 biography!)
Will Bookstores Boycott Amazon-Published Books?
Amazon has begun signing their own authors and then publishing the books themselves, leaving booksellers “wary” as Amazon “tries to have it all,” according to a Boston newspaper. The co-owner of an independent bookstore near Cambridge considered boycotting Amazon’s new line of books, complaining “They are a huge competitor, and they don’t collect sales tax, giving them an unfair advantage.”
A children’s bookstore noted that “the pie is getting cut into fewer pieces. I’d be nervous if I were an adult book publisher.” Borders bookstore has already declared bankruptcy, leaving The Daily Show to joke that bookstores should simply become “digital downloading” stations — or a “living history” museum where future generations can learn what “a magazine rack” was.”
Google Earth Begins Mapping Amazon Rainforest
Photo: Alex Guerrero (CC)
Not sure if ’street view’ is the right term for it, but Google has begun mapping the Amazon much like it does streets in cities and towns. Via The Australian:
Two women washed clothes in the dark water of the Rio Negro as a boat glided past with a camera-laden Google tricycle strapped to the roof, destined to give the world a window into the Amazon rainforest.
A “trike” typically used to capture street scenes for Google’s free online mapping service launched last Thursday from the village of Tumbira in a first-ever project to let web users virtually explore the world’s largest river, its wildlife and its communities.
The project was the brainchild of Amazonas Sustainable Foundation (FAS), which two years ago went to Google Earth with a vision of turning “Street View” into a river view in the lush and precious Amazon Basin.
[Continues at The Australian]
…
The Most Well-Read U.S. Cities (According to Amazon.com)
Amazon.com just crunched their sales data for 2011, and calculated the 20 Most Well-Read Cities in America. (Click here to see all 20 cities on a map.)
The #1 city on Amazon’s list (and the top purchaser of non-fiction titles) is Cambridge, Massachusetts, while four of the top five cities are college towns. This suggests students may be shopping online for cheaper text books – another bad sign for the future of the bookstore.
But the #2 city was Alexandria, Virginia, one of three cities on the list within 10 miles of Washington D.C. — which surprisingly, was also reported by Amazon as the city which purchased the most children’s picture book.
Amazon’s $23,698,655.93 Textbook About Flies
New copies are still going for around a grand. Interesting story: Michael Eisen writes on it is NOT Junk:
A few weeks ago a postdoc in my lab logged on to Amazon to buy the lab an extra copy of Peter Lawrence’s The Making of a Fly — a classic work in developmental biology that we – and most other Drosophila developmental biologists — consult regularly. The book, published in 1992, is out of print. But Amazon listed 17 copies for sale: 15 used from $35.54, and 2 new from $1,730,045.91 (+$3.99 shipping).
I sent a screen capture to the author — who was appropriate amused and intrigued. But I doubt even he would argue the book is worth THAT much.
At first I thought it was a joke — a graduate student with too much time on their hands. But there were TWO new copies for sale, each be offered for well over…
Chevron Fined $8 Billion For Polluting Amazon
It’s taken decades but finally the Amazonian Indians whose environment was despoiled by Texaco have won their lengthy court battle with successor corporation Chevron. Mind you, it’s an Ecuadorian court and no doubt the plaintiffs will have a tough time enforcing the judgment in the United States and actually collecting the money. Look forward to years more litigation while the people of the Amazon suffer for the oil giant’s wreckess conduct. BBC News reports on the judgment:
A court in Ecuador has fined US oil giant Chevron a reported $8bn (£5bn) for polluting a large part of the country’s Amazon region.
The oil firm Texaco, which merged with Chevron in 2001, was accused of dumping billions of gallons of toxic materials into unlined pits and Amazon rivers.
Campaigners say crops were damaged and farm animals killed, and that local cancer rates increased.
Condemning the ruling as fraudulent, Chevron said it would appeal.
The lawsuit was brought…
Ebooks Are Almost Outselling Printed Books
Kindle 2. Photo: Jon 'ShakataGaNai' Davis (CC)
Score one for technology. Amazon’s sales of ebooks have apparently almost doubled since this summer. Amazon just announced that they’re now selling more ebooks than paperback books — and three times as many ebooks as hardcovers!
In July, Amazon had said they were selling 180 ebooks for every 100 hardcovers — though paperbacks traditionally outsell hardcovers by about a 3-to-1 ratio. But if you combine Amazon’s latest statistics into a pie chart, it reveals that 45% of all the books Amazon sells are now ebooks. And Amazon’s statistic doesn’t even include all the free ebooks people are downloading to their Kindles.
If just one user downloads a free ebook for every nine paid ebook purchases — then Amazon is already delivering more digital ebooks than they are print editions!
WikiLeaks Website Kicked Off Amazon’s Servers
Peter Svensson reports on the AP Via MSNBC:
NEW YORK — Amazon.com Inc. forced WikiLeaks to stop using the U.S. company’s computers to distribute embarrassing State Department communications and other documents, WikiLeaks said Wednesday. The ouster came after congressional staff questioned Amazon about its relationship with WikiLeaks, said Sen. Joe Lieberman, an independent from Connecticut.
WikiLeaks confirmed it hours after The Associated Press reported that Amazon’s servers had stopped hosting WikiLeaks’ site. The site was unavailable for several hours before it moved back to its previous Swedish host, Bahnhof AB.
WikiLeaks released a trove of sensitive diplomatic documents on Sunday. Just before the release, its website came under an Internet-based attack that made it unavailable for hours at a time. But that move exposed WikiLeaks to legal and political pressure.
“WikiLeaks servers at Amazon ousted. Free speech the land of the free–fine our $ are now spent to employ people in Europe,” the organization…
Pedophilia Book Removed From Amazon, but Others Remain
Jennifer Valentino-DeVries writes on the Wall Street Journal’s Digits blog:
Amazon.com has removed a how-to guide for pedophiles that was appearing in its Kindle store, after a day of online outrage and threats of a boycott.
The e-book, “The Pedophile’s Guide to Love and Pleasure: A Child-Lover’s Code of Conduct,” and its removal raise questions about how Amazon reviews self-published works and what types of books are allowed on the e-commerce site.
Amazon on Wednesday defended the sale of the $4.79 book, telling technology blog TechCrunch that it “believes it is censorship not to sell certain books simply because we or others believe their message is objectionable.” But by early Thursday morning, the book was removed from the site. Amazon did not immediately return requests for further comment about the book or its disappearance from the site.
Other books about pedophilia remain on Amazon, including those that have previously prompted calls for boycotts. “Understanding Loved…
Evidence of Ancient Civilization Found in the Amazon
Amazon River drainage basin with the Rio Negro highlighted. Source: Kmusser (CC)
Tom Phillips reports that a drought in Brazil has provided evidence of an ancient civilisation in the form of engravings up to 7,000 years old, in the Guardian:
A series of ancient underwater etchings has been uncovered near the jungle city of Manaus, following a drought in the Brazilian Amazon.
The previously submerged images – engraved on rocks and possibly up to 7,000 years old – were reportedly discovered by a fisherman after the Rio Negro, a tributary of the Amazon river, fell to its lowest level in more than 100 years last month.
Tens of thousands of forest dwellers were left stranded after rivers in the region faded into desert-like sandbanks.
Though water levels are now rising again, partly covering the apparently stone age etchings, local researchers photographed them before they began to disappear under the river’s dark waters.
Archaeologists who have studied the…
The Loneliest Man In The World
This past month Slate wrote about the “most isolated man on the planet,” the sole remaining member of an Amazonian tribe, living a solitary existence in the jungle. Obviously, dozens of people may be choosing to live in remote locations by themselves — the difference is that this man’s isolation is not a conscious decision. Rather than seeking contact, Brazilian authorities are managing the surrounding area so as to prevent outside influence from disrupting his way of life — the whole scenario is slightly Truman Show-esque.
The most isolated man on the planet will spend tonight inside a leafy palm-thatch hut in the Brazilian Amazon. As always, insects will darn the air. Spider monkeys will patrol the treetops. Wild pigs will root in the undergrowth. And the man will remain a quietly anonymous fixture of the landscape, camouflaged to the point of near invisibility.
That description relies on a few unknowable assumptions, obviously,…
Will Amazon Push Ads into eBooks?
Kindle 2. Photo: Jon 'ShakataGaNai' Davis (CC)
A book editor at Houghton Mifflin argues ebook advertising is “coming soon to a book near you.” Report in the Wall Street Journal:
Amazon has filed a patent for advertisements on the Kindle, and the book editor joins with a business professor in today’s Wall Street Journal to make the case for advertisements in ebooks. Book sales haven’t increased over the last decade, and profits are being squeezed even lower by ebooks. According to another industry analyst, Amazon is being pressured to make ebook sales more profitable for publishers, party because Apple offers them more lucrative terms in Apple’s iBookstore. One technology site notes that Amazon’s preference seems to be keeping book prices low, and wonders whether consumers would accept advertising if it meant that new ebooks were then free?
Meanwhile, Ralph Lauren has confused the issue even more by publishing a “shoppable” children’s storybook online – narrated…
Uranium Is Getting Some Glowing Reviews On Amazon
By MG Siegler at TechCrunch:
Did you know you can buy uranium ore on Amazon? Well you can. It’s actually been on sale for a while — BoingBoing pointed it out back in 2007. But talk of it has recently started popping up around the Internet once again this past week. Our sister site CrunchGear did a quick post pointing it out last week. Since then, a whole new batch of great customer reviews have been flowing in, as Amazon CTO Werner Vogels points out today.
Some of the negative reviews note that uranium is “bad for you.” …
From ‘Avatar’ To The Amazon: James Cameron To The Rescue
Alexei Barrionuevo writes for the New York Times:
VOLTA GRANDE DO XINGU, Brazil — They came from the far reaches of the Amazon, traveling in small boats and canoes for up to three days to discuss their fate. James Cameron, the Hollywood titan, stood before them with orange warrior streaks painted on his face, comparing the threats on their lands to a snake eating its prey.
“The snake kills by squeezing very slowly,” Mr. Cameron said to more than 70 indigenous people, some holding spears and bows and arrows, under a tree here along the Xingu River. “This is how the civilized world slowly, slowly pushes into the forest and takes away the world that used to be,” he added.
As if to underscore the point, seconds later a poisonous green snake fell out of a tree, just feet from where Mr. Cameron’s wife sat on a log. Screams rang out. Villagers scattered.…
