Egyptian train hits school bus, 51 killed

ASSIUT, Egypt (AP) ? A speeding train that crashed into a bus carrying Egyptian children to their kindergarten on Saturday killed 51 and prompted a wave of anger against a government under mounting pressure to rectify the former regime's legacy of neglect.

The crash, which killed children between four and six years old and three adults, led to local protests and accusations from outraged Egyptians that President Mohammed Morsi is failing to deliver on the demands of last year's uprising for basic rights, dignity and social justice.

The accident left behind a mangled shell of a bus twisted underneath the blood-splattered train outside the city of Assiut, some 200 miles (320 kilometers) south of Cairo. Children's body parts, their books, schoolbags and tiny socks were strewn along the tracks.

Um Ibrahim, a mother whose three children were on the bus, pulled her hair in grief. "My children! I didn't feed you before you left," she wailed in horror. A witness said the train pushed the bus along the tracks for nearly a kilometer (half a mile).

As one man picked up pieces of shattered limbs he screamed: "Only God can help!" More than a dozen injured children were being treated in two different facilities, many with severed limbs and in critical condition.

Several hours after the accident, Morsi appeared on state television, promising an investigation and financial compensation for victims' families. His transport minister and the head of Egypt's railways resigned.

"Those responsible for this accident will be held accountable," Morsi said.

The response, his critics say, comes too little too late. For months, transport workers have been complaining about poor management and poor working conditions. Saturday's accident falls exactly one week after two trains collided south of Cairo, killing four people.

While many train accidents in Egypt are blamed on an outdated system that relies heavily on switch operators instead of automated signaling, the high death toll and fact that nearly all those killed were young children will likely give ammunition to Morsi's critics who say he has done little to improve life for ordinary Egyptians.

Opposition activists have accused Morsi of continuing the mistakes of his predecessor by not overhauling government services. They say he is too focused on foreign policy while moving slowly to tackle a myriad of domestic problems.

A day before Saturday's accident in al-Mandara village in Assiut province, the president positioned Egypt as a new Arab champion for the Palestinians. But with more children killed in Saturday's accident than by Israeli bombs in the Gaza Strip since an escalation in fighting this week, he is already being called on to refocus efforts at home.

"The blood of people in Assiut is more important than Gaza," said Sheik Mohammed Hassan, a village elder speaking at the scene of the accident.

Evening talk shows and state-radio programs fielded calls from an outraged public that demanded answers as to why Morsi had not visited the region Saturday and instead chose to keep his meetings in Cairo with foreign leaders seeking an end to the Gaza-Israel fighting.

Magdi el-Shelh, who lost three nephews in the accident, said his family wants a serious investigation and trial for those responsible. He said he wished for the president to be present to see the bloody scene himself.

At the crash site, parents of the missing wailed as they looked for signs of their children on the tracks. An Associated Press reporter at the scene said many of the remains were unrecognizable.

Residents of the region, like most other Egyptians in the provinces, are far removed the politics of Cairo and more preoccupied with basic needs. Most are armed and many handle disputes through local tribal councils rather than through official government channels.

After the accident, grieving families set up road blocks in the area to prevent Egypt's prime minister from reaching the scene late Saturday. Some burned logs and fired automatic rifles in the air, chanting "Down with Morsi!"

Crowds heckled Prime Minister Hesham Kandil when he arrived, surrounded by riot police, at a main hospital treating some of the injured.

Around 10 family members of those killed met Kandil on the outskirts of the city of Assiut to ask that a kindergarten be built in their village so that children do not have to travel nearly 15 miles to school on unpaved roads.

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's most powerful political force and Morsi's base of support, blamed the crash on a culture of negligence fostered by deposed leader Hosni Mubarak.

"It is unacceptable that things remain as they are without drastic treatment," it said in a statement, adding that it recommends a renovation of the entire transport system to spare the lives of citizens.

Residents also gathered outside the provincial governor's office, demanding the Brotherhood member resign.

Egypt's railway system has a poor safety record, mostly blamed on decades of badly maintained equipment during the Mubarak era. Accidents due to negligence regularly killed scores over the three-decade rule of Mubarak, who was accused of valuing loyalty over competence in many appointments of senior officials. Widespread corruption has also been blamed for the underfunding of government services, particularly in poor provinces outside Cairo.

The railway's worst disaster was in February 2002, when a train heading to southern Egypt caught fire, killing 363 people. Media reports quoting official statistics say that rail and road accidents claimed more than 7,000 lives in 2010.

Residents near the crash site say the railway crossing guard was asleep Saturday when the bus drove over the track. It appeared the crossing was not closed as the train sped toward it. Authorities detained a railway worker who had fled the scene.

One prominent opposition group said Morsi should bear some responsibility for Saturday's accident.

"He is the one who chose this failed government whose disasters increase day after day," the April 6 movement said in a statement.

Liberal figurehead Mohammed ElBaradei said in a post on Twitter: "When will the Egyptian feel his life has value and that there is a nation to protect it?"

___

Batrawy contributed from Cairo.

Source: http://news.yahoo.com/egyptian-train-hits-school-bus-51-killed-221330468.html

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Microsoft announces SkyDrive SDKs for .NET and Windows Phone 8, highlights web integration

DNP SkyDrive announces NET and Windows Phone SDKs, integrates IFTTT, Docusign and Soundgecko

After the introduction of new APIs last year, Microsoft has released SkyDrive SDKs for almost every major platform including Windows 8, JavaScript Web library, Android and iOS. Now the cloud service has opened its doors to more of Microsoft's own with new SDKs for .NET and of course, Windows Phone 8. To entice even more developers to its side, the team at SkyDrive also integrated with services like IFTTT (If This Then That), which lets you customize action triggers between different web services, DocuSign, an electronic signature site and SoundGecko, a text-to-audio transcription service. It'll likely take a lot of work for SkyDrive to win over fans of Dropbox and Box.net, but opening up its doors to developers is a step in the right direction.

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Microsoft announces SkyDrive SDKs for .NET and Windows Phone 8, highlights web integration originally appeared on Engadget on Sat, 17 Nov 2012 07:00:00 EDT. Please see our terms for use of feeds.

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Source: http://www.engadget.com/2012/11/17/skydrive-sdk-net-windows-phone-8/

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Cisco Acquires Enterprise Wi-Fi Startup Meraki For $1.2 Billion In Cash

Cisco Acquires Meraki DoneNetworking tech giant Cisco has just agreed to acquire cloud infrastructure startup Meraki, and my industry sources confirm the purchase price was $1.2 billion, all in cash. I've also gotten ahold of the letter to Meraki employees from CEO?Sanjit Biswas. It's a huge win for the 330 employee San Francisco startup.?[Update: The PR just hit the wire, confirming our details on the acquisition and $1.2 billion price.]

Source: http://feedproxy.google.com/~r/Techcrunch/~3/2t5Bsc4LJS0/

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Brain waves make waves

Friday, November 16, 2012

Naturally, our brain activity waxes and wanes. When listening, this oscillation synchronizes to the sounds we are hearing. Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for Human Cognitive and Brain Sciences have found that this influences the way we listen. Hearing abilities also oscillate and depend on the exact timing of one's brain rhythms. This discovery that sound, brain, and behaviour are so intimately coupled will help us to learn more about listening abilities in hearing loss.

Our world is full of cyclic phenomena: For example, many people experience their attention span changing over the course of a day. Maybe you yourself are more alert in the morning, others more in the afternoon. Bodily functions cyclically change or "oscillate" with environmental rhythms, like light and dark, and this in turn seems to govern our perception and behaviours. One might conclude that we are slaves to our own circadian rhythms, which in turn are slaves to environmental light?dark cycles.

A hard-to-prove idea in neuroscience is that such couplings between rhythms in the environment, rhythms in the brain, and our behaviours are also present at much finer time scales. Molly Henry and Jonas Obleser from the Max Planck Research Group "Auditory Cognition" now followed up on this recurrent idea by investigating the listening brain.

This idea holds fascinating implications for the way humans process speech and music: Imagine the melodic contour of a human voice or your favourite piece of music going up and down. If your brain becomes coupled to, or "entrained" by, these melodic changes, Henry and Obleser rea-soned, then you might also be better prepared to expect fleeting but important sounds occurring in what the voice is saying, for example, a "d" versus a "t".

The simple "fleeting sound" in the scientists' experiment was a very short and very hard-to-detect silent gap (about one one-hundredth of a second) embedded in a simplified version of a melodic contour, which slowly and cyclically changed its pitch at a rate of three cycles per second (3 Hz).

To be able to track each listener's brain activity on a millisecond basis, Henry and Obleser record-ed the electroencephalographic signal from listeners' scalps. First, the authors demonstrated that every listener's brain was "dragged along" (this is what entrainment, a French word, literally means) by the slow cyclic changes in melody; listeners' neural activity waxed and waned. Second, the listeners' ability to discover the fleeting gaps hidden in the melodic changes was by no means constant over time. Instead, it also "oscillated" and was governed by the brain's waxing and wan-ing. The researchers could predict from a listener's slow brain wave whether or not an upcoming gap would be detected or would slip under the radar.

Why is that? "The slow waxings and wanings of brain activity are called neural oscillations. They regulate our ability to process incoming information", Molly Henry explains. Jonas Obleser adds that "from these findings, an important conclusion emerges: All acoustic fluctuations we encoun-ter appear to shape our brain's activity. Apparently, our brain uses these rhythmic fluctuations to be prepared best for processing important upcoming information".

The researchers hope to be able to use the brain's coupling to its acoustic environment as a new measure to study the problems of listeners with hearing loss or people who stutter.

###

Max-Planck-Gesellschaft: http://www.mpg.de

Thanks to Max-Planck-Gesellschaft for this article.

This press release was posted to serve as a topic for discussion. Please comment below. We try our best to only post press releases that are associated with peer reviewed scientific literature. Critical discussions of the research are appreciated. If you need help finding a link to the original article, please contact us on twitter or via e-mail.

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Source: http://www.labspaces.net/125280/Brain_waves_make_waves

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Video: Matthews: Will President Obama dare to be great?

Jill Kelley vs. 'Bubba the Love Sponge'

When a Florida shock jock threatened to "deep fat fry" a Quran earlier this year, Gen. John Allen and CIA Director David Petraeusreached out to Tampa socialite Jill Kelley to help tamp down what they saw as a potential threat to the safety of U.S. troops, according to emails released by the city of Tampa.

Source: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/3036697/vp/49861051#49861051

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What Are Your Most Powerful Memories of Technology?

I've got some family shit going on right now, and it's making me nostalgic. The memories floating to the surface are overwhelmingly of my sister and my parents. But right there along with my family are the times I spent with technology—a surprisingly prominent cast member in the movie inside my mind. More »

Source: http://feeds.gawker.com/~r/gizmodo/full/~3/mZkNFlhutbY/what-are-your-most-powerful-memories-of-technology

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Inferno Appoint Kees As Coach

Chicago Inferno News Release -- www.infernosc.com

Friday, November 16, 2012

CHICAGO?? The Chicago Inferno are pleased to announce the appointment of Tony Kees as the new head coach of the franchise.

Kees is currently a staff coach for Chicago Magic Academy, a U16/U18 US Soccer Development Academy Program. Prior to Chicago Magic, Kees held the Assistant Academy Director position for five years at the US Soccer Development Academy for the Chicago Fire of Major League Soccer. In 2007, Kees was awarded the Illinois Youth Soccer Association?s Competitive Coach of the Year for his work with EG Arsenal (Elk Grove, IL) and also the 2007 Midwest Large High School Coach of the Year after a 21-year tenure as the varsity coach at Conant High School (Hoffman Estates, Ill.). He went on to coach Neuqua Valley High School (Naperville, Ill.) where his 2009 Varsity Team was ranked No. 2 in the nation by ESPN Rise after completing an undefeated regular season.

?I am beyond excited for this opportunity,? said Kees. ?I got a taste of it last season when Chicago Inferno reached out to me to run some of their training sessions and I enjoyed working with the players at this level. And it led to a great opportunity to be close to the Philippine National Team when they were here in August and then actually coach the Inferno against them. This is a forward-thinking club and I view this as an honor and a privilege.?

A graduate of Northern Arizona University, Kees also serves as a head coach for the Illinois Olympic Development Program (ODP) and holds a USSF ?A? National Coaching License (?97), the NSCAA Premiere Diploma (?98) and the KNVB Advanced Match Analysis Certificate (?01).

?Tony did a terrific job running our training sessions last season and the guys responded well to his presence and coaching style. I had the opportunity to observe Tony when I was with the Chicago Fire where he had a stellar record with the club and was always a consummate professional,? said Chicago Inferno president Todd Short. ?He has the drive and passion I need to help bring the club to the next level. I know the returning players will be pleased to know Tony is now at the helm of the squad.?

Returning to his post as Assistant Coach for Chicago Inferno, Brian Colicchia was a key figure in bringing Kees over to the club. ?Tony and I began working together last season after the head coach left the club unexpectedly. The goal then was to try to keep some continuity, and keep the training challenging, fun and relevant,? said Colicchia. ?We were determined to stay competitive and end the inaugural season on a positive note. Now that Tony is on board as the head coach, I know we will continue to drive the club in a positive direction.?

Colicchia is a graduate of Ithaca College in New York, where he became the assistant coach upon his graduation. He went on to become the assistant coach for Syracuse University and for the Chicago Storm of the Major Indoor Soccer League. Colicchia holds a USSF ?A? National Coaching License (?07) and has been with the Inferno since the club?s inception in 2009 as member of the National Soccer League of Chicago.

Source: http://www.uslsoccer.com/home/678286.html

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Gastro-Vision | Anti-Cancer Cooking in a Post-Hurricane Sandy ...

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Beatriz da Costa with Juan Recaman (camera), ?Dying for the Other? (video still), 2011.

In 2011, Beatriz da Costa underwent brain surgery to remove a cancerous tumor. Her video triptych Dying for the Other gives us glimpses into her life in the three months following the procedure. The artist is shown at different times moving about with the support of a walker, exercising her motor skills, stretching her limbs, sorting her daily medications, and chopping kale. The moment when da Costa is asked to spell words like truck and picture is telling: she?s unsuccessful and seems completely unaware. Footage from a New York City lab for breast cancer research is juxtaposed with these difficult moments in da Costa?s life. Bald female mice aged four to six-weeks old are being weighed, prodded, injected and dissected. Rarely do I feel sorry for the city?s vermin but this is awful to watch. It?s hard to distinguish the live mice from the dead ones. You have to wonder if there?s not a better way. Then again, does it matter if it saves human lives? In the years since her surgery, da Costa has explored this question about the price of sustaining life. Her projects in the series?The Cost of Life?have taken?a variety of forms, from this video triptych to a demonstration garden and most recently a cooking class.

Dying for the Other?is on view at the Sheila C. Johnson Design Center at Parsons, where it is included in the exhibition Art, Environment, Action! The theme of the environment has become a fall tradition at the Center. They?ve paid particularly close attention to the role of art and design in food systems, urban agriculture, and climate change.?With this show, curator Radhika Subramaniam wanted to present an exhibition that went beyond art that?s explicitly about nature. She says of da Costa?s video, ?It?s not just about illness of the planet but asks what is the relationship of our body to the world outside?? Oftentimes when people talk about the environment it sounds abstract, like something we exist at the side of, instead the force on which our lives depend?and to which art almost always, in some way, responds. Da Costa?s work brings the conversation, says ?Subramaniam, ?back to the body.?

For some people, Hurricane Sandy?s Northeast destruction sounded a wakeup call: climate change is real.?Also it?s lethal. I don?t know if scientists have tracked the rise of global warming alongside rates of cancer but it seems logical that the two would correspond; our health is tied to the land. When Sandy started wreaking havoc, da Costa and?Subramaniam were already sounding the alarm: When the environment is unhealthy or unstable so are we.

Art, Environment, Action! is not an exhibition so much as it is a ?teaching lab? where artists and visitors explore and share ideas in interactive workshops. For these, Subramaniam (working with Manuel Miranda and Jiwon Lee) has brilliantly designed the space: painted wooden boxes form a giant ?toy box? at the center of the gallery. Stored underneath the boxes are workshop materials and chairs and even a mini?refrigerator.?It was on this platform that I sat?in anticipation of da Costa?s ?anti-cancer-cooking class,? Flavonoid Time!

Beatriz da Costa (with Donald Daedalus). ?The Life Garden,? installed at Eyebeam Art + Technology Center, October-December 2011.

Flavonoid Time! relates to another project in The Cost of Life series called?The Life Garden. This beautiful living installation of plants, herbs and mushrooms with reported anti-cancer properties?was installed at Eyebeam last fall. What the artist advocates here is an ?alternative? approach to healing. Although modern medicine has saved the lives of many cancer patients, scientists and health practitioners repeatedly warn us about the foods we eat. Cancer can be fought and sometimes prevented with a good diet. Da Costa started studying anti-cancer cuisines last year and is already quite knowledgeable on the subject. At?Flavonoid Time!?she gave a broad overview of good-for-you foods and theories on anti-cancer eating. Among the?interesting?tidbits she shared is that turmeric reigns supreme though its bioavailability is low.

Michelle Fuerst (left) and Beatriz da Costa (right) at ?Flavonoid Time!?, November 12, 2012.

Flavonoid Time! participants were instructed to each bring a cutting board, sharp knife, place setting (cutlery, plate, bowl, glass), and an apron. People around the table ranged in age, ethnicity, and professional background.?I was pleased not to see the usual art world suspects; it would have been a shame if this had not reached a larger audience.?Chef?Michelle Fuerst,?who has cooked at California?s famous Zuni Caf? and Chez Panisse, and is also former?curator of Slow Food Nation,?led the cooking portion of the workshop. (Da Costa and Fuerst met in the Montalvo residency program on the West Coast.) Working in teams we prepared a spread that, to use an old school phrase, rocked my world: spicy red lentil soup with tomato, leek, and herbs; muhammara (red pepper and walnut dip); arugula salad with carrots, crunchy seeds, avocado and a dollop of quark; rice pudding with honey and cinnamon; mint and lemon verbena, and anise teas. Never did I imagine that an anti-cancer meal would be so delicious.

Arugula?salad with carrots, crunchy seeds, and avocado.

Participants were given a small but generous take-home recipe booklet. Printed on its cover are the words ?Anti-Cancer Survival Kit,? the title of another, newer project in The Cost of Life series. The kit, made for cancer patients and the people who love them, is being designed by a group of individuals who ?have a personal connection to the topic.? If you?ve ever seen someone you care about suffer cancer, you know that the desire to nurture that person back to health, to ease their pains even for a moment, is tremendous. Yet the options for cancer patients can seem limited and, from all of the information available online, also frustratingly vast. With The Anti Cancer Survival Kit da Costa aims to provide some useful tools and know-how. ?It?s the kind of kit I wish somebody would have given me as a gift, when I was first diagnosed three years ago,? Da Costa has said. She was diagnosed with her first cancer at the age of 14. Today, at 38 years of age, she continues to battle the disease. Looking at da Costa across the room as I chopped vegetables and filled tea bags, I was in total admiration of her perseverance. How could you not be? That she continues to devote herself to making art and then, during an obviously delicate moment in her life, bring people together to learn and enjoy a meal, is nothing short of extraordinary.

Art, Environment, Action! is on view through December 15, 2012.

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Source: http://blog.art21.org/2012/11/16/gastro-vision-anti-cancer-cooking-in-a-post-hurricane-sandy-world/

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CIA Inspector General launches investigation of Petraeus' conduct

As former CIA director David Petraeus heads to Capitol Hill to testify behind closed doors about the Benghazi consulate attack, the CIA announced it is launching an investigation to determine whether he used agency resources to further his relationship with Paula Broadwell. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.

By Jim Miklaszewski and Courtney Kube, NBC News

The CIA Inspector General has launched an investigation into the conduct of former Director David Petraeus, a source tells NBC News.?

The source, speaking on condition of anonymity, said that acting CIA Director Michael Morrell ordered the investigation to ensure there was no wrongdoing and that no agency resources were expended improperly by Petraeus.?

The CIA informed the House and Senate Intelligence Committees of the investigation on Thursday via letters from the IG.


"At the CIA we are constantly reviewing our performance,? an agency spokesperson said. ?If there are lessons to be learned from this case we'll use them to improve. But we're not getting ahead of ourselves; an investigation is exploratory and doesn't presuppose any particular outcome."

The FBI has separately investigated Petraeus in what began as a cyber-harassment case but later revealed an extramarital affair between the former CIA director and his biographer, Paula Broadwell, multiple government and law enforcement officials have told NBC News.

That investigation remains open, focused primarily on whether Broadwell, a West Point graduate and former military intelligence officer, improperly possessed classified material on her personal computers.

Additionally, the CIA is now investigating whether Gen. David Petraeus used agency resources to further his relationship with his biographer, Paula Broadwell. NBC's Andrea Mitchell reports.

The nature of the classified material found on at least one of Broadwell?s computers is not known, nor is it clear if she improperly possessed it, as she had a security clearance until it was suspended on Wednesday.

Law enforcement officials have told NBC News that Petraeus is not suspected of passing classified information to Broadwell and that no criminal charges are expected to result from the investigation.

Defense officials told NBC News on Thursday that earlier this week, the FBI came to Army officials with material discovered in Broadwell?s emails and asked, ?Is this real and is it classified?? After Army officials determined it was indeed classified material, the FBI launched a search of Broadwell?s Charlotte, N.C., home, with her consent.

On Wednesday, an Army official told NBC News that Broadwell?s security clearance and access to classified material was suspended because of an address she gave to an alumni symposium on Oct. 26 at the University of Denver, which appeared on the video-sharing site YouTube. Broadwell holds a master's degree in international study from the school.

In the address, Broadwell -- a lieutenant colonel in the U.S. Army Reserves, though not currently on active duty, according to Pentagon records obtained by NBC News -- ?talked about security at the consulate in Benghazi, Libya.

"Any time that the Army has a reason to believe that an officer has mishandled classified information, there is grounds for such action," the Army official said, referencing the YouTube clip.

As their secret dissolved, Petraeus and Broadwell chatted in public

A third related investigation, by the Department of Defense Inspector General, is focused on emails exchanged by Marine Gen. John Allen, commander of U.S. and NATO forces in Afghanistan, and Jill Kelley, the Tampa, Fla., socialite who inadvertently triggered the FBI investigation by turning over anonymous harassing emails to an agent with whom she was acquainted. The FBI later determined they were sent by Broadwell, which in turn led to the discovery of her affair with Petraeus, multiple government and law enforcement officials have told NBC News.

ISAF via Reuters file

Meet the people who have been pulled into the scandal that caused Gen. David Petraeus to resign as CIA director.

NBC News Chief Foreign Affairs Correspondent Andrea Mitchell contributed to this report.

More content from NBCNews.com:

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Source: http://usnews.nbcnews.com/_news/2012/11/15/15197365-cia-inspector-general-launches-investigation-of-petraeus-conduct?lite

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Guest Blog Post, Rikki Lux: New Superstition Review Goodreads ...

GoodreadsAs an English Literature major, I?ve studied Hemingway, Nabokov, Bronte, Chaucer, Shakespeare . . . and the list goes on. There?s something all of these writers have in common: they aren?t living. Their voices are frozen in the past.

Can you think of any living authors that you love to read? There was a time when I couldn?t list many. On the Superstition Review intern application, our editor Patricia Murphy asks for three of your favorite living authors. When I saw that I thought, ?Living? Why? All the good ones are dead!? Looking back, I can?t believe all of the authors I was missing out on reading. If you browse through the contemporary authors in Superstition Review?s Goodreads bookshelves, you?ll see these authors are writing lots of books and they are all a part of a thriving literary community. If only we would put down Faulkner, Fitzgerald, or Frost, pick up one of their books, and join the conversation. When I began to use Goodreads, the social networking site for readers, I found that Margaret Atwood, along with some of my other favorite authors, has an account there as well.

Contemporary authors are not only writing books: they?re tweeting, collaborating with a publisher on a Q & A session, or speaking to college students. Simon J. Ortiz is speaking to my Literature of Immigration and Diaspora class this semester. Michael Ondaatje came to ASU?s Tempe campus to hold a public discussion. Margaret Atwood is an activist of environmental preservation in Canada, and she uses Twitter and Goodreads to connect with her fans and promote environmental awareness. Alice Munro is the literary voice of the Canadian middle class ? she is referred to as ?the Canadian Chekhov? ? and her new collection of stories was just published. Dickens or Dickinson can?t fulfill that kind of presence.

When I joined Twitter, I was delighted by the presence of authors, literary magazines, and book presses. It was like browsing through a virtual bookstore: I followed Margaret Atwood, Joyce Carol Oates, Michael Ondaatje, Salman Rushdie, Anne Lamott, Sherman Alexie, Roxane Gay . . . and that?s just the writers. Almost every university literary review is on Twitter, plus Tin House, Willow Springs, McSweeney?s, and The Paris Review. I followed The Penguin Press, Red Hen Press, Random House, and Graywolf Press. Authors, magazines, and presses are tweeting like they aren?t worried about censoring themselves or fulfilling an image of distant formality. They talk; their followers talk back.

Every time the little blue mark pops up on the bottom of my Twitter feed, it means I have connected with someone. One time, that blue mark appeared because Margaret Atwood had retweeted my tweet. It was incredible ? an accomplished, famous writer who has over 300,000 Twitter followers took the time to retweet my tweet. I took a screenshot of my tweet on her profile, uploaded it to Instagram, and updated my Facebook status (it read: One of my tweets was retweeted by Margaret Atwood, one of my favorite authors. No big deal?just kidding, it is!). In my fifteen minutes of Twitter fame (at least, it felt like fame to be on Margaret Atwood?s profile for, literally, fifteen minutes before I was lost in her sea of tweets) I experienced how literary culture powered by social media makes writers and literary organizations accessible.

One of my projects this semester was to add to our SR Goodreads bookshelves all of the books by SR Contributors from all of our 9 Issues. I?created?bookshelves that hold fiction, nonfiction, and poetry written by?Superstition Review?contributors. With 9 issues of Superstition Review released to date, the number of books quickly rose to well over 1,000. I became better acquainted with so many contemporary authors.

Some?Superstition Review?contributors have a vast list of published works, such as Sherman Alexie, T.C. Boyle, Adrian C. Louis, and Madison Smartt Bell. Other contributors have a smaller list of works on Goodreads, but their readership is growing as they use Goodreads and other social networking sites to create an online presence. The SR Goodreads account is a great way to follow their careers.

As I worked on a Goodreads project for Superstition Review, I noticed that literary magazines and presses are also using Goodreads, like other social networking sites, to extend their online presence. Goodreads? target audience is passionate readers, so the site can be used to showcase works that magazines and presses have published while making connections with readers and other literary organizations.

Willow Springs and Featherproof Books have bookshelves titled ?we published it?,?The Paris Review has their blog connected to their Goodreads account, and Superstition Review includes all of their various social networking links on their Goodreads profile. The Goodreads literary community shares the goal of extending readership of their magazine, blog, and the authors they have published, while increasing traffic to their other social networking sites.

With the emergence of Goodreads, the options for following and connecting with authors, literary magazines, and presses is vast. Facebook, Twitter, Blogs, and Goodreads are all channels of communication within the literary community: which do you prefer and how do you use them?

You can visit our social networks here:

Blog: http://superstitionreview.asu.edu/blog/
Facebook: http://facebook.com/superstitionreview
Goodreads: http://www.goodreads.com/SuperstitionRev
Google+: https://plus.google.com/u/0/111992497499045277021
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LinkedIn: http://www.linkedin.com/groups/Superstition-Review-4195480
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Twitter: https://twitter.com/SuperstitionRev

Rikki Lux

Rikki Lux is a junior at Arizona State University. She will graduate in 2014 with a degree in English Literature and a minor in Communications. She plans on exploring MFA programs or entering into editing and publishing, social networking, or communications fields upon graduation. This is her first semester with Superstition Review.

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Source: http://superstitionreview.asu.edu/blog/2012/11/16/4992/?utm_source=rss&utm_medium=rss&utm_campaign=4992

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