NewScientist: A STATISTICAL method that picks out the most significant words in a book could help scholars decode ancient texts like the Voynich manuscript – or even messages from aliens.

Humans find it easy to identify the words that capture the theme of a text – for example, that “whale” is a key word in Moby Dick – but this is a difficult task for computers. Now Marcelo Montemurro, a systems biologist at the University of Manchester, UK, and colleagues have developed a method to identify word importance based on a branch of mathematics called information theory. “It seems that what we call semantics or meaning has a signature at the level of the statistics of words,” says Montemurro.

Simply counting the frequency of words in a text is not enough, as connective words such as “for” and “the” confuse the picture. Important words tend to clump in paragraphs and chapters that deal with the topic they relate to, but this only provides a crude guide, says Montemurro.

For a more detailed analysis, the team calculated the “entropy” of each word, a measure of how evenly distributed it is, in both the original text and in a scrambled version in which the words appeared in a random stream. From the difference between the two entropies multiplied by the frequency of the word, the team generated that word’s “information value” in the text. More

My friend Jon Peddie writes:

My pal Joel Orr wrote a book titled, “How to read a book in 30 days.” So I bought a book on my Kindle to test his principle. The book had 435 pages. Actually it had more than that but the story itself was just 435 pages. I figured I could read five days a week on average. So figuring 4.3 weeks a month that would give me 21.5 days to read the book, which meant I had to read 20.23 pages a day.

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The amazing Kurosawa film, Rashomon, is a study in and of ambiguity. I’ve experienced it a couple of times, and have been left amazed, perplexed, and unsatisfied. This analysis by Matt Shepherd, complete with powerful diagram, doesn’t bring ultimate satisfaction–but it does fascinate and edify. Enjoy!

Despite the fact that Wired editor-in-chief Chris Anderson’s latest book, Free: The Future of a Radical Price, wasn’t released until this week, it has still managed to generate much pre-publication discussion about the future of the digital economy. Anderson found himself enmeshed in a pre-publication plagiarism scandal two weeks ago when the Virginia Quarterly Review found that some passages in the book directly matched Wikipedia entries. (Anderson quickly apologized, blaming inaccurate citing and overall carelessness.)

Then, of course, there’s the actual content of the book, which has been received by journalists and business-minded folks in decidedly polarizing ways. Malcolm Gladwell unleashed a scathing review of Free in last week’s New Yorker, scolding Anderson for adhering to the freeconomy as an “iron law” and writing, “The only iron law here is the one too obvious to write a book about, which is that the digital age has so transformed the ways in which things are made and sold that there are no iron laws.” (Plenty of responses followed.)

But for Anderson, Free is indeed the ultimate destiny of our economy. “Sooner or later every company is going to have to figure out how to use Free or compete with Free, one way or another,” he writes in the beginning of the book. This assertion will probably look depressingly familiar to journalists who’ve watched their traditional business models fall apart in the wild west of the web, where “free” is the gold standard.  Read more

I met Liz Lynch at Kevin Nations’ Big Ticket Blueprint event. What a sweet and wonderful person! She is interviewing me tonight on a conference call. I highly recommend her “Smart Networking” book, which you can read about at http://SmartNetworkingNow.com

Check it out!

I just finished This is Your Brain on Music, by Daniel Levitin. It is an amazing book, for several reasons:

• Levitin was a rock music ;erformer and producer before deciding to study musicology and neuroscience, so his examples are hip and personal. But he is an eclectic lover of music, and his references to classical music are equally knowledgeable and evocative.
• The book addresses aspects of a question that has troubled me since my childhood: Why does some music make us happy and other music makes us sad? How universal are its effects?
• Levitin is a wonderful scientist, who is able to express strong beliefs while clearly representing opposing views.
• The writing is excellent.

I think the layout could have used a bit more “air.” Paragraphs are very long, and often made me feel a need to take a deep breath before proceeding.

It’s an old saw and true: If you want to write well, read lots of good writing. This book will help.