Twenty Most Visited Nat'l Monuments - Slideshow

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Big Brother Is Watching!

From an Amazon.com webpage, "Most popular Kindle hightlights:"

(click to enlarge)

And from that webpage's What's this? link:

The Amazon Kindle, Kindle for iPhone and Kindle for iPad each provide a very simple mechanism for adding highlights. Every month, Kindle customers highlight millions of book passages that are meaningful to them.

We combine the highlights of all Kindle customers and identify the passages with the most highlights. The resulting Popular Highlights help readers to focus on passages that are meaningful to the greatest number of people. We show only passages where the highlights of at least three distinct customers overlap, and we do not show which customers made those highlights.

The Most Highlighted of All Time passages have been highlighted by the most distinct customers. The Most Highlighted of All Time books are ranked based on a combination of number of highlighting customers and number of highlights. For Heavily Highlighted Recently passages and books the ranking is done in a similar fashion, but with a much greater emphasis on highlighting that was done recently over highlighting that was done a longer time ago.

Does the information gathered help Amazon sell more books? If so, how?

All the Picassos in the Cupboard

By Holland Carter
Published April 29, 2010

When in doubt, haul the Picassos out. There have already been several such haulings-out this year, and now comes the biggest of all, “Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art,” a display of nearly every scrap in the Met’s scrappy Picasso collection: 34 paintings, 58 drawings, a dozen sculptures and ceramics, along with 200 of the museum’s 400 prints. ...

... In the long run the museum is doing a smart thing by going public with its deficiencies. The results make for a disappointing exhibition, but they also serve as an open call to collectors to pony up with gifts, fill in those blanks, be another Gertrude Stein. If the ploy works, maybe the next time the museum hauls out its Picassos, it will have not just a popular hit, which this show is sure to be, but also a great event.

“Picasso in the Metropolitan Museum of Art” remains on view through Aug. 1 at the Met; metmuseum.org.

Click on the post's title to read the entire review at The New York Times.