I’m fairly proud of myself because last week I did something I’ve been wanting to do for years… I made little tiny icons, and put them in the right place on my two main websites. Now you should see them in your browser bookmarks and tabs. Incidentally, I love what Firefox 3 does to the…
I’m not a big fan of SHU’s content-management system, Jenzabar, but because the service was recently overhauled and upgraded, I thought I’d give it another chance. How frustrating — the site breaks the “go back” button. Every time you try to go back, it dumps you into a general screen, and of course then you…
Fantastic narrated slide show on the impact of drugs on a community. Striking black and white images, with an equally powerful interface. (Brenda Ann Kenneally.)
Look who‘s up there with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper: Famous women programmers are Adele Goldberg, who worked at Xerox PARC laboratory and wrote a number of SmallTalk books, Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field who wrote the first compiler, Ada Lovelace, credited as being the first programmer, Emily Short, who played a major…
Inside Higher Ed goes to hell. Job Listing #666. University of Hell at Seventh Circle. Visiting Assistant Professor, two years (with possibility of converting to tenure-track position at culmination of two-year appointment). Beginning September 2009. Teaching load of forty-three courses per semester, with no more than thirty-nine preparations (i.e. instructor will teach more than one…
Federation of American Scientists (FAS) makes a First-Person Shooter (FPS). Whoever wrote the description of the game won’t get a job at PC Gamer anytime soon, but the game itself looks interesting. Players navigate a nanobot through a 3D environment of blood vessels and connective tissue in an attempt to save an ailing patient by…
Science Journal (WSJ): “We think our decisions are conscious,” said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. “But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn’t rule out free will, but it does make it implausible.” Through a series…
Editor and Publisher: The newest version of the Associated Press Stylebook is available, and if you follow it, “WMD,” “iPhone” and “anti-virus” are in, while “barmaid,” “blue blood” and “malarkey” are out. Those are just some of the changes to its rules for certain often-used phrases and words. There are also new acceptable forms of…
I noticed something fishy about Josh Harris’s Jupiter Media Metrix back in 2000, when I wrote “Parasites on the Internet.” Now Harris tells BoingBoing that his next project was a $25 million joke: I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy…
Wired: The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy…
Jakob Nielsen: Print publications — from newspaper articles to marketing brochures — contain linear content that’s often consumed in a more relaxed setting and manner than the solution-hunting behavior that characterizes most high-value Web use. In print, you can spice up linear narrative with anecdotes and individual examples that support a storytelling approach to exposition.…
Inside Google Book Search For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but…
A good overview of the issues relating to using Wikis in the classroom. From the NCTE Inbox Blog: The benefits for collaborative writing should be obvious. Wikis allow multiple authors to edit a text easily. While the video doesn’t discuss it, wikis include tracking information so anyone can look at who makes changes to the…
From a University of Minnestoa press release: “What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of…
My six-year-old daughter is a very visual thinker, who absolutely adores her brother. About a year ago, I stumbled across a notebook of sketches I made in 1980, when I was 12, and I remember how much I enjoyed drawing gadgets and cityscapes. So I bought a notebook and some mechanical pencils, thinking I’d encourage my…
This one makes the o’l head spin… here’s the background. NBC journalist Tim Russert dies at work; NBC holds off on reporting the news until the family can be notified. Someone who works for the company that supplies internet access to NBC updates the Wikipedia entry for Russert before NBC breaks the story. Scandal? Innocent…
NYT: For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies. Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding…
A group of Seton Hill graduates who bonded through the SHU blogosphere in 2003 and 2004 have continued to use their blogs, and there are some newer students who have made an effort to continue their blogging this summer. Since the rise of social networking sites, the typical SHU student blog has gotten more academic,…
The Chronicle Review ponders the effects of Grand Theft Auto IV: You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car — or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town…
Inside Higher Ed: Student newspaper advisers are something of an endangered species these days. They often get caught in the middle when administrators and student journalists clash over content, and in more than a few cases on college campuses in recent years, advisers — sometimes faculty members with tenure or tenurelike protections, but often vulnerable…