July 2002 Archive Page

At Columbia, students "play pretend-journalism" for 10 months and leave with a master's degree.  "It's striking how small has been the influence of J-school graduates on the upper reaches of American journalism." Tunku Varadarajan

--Who Needs Dr. J? [Journalism-school reform at Columbia]WSJ)

Weblogs are vehicles for debunking inaccurate, biased reporting--exposing the media giants like never before. "A favorite target is the [New York] Times, which has developed the habit of running front-page editorials posing as news reports." John Leo

--Flogged by BloggersU.S. News)

"Researchers examined how different professions wrote text messages and divided them into four groups - creatives, jugglers, controllers and facilitators."

--Children's text messages are 'the key to their future'Ananova)

"ProQuest has digitized every back issue of the [New York] Times, from cover to cover. Every news article, editorial, photograph, cartoon and advertisement is included, and using a fully searchable file, readers can see articles as they originally appeared in print." (Wired)

"The Internet is fueling an increase in library use which, in turn, has led to a library-construction and renovation boom." Steve Freiss

--The Web Didn't Kill Libraries: It's the New DrawCS Monitor)

"I'm far too busy to seek [new drugs] out by reading medical journals and research papers or by talking to my fellow doctors. It really is a huge help to get great drug recommendations by way of hats, T-shirts, coffee mugs, pencil holders, clipboards, and fanny packs that I randomly encounter or that are sent to my office unsolicited." Dr. Jeane Horschart

--This Promotional Pen Works So Great...Satire from The Onion)

Through the website http://www.austinpowers.com/, AOLTimeWarner seems to be hosting an altered version of my weblog, with the background colors changed, an advertisement added, and all the links changed -- as if my weblog is affiliated with Austin Powers. I checked out the first movie from the library and won't bother with any of the sequels. Why is AOLTimeWarner using my intellectual property to market its product?

--Austin Powers Hijacked My Weblog

Somebody who apparently doesn't care much about copyright laws scanned in all the pages from the first appearance of the comic book hero Superman.

--Action Comics #1, 1938

"John Robb, Userland president and COO, has coined a new term for the business blog — K-log, the 'K' denoting knowledge. It is so named because it is a tool for capturing and leveraging the knowledge contained in the minds of individual employees..." George Partington  

--Blogging: Electronic postings and links...nbsp; (WorldCom)

Google has reversed the economy of links; linking to a document makes that document more valuable to page-ranking systems. "The link has a clearer value to B than the content of Bs page has to me or to my readers. I pay B for Bs content with my link." Jill Walker

--Links and Power: The Political Economy of Linking on the Web

"Realizing he hadn't eaten since lunch, the Ph.D candidate picked up the Burrito Bandito menu. Before he could decide on an order, he instinctively reduced the flyer to a set of shifting, mutable interpretations informed by the set of ideological biases—cultural, racial, economic, and political—that infect all ethnographic and commercial 'histories.'"

--Grad Student Deconstructs Take-Out MenuThe Onion)

"[W]omen have been systematically misled into overestimating their chances of dying of breast cancer in order to prepare them to accept mammography." [A review of the book Reckoning with Risk.]

--Crunched by NumbersThe Spectator)

Bulwer-Lytton wrote a novel that infamously began, "It was a dark and stormy night." His name lives on in the title of an annual bad fiction contest. This year's winner: "On reflection, Angela perceived that her relationship with Tom had always been rocky, not quite a roller-coaster ride but more like when the toilet-paper roll gets a little squashed so it hangs crooked and every time you pull some off you can hear the rest going bumpity-bumpity in its holder until you go nuts and push it back into shape, a degree of annoyance that Angela had now almost attained."

--2002 Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest Winner

"Mr. Lomax was a musicologist, author, disc jockey, singer, photographer, talent scout, filmmaker, concert and recording producer and television host. He did whatever was necessary to preserve traditional music and take it to a wider audience." (Jon Pareles)

--Folklorist Alan Lomax DiesNY Times)

"Weblogs are growing up.... They're not yet fully utilized in the news industry, but elsewhere weblogs are a common and widely used new piece in the Internet publishing puzzle."

Weblogs: Put Them to Work in Your NewsroomPoynter Inst.)

"Usability expertise is mainly an issue of talent and experience rather than theory. Much of usability work requires pattern matching, which is why it's so dependent on brain power and past experience: Once you observe slight traces of a usability issue in users' behavior, you must deduce the underlying implications for design." Jakob Nielsen

--Becoming a Usability ProfessionalUseIT.com)

Yahoo has admitted that it has been changing some of the words inside attachments accompanying messages sent to users of its web-based e-mail system.

--Yahoo Admits Mangling E-MailBBC)

"The Internet makes it ungodly easy now for people who wish to be lazy," says a librarian in this article about the pitfalls of relying on the Internet for research.

--Point. Click. Think?WashPost)

"In an age of big-budget titles and state-of-the-art technology, Skotos wants to revive the old text genre." Brad King [See also the sidebar: "Games Started Off Without a Bang."]

--No Bells, No Whistles: Just GamesWired)

"In an amazingly short time, software has become critical to almost every aspect of modern life... Yet much software simply doesn’t work reliably."  Charles C. Mann

--Why is Software So Bad?MIT Tech Review)

"Seniors in the early stages of Alzheimer's disease, with mild to moderate memory loss, are writing Web logs to help them make sense of their daily lives. And the activity, they say, is slowing the onset of their symptoms." Mark Baard

--Blog to Cope With Alzheimer's Fog Wired)

"Design matters, but which design is preferable depends upon the occasion, the context, and above all, upon my mood... Why do I own several teapots? Because I like them." Don Norman

--Emotion and Design: Attractive Things Work Betterjnd.org)

"The phrase 'Half the world has never made a phone call' or some variation thereof has become an urban legend, a widely believed but unsubstantiated story about the nature of the world." Clay Shirky

--Half the World shirky.com)

"This site is a repository for pictures of do not enter signs. Since this is one of many international roadsigns the collection is diverse in geographical context." James Canavan

--Do Not Enter!donotenter.com)

(The Economist) "...goes roughly as follows. The QWERTY design (patented by Christopher Sholes in 1868 and sold to Remington in 1873) aimed to solve a mechanical problem of early typewriters. When certain combinations of keys were struck quickly, the type bars often jammed." But the real problem is that "economists seem to adopt bogus anecdotal histories and then get locked in." 

• A drier, more academic version: "The Fable of the Keys."
• A rebuttal, from The Dvorak Keyboard: "[P]ro-QWERTY articles are written by people that don't care about typing efficiency, but rather want to make an academic point by shooting down the Dvorak keyboard."

--The QWERTY Myth...

"n d beginning God creatD d heaven & d earth. & d earth wz w/o form, & void; & darkness wz upon d face of d deep. & d Spirit of God moved upon d face of d H2Oz. & God z, Let der b light: & der wz light." [See Wired article on the text-message slang of European teenagers.]

--transl8it.com

"[T]hey ship 45,000 copies, and only 15,000 of the games allow you to proceed past the beach. That’s it. No refunds, either. You get off the landing craft; your screen goes black; your computer seizes up and cannot be rebooted. Game over, man." James Lileks

--Good Definition of a “Realistic” War GameThe Bleat)

Richard S. Wallace has created Alice, an artificial life form that gets along with people better than he does. 

--Approximating LifeNY Times -- registration req'd)

Will the world "expire in 2050"? Or are environmentalist alarmists "just another sect of mystics"?  In 1990, Paul Erlich, author of The Population Bomb, lost a famous bet with economist Julian Simon. 

"[U]sers—confounded by too many choices—fail to take advantage of their office equipment’s power-saving features." 

--One researcher’s unlikely crusade: to overthrow the on/off button.Technology Review)

Will the world "expire in 2050"? Or are environmentalist alarmists "just another sect of mystics"?  In 1990, Paul Erlich, author of The Population Bomb, lost a famous bet with economist Julian Simon.

"[U]sers—confounded by too many choices—fail to take advantage of their office equipment’s power-saving features." 

B>One researcher’s unlikely crusade: to overthrow the on/off button. (Technology Review)

The Method of Lies vs. the Method of Truth: "The sincerity of the propagandist is no protection; some of the worst excesses in history were engineered by persons motivated by zealous belief." Julian Simon [Note particularly the (unsourced) quotation from Stephen Schneider, describing how environmental scientists manipulate the media in order to get attention: "

"It's very enjoyable to visit a website that works, where everything just clicks for you. In contrast, a user interface that doesn't do things the way you want feels sluggish, unpleasant, and possibly even hostile, despite the designer's no doubt sincere attempt to invoke positive emotions." Jakob Nielsen

--User Empowerment and the Fun Factor (Alertbox)

Illegibility: Can America Write?: "[T]oday's teachers got their own final lessons in handwriting at about age seven or eight ... and they got those lessons from teachers who themselves received their own final training and evaluation in handwriting at that age." Kate Gladstone

"Reading is the key to knowledge. Knowledge is the key to understanding. So read on, young man! Read on, young lady!" Mr. T.

B>Mr. T. on Literacy (AVClub)

"Harry Potter and Leopard walk up to Dragon is on sale in Beijing street markets for about £1 and, much to the dismay of the publisher of J.K. Rowling’s original Potter books in China, it has become an instant success." The only problem? It's a fake. (Times Online)

"Despite the best efforts of poets, emotions are largely beyond words, and this is another reason why, in Kagan's view, psychology and psychiatry have stalled." Peter Watson --Why Psychology has FailedNew Statesman)

"When Socrates was asked where he came from, he did not say, 'From Athens', but 'From the world', an attitude that our own reading and travels may encourage." Alain de Botton

--A Journey and a Book are Perfect Companions  (Times Online)

"How did a Swingline Stapler change from humble office product to hot personal accessory? First it got a coat of red paint. Then it went Hollywood."

B>Cult Film, 1999's Office Space, Transforms Swingline Stapler (WSJ)

"Professors' office computers hold a wealth of original content: research articles... Some of the material will be published in journals months or years after it is created... The rest will never see the light of day." Jeffrey R. YoungB>"Superarchives" Could Hold All Scholarly Output (Chronicle)

Once upon a time, the written word depended exclusively on papyrus from the Nile: "Egypt had become the Microsoft of antiquity: whoever craves knowledge can come crawling to us, and we'll see what can be arranged." Enter the codex -- the bound book. Tom Bradley

A href="http://www.jackmagazine.com/essaytbradley.html">No Baudelaires in Babylon (Jack)

"The kids who grew up steering Pac-Man around his dot-filled maze have grown up to make video games one of the biggest slices of the entertainment-industry pie. Yet no game to date has come close to dominating the popular landscape the way Pac-Man did in the early 1980s." Chris Green --Pac-Man (Salon)

The Secret Lives of Numbers (turbulence.org)
A fascinating Java applet that lets you find the number of online references to any integer from 0 to 100000, and returns the text most associated with that number. The site is worth visiting even if only to play with the interface. Golan Levin et al.

Book Crossing: "Do you like free books? How about free book clubs? Well, the books our members leave in the wild are free... but it's the act of freeing books that points to the heart of BookCrossing."

"[T]he war on terrorism is unlike any other war in its dependence on intelligence, and the interrogators and "document exploitation" teams in Afghanistan occupy a crucial front."  Greg Miller

B>Intelligence Officers Read Between the Enemy Lines (LA Times)