“By the time school opened, I was thrilled to start molding the brains of my children. My optimism and naiveté evaporated within hours…. Raynard had told [his mother] that I had violently shoved him in the chest out the door of my classroom, injuring his head and back. His mother had dialed 911 and summoned…
“In its relentless pursuit of the power curve of Moore’s law, at the expense of the much less interesting price curve, the entire electronics industry may be unknowingly trapping itself in a giant and attenuated version of the dot-com bubble–living years into the technological future, only to be painfully snapped back to the human and…
“We are a powerful race, but we are not a violent one. The wars you wage on your planet are an outdated notion to us, as we prefer more intellectual pursuits. We also enjoy jogging, hiking, basketball, and golf, so we will accept nothing but the best in athletic footwear from Adidas, Reebok, and Converse.…
“When you play a multiplayer FPS video game, like Counter-Strike, you enter a complex social world, a subculture, bringing together all of the problems and possibilities of power relationships dominant in the non-virtual world. Understanding these innovations requires examining player in-game behavior, specifically the types of textual (in-game chats) and nonverbal (logo design, avatar design…
“Remember, too: you’ve just been wounded, and in addition to the adrenaline that’s just been dumped into your system, you’re likely looking at anywhere from a few drops to a steady flow of your own blood – a highly upsetting experience for many. Which means you’re shaking, and most likely trying to do this all…
“Over the next two and a half years, Güntürkün recorded 124 scientifically valid kisses in public places across the United States, Germany and Turkey.” —Most People Kiss the Right WayNature) The story cited above is a puffy little version of an academic article called “Adult persistence of head-turning asymmetry”
I got an e-mail from Bob Mosley, compiler of the Columbia loss FAQ, which called to my attention the latest updates to the Columbia FAQ resource, which was assembled rapidly by scores of volunteers on the day of the incident, —STS-107 “Columbia” Loss FAQsci.space.*)
“A homepage really has two main goals: to give users information, and to serve as their top-level navigation for information that’s inside the site…. [S]ample sites allocated less than half the screen space to useful pixels.” Jakob Nielsen —Homepage Real Estate AllocationUseIT.com)
“MMRPGs are pervasive virtual environments populated by human-controlled digital people from around the globe. | Players develop characters, work towards goals, solve puzzles and engage in social fluttery. They’re the visual marriage of text-based adventures and chat rooms, and women are flocking.” Alex Krotoski —Online Role-Playing Fits the BillGuardian) Interesting… while Slashdot just posted a…
“[T]the bulk of the nineteen page document was copied from three different articles – one written by a graduate student.” —Britain’s Official Dossier on Saddam Plagiarized?Channel4.com)
“The computer industry defies the pattern of all previous technological revolutions, making little or no progress toward convenience. It takes much longer to turn on your machine in the morning now than it did 20 years ago. The reaction of the clueless masses is to grumble and crack wise and then meekly accept the commands…
“That people are gravitating from the television to the Internet, especially for information, is, of course, extremely good news–at least for us. But while they are coming more, they are believing less: Last year the UCLA survey indicated that 58% of Internet users believed that most of what they read online was ‘reliable and accurate.’”…
“The social structure of the Network Age is already evident, and we can potentially anticipate a great deal about the next few decades of our lives by examining the essence of the network, both in its literal and figurative manifestations. But understanding the order of the coming age of distributed culture requires us first to…
“[R]esearchers had seen a precipitous drop in the use of books and an equally steep rise in the use of Web sites. Books composed 30 percent of cited sources in 1996, compared with 16 percent in 1999, with continued declines in the following year. Web sites, meanwhile, grew from about 8 percent of cited sources…
“Some see it as part of the same cultural continuum of reality TV programming. Others see a broader trend in which digital technologies are allowing everyone to participate more directly in media experiences. Under this scenario, an era of decentralized media is fast approaching in which the idea of “consumers” of mass-market media will become…
“The BWCA is a pristine wilderness and a canoeist’s paradise in north-eastern Minnesota. It has over 1,500 miles of canoe routes and more than 1,000 lakes and streams. It has been largely unaltered by human hands since the 1930’s, and is today an official wilderness. You can plan a canoe route to “get away from…
“There are dozens of well-designed studies that show that TV, movies and other media affect what viewers believe and how they behave. This is true of many different kinds of attitudes and behaviors — positive and negative — but many studies conclusively show a statistical link between watching violent programs and behaving aggressively. And, of…
“But after being heralded on the cover of Newsweek and on ’60 Minutes,’ the $25-million ‘Sims Online’ has turned into an expensive letdown for Redwood City, Calif.-based EA. Sales are sluggish, reviews have been merciless, and many in the video game industry wonder whether online games will ever find a large following.” Alex Pham —‘Sims…
“The kicker for economists is that these virtual economic relationships have broken into the real U.S. economy. When players found EverQuest’s bartering rules inadequate, they started exchanging the armor, spells, and other Norrathian objects of value at real-world auction sites. These transactions are conducted not in Norrathian PP but in U.S. dollars and then completed…
“The genetic code is truly digital, in exactly the same sense as computer codes. This is not some vague analogy, it is the literal truth. Moreover, unlike computer codes, the genetic code is universal. Modern computers are built around a number of mutually incompatible machine languages, determined by their processor chips. The genetic code, on…