A letter has been sent to a woman who died three years ago ordering her to tidy up her own memorial plaque. Leeds City Council mistakenly gave Moira Thoms 14 days to remove two vases, each containing a single white rose, from around the plaque at Lawnswood Cemetery where her ashes are scattered. —Dead Woman…
“One of the younger guys had been a prison guard and thought this would be less demanding; another was finishing a computer science degree and needed a part-time job in his Queens neighborhood. The military man listened to the rest of us and declared, ‘I wanted to serve my country.’” Beth Pinsker —Confessions of a…
UK online centres are for people who have limited or no access to skills in using new technologies. The centres will help people to develop the skills to use the Internet to access information, send email using a PC, mobile phone, digital television or games console; (please note not all centres will have the same…
“The purpose of this study is to further investigate breadcrumb usage by evaluating the following research questions: Do users choose to use breadcrumbs as a navigational tool? Does breadcrumb usage improve navigational efficiency? Does the location of the breadcrumb trail on a page effect usage? Does a breadcrumb trail aid the user’s mental model of…
“The social scientist Ray Oldenburg talks about how humans need a third place, besides work and home, to meet with friends, have a beer, discuss the events of the day, and enjoy some human interaction…. In creating community software, we are, to some extent, trying to create a third place. And like any other architecture…
“What we need is a C-SPAN for science: a cable science network (CSN). This network would carry live lectures by knowledgeable scientists on topics ranging from climate change to biological warfare, as well as debates on issues from the biological basis of aggression to missile defense.” Terrence J. Sejnowski —Tap into Science 24-7 (Science)
“Too many ?studies? and ?reports,? with tables of data in small print appended, have purported to reveal truths about welfare or policing or sex education but in fact have revealed nothing but the initial prejudices of the ?investigators.? For me, the epiphany came when I interviewed the nation‘sleading climatologists for a magazine article on acid…
—Bikini Model Photos, Before and After Retouching (Greg’s Digital Portfolio) Yes, this is a link to an attractive woman wearing a bikini — but it shows the unretouched, “before” pictures, too. A great set of photos for a gender studies class: marketers make big bucks forcing women to compare themselves to models whose bodies don’t exist.…
“I have concluded that AOL’s brand would benefit from being removed from the corporate name…” AOL executive Jon Miller —AOL Time Warner (Internal Memos) Yup, just like it’s good for the diseased limb if you cut if off from the rest of the body. This is an amusing attempt at corporate spin. He even tries to…
“Yes, the game business is increasingly reliant on movie licenses and sequels. It is less willing to take big risks, particularly in themes or audiences. But that risk aversion reflects an industry that largely is making fewer, bigger titles with absorbing, often branching narratives, well-written dialogue and much larger budgets — as much as $10…
This preoccupation with holding on to pre-college relationships would often get in the way of students forming new relationships in college. Female students seemed to fear that new friendships formed in college would lack the depth and intimacy of those friendships that took root in their growing-up years. —‘Friendsickness’ affects freshman female college students (EurekAlert) As…
“When students in Biloxi, Miss., show up this morning for the first day of the new school year, a virtual army of digital cameras will be recording every minute of every lesson in every classroom.|Hundreds of Internet-wired video cameras will keep rolling all year long, in the hope that they’ll deter crime and general misbehavior…
“As most people know by now, dictionary makers today merely record how the language is used, not how the language ought to be used. That is, lexicographers are descriptivists, language liberals. People using “disinterested” when they mean “uninterested” does not displease a descriptivist. | A prescriptivist, by contrast, is a language conservative, a person interested…
Be warned; this is a (strictly hypothetic) Google fan’s nightmare. 2014: Google, using its Geolocation feature, starts to heavily censor content for certain countries. Entering “Hitler” at Google.de returns zero results. 2015: Google buys the Yahoo! Directory and removes the DMOZ Open Directory Project. 2016: Google is successfully sued by Microsoft for spidering Windows Servers.…
Fully 80% of adult Internet users, or about 93 million Americans, have searched for at least one of 16 major health topics online. This makes the act of looking for health or medical information one of the most popular activities online, after email (93%) and researching a product or service before buying it (83%). |…
“After a user selects ?print? from the browser, the page is formatted before it is sent to the printer. The width of the layout is reduced to about 650 pixels for 8.5″ x 11″ paper, or 630 pixels for A4, assuming normal margins.|If all the elements of a page can’t wrap around to fit within…
“Information pollution is a worldwide scourge that afflicts not just travelers but everyone. In the United States, for example, you can’t buy a lawnmower without a label saying that you’re not supposed to mow your feet. |Most instruction manuals are littered with “important” warnings that caution against obvious stupidities, burying actual dangers amid a mass…
“I couldn’t help reflecting on the connection between hypertext and napalm, via Vannevar Bush…” Jonathan Delacour —As We May Incinerate (Jonathan Delacour) A fascinating exercise in connecting the dots, and a glimpse into Vannevar Bush’s “war guilt”.
John Scalzi writes: So basically, my job: Demystify the journaling and blogging process for AOL members so they can jump in and start doing it. Encourage the writing, reading, and linking of blogs and journals on AOL and in the blogoverse. Write a kick-ass blog worth reading. Why me? Well, why not? —AOL Hires Blogger (Whatever)…
“Textual history teaches us that authors have been taking back their words for a long, long time (in the form of variants and revisions and new editions), and that ‘their’ words, as we read them on the page, might or might not originate with the person named on the title sheet. In other words (so…