A student at McGill University has won the right to have his assignments marked without first submitting them to an American, anti-plagiarism website. —McGill student wins fight over anti-cheating website (CBC) As a former resident of Canada, I couldn’t repress a smirk at the CBC’s need to identify the website as “American” in the lead.…
The very premise of an online game is that it is uncontrollable – indeed, even the banned players have found ways to sneak back in various disguises. | That, in turn, presents a thorny set of philosophical problems. How do you seek to curb the baser instincts of a community of autonomous players? Is repression…
On this day in 1984, after a year of deliberation, the US supreme court ruled in favour of Sony (makers of the Betamax video-recorder) and against Universal Studios and Disney, who had claimed that viewers recording television programmes were stealing copyrighted material. The counter-argument was that home-tapers were “time-shifting”: rescheduling programmes through convenience rather than…
Approximately twenty-five years have passed since the production of the first widely-distributed computer games; but the medium still appears malleable and novel, and its criticism remains a new and open field. Much work remains to be done, and many questions have not been asked. What vocabulary will be necessary for a literate engagement with the…
In the early days of game publishing, many companies invested great effort not only in the design of their games, but also in the way those games appeared on store shelves and what was included in the box. This article’s intention is to describe this lost art of innovative game packaging from the early to…
You find yourself in yon dungeon. Back yonder there is a FLASK. Obvious exits are NORTH, SOUTH, and DENNIS. What wouldst thou deau?>_ —Strong Bad: Video Games (Homestarrunner.com) Bobby actually e-mailed me this suggestion a few days ago, and I saw it in a comment on MGK, and on the rec.arts.int-fiction newsgroup, but this was the…
Light playing on water drops, dust or ice crystals in the atmosphere produces a host of visual spectacles – rainbows, halos, glories, coronas and many more. Some can be seen almost every day or so, some are once in a lifetime sights. Find out where to see them and how they form. Then seek and…
[T]he typical Internet user is an avid reader of books and spends more time engaged in social activities than the non-user, it says. And, television viewing is down among some Internet users by as much as five hours per week compared with Net abstainers… —New study shatters Internet ‘geek’ image (CNN) Too bad that the folks…
Crucially, Mr Medjahdi said he could see no photographers anyway near the car, despite initial police suspicions that they might have distracted the driver. “I got a complete picture from my side and rear-view mirrors of what was happening beside me. There was no other vehicle in my field of vision. I saw no cars…
One of the great gifts of the book is the entrée it affords into the contemporary IF scene. Graham Nelson, Adam Cadre, Emily Short, and Andrew Plotkin were all authors who were new to me, but no sooner had I worked through Plotkin’s remarkable “Shade” than I added it to my spring syllabus (which I’ll…
I used to date a girl who regularly won trophies for running marathons and playing in tennis tournaments. I told her the only trophy I had ever won was 4th place in a shuffleboard tournament. At the age of nine. So she said, “so of all the nine year olds who turned out that day…
Private vs. Public Anyone can read this: professors, classmates Don’t write about your love life or last weekend‘sactivities unless you want your professors (or Dr. Gawalek) to read about it Take caution when complaining about classes or classmates Also, watch what you write — don’t link to pictures of you doing anything illegal while at…
—History of Computer Game Design: Technology, Culture, Business (Stanford University) This course website features an excellent bibliography of computer game history and scholarship.
While blogging’s earliest advocates operate on the “information wants to be free” principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought. | “Information is power” is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you’re hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there’s also a heads-down,…
CSS Not Displaying on My Site?Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve been pulling my hair out for the last 2 hours because something seems to be wrong with the style sheets on my site. Do my pages look the way they usually do? Most of the time, I get no styles whatsoever, then about once out of…
My first scholarly monograph, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, has rocketed to the 1.6 millionth bestseller (up from 1.8 millionth a few weeks ago) on Amazon.com. (Stop presses! — now it’s zoomed up to the 1.49 millionth! Take that, Distributional Ecology and Abundance of Dung and Carrion-Feeding Beetles (Scarabaeidae) in Tropical…
The Kelley controversy comes at a time of growing public mistrust of the mainstream media. In the past year, critics have questioned: Fox’s Geraldo Rivera and NBC’s Peter Arnett over their reporting on the Iraq war; The Washington Post for reporting that Jessica Lynch had been shot and stabbed and not correcting the account for…
“If they are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished.” Beverly Sweeney, middle school teacher involved in the suspension of a student who used a DOS command to send the word “Hey!” to 80…
Several university students said Thursday that they fabricated survey results factored into in a judge’s decision to move Scott Peterson’s capital murder trial out of Modesto…. [T]hey made up every answer on all the surveys they submitted because they found it difficult to gather legitimate data. They did it, they said, because they were short…
For almost all important social and political issues, a view of the past is essential, and the most powerful analyses of issues requires a historical framework that reflects all the complexity and ambiguity of the past. Yet, for most people, it seems that their concept of history settled into a fixed evaluation (usually a negative…