An online survey of 2,755 musicians and songwriters shows they are quite divided in their opinions about the impact of music file sharing by Internet users. There is no clear consensus regarding the effects of online file-sharing on artists. Some 35% of this sample agree with the statement that file-sharing services are not bad for…
How would you feel if a group of people (who aren’t associated with the IRS) just offhandedly decided that it was all right for them to steal one-tenth of your yearly income because they felt that what you did for a living wasn’t really work, and you made all kinds of money from the advance…
Ending months of speculation, search engine company Google plans to float by selling $2.7 billion worth of shares in an online share auction. —Google files for IPO (Internet Magazine) The online community has been waiting for this for a long time. How long will Google’s geek-friendly “don’t be evil” philosophy last under the pressure to make…
Because she does all of her teaching online, Ms. Achterhof can handle many more courses, at many more colleges, than she could face to face. She is an adjunct professor of business and management at four institutions, in three states, moving among her teaching duties with the click of a mouse while her black Labrador…
Discuss William Gibson’s Pattern Recognition. In-class activity: find a partner. Inspect what he or she is wearing or carrying, and write down every brand name you can spot. We will collate the results and vote on what is, or isn’t “cool.” Brand Name Cool rating? VICTORIA SECRET 14+ Advil 14 Hanes 13 Adidas 12 Smackers…
though Limbaugh is wrong to decide that video games are entirely like other games, his comparison opens up interesting possibilities for anyone wanting to develop a theory of video games as a medium because it suggests that any such theory ought to deal with both sides of video gaming’s cultural history. Though many readers in…
About 45 percent of all faculty members are now part-timers. Each year thousands of people with new doctorates in fields like history and English fail to find the tenure-track jobs they are chasing. In English, for instance, fewer than half of the new Ph.D.’s win tenure-track jobs initially, according to the Modern Language Association. When…
In Dragon’s Looking Glass world, inanimate objects speak in tongues; cups, saucers, hammers, and styrofoam are endowed with the gift of speech; and the babble of a brook is literal, not metaphorical. It’s personification (and heteroglossia) taken to an extreme. It strikes me that this peculiar propensity for hearing the cacophony of voices in anything…
A Tree-Mail ‘Thank You’Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Sometimes, even for a cyber-guy like me, an old-fashioned, hand-crafted “Thank You” note just makes it all worthwhile. From my former student Kirsten Schubert, who really knows how to make a fellow feel appreciated. You’re very welcome, Kirsten!
Under the guidelines, which go into effect in the fall for Princeton’s 4,600 undergraduates, faculty are expected to restrict the number of A’s to 35 percent in undergraduate courses; for junior and senior independent work, the percentage receiving A’s will be capped at 55 percent. —Princeton faculty approves grade-rationing plan (CBS/AP)
—Primetime Cheating (Pedablogue) My colleague Mike Arnzen has already created the blog entry I was about to create, so I’ll just link to him.
Complaints I often hear around campus (our students don’t read/write) are turned on their head when we see the kinds of writing circulating around the economy of expression called the Web. Not everyone‘sthere yet, but many are; many we don’t realize are our the students in first year writing sitting there bored because of some…
This admission is privately echoed by top players at magazines owned by major publishers, who sometimes cite more lax ad/edit divisions at European magazines as a catalyst. But a jacket showing up in a fashion layout doesn’t equal, say, a series of paid-for Cadillac references showing up in a short story that doesn’t have the…
He cried when she showed him photos she had taken of giraffes. Then, in one of his unexplained flashes of clarity, he told Debbie: “I don’t want to have Alzheimer’s.” — A frank, gripping article by Marsha King —A journey through dementia: Family surrenders to reality (Seattle Times)
In the 1980s millions of teenagers world-wide would battle dragons armed with just dice, paper and pens. D&D became part of youth sub-culture but as the game celebrates its 30th birthday, is anyone still playing? —Darren Water —Whatever happened to Dungeons and Dragons? (BBC)
The Project’s national phone survey of 1,371 adult Internet users conducted between February 3 and March 1, 2004 shows that 14% of online Americans say that at one time in their online lives they downloaded music files, but now they no longer do any downloading. That represents more than 17 million people. However, the number…
Colorado-based independent scholar Marie-Laure Ryan, author of Narrative as Virtual Reality and editor, most recently, of Narrative across Media: The Languages of Storytelling, who has offered comments here at GTxA, spoke about the ludology vs. narratology debate, admitting that she was preaching to the converted, not to the heathens… She took on the anti-narrativst arguments…
PageRank 100. Apparently, his little blog achieved a PageRank of 100. And after a coffee, Josh realized what this must mean. He called up one of his friends, a search engine affiniciado who took computer class. Matt arrived quickly, because he too never saw anything like this, and equally quickly Matt checked the rankings for…
Handwriting Analysis and Fortune Telling Yesterday I was at St. Vincent College’s “Earth Day,” where a man named Dennis collected handwriting samples and offered a personality reading. I let him go through his schtick — which included all sorts of affirming things like I am a resource person for too many people, I’ve either had…