Q. Who is responsible for the high cost, high visibility nature of intercollegiate sports? A: You are. Every time you or your family or friends watch a college game on television, buy college apparel with logos, purchase a ticket to the game, or otherwise participate in a college sports activity, you vote for the current…
Concerns have been raised, however, as to whether current copyright law imposes inappropriate burdens on users, including subsequent creators, of works for which the copyright owner cannot be located (hereinafter referred to as ?orphan?’ works). The issue is whether orphan works are being needlessly removed from public access and their dissemination inhibited. If no one…
When I recently asked a group of librarians how they thought Google organized its search results, the first suggestion was that Google counts the number of clicks on the links, and adjusts its rankings accordingly. Most of the people in the room seemed satisfied with that answer, but one person volunteered the clarification that Google…
When a sheet of paper covered in doodles was found on Tony Blair’s desk at the Davos World Economic Forum, handwriting experts delighted in analyzing it, concluding the prime minister was stressed and under pressure. Experts who examined the tangle of boxes, circles, loops and notes on debt and trade variously described Blair as “struggling…
“People who are savvy about how the Internet works don’t even try to find breaking news on the Net.” — Richard W. Wiggins —The Effects of September 11 on the Leading Search Engine (First Monday) Wiggins made this throwaway statement in an article published October 1, 2001. How quickly things change! In his defense, Wiggins was…
So I thought I’d have a go at writing up my notes from the first Technologies of Writing seminar yesterday. (This is the Folger Institute seminar, taught by Peter Stallybrass and Roger Chartier.) There’s no way I can do justice to the three hours, which included not only some terrific conversation but a long presentation…
The story goes that in the first half of last century one Ata Owoo was well-known for making magnificent chairs to transport the village chief on poles or the shoulders of minions. When Owoo had finished one particularly elaborate creation, an eagle, a neighbouring chief wanted one too, this time in the shape of a…
—Grammar and Punctuation Tests (The Blue Book of Grammar and Punctuation) Nifty little grammar and punctuation/capitalization online tests. Via MetaFilter.
While it was once believed that Marxism would overhaul notions of ownership, the combination of capitalism and the Internet has transformed our ideas of property to an extent far beyond the dreams of even the most fervent revolutionary. Which is not to say that anything resembling a collectivist utopia has come to pass. Quite the…
Any syllabus is fated to yield to the messy circumstances of its course, with results that cannot be predicted. This is reason enough to be against syllabi; their presentation of a course as a fully reasoned, systematically organized thing is spurious. A course that is only its syllabus, day after day, is a course where…
Web publishers and bloggers are already stealing readers, advertisers and classifieds. Particularly for young people, journalism has become, in the words of NYU professor and PressThink.org blogger Jay Rosen, more of a conversation than a lecture. That conversation, at least for now, almost always begins with a traditional news story, which is then subject to…
1.) J-School as School of Theology 2.) The Journalist’s Creed 3.) The Orthodoxy of No Orthodoxy 4.) Practicing Journalism But Not Understanding It 5.) The First Amendment as Press Religion 6.) The God Term of Journalism is the Public 7.) A Breakaway Church in the Press 8.) Interview at the Axis of Evil —Jay Rosen…
“The ideal of objectivity, properly understood, is vital not only for responsible journalism but responsible scientific inquiry, informed public policy deliberations and fair ethical and legal decision. The peculiar Western attempt to be objective is a long, honorable tradition that is part of our continuing struggle to discern and communicate significant, well-grounded truths and make…
A computer that learns to play a ‘scissors, paper, stone’ by observing and mimicking human players could lead to machines that automatically learn how to spot an intruder or perform vital maintenance work, say UK researchers. CogVis, developed by scientists at the University of Leeds in Yorkshire, UK, teaches itself how to play the children’s…
Literary critics who never use but one approach remind me of a child who, playing with a piece of transparent red plastic, has just discovered this effect. ?Look, mommy,? she says, ?the refrigerator is red!? ?Look, mommy, the stove is red too!? ?Look, mommy, the dish towel is light red and dark red!? ?Look, mommy,…
Google greatly advances its web search by raising the word limit to 32 words. Previously, only up to 10 words were allowed. —Google Raises Word Limit to 32 (Google Blogoscoped) The casual user probably won’t notice a difference. It was really hardly any trouble to cut out some of the words in a string that Google…
After 130 years of typing the same way the keyboard has finally grown up. [Who or what was doing the typing? The subject of the sentence is “the keyboard”. The word “typing” is a dangling modifier.] Standard Keyboards of Santa Maria, California announced [missing word — “an”] “alphabetical” keyboard that offers user-friendly benefits and quick…
Sure, blogging can serve as a corrective to the ideological blind spots and commercial orientation of the corporate media monopoly, Fact Checking Their Asses and Working the Ref and restoring some semblance of balance in the absence of the Fairness Doctrine. But bloggers who want to remedy what ails the corporate McMedia monopoly should grab…
A Columbia University study released Tuesday suggests that viewing fewer than four hours of television a day severely inhibits a person’s ability to ridicule popular culture. “An hour or two of television per day simply does not provide enough information to effectively mock mediocre sitcoms, vapid celebrities, music videos, and talk-show hosts?an essential skill in…
Until a few months ago, the attention paid to web logs, or blogs, focused mainly on politics and the media business. However, many in academia followed the web-diary of Salam Pax, the famous Baghdad blogger during the build-up to the war in Iraq. Now, the technology that has been an alternative source of news to…