—Text to Speech (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Over the summer when I spend little time in the office and a lot of time outdoors, I often fall behind in my reading. The past few weeks I have been using TextAloud, a fairly simple but interesting program that converts text files to MP3s. I then put the MP3s…
What is it for? Why is it there? Did whoever put it up realize that if there were no sign, there would be no need to warn about it? Is this a joke from the developers? Is it a lesson in recursiveness? Is it a philosophical prop? —Bizarre Sign (Lushlush) Does it mean “Don’t forget to…
The idea is simple enough. Imagine a 30-storey building with glass walls, topped off with a huge solar panel. | On each floor there would be giant planting beds, indoor fields in effect–Jeremy Cooke —Vertical farming in the big Apple (BBC) What will they think of next — maybe, taking an urban residential skyscraper, tilting it…
Back in the projector room, five hairy men wearing nothing but overalls, hardhats, and grime were toiling away, trying to get things under control. “It’s too powerful! It can’t take no more!” they yell as they hopefully pull levers and turn valves. “The movie is living up to the franchise! We’re going down!” Meanwhile, in…
Investigators are looking into who altered pro wrestler Chris Benoit’s Wikipedia entry to mention his wife’s death hours before authorities discovered the bodies of the couple and their 7-year-old son. —Dead wrestler’s Web page was altered (Yahoo! | AP (will expire)) I wasn’t particularly following this story, but this is an interesting wrinkle. When I first…
However, perhaps this is not a simple matter of cause and effect. Perhaps it‘swrong to assume that the availability of good graphics technology caused the decline of games like Zork. If “interactive fiction” has migrated to the margins of the computer gaming industry, it could be due simply to a lack of good marketing, not…
Doctors backed away on Sunday from a controversial proposal to designate video game addiction as a mental disorder akin to alcoholism, saying psychiatrists should study the issue more. —Experts oppose video game addiction designation (Reuters | C|Net)
The books Amazon will offer will include many rare volumes — some that are hundreds of years old and others that are too brittle to be handled by people day after day. With digital scanning and printing technology, such books can be reproduced for anyone who wants to buy them. —Dan Carnevale —Amazon Will Digitize…
The division is cleanest in communities where the predator panic hit before MySpace became popular. In much of the midwest, teens heard about Facebook and MySpace at the same time. They were told that MySpace was bad while Facebook was key for college students seeking to make friends at college. I go into schools where…
I handed my notes over to the class and gave them directions to plan the next three weeks of class. They had to schedule one project and one exam. The project has to run five days straight, and they’ll need the information from chapter seven to do the project. They had to make sure that…
At a packed session for academic librarians attending the annual meeting of the American Library Association, in Washington, the topic was how to help students who have learned many of their information gathering and analysis skills from video games apply that knowledge in the library. Speakers said that gaming skills are in many ways representative…
The crash involving a tandem tractor-trailer and four passenger vehicles happened around 12:30 p.m. on the westbound lanes, several miles east of the Lebanon-Lancaster exit, state police said. —Three passengers killed in fiery turnpike crash (Pittsburgh Post-Gazette) There is a lot of bad news out there, from the disappearance of the pregnant woman in Ohio, to…
The secret of American schooling is that it doesn’t teach the way children learn, and it isn’t supposed to; school was engineered to serve a concealed command economy and a deliberately re-stratified social order. It wasn’t made for the benefit of kids and families as those individuals and institutions would define their own needs. School…
“I’m scared, cold, sad, hungry, lonely, thirsty!” — Carolyn Jerz (age 5) My daughter should be asleep, but instead she is awake in her room, and has just offered her usual list of reasons for why she desperately needs parental attention at 10:40pm. This creature was also up at 6:30 this morning.
Traditionally, many news organizations have applied the rules to only political reporters and editors. The ethic was summed up by Abe Rosenthal, the former New York Times editor, who is reported to have said, “I don’t care if you sleep with elephants as long as you don’t cover the circus.” But with polls showing the…
Solar scientists predict that, by 2020, the sun will be starting into its weakest Schwabe solar cycle of the past two centuries, likely leading to unusually cool conditions on Earth. Beginning to plan for adaptation to such a cool period, one which may continue well beyond one 11-year cycle, as did the Little Ice Age,…
He is full of high sentence, like J. Alfred Prufrock. But beneath it all, one finds a sense of cultural history combining one part idyllic idealization with two parts status anxiety. Gorman only appears to be facing hard questions about the new digital order. Actually he is just echoing debates on “mass society” from five…
Of course he would expect I was in the pay of those whose interests I advanced. Why else would I advance them? Both he and I were in a business in which such shilling was the norm. It was totally reasonable to thus expect that money explained my desire to argue with him about public…
The college-educated humans, all of whom are not allergic to bee-sting venom and possess both cerebral and muscular capacities several orders of magnitude beyond that of the insect, proceeded to retreat in abject fright from its half-millimeter stinger, which, when used, causes a twinge of discomfort followed by mild irritation and kills the bee. According…
All touching — not only fighting or inappropriate touching — is against the rules at Kilmer Middle School in Vienna. Hand-holding, handshakes and high-fives? Banned. The rule has been conveyed to students this way: “NO PHYSICAL CONTACT!!!!!” […] It isn’t as if hug police patrol the Kilmer hallways, Hernandez said. Usually an askance look from…