See also my resources on interactive fiction (text adventure games), programming in Inform 7, making games in Scratch, and coding hypertext stories in Twine.
The automated essay scoring engine behind Criterion, called e-rater, has been used to score more than 1.5 million essays on the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, in tandem with human readers. The machine score and the human score are in agreement 97 percent to 98 percent of the time. —For Student Essayists, an Automated…
Recall is a search engine at the Internet Archive that indexes the text of over 11 Billion pages. The archive has pages dating way back to 1996 through the present day. —‘Recall’ Search Engine (Internet Archive) The engine is in beta. I tried typing in a quoted two-word query, but the results came back as if…
Naked and empty-handed, I ran back to the forest in search of my body. As I approached my corpse, I was attacked by a half-dozen zombies. An hour later, after being continually slaughtered, I decided to call it a night. — Aaron Delwiche —Warning: Do not follow strangers into Kithicor forest at night. (Aaron Delwiche’s…
Java and .NET take vastly different approaches to development, said John Rymer, a vice president with Forrester Research. Java’s philosophy of development is to expose low-level system interfaces to give developers greater control. Microsoft simplifies the development process; the developer has less control — but the tools are easier to use. — Vincent Ryan —Is…
just finished a draft of an encyclopedia entry about “artificial intelligence.” It’s for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory and so, of course, it deals with how AI relates to narrative. Following Jill’s example, I have posted this draft in case anyone has comments on who I might have slighted, how I might have misrepresented…
For those with time to notice, blogs are also a great cheap farm system for talent. You’ve got tens of thousands of potential columnists writing for free, fueled by passion, operating in a free market where the cream rises quickly. | Best of all, perhaps, the phenomenon is simply entertaining. When do you last recall…
In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us – through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear. — Tom Coates…
There are the always-in-fashion temptresses — DeepThroat, Hooker, FunLove, Love Letter, NakedWife, Paradise — and the ones that seem to refer to the person who created the worm: Annoying, Brat, Coma, Faker, Glitch, SadHound, Slacker, Small, TheThing and Yo Momma. And there are also names that seem to make no sense at all: Gokar, Klez,…
Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of “cut-and-paste” plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source. Almost half the students said they considered such behavior…
I wish I had the answer. I don’t, but I’ve taken some small steps of my own. First, I will not open e-mail attachments, period, unless I know the item is coming beforehand or have extremely good reasons to believe it’s not carrying an evil payload. If you want me to see a file such…
The anonymous e-mail offered $5,000 to any vendor capable of promptly delivering a collection of far-fetched gadgets for conducting time travel. Among the mysterious devices sought by the message’s author were an “Acme 5X24 series time transducing capacitor with built-in temporal displacement” and an “AMD Dimensional Warp Generator module containing the GRC79 induction motor.” —Brian…
—Nerds and Geeks (Kairosnews) Over on KairosNews, blacklily8 playfully taunts editor Charlie, “Can you tell me what the difference is between a geek a nerd? You seem to be the expert!“ I had a minute before heading home for the day, and thus spake Google: http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=geek http://jargon.watson-net.com/jargon.asp?w=nerd The Jargon Lexicon notes that the word “nerd” probably…
Such concerns about donations have been raised in fields of study as diverse as auto engineering and medicine, but Microsoft‘sdonations are a special case. Because students are likely to keep using the technology after graduation, they help to maintain Microsoft‘ssoftware industry dominance. — Ariana Eunjung Cha —Microsoft‘sbig role on campus : Donations fund research, build…
Slashdot Takes ‘Gullible’ out of Dictionary Geek community website Slashdot has posted a link to “Why computer virus writers are useful and we should thank them“, which purports to be a transcript of a teleconference with “Samuel D. Forrester, one of the most famous immunologists in the world”. Journalism 101… check your sources. I’ll help…
The Dutch PC-Active magazine has done an extensive CD-R quality test. For the test the magazine has taken a look at the readability of discs, thirty different CD-R brands, that were recorded twenty months ago. The results were quite shocking as a lot of the discs simply couldn’t be read anymore. —CD-Recordable discs unreadable in…
Next to page views and hit counts, the blog indexes are a good way to see if your story has people talking — with either good or bad feedback. Plus, marketing folks at media companies are starting to watch them, and PR people are using them to track companies and product releases, according to David…
I am cutting the whole thing into paragraphs, using my very sharp scissors. I will read a paragraph at the time. I will read it disjointed and jumbled, and see what I can do about the argument before me, without linking it to the devastating argument over or under on the page. Doing this I…
A New Zealander who sent millions of junk emails out every day has shut his business after his personal details were posted on the web. —Spammer ducks for cover as details published on web (New Zealand Herald) Spammer Shane Atkinson was outed by the Juha Saarinem of the NZ Herald. But like Pez candies lined…
Cyberslackers, egosurfing, data smog? All three terms have entered the English language, according to the compilers of the Oxford Dictionary of English, who have added 3,000 more words to the 350,000 words and phrases in modern usage. —Charles Arthur —Internet terms make entry in dictionary (The Independent) Contemporary English still contains a host of idioms that…
This is Dan Rather’s profile. Expanded to the nth degree. Taken to infinity. Overlayed on the back of Patrick Stewart’s head. It’s recombinant phrenology. The elements of phrenology recombined in ways that follow the rules of irrational logic, a rigorous methodology that follows nonrational rules. It is a structure for following your intuition and your…