It’s Friday night in July, and I’m jamming with my fall course preps.
The dean sends me an email at 9:07pm. Instead of answering, I post about it on social media. Oh yeah, #partylikeaprofessor
Facebook Updates its Fight Against Fake News
The only reason Facebook is paying attention to fake news is because it wants to monetize real news. (Monetize = control.) After initially dismissing the idea that Facebook plays a role in disseminating fake news, the company and CEO Mark Zuckerberg have been working to remedy the problem. Facebook partnered with third-party fact-checkers such as Snopes and PolitiFact, introducing alerts that warn users of articles on the site that include…
The Future of College Is Facebook Meme Groups
Interesting to see how large groups of college students are using Facebook, mostly as a forum for sharing memes. About four years ago I asked students in my “News Writing” class to make memes based on AP style / copy-editing principles, but I don’t think the students particularly cared for the assignment. I dropped the meme thing the next time I taught the class, but perhaps I should resurrect it.…
Twitter is testing a tool for reporting fake & offensive content
It’s risky to get your news from a social media algorithm. Facebook and Twitter exist to make money for themselves, not inform the public with accurate, fair, and thorough news. Facebook is the big culprit here, and it’s admitted it needs to take steps to improve, but Twitter isn’t far behind. While the company has yet to pledge to take action, it appears at least internally they’re testing one solution:…
Explore Geotagged Wikipedia Pages as a Text Adventure Game
For humans who like browsing through Wikipedia and also like playing old-school text adventure games, this is awesome. Wikipedia: The Text Adventure was written in June 2017 by Kevan Davis. Its map is pulled live from the Wikipedia API, and it uses all articles which have specified geo-coordinates. (If two articles share an exact location they get nudged in random directions.) The way the map is rebuilt on the fly…
Magnetic Scrolls Original Games Source Code Recovered!
Here we have possibly the only surviving backup tape of the source code to 30 year old historical game data being put into an oven and baked! | Have we gone raving mad? Have we totally lost it? What is this insanity? | The dish is: Baked tapes! Done nicely in your normal kitchen oven. Cook at 45C for 8 hours, take them out, wait to cool then server them (in your server,…