Replacement parts are hard to come by for a 17-year-old robot, so science center staff long have known that Hoops is one major breakdown away from forced retirement. That would leave a void not only for a generation of visitors who have marveled at the lanky mechanical athlete, but also for staff who have grown…
XKCD Similar:A spooooooky post about predatory journals for this Halloween season.Predatory publications are not concerned…AcademiaJournalism is doing just fine, thanks — it’s mass-media business models that are ailingHmm… I warn my freshmen not to use the…BusinessThe Chase (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 6, Episode 20) Planet-hopping archaeological DNA…Rewatching ST:TNG A well-done mystery…CultureRemember Me (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch,…
My high school Drama coach and freshman English teacher Michael Garcia often shared his stories of making ends meet as a struggling young actor. When my 9yo daughter (a budding drama queen) recently started rehearsals for a local Stage Right professional production of Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat, and when I found out that…
Why would Apple have agreed to pay higher prices for books while Amazon was still out there hocking them below cost? Good question. Those curious circumstances are why some, including Justice it now appears, think there might have been collusion on the part of the publishers. The European Commission opened its own formal investigation into…
Note to thieves. If you steal a nameplate from a judge, don’t let anyone post a picture of you holding it on Facebook. U.S. News – Cops: Man stole judge’s nameplate, posted Facebook photo of himself with it. Similar:Two decades of Alzheimer's research may be based on deliberate fraud that has cost million… Over…
The Pittsburgh regional FIRST Robotics Competition, held in the Peterson Event Center, was put on lockdown because of this incident. It looks like the search for an alleged second shooter was a red herring — the more recent stories have not mentioned any second shooter. A message sent to Pitt employees at 2:08 p.m. said…
Early tomorrow my son and I will be carpooling to Greensburg to participate in the FIRST Robotics Competition “Rebound Rumble” challenge. Our team built and programmed robot from a kit of loose parts. The effort was a success, said Peter Jerz, 14, of Greensburg, who said he learned about teamwork while working on the online…
I am so far out of the TV-watching habit that, Trekker though I be, I doubt I would watch any new Trek shows. I would probably just explore the fan-made wikis and blogs instead, as I have with Lost and the Battlestar reboot. Still, this imagined set of overlapping mini-shows sounds interesting. How does one…
Both Spock and McCoy are frequently at odds with each other, recommended different courses of action and bringing very different types of arguments to bear in defense of those points of view. Kirk sometimes goes with one, or the other, or sometimes takes their advice as a springboard to developing an entirely different course of…
Something I might want to do one day, before I go bald. Adam Bard shaves off half his hair and beard on opposite sides for unique driving licence photo Similar:Drawing of Once on This Island by the amazing Rebecca Scassellati.PersonalData-Related Deaths, 1960-2019 (Excluding Fatalities Caused by Misreadings, Typographical … DesignBabylon 5 redefined TV science fiction,…
How to Annoy Your Parents (Smurfs, Tweety, Jar-Jar and Ewoks) Similar:NASA | A View From The Other SideA number of people who’ve seen NASA’s an…AestheticsSeize the Day!PersonalJournalism isn’t dying. But it’s changing WAY faster than most people understand.Think of journalism as falling into thre…BusinessThe Icarus Factor (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 14)Rewatching Star Trek:…
How it works is kind of cool, from a Spy Kids / Bill Nye the Science Guy perspective, but will the world be a better place if we use technology to enforce manners? Kurihara and Tsukada suggested the speech-jamming gun could be used to hush noisy speakers in public libraries or to silence people in group…
In an exploratory, ungraded in-class activity yesterday, I introduced students in my upper-level English seminar to code. Yes, there was some coercion, given the realities of the education system, and some students may have preferred a lecture or more structured format, but I tried to invoke community and play. How successful was I? Too early…
The number and scale of the apparently unexamined assumptions in this comment gave me pause. This coding business baffles me. I recently tried out an online how to code course and lost the will to live after lesson 3. Surely it is not beyond the wit of IT technicians to invent a programme which translates…
With rare exceptions, schools currently treat the digital revolution as if it never happened. Computers, more often than not, still sit in dedicated rooms, accessible only with adult supervision. … When students step out the door of the institution called school today, they step into a learning environment … in which one is free to…
I just found out that Apple (NSDQ: AAPL) is rejecting my new manifesto Stop Stealing Dreams and won’t carry it in their store because inside the manifesto are links to buy the books I mention in the bibliography. Quoting here from their note to me, rejecting the book: “Multiple links to Amazon (NSDQ: AMZN) store.…
Atari’s Pong Indie Developer Challenge seeks to get all entrants to give away game ideas to Atari that Atari can then exploit, and the entrant relinquishes all further interest in the idea. Atari then selects 20 “semi-finalists” to put months of work into building out their ideas into playable versions that Atari has full ownership…
Visitors using personal computers spent an average of about three minutes a month on Google+ between September and January, versus six to seven hours on Facebook each month over the same period, according to comScore, which didn’t have data on mobile usage. via The Mounting Minuses at Google+ – WSJ.com. Similar:Let’s Make the Academic Job…
It’s tempting to leave the story there, and to let the hypernovel, or whatever you want to call it, become part of the technological imagination of the past, like the flying car. But I believe that the promise of hypertext fiction is worth pursuing, even now, or maybe especially now. On the one hand, e-books…
“Hypertext.” When I was a college student, I was obsessed with the idea that, some day, we would all be creating and consuming information— not just information, but literature—via portable devices like cell phones, when the hyperlink might become as central to reading and writing as the sentence. Since then, that day has come and gone. There…