Borders, which employs about 10,700 people, scrapped a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday amid the dearth of bids. –via Borders to Shut Down – WSJ.com. Similar:Topical Satire Is Not "Fake News."While I’ve been preparing to teach a cla…AmusingFences ( #AugustWilson #CenturyCycle, 6 of 10)August Wilson’s Century Cycle > …BooksIt's “Alexander’s Ragtime Band” 111th birthdayInteresting introduction to…
Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead. Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems,…
It’s good to see some activity in this area. I liked holding onto my college textbooks, in part for the notes. (A few weeks ago, I passed two of my college physics textbooks to my science-geek son.) It’s nice that Amazon stores your notes for you in the cloud, but it appears you have to…
Then the researchers handed over the instructions and taught the PCs a “machine-learning system so it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy.” They didn’t teach the PC how to play Civ, but they taught them how to read about it. The system had no pre-programmed notion of turn-based…
Google+ has beautiful photos and videos. Twitter? Just page after page of mind-numbing 140 character items. Now, Flipboard demonstrated to all of us that photos and videos CAN be added into the display, and the new Twitter UI does do some of that, but it just isn’t enough. Google+ is blowing Twitter away here. —Google+…
This painting, of two impish children taking advantage of a moment of unsupervised freedom as their mother naps, is one of my favorites from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, here in Greensburg. The pun in the title intrigues me, as does the amazing complexity of the children’s clothing. The painting was not there when…
We’ve all seen how Ken Burns brings old photos to life by panning and zooming. This clip demonstrates a striking effect of mapping a 2D photo onto a 3D surface. The animator has to clone in order to create the missing data — the background details that are hidden by foreground objects. But the end…
Yay, me. I got the MouseLook script to work in my Blender Game Engine work-in-progress. Thanks to [2.5] FPS MouseLook Script. Based on models I had already created for one reason or another, the game currently involves donuts, paneled walls, tables, and iPad projectiles. Oh, and you’re a little bot. You may have guessed that I’m not…
I love this piece, on display at the Westmoreland Museum of Art, as part of “They Practice What They Teach: Artist Faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology.” Similar:Imma Let You Integrate QuotationsIn the poem “Imma Let You Integrate Quot…AcademiaR.U.R. (Rossum's Universal Robots) Full Play (via Zoom)All 3 acts and the epilogue to R.U.R. (R…BooksThe joy…
On July 8, I went on the Google+ Diet, using Google’s new social network for all my online communication. As part of the diet, I stopped using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and several other services. I even stopped using e-mail. As I explained in my column last week, the purpose of the experiment was to see if…
Men are into Google+; ladies, not so much. Google confirmed yesterday that over 10 million people have signed up for the new social networking site, but they didnt mention that men make up three quarters of those early adopters. Instead, Mashables Jolie ODell did some digging using sites that compile these sorts of stats, and…
Predictably, Wired celebrates the freedom that comes from depending on computers instead if your own memory. (The story includes a link to Nicholas Carr’s opposing view.) By sharing and comparing our memories, we can ensure that we still have some facts in common, that we all haven’t disappeared down the private rabbit hole of our…
The personal use of the internet by BBC staff must be tempered by an awareness of the potential conflicts that may arise. There should be a clear division between “BBC” pages and “personal” pages. On Social Networking sites, you should be mindful that the information you disclose does not bring the BBC into disrepute. For…
The virtual server Seton Hill has set up for me needed some attention before it was ready for the upgrade to WordPress 3.2.1. Luke from our IT department did all sorts of techno-magic, hampered briefly when a big data transfer yesterday was interrupted by a power outage. So my site’s been down for about a…
The water table in the lobby has been redesigned since our last visit. Great big Tesla coil, in a great big Faraday cage. Similar:A spooooooky post about predatory journals for this Halloween season.Predatory publications are not concerned…AcademiaPie, anyone?PersonalIn March, 2001, I was blogging about "All Your Base…", digital history, 3D printers, and…In March 2001, I…
Facebook’s default approach—sharing with everyone in your personal network—has created a dilemma for professors whose students want to be their online friends. Often the students inadvertently share their party pictures and other private material with their instructors on Facebook, giving some faculty members the feeling that they have crossed too far into students’ personal space.…
Anyone who thinks Google+ is fighting Facebook is thinking way too small. Hell, Google may even physically replace the internet, putting up fiber optics between Google-owned locations. All of this is going to result in a much smoother, easier to use internet. Owned by Google. ProjectPerko: The Replacement Web. Similar:Context for Hayles, My Mother was…
One of my students used a SHU blog during a trip to Europe. Here she describes Warsaw: It was almost as if we were stepping into a real-to-life version of the Festival of Fools in Disney’s “The Hunchback of Notre Dame.” I’m not insinuating that the Warsawians are fools… but there was chainsaw juggling, mile-high…
Another great suggestion from Nick Carbone, via Techrhet. lau and Caspi learned two things: first, that in general students felt that collaborating with partners improved the quality of drafts. On the other hand, the students mostly felt that their edits improved other people’s drafts, whereas other people’s edits worsened their own drafts. Blau and Caspi…
What a way to socialize the school-building kids. The 55,000-student Atlanta public school system rose in national prominence during the 2000s, as test scores steadily rose and the district received notice and funding from the Broad Foundation and the Gates Foundation. But behind that rise, the state found, were teachers and principals in 44 schools…