When my son was young, I noticed that videgames had taught him that problems are surmountable, so long as you have enough tries. That’s not always true, of course, or practical. We had a chat about things dying, and as I struggled to lightly broach the subject with him I ended up talking about the…
USA Today designed its coin-operated dispensers to resemble TV screens, but today’s flatscreen TVs don’t have rounded corners anymore. The content is getting a refresh, though. That breezy approach has reinforced perceptions that USA Today lacks the intellectual heft and sway of the Times and another national newspaper, The Wall Street Journal. Both those newspapers…
This was by the teacher’s station in Admin 403 today. I went to drop it off at the lost and found, but the campus police office was closed. Instead, I left it in the chaplain’s office, since that seemed appropriate. Similar:An overnight traffic spike on an older online handout prompted me to touch it up.…
A weblog’s most characteristic feature — the prominence of the most recent entry — has consequences for long-term discussions. But those archives are linkable; a really good blog entry exists in a network of other related posts. Constantly linking to your own ideas can be a form of narcissism, but judicious back-linking can overcome the…
Under the agreement with the Authors Guild and the Association of American Publishers, Google would continue to digitise books and sell access online. In return, the company would pay $125m (£76.9m) in royalties every year to the copyright owners of the books being scanned. However, copyright concerns persisted, as the ownership of many of the…
A VCU survey this year found that 43 percent of students said they use mobile devices as their primary way to access the Internet, up from 10.2 percent just two years before. Last fall, 63 percent of freshmen said they own a smartphone and 73 percent expect to have one by next year. Va universities…
I was at a meeting yesterday in our IT department, when I saw a Zaggmate keyboard/case lying abandoned on a table, with no iPad in sight. I guess I must have looked interested in it, because the owner, our VP for IT, happily handed it off to me, and even ran down to his car…
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My first contribution to the Day of Digital Humanities was not really what I expected. On this Day of Digital Humanities, I ditched a database lesson in my morning writing course, and instead read a hand-written letter about a stack of books. A couple of weeks ago, a colleague handed me a letter sent from…
That reminds me. I have a couple of academic integrity reports to file. The Washington Post has suspended a Pulitzer Prize-winning reporter for three months for lifting material from another US newspaper. Sari Horwitz, who won America’s top journalism award with a colleague in 2002, was found to have used “substantial” parts of two articles…
A good analysis. Beyond that, $15 per four-week period gives you access to the website and also its smartphone app, while $20 gives you access to the website also its iPad app. But if you want to read the NYT on both your smartphone and your iPad, you’ll need to buy both digital subscriptions separately,…
From the NYT press release, an interesting compromise, that recognizes the value of traffic from search engines and blogs. Full digital access will cost an eye-popping $420/year, or $35/week. Will subscribers have to put up with online ads? All users of NYTimes.com are able to enjoy 20 articles at no charge each month (including slideshows,…
Jeez, kids these days. Not satisfied to merely participate in wildly cool science fairs and competitions sponsored by tech industry giants, now they’re teaching us what we did wrong on our own science fair projects, oh so many years ago. At least that’s what Kevin Temmer managed to do, all in a video which Pearson…
This looks very, very interesting. I may experiment with this in one or more of my classes this term. When we launched the new Google Docs last April, one of the big changes was moving comments to the sidebar and letting people reply to comments. Today, we’re updating comments in Google Docs to facilitate rapid and…
Crates and barrels are 3-D versions of the dots that PAC-Man eats. They’re features of the gaming genre, not only because they are easy to generate, but because we already know what they do. As gamers, many of us roll our eyes at the clichés that have sprung up within the industry. Every red barrel…
A student writes, I have the Kindle version of “A Tree Grows in Brooklyn” and I’ve had some difficulty trying to figure out how to cite it… I’ve looked all over the internet but I can’t seem to find one solid way of citing it. I was wondering if you had any suggestions because I’m…
Someone needs a basic geometry lesson. Brown marmorated stink bugs lay especially beautiful egg clusters — sea green with exactly 27 to 28 eggs in each mass. The assemblage of eggs looks a little like a one-dimensional view of a stack of cannon balls. Stink bugs meet their nemesis in Asian wasp – USATODAY.com. A…
A few months after I switched from a PC to a Mac, I switched my photo archive from Picasa to iPhoto. But for a while there, I was trying to put my photos in both locations. Then when I started running out of space, I combined my photo albums, but I botched it. My iPhoto…
Sharing content is cool. Sharing tools is even better. Sharing tools to make new tools would be even better still. As a professional Final Cut Pro videomaker myself, I was personally frustrated that Apple kept making it easier and easier for anyone to replicate my technical skills with much simpler tools. Now Apple’s making these…
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