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…
10 Revolutionary iPad Apps to Help Autistic Children | Gadgets DNA. Similar:URL Hacking (new graphic for an older page that’s surprisingly popular on my site)CybercultureCollege Professors Hate Sharing These Mind-Blowing Study Tips (#3 Made Me Cry) Read the syllabus. Read the syllabu…AcademiaMissouri governor vows criminal prosecution of reporter who found flaw in state website • …I’m…
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…
Yes, please, I would certainly like one of those. Thanks for asking. Steampunk Submarine Room » Geeky Gadgets. Similar:Scat "boop oop a doop" and variations (Esther Lee Jones, Helen Kane, Betty Boop, Marilyn M… A few years ago I was working regularl…BusinessWe are cruel. We always have been. The Internet did not make us soWe…
NASA’s Messenger probe is about 10 days away from parking in an elliptical orbit around Mercury, the innermost planet of our solar system. Messenger has been en route since 2004, making a crazy Spirograph-looking series of orbits around the sun, taking the craft past Venus, and past Mercury three times, and finally heading for orbit…
Despite the differences from discipline to discipline, a good thesis will generally have the following characteristics: A good thesis sentence will make a claim. This doesn’t mean that you have to reduce an idea to an “either/or” proposition and then take a stand. Rather, you need to develop an interesting perspective that you can support…
Digital Humanities is the deliberate, critical application of emerging technology to the study of traditional subjects such as literature, art, philosophy, and language, often (but not always) with a focus on how those traditional fields are now using emerging technology. We are deliberate and critical when we foreground the study of our own digital tools…