To My Old Master, Colonel P.H. Anderson, Big Spring, Tennessee Sir: I got your letter and was glad to find you had not forgotten Jourdon, and that you wanted me to come back and live with you again, promising to do better for me than anybody else can. I have often felt uneasy about you.…
Universities “should not be doing anything in the classroom that could be done online” (Times Higher Education) I’ll give the speaker the benefit of the doubt, and interpret that to mean “could be done just as well online.” Actually, I’ve recently been re-considering my goal of collecting and returning all feedback from face-to-face classes electronically.…
Hitler, as “Downfall producer” orders a DMCA takedown from Brad Templeton on Vimeo. As I understand it, the DMCA is not actually involved — it’s YouTube’s internal content-management feature, that lets copyright owners register their material, so that YouTube can search its database and take down, or monetize, any and all instances. Similar:“Oh, that I…
The industry’s great hope was that the iPad would bring electronic books to the masses–and help make them profitable. E-books are booming. Although they account for only an estimated three to five per cent of the market, their sales increased a hundred and seventy-seven per cent in 2009, and it was projected that they would…
For my money, memes on the Internet don’t get any better than the Hitler one. You know, the one in which you take some current event (the more mundane, the better) and shove it into the scene from the German film Downfall in which Hitler is told in his bunker that he cannot win the…
Compare Graduation Days with this Victorian comparative geography image. I’m not sure the diploma motif of “Graduation Days” works, since there’s nothing on a a diploma that has vertical lines like that. The density of information takes a while to absorb, but other than the pie chart seal, there’s nothing particularly interesting to look at…
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Roger Ebert expounds upon — but does not reconsider — his rejection of the aesthetic possibilities of the video game. Ebert is prompted to return to the topic because of a talk by Kellee Santiago, who used cave paintings and stills from early black and white movies to argue that just as painting and movies…
“I shouldn’t be saying this, but I think I’ll love you always, baby, always,” Adam cried into the email. –Shexmus Amed The winner from Adam Cadre’s “Lyttle Lytton” contest (an awful-first-line contest, named after the author who famously penned “It was a dark and stormy night”) My favorite was actually: There was only one man…
Even for those who love books enough to persevere with reading without e-ink will soon face another problem with the awesomeness of the iPad. The device does so many different things so well that there’s a constant urge when you’re using one to do something else. Two or three pages into a book, you’re already…
I just posted a new handout, introducing students in my “History and Future of the Book” course to Vannevar Bush and his memex. I’ll probably tweak that handout a bit more, but it’s quitting time today. In 1946, Vannevar Bush published “As We May Think” (I assigned it in EL236, but I’m not assigning the…
“As We May Think” has been constantly cited ever since, a development that has been analyzed by Smith (1981), who noted that the article has been used as a symbol for a number of different concepts. However, references to it often have little substance. The paper has become a fashionable icon of modern information science,…
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The world’s first copyright law was passed by the English Parliament on 10 April 1710 as ‘An Act for the Encouragement of Learning’. The Queen Anne Statute, as it is known, marked the beginning of modern copyright law. Professor Gillian Davies, author of ‘Copyright and the Public Interest’, describes it as ‘the foundation upon which…
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Responding to Apple’s most recent legal agreement governing the way apps are developed for the iPhone. Some popular apps have been written in Adobe Flash and converted to work on the iPhone; this is cumbersome, but at least it lets designers use the Flash skills they already have. I have no love of no love…
I was a sophomore in college when Star Trek: The Next Generation aired. Most of the guys in my suite watched the premiere episode, and then sampled a few after that. Then, the guy who owned the TV wanted to watch basketball instead, and after a few attempts to find a place to watch Trek,…
Today the most consistently pleasurable pursuit in my life is playing video games. Unfortunately, the least useful and financially solvent pursuit in my life is also playing video games. For instance, I woke up this morning at 8am fully intending to write this article. Instead, I played Left 4 Dead until 5pm. The rest of…
The graders working for EduMetry, based in a Virginia suburb of Washington, are concentrated in India, Singapore, and Malaysia, along with some in the United States and elsewhere. They do their work online and communicate with professors via e-mail. The company advertises that its graders hold advanced degrees and can quickly turn around assignments with…