OK, asking 250 students to post questions on Twitter during a class doesn’t risk life or limb. But it can cause ego damage if the mob of students in his course on personal finance gets disorderly online. —Chronicle Teaching with technology changes the dynamics of the teacher-student relationship, putting more control in the hands of…
Fascinating new development, as Microsoft and big media align themselves against Google. [T]he Financial Times has learnt that Microsoft has also approached other big online publishers to persuade them to remove their sites from Google’s search engine. News Corp and Microsoft, which owns the rival Bing search engine, declined to comment. One website publisher approached…
X-altruists are compelled to good, even when doing so makes no sense and brings harm upon them. The cannot tolerate injustice, and go to extreme lengths to help those who have been wronged, regardless of their personal relationship to them. Now, I am not speaking of the guy who helps an old lady cross the…
Part of an Ars Technica review of Google’s new operating system. Longtime Ars readers may be familiar with my periodic rants about the increasing disutility of the “volume/directory/file” metaphor for modern networked machines. Saving files, copying them, syncing them–this is all pointless clerical work that I want my computer to do for me. Bravo. Similar:The…
I guess I won’t be linking to any many more NYT articles. NYT has disabled their special access for webmasters Similar:You didn’t make the Harlem Shake go viral—corporations didI never found “Harlem Shake” videos to b…BusinessAs coronavirus cases climb, the White House line is consistent: Everything is well in handTraditional journalism aims for neutrali…Current_EventsIf you…
One of my students posted this on her blog… she’ll be presenting it tonight in class. I’m looking forward to it! Here’s a parody, by Meagan Gemperlein At the beginning of the semester, I had blogged about hating blogging, but really in the end it wasn’t that terrible. I came to see how it can…
I’ve had a Kindle DX for a few weeks now. I’ve been using it as I read The Girl Who Circumnavigated Fairyland to my daughter. I haven’t yet used the Kindle to buy any books, but I’ve stuffed it with out-of-copyright classics and academic PDFs. It takes maybe 5-10 minutes to set up the text…
Wired gives Star Wars a good drubbing, focusing on the ending: There are somewhere between 20 and 30 one-man fighters in the assault, right? And of all of those guys, only Luke, Wedge and some guy in a Y-wing make it back (and Han and Chewie, of course, but they weren’t part of the original…
Via Jay is Games We are pleased to announce a very special Casual Gameplay Design Competition, one focused entirely on interactive fiction! For CGDC #7, we’re calling on IF authors to craft one-room games incorporating the theme “escape”. It’s text-only this time around, so you can spend your time polishing puzzles instead of pixels. Full…
unfriend – verb – To remove someone as a ‘friend’ on a social networking site such as Facebook. As in, “I decided to unfriend my roommate on Facebook after we had a fight.” “It has both currency and potential longevity,” notes Christine Lindberg, Senior Lexicographer for Oxford’s US dictionary program. “In the online social networking…
Sadly, I haven’t had time to play any of the IF Comp games this year, but here are the winners. Vote Summary Place Game Avg. Std. Dev. No. Votes 1 Rover’s Day Out 7.96 1.65 92 2 Broken Legs 7.39 1.72 92 3 Snowquest 7.37 1.41 101 Similar:The LA Times deletes tweets that used…
The age of the notebook is rapidly passing us. I know it still has places in many circles, and that for some, the function of the notebook will never go away, replaced by weblogs and online diaries and bookmark lists; but the nature of these written-out sketches of crashing ideas overlaying each other and betraying…
Every family, it seems, has its own set of words for describing particular Lego pieces. No one uses the official names. “Dad, please could you pass me that Brick 2×2?” No. In our house, it’ll always be: “Dad, please could you pass me that four-er?” And I’ll pass it, because I know exactly which piece…
During a scheduled internet outage at work, I took a stack of papers from my “I’ll probably never need this stuff but I need to go through it one more time before I chuck it” stack, and headed to the copy room, where there’s a big recycling bin. A colleague did a double-take as he…
Beatiful graphic visualization of CYOA books. Not just in the abstract — these are visualizations of specific CYOA titles. At its atomic level, a cyoa book is a collection of numbered pages of a few different types. Most pages tell a portion of the story, then finish by telling you to jump to another page.…
A scientific study that came out this year is the first to offer firm evidence that human beings undergo a chemical reaction deep in their brains when they look at babies. It was conducted by biologist Melanie Glocker of the University of Muenster, while she was a visiting scholar at the University of Pennsylvania, and…
To describe the world before or after the spread of print was child’s play; those dates were safely distanced from upheaval. But what was happening in 1500? The hard question Eisenstein’s book asks is “How did we get from the world before the printing press to the world after it? What was the revolution itself…
Many have defined the problem — people are abandoning old media for new in droves — but nobody has come remotely close to figuring out the formula to monetize this audience in a way that ensures the range and level of news and periodical content and offers the rich experience advertisers will pay a premium…
Remember, remember, the ninth of November. “Anyone standing shortly before eight at the Brandenburg Gate would have thought it an absurd dream that there would be a crowd of people on top of the Wall four hours later.” Reuters / Washington Post Similar:The false link between Amy Coney Barrett and The Handmaid’s Tale, explainedOne of…
Welcome to the “fakeosphere.” Internet marketing veteran and analyst Jay Weintraub says fake blogs – or flogs – fake news sites and manufactured testimonials are the fastest-growing segment of Internet advertising. He thinks it’s a $500 million-a-year industry – and he compares it to the explosive growth of spam a decade ago. “I don’t think…