Facebook's New Social Ads Turn Your Friends Into Marketers | Epicenter from Wired.com

Facebook’s advertisers in ur feed, annoying ur friends. (Wired) Undeterred by the setbacks with its Beacon platform last year, Facebook is rolling out more advertising that uses your friends to sell you stuff. Similar:Life Support (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 3, Episode 13) Bashir keeps the gravely injur…Rewatching ST:DS9 An accident aboard …CultureMove Along Home (#StarTrek…

Study Examines The Psychology Behind Students Who Don't Cheat

An Ohio State press release discusses how a student’s psychological profile correlates to academic integrity. An interesting study in rhetoric, focusing on promoting a cultural identity for the “academic heroes” who do honest work, rather than hunting and trapping those whose behavior is less exemplary: The students completed measures that examined their bravery, honesty and…

I Was There. Just Ask Photoshop.

Josh suggest this story. Experimental software now under development can automatically swap eyes and facial expressions from one face to another, and the software is being tested as a way to anonymize faces that appear in Google Maps.  This story is about more personal, more targeted, use of image-processing software. (NYT) Ellen Robinson, a volunteer…

Wondermark: In Which There Is a Taunting

Wondermark   Similar:When F. Scott Fitzgerald Judged Gatsby By Its Cover With a big Hollywood movie now in th…AestheticsIn June, 2001 it seems I only blogged three times…I’m not sure what else I was doing durin…AmusingMy hard-working media students curated a collection of psychology student editorials & inf…My “Media Aesthetics” students worked wi…AcademiaComputer scientist Leslie…

Check it for Tribbles First

I need a new office chair. Similar:SMS Generator SMS Generator.AmusingThere are many Star Wars references in Dani Girl, so I made this tribute to Tom Jung's 197…CultureWhy It’s So Hard For Foley Artists To Make Footstep SoundsAccording to Foley artist Stefan Fratice…AestheticsTurnitin's slick new iPad app almost erases years of web-based GradeMark traumaI have in…

Aug. 15, 1877: 'Hello. Can You Hear Me Now?'

It’s hard to believe that the word “hello” entered common discourse so recently, and that an inventor suggested it in a conscious attempt to develop a protocol for using the telephone. (Wired, apparently borrowing heavily from Wikipedia.) Bell’s famous first words spoken over what we now call the telephone — “Mr. Watson, come here. I…

Old-School Text Adventures Come to the iPhone

An iPhone is too expensive for my budget, but I’m still happy to see this, from Wired: Open iPhone. Go to App Store. Download Frotz. The classic text adventures from Infocom made us all learn the shortest possible way to write responses, and this brevity of input seems perfectly suited for iPhone use. Similar:Twitter was…

Hugh Laurie and Rowan Atkinson: Shakespeare’s Editor

A short comedy sketch that emphasizes the importance of finding the right editor.   Similar:2023 public domain debuts include last Sherlock Holmes workFritz Lang’s Metropolis, the first talki…AcademiaMerchant of Venice Part 2 live, now! #PPTPlaytimeDramaSHU Italy Trip « blogs.setonhill.eduSeveral students on Maureen Vissat‘s M-t…AcademiaLie to Me: Fiction in the Post-Truth EraI’m trying to remember what it…

Lord of the Memes

David Brooks, NYT: Today, Kindle can change the world, but nobody expects much from a mere novel. The brain overshadows the mind. Design overshadows art. This transition has produced some new status rules. In the first place, prestige has shifted from the producer of art to the aggregator and the appraiser. Inventors, artists and writers…

You are likely to be eaten by a grue

Mark Bruno offers his version of the “Remember text adventure games? People are not only still playing them, they’re writing new ones!” essay. I thought his discussion of the relationship between IF and electronic literature showed some insight. I also discovered that while text adventure games where born into the family of computer games, they…

Parenting Tip #234: Katamari Damacy

Once when I needed to entertain my daughter while we were driving somewhere, I said, “Let’s pretend that, rolling along outside the window, there was a little ball that would pick up trash and boxes and trash cans, and that as it collected items it got bigger and bigger, until it was picking up houses…