Boston.com: A man from Somerville, Mass., and his friend who went around the country this year removing typographical errors from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon. Similar:The overlooked masterpieces of 1922In literature the response to the challe…BooksPhoenix journalist admits 'bad reporting' in claiming White…
A good lesson in journalistic humility. FoxNews. One morning, there was a fatal accident. One person died. One lived. As always, I dutifully jotted down the information from the report. And a few hours later, I announced to all of Ohio who died and who survived this crash. But I was wrong. See, the police…
From the BBC… thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. The 3,000-year-old skeletons were in such good condition that anthropologists at the University of Goettingen managed to extract a sample of DNA. That was then matched to two men living nearby: Uwe Lange, a surveyor, and Manfred Huchthausen, a teacher. The two men have now become local…
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:Students Are Using ChatGPT to Write Their Personal Essays Now: AI can replicate the shape …Students say they appreciate AI’s abilit…AcademiaThe Left…
Excellent example of effective journalistic use of a striking detail. This made my morning. The gnome, about a foot tall, wore a hat, a blue shirt over a bulging stomach and a wide grin as it sat on a table in open court throughout the two-day trial. Morrison and the weapon were separated by about…
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…
The latest Pew report: Since 2006, the proportion of Americans who say they get news online at least three days a week has increased from 31% to 37%. About as many people now say they go online for news regularly (at least three days a week) as say they regularly watch cable news (39%); substantially…
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 Similar:Encyclopedia Smithsonian: Star-Spangled Banner and the War of 1812 When he saw “by the dawn’s early light…AestheticsMultimodal Composition: Every time a student submits a narrated PowerPoint, a puppy cries.AcademiaCrabby 10yo Ties Self to Pole to Protest InjusticeMy wife confiscated my preteen daughter’…CultureRob Rogers' firing is a frightening omenPulitzer Prize-winning cartoonist Nick A…CultureChecking out…
I need a new office chair. Similar:Thank You, Verizon, for this Confusing ScreenA few weeks ago, I had to get a new cred…BusinessWhat does a professor do, other than lecture for a few hours a week? Wow, this response! 😮 We really do hav…AcademiaWonderfully Detailed Tribute to 1970s British TV Show Space: 1999″A middle aged…
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…
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:Summer Project:…
I’ve gone underground to finish off a few projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure, so the blogging has been light. But I’m surfacing in order to blog about this poll, which shows that a majority of respondents said that the government should not force bloggers to give equal time to opposing views, some 31% disagreed. …
A short comedy sketch that emphasizes the importance of finding the right editor. Similar:Jimmy Maher's Appreciation of Infocom's Classic Sherlock Text AdventureI learned a lot while reading this enjoy…BusinessAlas for You (Godspell, Stage Right)Three weeks ago tonight, I got an email …DramaShe’s wearing a shirt with a frog. We are in town to see…
From The Washington Post: It hit Mark Gruntz all at once, while he was sitting flat-broke in an airport in Greece: He had lost credit for three summer courses, wasted $11,474 in student loans and gotten kicked off a boat. All because he hadn’t cited Wikipedia enough in a paper about a movie. Last week,…
Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students’ atrocious spelling. Aren’t we all!? But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea. University teachers should simply…
A thirteen-year-old girl posing as a record executive on MySpace has lured several bands to Los Angeles with promises of a record contract. — BBspot The concept is good, but the writing doesn’t sustain the joke. The reason The Onion is so good is that the articles not only make the joke, but they do it completely within…
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…
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…
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…