Federation of American Scientists (FAS) makes a First-Person Shooter (FPS). Whoever wrote the description of the game won’t get a job at PC Gamer anytime soon, but the game itself looks interesting. Players navigate a nanobot through a 3D environment of blood vessels and connective tissue in an attempt to save an ailing patient by…
Science Journal (WSJ): “We think our decisions are conscious,” said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. “But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn’t rule out free will, but it does make it implausible.” Through a series…
Editor and Publisher: The newest version of the Associated Press Stylebook is available, and if you follow it, “WMD,” “iPhone” and “anti-virus” are in, while “barmaid,” “blue blood” and “malarkey” are out. Those are just some of the changes to its rules for certain often-used phrases and words. There are also new acceptable forms of…
I noticed something fishy about Josh Harris’s Jupiter Media Metrix back in 2000, when I wrote “Parasites on the Internet.” Now Harris tells BoingBoing that his next project was a $25 million joke: I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy…
Wired: The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy…
Jakob Nielsen: Print publications — from newspaper articles to marketing brochures — contain linear content that’s often consumed in a more relaxed setting and manner than the solution-hunting behavior that characterizes most high-value Web use. In print, you can spice up linear narrative with anecdotes and individual examples that support a storytelling approach to exposition.…
Inside Google Book Search For U.S. books published between 1923 and 1963, the rights holder needed to submit a form to the U.S. Copyright Office renewing the copyright 28 years after publication. In most cases, books that were never renewed are now in the public domain. Estimates of how many books were renewed vary, but…
A good overview of the issues relating to using Wikis in the classroom. From the NCTE Inbox Blog: The benefits for collaborative writing should be obvious. Wikis allow multiple authors to edit a text easily. While the video doesn’t discuss it, wikis include tracking information so anyone can look at who makes changes to the…
From a University of Minnestoa press release: “What we found was that students using social networking sites are actually practicing the kinds of 21st century skills we want them to develop to be successful today,” said Christine Greenhow, a learning technologies researcher in the university’s College of Education and Human Development and principal investigator of…
My six-year-old daughter is a very visual thinker, who absolutely adores her brother. About a year ago, I stumbled across a notebook of sketches I made in 1980, when I was 12, and I remember how much I enjoyed drawing gadgets and cityscapes. So I bought a notebook and some mechanical pencils, thinking I’d encourage my…
This one makes the o’l head spin… here’s the background. NBC journalist Tim Russert dies at work; NBC holds off on reporting the news until the family can be notified. Someone who works for the company that supplies internet access to NBC updates the Wikipedia entry for Russert before NBC breaks the story. Scandal? Innocent…
NYT: For newspapers, the news has swiftly gone from bad to worse. This year is taking shape as their worst on record, with a double-digit drop in advertising revenue, raising serious questions about the survival of some papers and the solvency of their parent companies. Ad revenue, the primary source of newspaper income, began sliding…
A group of Seton Hill graduates who bonded through the SHU blogosphere in 2003 and 2004 have continued to use their blogs, and there are some newer students who have made an effort to continue their blogging this summer. Since the rise of social networking sites, the typical SHU student blog has gotten more academic,…
The Chronicle Review ponders the effects of Grand Theft Auto IV: You need to be honest with yourself. Go outside and find a locked car — or go to the back alley where missile launchers hover in a glowing light waiting for you to pick them up, or go drive down that street in your town…
Inside Higher Ed: Student newspaper advisers are something of an endangered species these days. They often get caught in the middle when administrators and student journalists clash over content, and in more than a few cases on college campuses in recent years, advisers — sometimes faculty members with tenure or tenurelike protections, but often vulnerable…
I was busy at the Hypertext ’08 conference these past few days, so only now am I following up on the AP vs. Bloggers story. According to NYT blogger Saul Hansell: one key issue is the A.P. wants to protect the headline and first paragraph of its articles. He suggested that this will put The…
Lisa Spiro posts an interesting analysis: I wanted to get a quick visual sense of the two texts, so I plugged them into Wordle, a nifty word cloud generator that enables you to control variables such as layout, font and color. (Interestingly, Wordle came up with the perfect visualizations for each text at random: Pierre…
Chair: Ken Anderson (University of Colorado at Boulder, USA)Enhancing Access to Open Corpus Educational Content: Learning in the Wild (Long Paper) Seamus Lawless, Lucy Hederman and Vincent Wade Lack of relevant and accessible digital content hampers the implementation of e-learning. As these eLearning tools begin to try to offer personalization, the tools require access to…
Chair: Mark Bernstein (Eastgate Systems, USA) Information Flows and Social Capital in Weblogs: A Case Study in the Brazilian Blogosphere (Long Paper) Raquel Recuero Qualitative study. Perception is that bloggers are just wasting time, but people have strong personal reasons for blogging. Went quickly through the obligatory background slide… I wonder that this audience might…
Chair: Andreas Hotho (Universität Kassel, Germany) The Very Small World of the Well-Connected (Long Paper) Xiaolin Shi, Matthew Bonner, Lada Adamic and Anna Gilbert Matt Bonner is the presenter; this paper won a “best paper” award at the banquet last night. Vertex Important Graph Synopsis. (Promises a definition!) Opening image — “Network or Hairball?” Huge…