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…
Brent Batson (via): Academics have long talked of the “academic conversation.” Now, Web 2.0 has called our bluff. We live in the midst of a non-stop world conversation. But, are conversational skills (in writing) important and, if so, how do we teach them? Similar:Do the Best Professors Get the Worst Ratings?To summarize the findings: because…
Scott Sharkey: Often called a dead genre, interactive fiction continues to flourish long after reaching the end of its commercial lifespan. In the decades since whiz-bang graphics drew away the attention of the masses, hundreds of games have continued to evolve the genre — to the point where it can be a little intimidating to…
John Kleinberg This year’s conference emphasizes social linking and its relation to information linking. A striking slide illustrated the tangled interconnections of online friendships, as opposed to the red and blue nodes that characterize political blogs (with some neutral interconnections). (Blackstorm-Huttenlocher-Kleinberg-Lan 2006) and (Adamic and Glance 2005) Bridging levels of scale; Zacharly 1977 studying a…
Chair: Ethan Munson (University of Wisconsin) Dynamic Prediction of Communication Flow Using Social Context (Short Paper)Munmun De Choudhury, Hari Sundaram, Ajita John and Doree Seligmann Estimate intent to communicate and the associated delay. Using MySpace, successful prediction of intent to communicate. [This section is a review of related work, so the speaker is going quickly…
Inside Higher Ed: Understandably, professors frustrated with large class sizes turn to technology such as clickers in an attempt to engage students. Often, the technology become the handmaiden of an administration bent on sustaining huge classes where students need opera glasses to see the instructor. No wonder students are bored; answer their cell phones and…
Because I’m unfamiliar with the poster paper genre, my own textual bias made me want to read all the text on the poster before I was ready to listen to the presenter’s explanation. A couple times I had to tell the eager presenter to give me a minute to take in all the information before…
I don’t attend many science/technology conferences, so the genre of the one-minute poster presentations is brand new to me. The genre is akin to the haiku or flash fiction — it’s a research paper bared down to the bones. Flash scholarship? 60-second-scholarship? About 20 people pre-loaded their slides onto the conference room computer, then lined…
Today’s keynote: Brughel painting showing the social dynamics of a village festival. Grounded the talk with a presentation of statistics on user-generated content (Facebook, MySpace, etc.), noting that whether those users are interacting with one another is another question. Noted that his research is observational rather than experimental, and that he won’t be able to…
Best evidence of ice on mars: “It must be ice,” said Phoenix Principal Investigator Peter Smith of the University of Arizona, Tucson. “These little clumps completely disappearing over the course of a few days, that is perfect evidence that it’s ice. There had been some question whether the bright material was salt. Salt can’t do…