Here Comes Another Bubble – The Richter Scales

Similar:The 19th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition Welcome to IFComp 2013, the competit…Current_EventsMore #Blender3D practice. Additional details for a steampunk control panel. Just because.AestheticsFact check: Trump lies about CNN at Mississippi rallyI tell my journalism students they won’t…Current_EventsImagine, if you will, a Shakespeare course / Propos'd in blank verse like the Bard would w…Verses Proposing a New Course: “Shakespe…AcademiaJanuary…

Beacon's reach extends to non-Facebook users

Macworld has new info on the scope of the information Beacon gathers on Facebook users: While users’ activities on the Web are tracked in various ways for different purposes, most commonly with tracking cookies in banner ads, the Beacon implementation is one Berteau has never come across before in terms of the details of users’…

Prosecutor won't bring charges in MySpace suicide

Via CNN. Here’s a heartbreaking detail I hadn’t noticed in previous coverage. When Megan’s mother returned home, she found her daughter crying at the computer. After reading the messages, she criticized her daughter for using inappropriate language, Banas said. Telling her mom that “I can’t believe you’re not on my side,” Megan ran upstairs and…

Russian Firm Buys LiveJournal

The NY Times reports that Six Apart is selling LiveJournal. The owner of LiveJournal, a blogging and social-networking site, agreed yesterday to sell the company to SUP, a Russian online media company, in the latest example of deal-making in the social-networking sector. Similar:Epilogue to Rossum's Universal RobotsMy big finish as Alquist in a Zoom-based…DramaPost-Pandemic News:…

Caught in the Web

Inside Higher Ed offers short stories on two student papers that are struggling to keep their administrations at bay: At Oklahoma State University, the editors of the Daily O’Collegian, the more than 80-year-old campus newspaper, have for several weeks refused to let the articles they write for the print publication appear on ocolly.com, the newspaper’s…

A Vision of Students Today

I must have missed this video when I was sick earlier this semester… Michael Wesch at Kansas State University: … the basic idea is to create a 3 minute video highlighting the most important characteristics of students today – how they learn, what they need to learn, their goals, hopes, dreams, what their lives will…

Promising Crystal Space with Documentation Clear as Mud

While my daughter was (supposed to be) napping this afternoon, I downloaded Crystal Space, an open-source tool for creating 3D games. I made lightening-fast progress in the first couple of hours, but after that I was quickly lost. Maybe my expectations were unrealistic. Over the last year or so, I have experimented with Half-Life 2…

The Many Errors in Thinking About Mistakes

NY Times: On one hand, as children we’re taught that everyone makes mistakes and that the great thinkers and inventors embraced them. Thomas Edison’s famous quote is often inscribed in schools and children’s museums: “I have not failed. I have just found ten thousand ways that won’t work.” On the other hand, good grades are…

Full Circle

Here is the beginning of a poem that recent SHU graduate Moira Richardson read at her father’s funeral this morning. I am the twinkle in your eyes, Eternal laughter sparkling, Strong and silent, My father. Similar:The karyotype of Pimelodella cristata (Siluriformes: Heptapteridae) from Central Amazon ba…Some scholarly journals have a more rigo…AcademiaTop deck of a…

Command Lines: Dissertation on Interactive Fiction and New Media at WRT: Writer Response Theory

Jeremy Douglass has published a Creative Commons dissertation on interactive fiction. I recently brought a printout into my “Writing about Literature” class in order to help my undergrads (English majors, some of whom want to be professional writers or literature professors) see their homework assignments as points on a scale that includes books and beyond.…

Banning Wikipedia at school: good idea or missed opportunity?

Ars Technica: Earlier this month, Pennsylvania’s Express-Times reported on a local school librarian who put up her own “Just Say No to Wikipedia” signs in the computer lab. The entire Warren Hills Regional School District in New Jersey has also blocked access from all school computers. The basic problem, according to officials, is that Wikipedia’s…

Amazon's Kindle eBook Reader

Gamers with Jobs reviews Amazon’s Kindle. Now that Jess has finished vampire romance novel number 324, I spend some quality time goofing around with the Kindle. It’s surprisingly easy to get non-Amazon material on it. I just plug it in to the USB cable which perpetually hangs off the back of my laptop, and it…

Police urged to drop photofits for caricature

Guardian (UK): Police forces should issue comical caricatures of the criminals they are hunting instead of standard photofits, according to a team of scientists who found that cartoon-like faces are better at jolting people’s memories. Similar:Sibling Affection and Paternal Abstraction as Drawn By a Six-Year-Old; or, Aren't My Daugh…My six-year-old daughter is a very visua…AmusingI've…

Freud Is Widely Taught at Universities, Except in the Psychology Department – New York Times

The article has a great illustration — a defenestrated couch on the ground outside the psych building. Patricia Cohen, NYT. For decades now, critics engaged in the Freud Wars have pummeled the good doctor’s theories for being sexist, fraudulent, unscientific, or just plain wrong. In their eyes, psychoanalysis belongs with discarded practices like leeching. But…

Anglo Irish Bank Fairy Intern Bust

This story brings Facebook shaming to another level. It tells the story of an intern at a bank who emails his bosses about needing to take a day off work in October to take care of some family business in New York City. But his bosses discover a picture of him at a party in…

Does what happens in the Facebook stay in the Facebook?

Uh, no, it doesn’t. Interesting rhetoric, via YouTube. It re-mediates an animation that takes far too long to load, which is credited to Vishal Agarwala, who is apparently an undergraduate at the University of Florida. The presentation is a useful tool for informing young people exactly why Facebook works so hard to get young people…

Sword of Mana: Do, don't show

In Game Design Review, Krystian Majewski takes a common creative writing mantra and rips it a new one in a way that I haven’t been able to get out of my head for some time. It seems counter-intuitive but actually, LESS emphasis on some parts of the story create MORE emotional response. This is something…

We're Not Listening: An Open Letter to Academic Game Researchers

On Gamasutra, John Hopson says academics should not bother trying to get game designers to listen to any research that doesn’t translate into more money for game companies. When a researcher presents a product team with a set of research findings and recommendations, they are asking the team to invest time and money implementing their…

Rethinking Mass Culture

Douglas McLennan (Arts Journal): Newspapers have not traditionally been mass market. In fact they were the classic niche subsidy model. The genius of newspapers was that they aggregated lots of mini-content – comics, bridge columns, stock tables, crossword puzzles, the arts, business, sports – and built enough of a combined audience to subsidize the content…

Brokaw: Washington Post Print Paper 'Probably' Dead in 10 Years

Tom Brokaw, via businessandmedia.org: “I was at The Washington Post earlier today,” Brokaw said. “And in the lobby they’ve got a wonderful graphic describing how the printing press works and where it is … 75,000 copies an hour it can turn out. Its last run is at 2:15 in the morning and [has] an automatic…