Cringely Google Personalized Search now uses the terms from previous searches to help fine-tune the next search, which seems good in principle, but if someone searches first on “childcare” then later on “insurance” they are likely to be served ads for insurance for children, which might not interest them at all. There are other issues…
From Inside Higher Ed: An Enthusiast’s View of Academic Blogs A Skeptic’s Take on Academic Blogs Similar:Trump, finally, takes the coronavirus emergency seriously CNN’s Stephen Collinson praises the pr…Current_EventsPrepare for the Ultimate GaslightingThoughtful essay from Julio Vincent Gamb…BusinessIt is often said that autistic people lack empathy. Some autistic people are told that the…@ItsEmilyKaty supplies another…
Spit & Polish: When this game was first released in 1880 it was so hugely popular in taverns and inns that the bank of England was forced to mint more threepenny bits to keep up with demand. Gotta love the mustaches and bowler hats. Similar:Charlie Brown has his kite-eating tree. I have my keys-eating chair.…
Anthony Grafton, in The New Yorker The hype and rhetoric make it hard to grasp what Google and Microsoft and their partner libraries are actually doing. We have clearly reached a new point in the history of text production. On many fronts, traditional periodicals and books are making way for blogs and other electronic formats.…
In the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, Jonathan D. Silver waxes poetic: Where do all the pumpkins go, post Halloween’s big costume show? Are they left to rot and molder, as the weather trends ever colder? Or is there some more organized scheme, to dispose of leftovers that aren’t the crop’s cream? Wherefore do they, might they go?…
Jessica Mintz writes of University of Washington-Bothell professor Martha Groom’s Wikipedia assignment: “I would find these things on Wikipedia,” she said, and would think, “Gosh, this is awfully thin here. I wonder if my students could fill this in?” Wikipedia has been vilified as a petri dish for misinformation, and the variable accuracy of its…
Kate Luce Angell writes an entertaining feature on my next-door officemate and his work in Seton Hill’s Writing Popular Fiction MA program. Award-winning author and Seton Hill University professor Michael Arnzen demonstrates that in horror, as in life, it’s often the little things that matter most. Take his short-short piece “Nightmare Job #3,” which begins…
…did they steal candy from me while I wasn’t looking, and stuff the empty wrappers into their pockets? If they did, they certainly didn’t confess on their blogs. Similar:Pater Noster Passenger ElevatorsSome 50 years ago, my father took me to …AmusingThe “Other Side” Is Not Dumb.The song “No One Is Alone,” from the mus…CultureLego signs…
Next Generation: “The game begins with Bart wanting to play a game called Grand Theft Scratchy. Of course this is a parody of Grand Theft Auto. And Marge immediately takes it away from him. She tries to clean up the town and stop the game from being distributed in Springfield because Marge is against video…
The New York Times has published more details about Google’s plans to compete with Facebook: On Thursday, an alliance of companies led by Google plans to begin introducing a common set of standards to allow software developers to write programs for Google’s social network, Orkut, as well as others, including LinkedIn, hi5, Friendster, Plaxo and…
In a corner of the living room between the couch and the video tape cabinet, my kids keep a huge stash of paper towel rolls, which they use to stage epic battles. The Cardboard Tube Fighting League website is annoying since it’s mostly made up images… I didn’t find any text that I could copy…
Ear Studio: Moveable Type, by New York artist Ben Rubin and U.C.L.A. associate professor Mark Hansen, is an artwork commissioned for the ground-floor lobby of The New York Times Building in New York City. When complete, it will be a dynamic portrait of The Times. Statistical methods and natural-language processing algorithms will be used to…
Business Week says there is no science education crisis; that in fact the US is producing more science experts than the market demands. The call has been taken up by some of the most prominent people in business and politics. Bill Gates, chairman of Microsoft, said at an education summit in 2005, “In the international…
Structure, Sign, and Play An Interactive Fiction by Jason Helms and Jacques Derrida “There seems to be a voice reverberating around you, but whether its origin is above or below, you are unsure. It speaks in a heavy french accent: “Perhaps something has occurred in the history of the concept of structure that could be…
What if FEMA gave a press conference, and nobody (but FEMA) came? FEMA employees lobbed softball questions during a staged media event. Reuters: No actual reporter attended the news conference in person, agency spokesman Aaron Walker said. A spokeswoman for Homeland Security Secretary Michael Chertoff, who has authority over FEMA, called the incident “inexcusable and…
In Inside Higher Ed, Elizabeth Redden reports on the National College Media Convention: In his opening remarks, Mattingly, a religion columnist for the Scripps Howard News service and director of the Council for Christian Colleges & Universities’ Washington Journalism Center, described six possible models for student newspapers, ranging from a university public relations model (with…
Via Bloomberg: James Watson, winner of the Nobel Prize as co-discoverer of DNA’s molecular structure, said he plans to retire immediately as chancellor of New York’s Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory amid a controversy over racial remarks. The lab suspended Watson from his position earlier this month after he questioned the intelligence of Africans during a…
Students are starting to ask questions about the online course I’m planning to teach in January. I was very happy with the way the course went the last time I taught it, in 2006. I’m sure I will tweak the course here and there, but here are the course objectives and some other details about…
This quote from a Gizmodo interview caught my attention. There is considerable attention given to John Wilkes Booth as the central figure in the majority of the artworks. For instance, I have been rewriting the code (story line) for the interactive fiction game ‘Adventure!’ to include Booth as the lead antagonist. Similar:Looking for Par'Mach in…
Web guru Jakob Nielsen risks the wrath of the grammatical bluestockings when he suggests that the passive voice might be useful for headlines, but he’s really talking about front-loading web titles, so that the first two words of a web heading will contain words that will catch the eye of people scanning the page. Since…