In mid-May, the difference between the student summer and the professor summer seemed vast to me. One approaches the student summer the way Evel Knievel approaches a line of Ford Mustangs — a burst of frenzied acceleration as one heads up the ramp of stress and procrastination, a brief moment of giddy release as one…
DUBLIN — Professor Hanlon O’Faolin, once called “mad” at the Royal Irish Academy for attempting to reanimate the traditional body of Celtic folktales with the power of elcectic multilingual puns, is readying his apoplectic Bloomsday Device for activation on June 16. “Yes! Yes, they laughed at me yes but now yes I will make them…
The whole idea of episodic stories was born in the 19th century when the printing press made cheap magazines possible. Writers like Charles Dickens hit upon the idea of delivering a big story in weekly chunks, each with a cliffhanger to keep the audience in anticipation. (The cliffhanger is essentially a technological invention — a…
Perched on the edge of a white grand piano and decked out in a full-length evening gown, the former CBS and CNN anchorwoman [Connie Chung] warbled a farewell song that put down Dan Rather (with whom she co-anchored the CBS news in the early 1990s), her husband and cable TV – all at the same…
Hollywood knows that it needs new ideas. The games industry doesn’t know. Hollywood goes out of its way to provide itself with a seed stock of new talent and ideas, the games industry doesn’t. Hollywood spends an enormous amount of money supporting colleges and universities, and training programs at those settings. The games industry does…
—Weblog: een doe-het-zelf medium — Chronologische ordening in de informatiechaos? I’m assuming the language of this site is Dutch. At the bottom is a list of over 100 early articles about blogging, most of them popular (rather than academic) and most of them in English. Just blogging it for future reference. Lots to learn here.…
Do you have what it takes to create a LiveJournal? Well, ask yourself this question: Are you able to put words together? Not in complete, grammatical sentences, mind you. Are you able to take a word and another word and place them one after each other? Then you’re set! —Lore Sjöberg —You and Your LiveJournal…
Mr. Wales said that he gets about 10 e-mail messages a week from students who complain that Wikipedia has gotten them into academic hot water. “They say, “Please help me. I got an F on my paper because I cited Wikipedia’” and the information turned out to be wrong, he says. But he said he…
Curious about the candidate, Ms. Homayoun went to her page on Facebook. She found explicit photographs and commentary about the student’s sexual escapades, drinking and pot smoking, including testimonials from friends. Among the pictures were shots of the young woman passed out after drinking. “I was just shocked by the amount of stuff that she…
What McGuirk said he’d rather see is administrators using Facebook to get students thinking about how they want to craft their public persona. One picture McGuirk displayed was from the profile of a Fitchburg student pointing a gun at another person. The gun turned out to be a water gun, but McGuirk said he had…
This image, modified from John Speed’s map of Yorkshire, England shows the walled city of York — the site of the brilliant annual spectacle known to its medieval performers and spectators as the “Corpus Christi Play”. Dozens of short plays, mounted on pageant wagons, began with a performance at the Trinity Priory (red dot, lower…
Vaporizing VR Hardware (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Last year, my brother-in-law asked me what I would do with a bunch of virtual reality gear his employer had packed in crates in a warehouse. VR headsets, sensors, software to get them working together, and computers to run them all — enough to fill “a big closet.” I started…
Programming games is an activity. A programming language is a kind of thing. Inform 7 is a kind of programming language. It is either the single-most important advance in interactive fiction in a decade, or an interesting idea doomed to fail. —Liza Daily —Natural Language Game Programming with Inform 7 (OnLamp.com) I’ve been teaching myself Inform…
New media have always met with suspicion: As The Economist editorialized a while back, a “neophobic” tendency dates from antiquity, with Plato’s argument in the “Phaedrus” that the relatively newfangled medium of writing corrupted the memory-building powers of oral culture. Of course sometimes the new is bad. Yet the critics of video games are not…
—The Song Tapper Tap out the rhythm of the lyrics on your space bar, and this website will try to guess the song. It will serve up a set of pre-loaded links to where you can buy the song. I was unsuccessful in getting it to recognize “Lola,” but I had more luck with “Happy…
The story, “University Police Monitoring Facebook,” hit the street last Thursday. Many copies didn’t stay long, and not because eager readers were snatching them up. Some time between about 8 and 10 a.m., Tropolitan staffers estimate, 1,500-2,000 of the 3,000 copies distributed vanished. (The papers that remained were those in highly trafficked areas, like the…
Every student will soon be a blogger at the University of Pennsylvania’s College of Arts and Sciences — and the authors won’t just be filling their pages with party anecdotes. As part of summer registration, members of the class of 2010 are receiving from the college personalized “academic blog” pages, where they are asked to…
Words: Redfield Clarke Music: J. Bodewalt Lampe Lyrics: As I sit here in my office chair and watch the dying fire, I think of all the messages that flash along the wire. I hear the constant clicking, the clicking of the key, And while in the mood I’ll tell you what the wires tell me.…
The way I see it, there are three basic tasks that journalists do: 1. Gathering information. This involves talking to sources, examining documents, taking photographs, etc. It’s reporting. 2. Distilling information. This involves applying editorial judgment to decide what parts of the gathered information are important and relevant. 3. Presenting information. This involves shaping the…
In general, we can slip up in a verbal conversation and get away with it. A colleague may be thinking, “Did she just say ‘irregardless’?”, but the words flow on, and our worst transgressions are carried away and with luck, forgotten. That’s not the case with written communications. When we commit a grammatical crime in…