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…
A conservative estimate from the study says 17 percent of overall media is consumed via the Internet, and Horan notes that other researchers like Forrester have placed that number even higher. […] Yet, studies have shown that only about 8 percent of advertising goes to the Internet, Horan said. —Candace Lombardi —Study: Web is the…
The robot in the classroom, which displays a live picture of Achim, provides what its inventors call “telepresence”: It gives the boy an actual presence in the classroom, recognized by teachers and classmates. It can move from class to class on its four-wheel base and even stop at the lockers for a between-periods chat. “The…
The Internet is popularly perceived as either a definitive and government-created (and controlled) international computer network–as if “The Internet” is an official and closed system, not unlike “The Post Office”–or as a free-wheeling, uncontrolled, chaotic, and unruly frontier. Neither one of these perceptions is entirely accurate because the Internet is, in fact, the result of…
Efforts are afoot to not only make IF more accessible, but to make it more modern and attractive in appearance. Along with all of the other innovations of Inform 7, for instance, a facility has now been added by which the author can easily include a “book cover” of sorts for her work, which is…
666 is the occult “number of the beast,” also called the “sign of the devil” (Wang 1994), associated in the Bible with the Antichrist. It has figured in many numerological studies. It is mentioned in Revelation 13:18: “Here is wisdom. Let him that hath understanding count the number of the beast: for it is the…
I know it sounds nerdy, but I jumped at the chance to tag along on my husband’s business trip to Hartford, CT last weekend so that I could re-walk the 2 miles that Wallace Stevens used to walk to and from his home on Westerly Terrace to Hartford Accident & Indemnity each day. I took…
A quarter-billion copies sold worldwide as kids raced to discover lost civilizations, navigate black holes, and go in search of … the Yeti. This summer, eight of the original titles return to bookstores, revamped with 21st-century references (cell phones!). Will they become popular again? — Michael Reilly If you think nostalgia will help the books…
Don’t call me “Honey.” Call me “Smart Girl.” —Carolyn Maureen Jerz (age 4).Cute vs Brainy (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) How perceptive children are, at an early age. Of course, next week she’ll be back to “My name is Sally. My family was killed in a car crash. Can I be your new girl?” or “I want to…
—Online chess video about two pawns that fall in love (Chess Maniac) This was a cute computer-generated story. It’s about six or seven minutes long. I wish I knew more about it. Similar:We Are Hopelessly Hooked [on our Gadgets]We check our phones 221 times a day—an a…CultureMSU asks faculty & staff to volunteer in short-staffed dining…
It’s only made worse by the lame assignments many comp instructors assign (or are forced to assign): 1. A turning point in my life! (Get ready for five hundred essays about, “The time I got drunk? And almost had a wreck? And now I realize how precious life is?” or 2. My personal hero! (Get…
There are still people who think disposing of the trash in a regular, professional and safe manner is more important than writing deep and penetrating pieces of literature – which nobody reads anyway. They admire carpenters who can build good houses to live in, gardeners who can make trees and flowers grow, farmers who can…
“In the twenty years since the Chernobyl tragedy, the world’s worst nuclear accident, there have been nearly [FILL IN ALARMIST AND ARMAGEDDONIST FACTOID HERE],” the sheet said. The Greenpeace spokesman who issued the memo, Steve Smith, told the Web site that a colleague was making a joke in a draft that was then mistakenly released.…
Katharine Close, an eighth-grader at the H.W. Mountz School in Spring Lake, N.J., is the first girl since 1999 to win the national spelling title. She stepped back from the microphone and put her hands to her mouth upon being declared the winner. She recognized the word as soon as she heard it. “I couldn’t…