HOAX! Did Sgt. Dan Kennings die in Iraq? Not really.Did Sgt. Dan Kennings even exist? Well, no.So who was that little girl writing the letters?

Word that Sgt. Dan Kennings had been killed in Iraq crushed spirits in the Daily Egyptian newsroom. The stocky, buzz-cut soldier befriended by students at the university newspaper was dead, and the sergeant’s little girl–a precocious, blond-haired child they’d grown to love–was now an orphan. They all knew that Kodee Kennings’ mother had died when…

The Story of the Iraq Museum

Cuneiform, the world’s first script, was born in southern Iraq, and carbon dating indicates it originated between 3400 and 3300 B.C., writes Robert Biggs in one of the book’s finest essays. There must have been quite a burst of innovation, because within a century or two the wheel appeared as well. It was quickly put…

WTF is a Podcast?

Podcasts get their name from combining iPods with radio broadcasting. It all started when a few folks started recording indie talk radio programs and releasing them online, intending them to be uploaded to iPods and listened to on the road. Of course, Apple, knowing what was happening, decided to push the technology into the mainstream…

Bye, Bye, Library

The fact is, there will be no more books to restock. The UT library is undergoing a radical change, becoming more of a social gathering place more akin to a coffeehouse than a dusty, whisper-filled hall of records. And to make that happen, the undergraduate collection of books had to go. This summer, 90,000 volumes…

Writing a Sports Story

While the news lead told the five Ws and the H, the lead of a sports story (though not limited to one paragraph) must contain certain elements. When editing sports, check the lead for: 1. Who was involved 2. What happened 3. When 4. Where 5. Name of the sport 6. Score 7. How won…

Why People Hate the Paperclip: Labels, Appearance, Behavior, and Social Responses to User Interface Agents

User interface agents are increasingly used in software products; perhaps the best-known user interface agent is the Microsoft Office Assistant (“Clippy the Paperclip”). This thesis explores why many people have a negative response to the Office Assistant, using a combination of theoretical, qualitative, and quantitative studies. Among the findings were that labels–whether internal cognitive labels…

>Read Game

If you’re older than about 38, words and phrases like “frotz,” “xyzzy,” “maze of twisty passages all alike,” and “eaten by a grue” trigger sharp remembrance, like Marcel Proust eating a madeleine. You’ll instantly reminisce about text games like Infocom’s Deadline, Suspended, Infidel, Leather Goddesses of Phobos, and a zillion Scott Adams titles from Adventure…

Playing with words

Text games circa 2005, however, are called interactive fiction or interactive storytelling. Some are book-length, requiring 20 to 30 hours to play and read. Others are more akin to short stories and can be completed in a half hour. “The goal is to make you forget you’re sitting at a computer and to make you…

What's in the works for the next 12 months at OJR?

The world’s grown too complex for journalists to cover using only literary skills. A generation ago, forward-thinking journalists developed computer-assisted reporting techniques, uncovering stories from public databases, including crime reports, school test scores and census data. Unfortunately, CARR has remained a specialty within journalism, rather than a core skill. Part of this can be attributed…

Google launches Sidebar in latest attempt to make 'push' model work online

Like a zombie from a George Romero flick, the PointCast model refuses to die. The latest incarnation? Google Sidebar aggregrates news headlines, plus custom local weather reports and stock quotes in a desktop application window. Sidebar also adds new features, including the ability to read messages sent to a Gmail account and reader-selected RSS feeds…

On the Trail of an Undercover Professor

Despite “the rhetoric of student culture,” she writes, students are not only studying less, they are also spending less time socializing than students a generation ago. The reason why, she offers, is that they’re too busy holding wage-paying jobs. In addition, efforts to create a more cohesive college community are stymied because the “sheer number…