The evolution of the Internet as collective, public dream via electronic interfaces, and the evolution of human beings into civilizations, has many striking parallels. The earliest networks were often protected by their owners, and communities were relatively secretive or ?cave-dwelling.? The wiki, on the other hand, is out in the open field, where its vulnerability…
As I write, I am one week into my retirement from six years as assistant to the president of a Research I university. In many ways, this was a great job. To gain a perch on the heights of academic responsibility while being responsible for very little; to learn the ropes without having to pull…
In Indiana, the $9.6 million railroad project funded by state, federal and railroad monies is a cooperative effort that is the “product of a great partnership of private and public officials,” according to David J. Collins, president of B&P. “It was truly a railroad lost to the wilderness,” Collins said, explaining the track had been…
Yes, the news is less entertaining than Friends, so we need other reasons to watch. But those reasons — including voter participation, party affiliation, and educational expectations about following the news — have weakened in the past three decades. We need to turn the tide. But what can we do? Plenty. First, we must raise…
Okay. It’s true, as Johnson says, that video games can be intensely challenging and absorbing, and that book-loving snobs tend to be oblivious to this fact. It’s true that “The Sopranos” is complicated and subtle as well as violent. And although you yourself don’t watch “24,” your smart colleagues talk endlessly about its intricate plotting.…
Grist for the e-mail forwarding mill. Whatever you call them, Web fads are entertaining, unintended consequences of life on the World Wide Web. Once the masses could put anything online easily, they turned up weird fetishes, hilarious parody, jaw-dropping narcissism, and moments of brilliance. And over the past 10 years, some of these ideas broke…
“Even if you have seven people together eating TV dinners, they are eating in a line and that’s not conducive to communication,” Dr Spungin said. “Eating together has always been a mark of family life. You also eat together as a sign of hospitality and welcome. “[The TV dinner] is a big problem in the…
Each book in “For Pittsburgh” has about 450,000 characters, and will take about 20 hours, on average, to cycle through the LED tubes. Each side of the display has about 750 tubes stretching from the bottom edge of the convention center’s roof up to its peak. The letters, about 3-foot-high-by-1-foot-wide, scroll vertically up the horizontal…
Such are but a few of the reasons I make errors of fact, not regularly but often enough to provoke eternal vigilance. What I hope my students get out of analyzing their professor’s foibles is that everyone — they, I, the authors of textbooks, the president, Nobel Prize winners, and so on — makes mistakes.…
Doohan, whose role was immortalised in the line “Beam me up, Scotty”, had been suffering from pneumonia and Alzheimer’s disease, his agent said. —Star Trek’s Scotty dies aged 85 (BBC) Just as Sherlock Holmes never said, “It’s elementary, my dear Watson,” nobody in the original show ever said “Beam me up, Scotty,” but that’s OK. (Favorite…
First, you see no letters. No, you don’t a row of letters along the top informing you of what game you are playing – you’ve got to figure it out all by yourself. Next, you have 9 columns and 3 rows of numbers. You have two ways to win: you either get a line straight…
When playing Rogue, I’m almost as into the game as when playing an uptodate game like Diablo. The atmosphere is almost the same. How on earth did you achieve that? “I don’t know. In a lot of ways, I think playing Rogue is to playing Diablo as reading a book is to watching a movie.…
Even before the election, a new political word had begun to take hold of the party, beginning on the West Coast and spreading like a virus all the way to the inner offices of the Capitol. That word was ”framing.” Exactly what it means to ”frame” issues seems to depend on which Democrat you are…
Rupert Murdoch’s News Corp. has demonstrated the seriousness of its commitment to digital media by reaching a deal to buy Intermix Media Inc. for $580 million in cash…. The announcement — one of the biggest commitments to the Web by a big media conglomerate in recent memory — underscores how important online advertising has become…
On Saturday, the National Governors Association released the results of a poll of 10,000 teenagers (16-18 years old), including both students in high school and those who had dropped out. Significant numbers of students reported that high school was not challenging enough and that they were willing to take on more work. —Scott Jaschik —High…
All this week the BBC News website is speaking to people whose creativity has been transformed in the digital age. From blogging to podcasting, millions of ordinary people are becoming writers, journalists, broadcasters and film-makers thanks to increasingly affordable and accessible tools. —Darren Waters —Digital Citizens: The film-maker (BBC) Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. Similar:Science Fair…
Computer technology is an invaluable supplement for research, but it becomes inefficient when it is used as a substitute for the hands-on investigation of the stacks. In any large, old library, there are unknown quantities of printed materials that cannot be found in electronic catalogs. Some of them were missed during the shift from cards…
Journalists are worrywarts. We worry about toxins in the drinking water, graft at City Hall, opposition leaders in countries you’ve never heard of and the rotator cuffs of journeyman pitchers. We worry about greenhouse gasses, decorum in the Senate, childhood obesity, abandoned pets and the fall lineup on ABC. If there’s an asteroid headed in…
The British suicide bombers and the Iranian nuke demands are genuine crises. The Valerie Plame game is a pseudo-crisis. If you want to talk about Niger or CIA reform, fine. But if you seriously think the only important aspect of a politically motivated narcissist kook’s drive-thru intelligence mission to a critical part of the world…
Everyone that plays video games knows Grande [sic] Theft Auto and it’s [sic] reputation for violence, especially GTA 3, GTA: Vice City and now GTA: San Andreas. Lately, however, GTA:S.A. has come under more fire than its predecessors and it’s all because of something called the “Hot Coffee Mod.” Apparently the .mod,which unlocks minigames that…