The happiest and most peaceful parts of the World Wide Web are the places where people are buying things. The nasty parts of the Web are where people are doing what the Founding Surfers intended: expressing themselves and forming communities. […] Having spent a decade working at the devil Microsoft and then at a big…
In this essay, we will explore the idea of emergence. We will examine how objects and patterns can arise from simple interactions in ways that are surprising and counter-intuitive. We will present examples with simple squares that turn on and off, but the underlying ideas will provide you with a new perspective for thinking about…
There are already educational and psychotherapeutic treatments for writer’s block, some fairly effective. But remember, not many people want to be treated for hypergraphia. Their writing is usually very important to them. That raises an important point: What right do I have to give a medical name to a character trait that people value in…
I’m Humbler than You Are! Na na-na na-naah! (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve been thinking a lot about improvization in education, thanks in part to recent posts on Pedablogue, but also due to Mike Rubino’s occasional blog entries about The Cellar Dwellers. Kids offer great material for improvisation. I’m immune to the “Are we there yet?” question,…
I began pondering what life would be like if zombies came around. How would I react? What would my use be to society (because nearly everyone in a zombie movie has a distinct purpose)? How would I survive? What would I be like as a zombie if I did get bitten? There are obviously a…
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…