Provided it is fed with cubes, the robot can create a copy of itself within a few minutes. To build a replica, a ‘parent’ robot bends down and places its own uppermost cube on the table next to it. This becomes the base of the ‘child’ robot. The parent then picks up a new cube,…
No one at Southern Methodist University knew — for sure — who The Phantom Professor was. The professor’s blog, like those of many untenured academics, was anonymous and the university was never named. —Scott Jaschik —‘The Phantom Professor’ (Inside Higher Ed) A professor blogs anonymously, venting about the campus crime and the wealthy socialites in her…
How many other American journalists, perhaps not as secure in their position as I, have thought to do a story and decided that it’s too close to the bone, too questioning of the American government or its actions? How many times was the risk that our own government might come in and rifle through our…
We are prudent, practical, common-sense people. And what could be more common-sense — more downright American — than chopping down vast acres of trees, loading them onto trucks, driving the trucks to paper mills where the trees are ground into paste and reconstituted as huge rolls of newsprint, which are put back onto trucks and…
Given the dominance of Hierarchical folders over the last 40 years, this is a major development in the history of information management. Implicit in Google’s product offerings is an declaration of war: Hierarchy is doomed, and Search is going to kill it. —John Hiler —Google’s War on Hierarchy, and the Death of Hierarchical Folders (Microcontent News)…
We edubloggers talk and write about this a lot, this idea that the tools of the Read/Write Web necessarily change the relationships and construction of the classroom. When audience moves from one teacher to many readers, when assessment moves measuring correctness to measuring usefulness, when we ask for long lasting contribution of ideas instead of…
”You cannot overestimate the passion that engineers and scientists of that generation have for the slide rule,” said Douglas, carefully sorting these precursors to the calculator with her white curator’s gloves. —Jonathan Abel —For curator, slide rules are cutting edge (Boston.com) Similar:The Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)As a grad student at the University of…
3) The most common excuse for guests not being asked to come on show was ?I am taping my own show at that time.? Realized I no longer know anyone who doesn’t have own talk show. 8) The better writers are on the page the worse they sometimes are on the air. What TV requires…
MIT Technology Review Online on March 21 retracted two stories written in whole or in part by Michelle Delio, citing the publication’s inability to confirm a source. On April 4, InfoWorld edited four articles by Delio to remove anonymous quotes…. Penenberg provided Wired News with a list of 24 stories that contained sources he could…
The columnist who once ran for governor of California launched a Web site called The Huffington Post on Monday. It features dozens of name-brand bloggers, as well as news coverage. Is this a welcome addition or an unwanted intrusion? —Blogs of the Rich and Famous (AOL — Daily Pulse) Now this is funny… when AOL is…
It almost seems like some sick hoax. Perhaps Huffington is no longer a card-carrying progressive but now a conservative mole. Because she served up liberal celebs like red meat on a silver platter for the salivating and Hollywood-hating right wing to chew up and spit out. —Nikki Finke —Deadline Hollywood: Arianna’s Blog Blows (LA Weekly) Similar:Helvetica…
—Google Movie Reviews (Google) Amazing… one page gives you the showtimes and rating of movies playing in your area, along with a link to the IMDB. I learned about this on Dan Gillmor’s site. Similar:Key and Peele sportscenter teacher parody: New sketch imagines teachers as athletes (VIDEO…Oh, how I wish we lived in a world where…CultureMy…
What will be the contributions of a large bunch of people, who could have blogged on their own if they wanted to, but were motivated to do so by the Arianna Huffington brand name? I briefly checked out The Huffington Post today. I was never too impressed by the collective achievements of the celebrity intellectuals…
I take the view that computer languages, robot ethics, method acting, and biomechanics are the main ingredients that fused, in the 1950s, to become the cultural meme we call Artificial Intelligence, or AI for short. None of those ingredients was wholly new at that time: biomechanics and the Method – first known as the Stanislavski…
O for a Muse of fire, that would ascend The brightest heaven of invention, A kingdom for a stage, princes to act And monarchs to behold the swelling scene! Then should the warlike Harry, like himself, Assume the port of Mars; and at his heels, Leash’d in like hounds, should famine, sword and fire Crouch…
—Hawaiian Good Luck Sign (USS Pueblo.org) Communist North Koreans captured the U.S.S. Pueblo, imprisoned its crew, and began using them for propaganda purposes, coercing them to write apologies and trotting them out at press conferences that North Korea used to its advantage. The October 18, 1968 issue of Time revealed that the men of the Pueblo,…
—Bad Timing In the Worst Way (BreakTheChain.org) How strange… when I catch a glimpse of the Twin Towers in the background in Sesame Street videos that we taped years ago, or on the cover of a Curious George book, I still cringe. But for this ad, I felt a pang of sympathy for the advertising designer,…
Tom Bosley Haunts Me (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m laid up in bed, having gotten my usual end-of-semester cold a week and a half early. (Last time at least it had the courtesy to wait until a few hours after I submitted final grades to start hammering me into submission.) It suddenly occurred to me, from out…
Like many developments in the history of computing, some of the ideas for a GUI computer were thought of long before the technology was even available to build such a machine. One of the first people to express these ideas was Vannevar Bush. In the early 1930s he first wrote of a device he called…
Put bluntly, failure attracts more money than success. Politically, failure becomes a reason to demand more money, smaller classes, and more trendy courses and programs, ranging from “black English” to bilingualism and “self-esteem.” Politicians who want to look compassionate and concerned know that voting money for such projects accomplishes that purpose for them and voting…