—MSN Spaces = soylent green (BoingBoing) A good introduction to the online reaction to MSN Spaces, Microsoft’s new blogging service. Note particularly the terms of service that says anything you post using the service becomes a product that MSN can sell without reimbursing you. Similar:Verify or duck. Confirm each detail or leave it out of your…
Lycos Europe has shut down its screensaver, makelovenotspam, which delighted many Internet users with the opportunity to flood spammers’ Web sites with junk e-mail. ISPs and anti-virus developers objected to the tactic, and at least one spammer found a way to turn the tables…. One Web site reportedly spammed by the screensaver simply forwarded its…
How indulgent is World of Warcraft? The game actually rewards you for not playing it. If you log out of the game in an inn, you get double experience for a while when you return later. According to the documentation, staying away from the game for a week should give you about a level and…
—Subjects > News > Colleges and Universities (Alexa) The web indexing service Alexa rates my academic site (jerz.setonhill.edu) as the fifth most popular in the “News > Colleges and Universities” category. Then again, there are only five sites in that category… so “Alexa puts my site in last place” is another way of looking at the…
Three major network television stations – NBC, CBS and ABC – have provided news and entertainment to American television viewers for decades. Each network broadcasts the evening news at 6:30 p.m., and for many American families, gathering around the television set to watch NBC anchor Tom Brokaw, CBS anchor Dan Rather, or ABC anchor Peter…
“Troops crossed the line of departure,” 1st Lt. Lyle Gilbert declared, using a common military expression signaling the start of a major campaign. “It’s going to be a long night.” CNN, which had been alerted to expect a major news development, reported that the long-awaited offensive to retake the Iraqi city of Fallouja had begun.…
A spokesman for the Oxford University Press said that the word was now being put into other dictionaries for children and learners, reflecting its mainstream use. “I think it was the word of last year rather than this year,” he said. “Now we’re getting words that derive from it such as ‘blogosphere’ and so on,”…
In justifying this nightmare society [Orwell’s 1984], Winston’s torturer, O’Brien, explains: “You are imagining that there is something called human nature which will be outraged by what we do and will turn against us. But we create human nature. Men are infinitely malleable.” Fortunately, O’Brien, like the Director in Brave New World, is wrong. People…
Indeed, the core problem facing women who want to advance in academe appears to be at research universities. The higher up the academic-prestige ladder a university is, the fewer women it usually has in tenured faculty positions. Research released this year shows that while the nation is doing a good job of turning out women…
The whole affair shows that in fact bad writing is a joint academic/public matter, and to broach it as one would in a professional journal article or seminar presentation is to continue to theorize as if theory were never in doubt. In “interrogating the terms” of “bad” or “difficult” indictments, the contributors follow an academic…
Internet portal Lycos has made a screensaver that endlessly requests data from sites that sell the goods and services mentioned in spam e-mail. Lycos hopes will it make the monthly bandwidth bills of spammers soar by keeping their servers running flat out. —Screensaver tackles spam websites (BBC) A very interesting strategy. Similar:Infinite Scrolling: XKCD's Creative Insight…
Through a new effort, Wikinews, members of the open-source community who write and edit Wikipedia’s encyclopedia entries are encouraged to test their skills as journalists. The news site follows a similar set of rules as the encyclopedia, which allows anyone to edit and post corrections to entries, so long as each change is recorded.–Joanna Glasner…
My concern was that the D would send him from the front row to the back row, where he would turn his baseball cap backward and scowl at me for the rest of the semester. I couldn’t have been more wrong. That D motivated him to come see me about his next paper, and the…
“Serious games” demonstrating everything from flying a jet plane to negotiating a hostage crisis are used to train workers who can’t afford to slip up on the job. Firefighters can use “HazMat:Hotzone” (http://www.etc.cmu.edu/projects/hazmat) to learn how to respond to a chemical-weapons attack, George Soros wannabes can learn the ins and outs of currency trading with…
The prototype consists of two related arenas of activity. In the first, children have to survive ?as lions? outside in a playing field, interacting with a virtual savannah and exploring the opportunities and risks to lions in that space. Children are given GPS-linked PDAs through which they ?see?, ?hear? and ?smell? the world of the…
I believe that educational use of blogs is plausible only if the educational context is suitable for its use. For example, it is plausible for me if one uses blogs in a journalism class; however, I don’t see any reason for a math teacher to use blogs in teaching mathematics, it’sreally pointless for me. —Murat…
What is quality in hypertext? How, in other words, do we judge a hypertext collection of documents (or web) to be successful or unsuccessful, to be good or bad as hypertext? How can we judge if a particular hypertext achieves elegance or just mediocrity? Those questions lead to another: what in particular is good about…
Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn’t accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I’m not making this up): They didn’t like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses. Don’t think for a minute that young people…
It has taken the dedicated work of professors and academic critics over a period of decades to make sure that Faulkner has an audience. Of course, once properly introduced to him, some of those readers continue to seek out his fiction, which accounts for the continuing interest in even his lesser works. It fascinates me…
He made no mention of the National Guard story in announcing the change, saying he had agreed with CBS executives last summer to leave sometime after the Nov. 2 election. But he was forced to fight for his professional life after anchoring a September “60 Minutes Wednesday” story about Bush’s service that turned out to…