Evil, Evil, Evil (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) For the past few days, this blog has been getting comment-spammed one or two times per hour, and my network of student blogs is getting hit with spams that contain URLs with increasingly crude language. I’ve spent over an hour today, and between the two different sites (and two different…
The key to a successful defense is not answering the questions they ask you, but figuring out how to give them the answers you have prepared, no matter what questions they ask. The same, I understand now, is true of television or radio interviews. If they aren’t soliciting the answers you’ve rehearsed, you have to…
At 6pm tonight at the Geological Society of London, scientists will raise their glasses to James Ussher, Archbishop of Armagh … who in 1650 used the chronology of the Bible to calculate the precise date and moment of creation. Working from the book of Genesis, and risking some speculation on the Hebrew calendar, he calculated…
The health plan Wellpoint earlier this year provided $42 million worth of free PDAs or PCs to help entice doctors to adopt E-prescriptions or reduce paperwork by submitting claims electronically. Although WellPoint contracts with 25,000 doctors, only 19,000 physicians participated–one in four passed on the free gear. A big part of the problem is keeping…
There’s a hot concept called “stealth education” that says it’s possible for people to play a game because they enjoy it and “accidentally” learn stuff along the way. Unfortunately, the concept has yet to prove its worth with the pre-teen and teen community. But what if educational games rivaled the quality and game-play of today’s…
Iraqi militants who kidnapped an Australian reporter in Baghdad and threatened to kill him Googled his name on the Internet to investigate his work before deciding to release him unharmed, the journalist’s executive producer said Tuesday. —Mike Corder —Militants who kidnapped Australian reporter in Baghdad “Googled” him before deciding to release him unharmed (SF Gate) Similar:Facebook…
Jim Dunnigan’s Serious Games Keynote (Serious Games) Jim Dunnigan is a talented speaker who rushed through a entertaining narrative of his own long involvement in serious games. I’ll blog more extensive notes later, but two things that struck me were his reference to geeks as people who can make fortunes for other people, and his mention…
—Serious Games Summit (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Apparently The Washington Post has an article on the Serious Games summit, but I haven’t read it. The conference is scheduled to start in a half hour. I’m glad I got here early. The printed program is alphabetized by title — that’s the stupidest organization technique I’ve seen. The events…
The NASA spacecraft that smashed into the Utah desert last month while bringing home fragile samples of the sun may have been doomed by engineering drawings that had been done backwards, an investigating board said Friday. —Drawings Blamed for Genesis Crash (Wired) Similar:We Are Hopelessly Hooked [on our Gadgets]We check our phones 221 times a…
A graduate student has been fired after leading his class of University of Virginia undergraduates on a field trip outside the law. Justin Gifford, who was named teaching assistant of the year by the university’s Seven Society in 2002, was relieved of his duties Monday, a week and a half after his detective-fiction class was…
Dungeons & Dragons players gathered in game stores around the country Saturday to celebrate the 30th anniversary of the grandfather of fantasy role-playing games — a pop culture phenomenon that has influenced myriad video games, books and movies. —Gamers mark 30 years of Dungeons & Dragons (CNN|AP) Dungeons & Dragons was one of the influences on…
Only one school of contemporary art has retrieved an idea of geometrical harmony, reminiscent of the aesthetics of proportion, and that is abstract art. By rebelling against both subjection to nature and to everyday life, abstract art has offered us pure forms, from the geometries of Mondrian to the large monochromatic canvases of Klein, Rothko…
Visitors enter the museum, which is located at 1937 Spam Blvd., through a wall o’ Spam, a display of nearly 3,500 cans of the pork luncheon meat. A sign by the wall helpfully notes that if you manage to restrict yourself to eating only one can of Spam a day, the contents of the wall…
One of the recurring problems that users face is that computers…well…don’t always work quite as well as expected (and sometimes not at all.) But that doesn’t make it any easier for developers and vendors to fix computer problems. For developers to fix the problems, they need to understand what the problem is. Here’s where the…
Since the dotcom bust in 2000-2001, nearly a quarter of California technology workers have taken nontech jobs, according to a study of 1 million workers released last week by Sphere Institute, a San Francisco Bay Area public policy group. The jobs they took often paid less. Software workers were hit especially hard. Another 28 percent…
Google’s desktop search is integrated with the familiar Web search, with a new Desktop tab appearing at Google.com, and results culled from a search of the local drive are added to the top of any search through the Web. The local results are displayed at the top of the list, marked with a new logo…
Analysis, interpretation, literary research and explication all have their own pleasures, of course, but these are intellectual rewards which often come — students are quick to say — at the price of “enjoying” stories, poems, etc. The students would prefer to be blissfully entertained. In the hallway after my most recent class, a student told…
What exactly happened to the link-and-node hypertext novel? We don’t have to carry out that much of an investigation to see what‘sgoing on with Flash poetry, or the network novel, or interactive fiction. But what‘sup with the venerable form used by the soi-disant wunderkinder authors of The Unknown, the one in which Victory Garden took…
This summer, sitting in the Tank and reading campaign blogs, you could sometimes get a half-giddy, half-sickening feeling that something was shifting, that the news agenda was beginning to be set by this largely unpaid, T-shirt-clad army of bloggers. A few blocks down Eighth Avenue, thousands of journalists with salaries and health benefits waited for…
As our hard drives fill up with thousands then tens and hundreds of thousands of digital snapshots, we’re all going to face the same basic challenges as the Bettmann Archive. Of course, you won’t haul 19 semitrailers full of your decaying family photos into cold storage, as the Bettmann did in 2001. But you can…