Children as young as two are the target audience of a new software that will enable toddlers to both surf and send e-mails safely without help from their parents. —New software lets toddlers e-mail and surf (BBC) So… who’s going to develop the blogging plug-in? Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. Similar:Just remember: what you’re seeing and…
Heft vs. Googlehole: Scholarship and the Print Pit (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I love the heft and feel of a book. So do academic tenure and promotion committees, I am told. In “The Book as the Gold Standard for Tenure and Promotion in the Humanistic Disciplines,” Estabrook notes that only in history departments do a majority of…
Use it or Lose It: The MLA Bibliography Database (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) In “Understanding the Economic Burden of Scholarly Publishing,” Cathy N. Davidson makes the case for preserving traditional university presses. If scholarly publication was financially lucrative, she points out, then there wouldn’t be university presses to subsidize the cost of producing monographs. She sees the…
From the Call for Papers: [W]orkshops and presentations that address the following themes and issues: Strategies for teaching information literacy to students and/or faculty across the curriculum Empirical studies on the effect of information literacy initiatives on student retention and/or learning Learning communities and information literacy Creating teaching partnerships between reference librarians and instructors What…
“As soon as he was shot, he started talking his head off,” Holder said. “He began to have a conversation with the robot, telling it, ‘Hey little buddy,’ and then began talking to us through the robot.” —Holed-up suspect talks to robot for five hours, then gives up (Kentucky.com) Those Kentucky robots sure are amazing. Similar:Another…
The floodwaters carried silt, debris, sewage, and diesel fuel. Every pinball machine was submerged at least up to the backglass, and every surface within five feet of the ground, including playfields and inside cabinets, has been coated in the floodwater sludge. The sludge is a sanitary hazard and will have already destroyed sensitive materials… Two…
My Alternate Life (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My colleague Lee McClain recently published My Alternate Life, a young adult book that features an amazing computer game that lets adopted children live the life they lost when their birth mothers gave them up for adoption. If you pass by my office door this time of year, you might…
“What,” I asked, “are we to make of Plato’s attempts to define justice?” A chill descended. Noses burrowed into The Republic. One student hesitantly volunteered a comment; another offered a passing observation. Something resembling a discussion followed, but most of the remarks betrayed the superficiality of the students’ engagement. They were eager to discuss their…
Examples of systemic bias: Because so many Wikipedians do their research on line, topics not already well covered on the Internet tend to be under-covered in Wikipedia. Because so many English-language Wikipedians live in a very small number of countries, topics pertaining strongly to those countries are disproportionately covered. Because so many Wikipedians are interested…
Unlimited selection is revealing truths about what consumers want and how they want to get it in service after service, from DVDs at Netflix to music videos on Yahoo! Launch to songs in the iTunes Music Store and Rhapsody. People are going deep into the catalog, down the long, long list of available titles, far…
SpaceShipOne needed to reach 100 kilometers, or about 62.5 miles, twice within a two-week window to take the X Prize. The other principal requirement was to carry a pilot and either two passengers or their weight equivalent in ballast. —Dan Brekke —SpaceShipOne Wins the X Prize (Wired) Similar:My tween found this creative use for an…
High-school student Jillian Clarke investigated the scientific validity of the “5-second rule” during her apprenticeship in Hans Blaschek’s University of Illinois lab this summer. You know the rule: If food falls to the floor and it’s in contact with the floor for fewer than 5 seconds, it’s safe to pick it up and eat it.…
[A]academic training can sometimes compete with this sense of “adventure” by giving you detailed maps to the treasure, complete with complex keys and dotted lines. I find books now by following footnotes more often than I do by browsing shelves. —Caleb McDaniel —Used book stores (Mode for Caleb) Similar:Once on This Island (Stage Right! Greensburg; May…
More and more, we Americans like to watch (and not to do). In fact watching is our ultimate addiction. My students were the progeny of two hundred available cable channels and omnipresent Blockbuster outlets. They grew up with their noses pressed against the window of that second spectral world that spins parallel to our own,…
The games begin: you can now download entries in the 2004 Interactive Fiction Competition. —Nick Montfort —IF Comp 2004 Unleashed (Grand Text Auto) Similar:Jeff Bezos Plan for News: The Washington Post Becomes an Amazon ProductFor the past few months, a group inside …BooksChillax, Wikipedia, and bridezilla are not puns: Against adjoinagesSo if recessionista and fembot are…
Emerson and Thoreau on Laundry Night (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) It’s past midnight and I can’t sleep. In a few days, I’ll be teaching Emerson’s “Self Reliance” and Thoreau’s “Civil Disobedience.” With two small children in the house, an the usual full roster of “quality time” activities scheduled this weekend, I know I won’t get any work…
By teaching kids to become both media producers and media consumers, the Adams Avenue project promotes the reading, writing, and critical thinking skills necessary to succeed at the college level, Seiter says. That’s especially important for at-risk students, she adds, because while “they may know a lot about TV or movies or video games, kids…
Recommended reading: “Descriptions Constructed” by Stephen Granade, a just-posted close-up look at IF output text, and “Crimes Against Mimesis” by Roger Giner-Sorolla, a broader essay from 1996 on what can go right or wrong in IF, still worth a read today. —Nick Montfort —IF Essays, New and Old (Grand Text Auto) Similar:In discord with its own…
William Shatner’s low-budget sci-fi flick, “Invasion Iowa,” that was supposedly filming in Riverside, turned out to be an elaborate hoax. To borrow the phrase from MTV, the entire town was “punk’d.” Yes, William Shatner is there, and yes, there is a film crew, but the whole thing wasn’t for a movie, but for a “reality”…
When we see a drawing of a transportation futuristic, we instinctively know that’s what it is. But what do jetpacks, rolling boats and these other endeavors have in common? With few exceptions, such as Leonardo da Vinci’s visions of helicopters and airplanes, the futuristics are the product of the Industrial and post-Industrial Age, a time…