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:The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar…
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:Rhythm of the Dance (Irish dance, song, and…
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:Melissa Terras Reports Her Success in Making Digital Humanities More InclusiveA pleasant little success story. “TEI” i…AcademiaLet's face it, it's time to give up on those Portal and Half-Life sequelsReserving judgments is a…
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:Teaching with iPads: Motivation, Inspiration…
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…
—Interactive Fiction Workshop 1 (Writing for the Internet) This morning I introduced my Writing for the Internet class to Pick up the Phone booth and Die and 9:05. I always enjoy this class period. Most get to at least one of the endings in 9:05. About five minutes before class ends, I ask the students for…
Blogger, and several of the other blog-systems, have a feature that lets you blog in the future. I can set the date on the post for a date in the future, and then it will be posted when I am dead. This is a classic set-up for the: “There is a letter with my lawyer,…
With a clean, no-nonsense interface and existing search engine traffic, Google News didn’t take long to attract a loyal following and elbow its way into the top-10 news sites, pulling in some 6 million unique visitors a month. Of course, executives at rival online news publishers couldn’t help but wonder why they shouldn’t just imitate…
Self-service has been around for decades, ever since Clarence Saunders, an American entrepreneur, opened the first Piggly Wiggly supermarket in 1916 in Memphis, Tennessee. Saunders’s idea was simple, but revolutionary: shoppers would enter the store, help themselves to whatever they needed and then carry their purchases to the check-out counter to pay for them. Previously,…
But how does one measure the godliness of bacteria versus a fruit fly? (Keats opted for flies in lieu of humans, which, he said, would require “a really big bell jar.”) After briefly considering omnipotence, Keats decided to measure omnipresence. Did the number of organisms increase? How fast? In the case of the fruit flies,…
The late writer’s estate hasn’t approved publication of the 1924 piece, a gory, over-the-top parody about a bullfight in the Spanish city of Pamplona, the manuscript’s owner, Donald Stewart, told The Associated Press on Monday. —Found Hemingway Story Won’t Be Published (Yahoo!|AP (will expire)) Similar:Bill Murray Admits A Painting Saved His LifeDuring a February press…
The Weekly Standard posted an article on its website Saturday charging Tribe with using language that closely mirrors sections of Henry J. Abraham‘s1974 book on Supreme Court appointments, Justices and Presidents. And at one point in his 1985 book, Tribe lifts a 19-word passage verbatim from Abraham‘stext. —Prof Admits to Misusing Source (The Crimson) This is…
The really big mistake comes when you treat people as authority figures when they are not expert but simply well known. There is a terrible tendency to treat people as reliable sources of fact when in fact they are simply “important” people or people who happen to be in the news. It is doubly perverse…