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…
The most important ingredient for a journalist – you have to feel it in your gut, you have to really believe that this is a calling, that conveying information to people is among the most important of professions. You have to understand that in a free world we have a free press, and when freedom…
My main workstation has a standard keyboard, with the slight rise and the stadium keying layout, where each row rises a little above it. The kind I’ve used since I got my first Packard Bell in 1990. The natural shape one can even remember from Commodore 64s and Apple IIs, and probably even abacuses. But…
Too much information. Students who understand how to navigate the web. Teachers who do not. Students who have no one to show them what is good and what is bad. A system of education in which students and teachers do not connect. —dcannell —Are we entering a dark age of information? (Teaching and Developing Online) Via…
One thing that has struck me is that many, if not most, of the people I’ve met from the community who are involved in managing Wikipedia seem to be women. I haven’t conducted any scientific analysis or anything, but Wikipedia seems much more gender balanced than the blogging community. I know many people point out…
Google’s mission is to organize the world’s information and make it universally accessible and useful. Since a lot of the world’s information isn’t yet online, we’re helping to get it there. Google Print puts the content of books where you can find it most easily; right in Google search results. To use Google Print, just…
Technology has come a long way since the washing machine, but somewhere along the line it lost relevance to women. Now gadget makers are striving to win back the female market…. [O]ne can pick up lipstick memory sticks, mini iPods in pastel hues, mobiles with mirrors in them, and slim cameras, all intended to pull…
Most of the cells in your body are not your own, nor are they even human. They are bacterial. From the invisible strands of fungi waiting to sprout between our toes, to the kilogram of bacterial matter in our guts, we are best viewed as walking “superorganisms,” highly complex conglomerations of human, fungal, bacterial and…
The San Francisco-based Breast Cancer (news – web sites) Action (BCA) group is counter-attacking this onslaught of commercialism with its campaign “Think Before you Pink.” The group decries the lack of coordination and transparency among federal agencies, private foundations and pharmaceutical companies funding research on breast cancer. “No one knows exactly how much money is…
Derrida’s prolific writings, criticised by some as obscure and nihilist, argue that in literature — but also in fields such as art, music, architecture — there are multiple meanings not necessarily intended or even understood by the creator of the work. —French philosopher Derrida, father of deconstruction, dies at 74 Interesting… this is filed under…