Blogrolling‘sgone dark and the blogrolls lie limp, no shuffle and bustle as busy blogs hustle their way to the head of the queue. Gone too are the diacriticals, small, precious marks of individualization, the QWERTY electron bursts that celebrate fresh activity, new life?our SETI receivers. Brackets and parentheses, asterisks and exclamations, plusses and minuses and…
Spam: In Your E-Mail and on Your Blog (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Wikipedia has an excellent overview of spam — electronic junk mail. A strict definition of spam identifies it as unsolicited commercial bunk messages, but viruses that send multiple copies of infected messages, and chain letters bearing bogus virus warnings or charitable messages are responsible for…
I could have sketched the layout of her blog for her with fair accuracy, but I?ve never before spoken her name. —Jill Walker —ubiquity? (jill/txt) An interesting epiphany describing the impersonal intimacy one can experience in the blogosphere. Similar:Back in the MLAAs the humanities decline in the United …AcademiaDr. David von Schlichten honors the spectrum of…
Anything that lets us avoid a trip to the video-rental store, while simultaneously offering more choices of movies, sounds good at first glance. In some ways, it’s the future of home entertainment. If such a service ever does take shape, however, it’ll likely include severe restrictions on what customers can do with what they’ve rented.…
—Xenoblogging (Google) Last week when I posted on a course web page a detailed explanation of how I plan to evaluate student blogs, I coined a phrase and googled it. Nobody seems to have used it before. Now, thanks to the reach of KairosNews and a few popular bloggers who read it, several other edu-bloggers are…
Isolated and Stranded…and Wet (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Yesterday afternoon, if you were on campus at Seton Hill University, you might have noticed signs going up in the hallways, stating that the faculty/staff e-mail server would be down all weekend, for unavoidable emergency repairs. If you were behind me as I was driving home in the pouring…
An Idaho English teacher is in trouble for ripping up a Bible in class. Burley High’s Karen Christenson said she was trying to illustrate a point about censorship, as her sophomore students read Ray Bradbury’s novel “Fahrenheit 451,” which is set in a future society that commands all literature be burned. —Teacher In Trouble For…
Much of what I and a former student put in “Writing Effective E-Mail: Top 10 Tips” also applies to e-newsletters, but people are much more likely to scan (or trash) newsletters that seem irrelevant. I like e-mail newsletters because they are self-contained — I can print them out and read them offline, or I can…
With funding from the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, the Committee on Institutional Cooperation conducted a study (June-November, 2003) to determine the extent to which publication of a scholarly monograph is essential for faculty to receive tenure in the humanistic disciplines…. Among the major findings are the following: With the exception of scholars who are doing…
Our first and most important line of defense against academic dishonesty is simply good teaching. Cheating and plagiarism often arise in a vacuum created by routine, lack of interest and overwork. Professors who give the same assignment every semester, fail to guide students in the development of their projects and have little interest in what…
FactCheck.org fills a journalistic void. Major media outlets tend to report on the strategy behind campaign commercials rather than analyzing the content for veracity. Even though Jackson pioneered ad watches for CNN, the cable network let him go last year. “I’ve seen the press generally put less emphasis on ad watches and fact-check-type stories,” Jackson…
After much delay, the results of this year’s BetaComp are in. I was pleased to see that once again, each entrant found at least *something* that no other entrant did, and no single entrant found more than about 50% of all the bugs that were found. This reinforces the prevailing theory that several testers (and…
The problem with comments, open forums, e-mail discussion lists and other user-generated online content is that it takes work — usually a moderator or trust system — to make sure the comments stay relevant, clean and spam-free. In fact, spammers have made old Usenet groups unreadable, have flooded most e-mail inboxes, and have brought their…
Whenever Richard Cory went down town, We people on the pavement looked at him: He was a gentleman from sole to crown, Clean favored, and imperially slim. —Richard Cory Interactive Adventure (LLamas) Quite frankly, this was a disappointment, but it was still sick, so it might still have some morbid entertainment value. (The climax of…
You are now registered for Serious Games Summit at the Loews L’Enfant Plaza Hotel in Washington, DC on October 18-19, 2004. Serious Games Summit Registration Confirmation (Serious Games Summit) The Seton Hill administration came up with most of the cost of registering for the conference, which was very generous, since I’m not presenting a paper. My…
I have never posted before, and I hope that I am doing this correctly. This is in response to the questions about the dates of the birth of the historical Jesus of Nazareth. —Dennis G. Jerz, 1993. —Clueless Usenet Newbie: ”Re: Jesus’ Birthday” (alt.folklore.urban) What a dork I was. I was… am part of the Eternal…
[O]nline media can take us and our readers to places journalism hasn’t been before. And in those places, our values may be obstacles or antiques. Please consider: Balance/Fairness/WholenessHypertext links to more information can guarantee thorough reporting. But we should decide: When we should link to ads, to editorials or columns, to sites of partisan organizations,…
One proposal put forward is that Newton’s idea that the force of gravity weakens as distance increases may be incorrect over very large spaces, and may drop off over very long distances. —Robin McKie —Space probes feel cosmic tug of bizarre forces (Guardian) Similar:Is Google Making Us Stupid?Nicholas Carr, in The Atlantic: As the …BooksWhy…
NEW YORK – It‘snot just students who need to brush up on their writing. A majority of U.S. employers say about one-third of workers do not meet the writing requirements of their positions, according to a survey by the College Board‘sNational Commission on Writing. —Survey show workers shud write better (MSNBC/AP) I’m sorry, this is just…
It is an article of faith with millions of Americans, most of them on the left, that George W. Bush is stupid. Many reasonable people think his policies are ill-advised, but millions more insist Bush must be a moron because he sounds stupid… In a letter to be published in The Atlantic’s October issue, Price…