Called Ka-on, which means “flower sound” in Japanese, the gadget consists of a doughnut-shaped magnet and coil at the base of a vase. It hooks up to a CD player, TV or stereo and relays sounds up through a plant’s stem and out via the petals. — Flower power turns up the volume (BBC) Thanks for…
While some early reviews bemoan the fact that elements of Fable had to be scaled back, it‘sclear that the game is still remarkably ambitious. As the player‘scharacter ages, and as the world changes around him (“him? because plans for female heros were among those cut), he can choose at almost any time to explore and…
While there were times in which some students wrote longer messages, more often than not, the posts were short, merely links to other documents, or text that was “cut and pasted” from another source. There was very little writing that could be described as reflective, dynamic, collaborative, or interactive. There was almost no exchange or…
When history books are written, bloggers’ real contribution to the 2004 election may well turn out to be in providing leagues of amateur sleuths to fact-check political controversy…. The Bush memo story has shown the Internet’s broader power of linking thousands of readers together, as much as it has demonstrated the intrinsic power of blogs…
Welcome to the exciting world of hurricane journalism! While your highly paid colleagues on the anchor desk are broadcasting from the dry safety of a heavily fortified television studio, you and your camera crew will be out in the maw of the storm, risking your lives for no good reason. ? What you should wear:…
On April 19, 2002, U.S. District Judge Stephen N. Limbaugh Sr. ruled that video games do not convey ideas and thus enjoy no constitutional protection. As evidence, Saint Louis County presented the judge with videotaped excerpts from four games, all within a narrow range of genres, and all the subject of previous controversy. Overturning a…
A computer game written by Douglas Adams is being revived to coincide with a new BBC Radio 4 series of The Hitchhiker’s Guide To The Galaxy. The text adventure will appear on the station’s website and was described by the late Adams as “the first game to move beyond being ‘user friendly’”. “It’s actually ‘user…
“People fall for it all the time,” said Greg Paradee, a Chatting AIM Bot, or CAB, fan. “It acts so much like a real human, sometimes it’s hard not to fall for it. The bot … keeps conversation going with normal, everyday questions, so people answer those thinking it’s a real person.” —Beware of Bots…
Student Impressions of Internet History Milestones (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) This morning I gave my students a randomized list of key events in the history of the internet, and asked them to estimate the year when each event happened. “Average” gives the average of all student guesses. “Actual” gives the actual date. “Diff” gives the difference. Â …
Historical Awareness of the Internet (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Most college students today would probably say that they feel very comfortable using the internet. Some really and truly are expert users, with a deep understanding of the function and history of the internet. But I find that when they first arrive at college, most students bring with…
We don’t have cable TV at home, so I don’t watch much TV. My mother-in-law occasionally tapes educational shows from PBS, and sends them up to us. In 2000, when my son was 2, she filled a whole tape with “Between the Lions” (about a family of lions that lives in a library… get it?…
  The memos were written using a proportional typeface, where letters take up variable space according to their size, rather than fixed-pitch typeface used on typewriters, where each letter is allotted the same space. Proportional typefaces are available only on computers or on very high-end typewriters that were unlikely to be used by the National…
A ROBOT that will generate its own power by eating flies is being developed by British scientists. The idea is to produce electricity by catching flies and digesting them in special fuel cells that will break down sugar in the insects’ skeletons and release electrons that will drive an electric current. —Robot eats flies to…
Your online participation is evaluated mostly by your portfolio — a collection of your best blog entries, that represent your developing intellectual engagement with the literary works we have studied. —Framework for a Weblog Portfolio (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’m using weblogs in my American Lit course. I thought the experiment went well when I did it…
For math and science geeks it was a badge of honor, nestled neatly into a plastic pocket protector along with a handful of stubby pencils. And then, one dark day in 1972, with the advent of the pocket calculator, the slide rule went the way of the abacus. Why fiddle around with the arcane log…
Bliss, Sugar, Cosmo girl, Elle girl, the list goes on … The power of such marketing is highlighted today by a survey which shows that most seven- to 10-year-olds are using makeup. The survey showed that by the age of 14, around nine out of 10 girls apply some type of eyeliner, mascara or lipstick.…
Many humans are less inhibited when they’re typing then when they are speaking face-to-face. Teenagers are less shy. With cellphone text messages, they’re more likely to ask each other out on dates. That genre of software was so successful socially that it’s radically improving millions of people’s love lives (or at least their social calendars).…
It’s a mistake to assume that college students who hold jobs are working to pay tuition — or, for that matter, any college-related expenses. One full-time student at Wright State complained of working 50 hours a week, but then admitted using much of the money to pay for flying lessons. Others acknowledged spending a substantial…
Two researchers argue, in a paper published this month in the journal Global Environmental Change, that following the norms of American journalism, U.S. media have promulgated a bias in the coverage of climate change essentially by giving too much credence to climate skeptics at the expense of the scientific consensus. —Climate: Media’s Balance Tips To…
After 180 days in the U.S., email messages lose their status as a protected communication under the Electronic Communications Privacy Act, and become just another database record. This means that a subpoena instead of a warrant is all that’s needed to force Google to produce a copy. Other countries may even lack this basic protection,…