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,…
What made the early Internet so very threatening to the mainstream media was not just the new opinions being expressed, but the fact that people were spending hours of their lives doing something that didn’t involve production or consumption in the traditional market sense. Families with Internet connections were watching an average of nine hours…
The floppy disk has several replacements, including writeable compact discs and keychain flash memory devices. Both can hold much more data and are less likely to break. Even so, floppies have been around since the late 1970s. People are used to them. They were the oldest form of removable storage still around. —Mark Neisse —Floppy…
Would they enjoy a peek into the diary of a wombat? That, of course, would be up to me. I had the power of a book in my hand, and like any conscientious role model — parent, coach, teacher, baby sitter — I approached this responsibility with enormous respect for its importance. Few things create…
—The Omnificent English Dictionary In Limerick Form A project so glorious and immense; Pointlessly witty magnificence. With limericks numerous Defining so humorous: Versified database brilliance. Via Sarcasmo. Similar:Finland's Museum of Contemporary EmotionsA history of the beginning of the pandem…AestheticsDetails matter in journalism. Get the brand of the beer, the make, m…EthicsThe Decline of Humanities Enrollments…
Television started as a powerful community-building force. If you had a TV set, you would watch what was broadcast, discuss it among the family at home, and also with the wider context of friends, relatives, neighbours and colleagues. If you encountered someone else with a TV set, the immediate assumption would be that that you…