The study followed about 1,000 people from the age of three into adulthood, and found that those who had consistently spent more than two hours a day watching TV between the ages of five and 15 were at increased risk of being overweight, having high cholesterol, and poor cardiovascular fitness. —James Meikle —Limit child TV…
Webloggers are turning a profit, sometimes unexpectedly, reports the Chicago Tribune Online. Blogs such as TalkingPointsMemo, Wonkette, and RightWingNews are securing enough advertising to turn a profit. A firm called Blogads has been connecting advertisers with bloggers and enabling them to reach an 18 to 34-year-old demographic that is dwindling from traditional media outlets. Recent…
Hawking has always stuck resolutely to the idea that once information goes into a black hole, there is no way out. Until now. When news@nature.com asked about his change of heart, Hawking smiled and wrote: “My views have evolved.” —Mark Peplow —Hawking changes his mind about black holes (Nature) Similar:An Hour of Monastic Silence in Media…
[Translated from Italian, by Google.] More interesting, above all for the informative content, are instead articles of historical character like “The scientist on the stage: to survey “of M. To Orthofer, a review of teatrali witnesses from the classic antiquity today with a more rather wide deepening on the dramas of the atomic “era “,…
When you think about it, the Times may have it backward. It charges $1 for the latest news in print, and offers it free over the Web, but for old material demands $3, which is three times the price of an entire newspaper. —Adam L. Penenberg —Searching for the New York Times (Wired) The NY Times…
Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Violin (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Monday was cello, Tuesday was piano, today is violin. Miss Ramona starts with the usual chit-chat that one can count on going over well with young kids.. how old are you? She asks them how old they think she is. Peter thinks.…
Elisha Gray (born in Barnesville, Ohio, on Aug. 2, 1835, died Newtonville, Mass., on Jan. 21, 1901) would have been known to us as the inventor of the telephone if Alexander Graham bell hadn’t got to the patent office one hour before him. Instead, he goes down in history as the accidental creator of one…
With assertiveness, we’re looking at the extent to which the question is designed to favor or invite a particular answer. For example, if a journalist asks the president, “Are you going to run for reelection?”—that’s relatively neutral. Another way is to say: “Mr. President, many of your supporters are calling for you to run again.…
Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Piano (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) The piano lesson was a little more stressful than yesterday’s cello lesson, in part because we have a few toy and electric piano keyboards around the house. While playing with the cello, and even smelling it, was a new and exotic sensation,…
In traditional print journalism, the imperative is to filter, then to publish. The filtering is possible because of a daily printing cycle and large editorial and production staffs. With large, capital-intensive printing presses and a prohibitively expensive distribution system, newspapers in fact require large staffs. Organized hierarchically, these staffs funnel the information out from a…
Suzuki Sampler: Cello | Piano | Violin | GuitarSuzuki Sampler: Cello (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) In the first few moments of his first Suzuki music lesson, my six-year-old son is sitting on the floor with Miss Rann, who is introducing him to the parts of a cello. The instructor sings a very simple melody: “This is the…
Yesterday (July 8, 2004) I took the Internet Bookmobile to Walden Pond in Concord, Mass. It was the 150th anniversary of H. D. Thoreau’s book “Walden.” The Thoreau Society had a dawn to dusk reading. After an hour of having readers print and take away free copies of “Walden,” I was asked by the Walden…
I’d try to peek through the gaps between his fingers, attempting to piece together images through the tiny trickles of light and color that broke through the gaps between his knuckles. But that didn’t work very well, so I’d have to use my imagination to fill in the blanks. And this is how I was…
Dana Gioia, chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, writes in his preface to this report: Reading at Risk merely documents and quantifies a huge cultural transformation that most Americans have already noted — our society‘smassive shift toward electronic media for entertainment and information. — most electronic media such as television, recordings, and radio…
Earlier today, we dropped our daughter off at college. Like her brother before her, she went and grew up on us…. And as usual, whenever a buzzer sounds, the competitor within wants a score. How’d I do? whispers the bottom-line lobe of my brain…. [S]omehow, my kids’ leave-taking has cracked open my shell. Suddenly, I…
The first adventure game was called Adventure and ran on IBM mainframes. It became known as Colossal Caves or The Hobbit, and was influenced by Dungeons and Dragons. —Theo Clarke —The Infocom Adventure (Strategy Plus) The Hobbit? WTF? A transcription from a book, the full publication data of which is not given. See my “Colossal Cave…
The five ran a firm called InfoCom. On Wednesday, they were found guilty of shipping money to countries regarded by the US as sponsors of terrorism, and could face up to 10 years in jail. —US Muslims convicted over exports (BBC) Where’s a grue when you need it? Similar:Journalists prefer in-person interviews. Emailing questions to strangers…
We thought a lecture about game criticism was most likely a recipe for disaster. Straight off the bat, Matteo Bittanti, a teacher at the European Institute of Design, in Milan, proved us wrong. The very first thing he said was, “Hello. I am here to talk to you today about videogame criticism. Because right now,…
Unlike the film industry, where anyone can write a script and submit it to the film studios, there is no real equivalent in the game industry – they are simply not set up, in the main, for that kind of approach. A writer does not produce the “screenplay” for a game and then a studio…
The user plays Sergeant Smith, while the other characters are virtual constructs. Using a laptop, the user speaks for the sergeant, in Arabic, through a microphone headset and controls the character’s actions by typing keyboard instructions. The project is part of a major initiative, financed by the Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency, or Darpa, to…