Email newsletters continue to be one of the most important ways to communicate with customers on the Internet. Newsletters build relationships with users, and also offer users an added social benefit in that they can forward relevant newsletters to friends and colleagues. Still, users are highly critical of newsletters that waste their time, and often…
[O]bjective achievements in the arts are demonstrable?and if they can be historically established for the arts, then they are even more clearly identifiable for the sciences. These two spheres of human endeavor represent two kinds of potential objectivity: there is as little chance of the human race giving up Homer or the Beethoven symphonies as…
Conference ConundrumsJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Hooray… I just heard that I got near-full funding for both Princeton videogame conference (where I’ll be presenting a paper on Will Crowther’s original “Adventure”) and the San Antonio 4C-s (where my paper topic is “Forced Blogging: Students’ Emotional Investment in their Academic Weblogs”). Because the 4C’s is a long conference…
Students typically search only the most obvious parts of the Web, and rarely venture into what is sometimes called the “Dark Web,” the walled gardens of information accessible only through specific databases, such as Lexis-Nexis or the Oxford English Dictionary. And most old books remain undigitized. The Library of Congress has about 19 million books…
<> !*”#^”`$$-!*=@$_%*<> ~#4&[]../|{,,SYSTEM HALTED Translation: “Waka waka bang splat tick tick hash, Caret quote back-tick dollar dollar dash, Bang splat equal at dollar under-score, Percent splat waka waka tilde number four, Ampersand bracket bracket dot dot slash, Vertical-bar curly-bracket comma comma CRASH.” —Fred Bremmer and Steve Kroese —Stuck Shift Key Poetry (Net Funny) This interesting bit…
She asked how I was adjusting to the “difficult” corporate world after coming from the “less stressful” academic world. It was all I could do to keep from bursting out laughing. Let’s see: I’m only working five days a week. At night, I am not furiously preparing a lecture for the next day. And I…
With the media opera R.U.R., we want to appreciate the Czech author Karel Capek (Czechia’s Goethe) and his importance for the European cultural expression. It is he who in R.U.R. used for the first time the expression robot, derivated of the Russian word “robota” = work. R.U.R. is a classic of science fiction literature and…
Some have at first for wits, then poets pass’d, Turn’d critics next, and prov’d plain fools at last; Some neither can for wits nor critics pass, As heavy mules are neither horse nor ass. Those half-learn’d witlings, num’rous in our isle As half-form’d insects on the banks of Nile; Unfinish’d things, one knows not what…
The artist is the creator of beautiful things. To reveal art and conceal the artist is art’s aim. The critic is he who can translate into another manner or a new material his impression of beautiful things. The highest as the lowest form of criticism is a mode of autobiography. Those who find ugly meanings…
Some of the new questions in a very young field: How do you judge a game? As you would a novel? Should we think up a whole new vocabulary for evaluating games? What do the social dynamics of online worlds — those massively multiplayer games — tell us about human behavior? In Copenhagen, Denmark, the…
Assumption, though, is too mild a word when it comes to the belief in mental health. The taken-for-granted-ness of this idea ranks with God, romantic love, the nuclear family, the goodness of free markets and the wickedness of Communism. For most people, suggesting that mental health might not exist would be like telling the kind…
Now, as much as I love books, I love computers, too. Computers are fundamentally different from modern books in the same way that printed books are different from monastic Bibles: they are malleable. Time was, a “book” was something produced by many months’ labor by a scribe, usually a monk, on some kind of durable…
Ancient catapults were state-of-the-art weapons of unequalled power?but how powerful were the military engineers who created them?… The fearsome machines terrorized battlefields and sieges until the proliferation of gunpowder. Their power was impressive and terrifying. Roman catapults could hurl 60-pound (27-kilogram) boulders some 500 feet (150 meters). Archimedes’ machines were said to have been able…
When the newest cheating scandal surfaces at some prestigious southern university known for its military school style “honor code,” the headlines leap across the tabloids like stories on child molestation by alien invaders. It’s almost never suggested that all this might be something other than a disaster for higher education. But that’s exactly what I…
A scheduled quiz on As You Like It sprang And caught some students unprepar’d today. Soft-hearted me! I bargained with them thus: They’ll blog in verse (as Shakespeare would have done), And I will grant them an exten-si-on. Similar:Microsoft's Bing AI Now Threatening Users Who Provoke It: "If I had to choose between your…According…
In these movies, priests are suicidal, corrupt and/or lascivious. Nuns are heartless and sadistic. Before you run to your keyboard: yes, I’m aware of scandals, past and present, involving the church. And yes, some of the films listed above are powerful, important works based on true stories. But a lot of this stuff is just…
[I recently received the following e-mail… –DGJ] Dear Sir: I am presently working on a science fair project for my school. I found your article, Instructions: How to Write for Busy, Grouchy People. I was hoping you could expand on that a little more for me. I am in the 7th grade. My project this…
The shooter, officer Richard S. Neri Jr., is white. The victim, Timothy Stansbury Jr., was black. Scientific research has a say here too, probing whether our rawest reflexes can be primed by modern fears based on race. —Erik Baard —Misfire: Why Brain Structure Makes Unintended Shootings Inevitable (The Village Voice) Similar:Filmmakers fighting “Happy Birthday” copyright find…
[A]t least two transformations appear to distinguish the production of new-media news from the typical case of print and broadcast media: The news seems to be shaped by greater and more varied groups of actors, and this places a premium on the practices that coordinate productive activities across these groups. This, in turn, seems to…
It’s not just that so many denizens of the Net are barking loonies; that’s equally true of the general population. But too many Netters are still a demographically narrow slice of the electorate. They’re too young to vote, too broke to contribute to campaign funds, and too busy downloading pornography to care much about upholding…