History of Computer Game Design: Technology, Culture, Business

—History of Computer Game Design: Technology, Culture, Business (Stanford University) This course website features an excellent bibliography of computer game history and scholarship. Similar:31 Undeniable Truths That Journalism Majors Can All Agree OnBecause you know you have the chance to …AcademiaHemingway: The First Draft of Anything… Facebook.AmusingDigital Humanities: A DefinitionDoes the world need another working defi…AcademiaIs…

Why blogs could be bad for business

While blogging’s earliest advocates operate on the “information wants to be free” principle, many businesses would shudder at the very thought. | “Information is power” is a more likely mantra in many organisations. Whenever you hear those three words, you’re hearing the signal of the kind of closed information culture where there’s also a heads-down,…

CSS Not Displaying on My Site?

CSS Not Displaying on My Site?Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) I’ve been pulling my hair out for the last 2 hours because something seems to be wrong with the style sheets on my site. Do my pages look the way they usually do? Most of the time, I get no styles whatsoever, then about once out of…

Jack Lynch's Home Page

My first scholarly monograph, The Age of Elizabeth in the Age of Johnson, has rocketed to the 1.6 millionth bestseller (up from 1.8 millionth a few weeks ago) on Amazon.com. (Stop presses! — now it’s zoomed up to the 1.49 millionth! Take that, Distributional Ecology and Abundance of Dung and Carrion-Feeding Beetles (Scarabaeidae) in Tropical…

Reporter 'Panicked' In Probe

The Kelley controversy comes at a time of growing public mistrust of the mainstream media. In the past year, critics have questioned: Fox’s Geraldo Rivera and NBC’s Peter Arnett over their reporting on the Iraq war; The Washington Post for reporting that Jessica Lynch had been shot and stabbed and not correcting the account for…

Hey! Where's the problem?

“If they are allowed to experiment and do things on the computers that the teachers have not specifically given them permission to do, we would never get any computer education accomplished.” Beverly Sweeney, middle school teacher involved in the suspension of a student who used a DOS command to send the word “Hey!” to 80…

Allegations arise in Peterson trial survey

Several university students said Thursday that they fabricated survey results factored into in a judge’s decision to move Scott Peterson’s capital murder trial out of Modesto…. [T]hey made up every answer on all the surveys they submitted because they found it difficult to gather legitimate data. They did it, they said, because they were short…

The Uses of History

For almost all important social and political issues, a view of the past is essential, and the most powerful analyses of issues requires a historical framework that reflects all the complexity and ambiguity of the past. Yet, for most people, it seems that their concept of history settled into a fixed evaluation (usually a negative…

The Click Heard Round The World

It was December 1968. An obscure scientist from Stanford Research Institute stood before a hushed San Francisco crowd and blew every mind in the room. His 90-minute demo rolled out virtually all that would come to define modern computing: videoconferencing, hyperlinks, networked collaboration, digital text editing, and something called a “mouse.” —The Click Heard Round…

The Decline of Fashion Photography

Today, 30 years into feminism, we have models who look not just weak and unsophisticated, but also dumb and victimized. Academic feminists haven’t complained because the models are supposedly playing a subversive role and subversion is inherently politically correct. Moreover, many of the young photographers are female. But now we?ve moved into ?fashion vérité? and…

Neodymium Super Magnets

Matt Hoy writes: They sell rare earth magnets. Incredibly strong and small. I ordered a bunch of them. These would be useful for creating the “hard drive killer” door frame [Neal] Stephenson mentions in “Cryptonomicon”. They sell one monster with over 350 lbs of force. I’m afraid I had to buy smaller ones, since I…

'Historic find' is old garden patio

Huge slabs uncovered in Marion Garry’s garden in Buckhaven, Fife, had experts convinced they had found evidence of an early Viking village….Mr Speirs admitted that his team mistakenly ignored the finds of a World War II child’s gas mask and old television remote in their hunt for Viking evidence. —‘Historic find’ is old garden patio (BBC)…

The Wandering and Homes of Manuscripts

The Wanderings and Homes of Manuscripts is the title of this book. To have called it the survival and transmission of ancient literature would have been pretentious, but not wholly untruthful. Manuscripts, we all know, are the chief means by which the records and imaginings of twenty centuries have been preserved. It is my purpose…

No Mark of Distinction

Over the last two decades, academic [book] titles have become increasingly cumbersome, and it is rare to find an academic book title that is not lashed together with a subtitle and its colon. Some books even boast two subtitles, glued tenuously to the title with two colons. —Jennifer Jabson —No Mark of Distinction (Chronicle) The title…

PC version of Deus Ex: Invisible War disappoints

The game’s artificial intelligence borders on idiotic. At one point, I conversed with the civic manager of Upper Seattle in his office. After our chat, he conveniently walked into the hallway and blankly looked on as I hacked into his safe and stole secret information. I was especially disappointed with Invisible War because its ambitious…

Who Killed the Detective Novel?

“It was the Critic, in the New Yorker, with the essay.” —Eric Mayer —Who Killed the Detective Novel? (Eric Mayer) Not, says Eric. Similar:The Ongoing Obsession with Shakespeare’s True IdentityI’ve never been all too keen on Shakespe…AcademiaEmotional Intelligence Needs a RewriteI’ve recently processed and absorbed my …EssaysIf you like to play with words, good newsI wish…