His voice was calm, but I could tell by his furrowed brow that what he truly wanted to say was, “Graduate school is a slow and unrelenting descent into hell. Save yourself while you still can.” | I felt the earth move under my feet. Grad school had been my last great hope. For most…
Key to the technique is comparing news sources that cover the same events but employ slightly different styles. Because they are writing about the same events they contain the same facts, or arguments, said Barzilay. “This gives us patterns which are kind of the same — and this is the core of the paraphrasing technique.”….…
“We realized the only way we could improve on the original is if the Cylons could have sex,” quipped co-executive producer David Eick at Tuesday night’s Los Angeles premiere. The chrome-domed “walking toasters” from the original TV series are succeeded by — well, really hot blond chicks, who infiltrate human society to engineer its doom.…
…Ms. Arevelo discovered the distance between what Texas public schools called success and what she needed to know. Trained to write five-paragraph “persuasive essays” for the state exam, she was stumped by her first [college] writing assignment…. “I had good grades in high school, so I thought I could do well in college,” Ms. Arevelo…
Santa Claus needed Rudolph, Hermey, and Yukon Cornelius, and during the show’s climactic blizzard, the outcasts negotiated a place within the North Pole’s hegemonic power structure… | One can only imagine the looks on the faces of the children who unwrapped the misfit toys. Did they laugh and cheer for the squirt gun that sprayed…
The story you are about to read is true. It involves a fugitive heiress, guns, money, and layers of Internet intimacy and deception. It is a mystery that takes place at the edge of technology. And it is unlike anything you’ve ever read before. —John H. Richardson —The Search for Isabella V (Esquire) A fascinating additional…
Babylon 5 creator J. Michael Straczynski told fans on a message board that he’s working on a follow-up to the popular SF series, according to a report on the Dark Horizons Web site. Straczynski remained coy about the project, saying only that he’d have more news next month. —New Babylon 5 project? (Sci-Fi Wire) I haven’t…
Jorn Barger, editor of Robot Wisdom, is missing. He resides in Socorro, New Mexico, and was last seen there by his housemate in very early October. Most if not all of his possessions, including his ID card, are still at his residence. —Eric Wagoner Update: According to poster “cedar” on Metafilter: “I called the Sorocco…
No matter how digital the electronics got, the companies that made the gadgets were still stovepiped; suites of devices worked in perfect harmony – as long as they all wore the same corporate logo. If you managed to force a Sony receiver to work with a Panasonic TV, you lived in a rat’s nest of…
Santa has 31 hours of Christmas to work with, thanks to the different time zones and the rotation of the earth, assuming he travels east to west (which seems logical). This works out to 822.6 visits per second. This is to say that for each Christian household with good children, Santa has 1/1000th of a…
Doctor Who is to get a Buffy-style sidekick when he makes his TV return. His new colleague will be a modern action heroine, according to writer Russell T Davies, who is reviving the sci-fi series for the BBC in 2005. —Buffy ‘inspires Doctor sidekick’ (BBC) While the screaming girly female companion is part of the Dr.…
It’s been an interesting and very rewarding nine months bringing a bit of entertainment to bloggers (and blog lovers). I’d like to thank especially all those people who donated money or their valuable time, those who became premium subscribers, those who worked on cool toys which made use of the fledgling API and all those…
She does say that people who put an apostrophe in the wrong place, when they ought to know better, deserve to be struck by lightning, hacked up on the spot and buried in an unmarked grave, but it’s probably mostly in fun. —Oliver Pritchett reviews Shoots and Leaves: The Zero Tolerance Approach to Punctuation, by…
“Reports that say that something hasn’t happened are always interesting to me, because as we know, there are known knowns; there are things we know we know. We also know there are known unknowns; that is to say we know there are some things we do not know. But there are also unknown unknowns –…
If Michael Jackson did not have all his surgery over the years, this is how he might look at the age of 45. —Michael Jackson Aging (ForArtist.com) Click the link to see the images… I’m too lazy to make thumbnails tonight. Similar:Choose Your Own Buzz LightyearI was on the road (and away from a compu…AestheticsPast Tense,…
America’s higher education system is facing a crisis. Decades of dramatically increasing costs, in both good economic times and bad, are threatening to push the dream of college out of reach for millions of students and families. —College Cost Central: A Resource for Parents, Students, & Taxpayers Fed Up With the High Cost of Higher…
Dellavalle’s concerns reflect those of a growing number of scientists and scholars who are nervous about their increasing reliance on a medium that is proving far more ephemeral than archival. In one recent study, one-fifth of the Internet addresses used in a Web-based high school science curriculum disappeared over 12 months. | Another study, published…
If students cannot find the answers but must make the answers, they are less apt to pass off others’ ideas as their own. The secret is to pose or ask students to pose questions or problems and decisions which have never been adequately answered. —Jamie McKenzie —The New Plagiarism: Seven Antidotes to Prevent Highway Robbery…
There are some things that the birds do that, colloquially speaking, “just blow us away.” We were training Alex to sound out phonemes, not because we want him to read as humans do, but we want to see if he understands that his labels are made up of sounds that can be combined in different…
Dear Professor Jerz, Associate Vice-President Rodd Webb has forwarded me your concerns about the reproduction of your work on a York based website without proper citation. I am writing first of all to apologize for York’s delay in responding to your concerns. The essay has now been removed from the website, and the issue of plagiarism…