A century after the Wright brothers briefly piloted an ungainly aircraft 12 feet above the dunes of North Carolina, humanity is reaching another milestone: getting a craft to the threshold between the solar system and interstellar space. —Peter N. Spotts —Voyager Sails to Edge of Solar System (CS Monitor) I was glued to the TV set…
The PDA is Dead… Long Live the PDA!Literacy Weblog) The Palm has changed a lot in six years. When I bought mine in 1997 (or was it early 1998?) it was called a “Pilot.” Similar:NASA finally makes contact with Voyager 2 after longest radio silence in 30 yearsI was thrilled as a middle-schooler to s…Current_EventsBlender…
Some were allowed to play simple Windows games like Solitaire and Minesweeper, while other “control” groups were denied the chance…. The results were measured against how they felt about the work they do and their job. | “The groups that played games showed improvement on both of these measures,” says Professor Goldstein. —Games at Work…
—There is no website configured at this address (Google?!) Aahhh! Somebody tell me there’s a virus on my computer! I don’t want to believe this… I noticed it at about 1:20 am EST. Similar:Orson Scott Card Builds an EmpireVideo games are a viable storytelling me…CybercultureMaking Interactive Fiction Mainstream: ReadersJon Ingold describes the gamelike storyt…AestheticsA Beginner's Guide…
On the same day she spoke about media panics to my journalism class, Torill Mortensen introduced my “Writing for the Internet” class to hypertext theory. (This is going to be a long post and I’ll probably be too lazy to link everything properly, so see Torill’s online lecture notes, “Hypertext, class and power.”) She began…
In my “Practice of Journalism” class yesterday, Torill Mortensen used examples from her native Norway to discuss media panics surrounding the introduction of new technology in society. There has long been a connection between new media, in whatever form it took — from moving pictures, to TV, to computer games… in the 1970s, Norwegian Parlament…
A six-part adaptation of Life, the Universe and Everything will be up first in the spring. This will be followed towards the end of 2004 by an eight-week serialisation combining So Long and Thanks for All the Fish with Mostly Harmless. | The news comes just weeks after confirmation that the planned movie version of…
It’s not hard to imagine the power of millions of people each taking pictures and attaching them to physical places. You’re headed into Helsinki, and you want to see what the Esplanade looks like in mid-August. Or you wonder what the inside of the Intercontinental hotel looks like. | There’s immense potential for people to…
Torill ‘thinking with my fingers’ Mortensen @ Seton Hill UniversityLiteracy Weblog) For the past few days, I have been showing Torill’s “thinking with my fingers” blog to my new media journalism students. Around the time that our own “New Media Journalism @ Seton Hill University” blog was lagging, Torill posted about the lack of personal…
The Internet is coming of age, and the era of innocence is gone. while the digital axis of evil takes over. It’s high time we leave the term ICT (information and communication technology) behind unless we claim that it stands for “indifferent capitalist thrash”, or “infamous crime technology”. —finn —Infamous Crime Technology (Saywords) Similar:Scoutship Flyby –…
Kitty Kelly has sold it to CBS. No, just kidding. A tremendous night. It’s the beginning of a second media century, Joe, where it’s much more of a people-driven media. And I say that not lightly. It was the Internet, it was talk radio, it was cable that put pressure on CBS, and heretofore, there’s…
Software which enables e-mail writers to choose the image they want to portray is being developed by a team of Scottish researchers. —How to Become an E-Mail Extrovert (BBC) Hi!!!! This new software sounds cool! ;) Its supposed to make your writing more cheerful and outgoing!! The article is a bit vauge — maybe the designers…
“The pirate’s life is so deadly that humor is an essential part of what they do. They tell jokes, they make jests, they perform plays. They’re hilarious.” People are obsessed with pirates, Rediker says, because, while pirates may be “the common enemy of mankind,” they’re also “the freest people on earth,” which makes pirate humor…
After inviting every robot maker with a dream to take part in the Grand Challenge, Darpa, the Defense Department’s research arm, has suddenly declared that only 20 drone roadsters will be allowed to enter. This may not mean much to the conglomerate-sponsored, university-backed outfits in the race. But bootstrapping crews like Chabe’s six-man Team LoGhIQ…
The wildfires weren’t the only things burning in Southern California last week. Web servers at The San Diego Union-Tribune were also hot with traffic. —Wildfires Break Records at San Diego Website (Editor and Publisher) The California wildfires forceD journalists to improvise in order to provide audiences with the coverage they need in a time of crisis.…
A while back Michael Lesk wrote a paper called “How Much Information is There in the World?” That work has now been updated by a team led by Peter Lyman and Hal Varian: “How Much Information 2003?” —How Much Information? (Via MGK) Similar:Preschoolers Outsmart College Students In Figuring Out GadgetsThis is flexible, fluid thinking — child…PsychologyI…
Professors today often believe erroneously that they are already teaching critical thinking in their courses and that students are absorbing it… “[College seinors] say, ‘Look how open-minded I am.’ But when pressed to say, ‘What do you think about this? What suggestions would you make and what are they based on?’ – that’s when the…
This Vampire Killing Kit complete with a wooden stake and 10 silver bullets sold for $12,000 as part of Sotheby’s sale of 19th century furniture and decorative works of art in New York, Thursday, Oct. 30, 2003. The kit, a walnut box that also contained a crucifix, a pistol, a rosary and vessels for garlic…
The feature is particularly troubling to reference-book authors who think they may lose a sale if a user can find “the best place to hike in Chaco Canyon” or “where to find the best airfare to Cuba” by using Amazon’s search feature instead. —Monica Soto Ouchi —Amazon’s inside look irks authors: Search function previews any…
Once adopted, the credit hour became a driving force in higher education. | It presented students with a specific time frame in which they were expected to complete course work, usually one semester…. But Wellman and Ehrlich, a senior scholar with the Carnegie Foundation for the Advancement of Teaching, argue in their book that using…