A study carried out by USA Today and seven other newspapers in 2001 concluded that faulty design, not punch-card machines, was responsible for voters’ confusion in Palm Beach County in 2000. Despite this finding, states have focused their election-reform energies on upgrading old punch-card machines to optical-scan systems or on implementing electronic voting. They have…
A person’s mental ability as a child could well be an indicator of their chances of surviving to a ripe old age, according to a landmark study which has followed up on surveys carried out in the first half of the last century. —David Salt —Mental Ability Linked To Survival Age (Discovery) Similar:Conflict Strategies for Nice…
Defendants will distribute the Net Settlement Fund by providing a discount at the cash registers of all KB Toys, KB Toy Works, KB Toy Outlet, Toy Liquidator and KB Toys Express stores nationwide, including Guam and Puerto Rico, equal to 30% off all qualifying purchases of $30 or more during October 8-14, 2003. This distribution…
News makers have always had ways of getting their news and views before the public. Often with the help of public-relations professionals, they’ve held press conferences, issued statements, offered interviews. In the past decade, they’ve created Web sites, though those pages have usually contained public-relations puffery, not candid communications.|Recently, a few forward-thinking news makers have…
Dear Dennis: Rosemary asked me to pass on the following passage from J.P. Mallory’s “In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language, Archeology and Myth” (which is actually a good book). “Our review of Proto-Indo-European culture omits volumes that have been written about the reconstructed vocabulary, since much falls under the category of predictable phenomena or else…
—Movie Posters Redone in Lego Similar:Top: flat, monochrome rectangles. Middle: rectangles with a flat bitmapped texture of butt…AestheticsWhy I Was Wrong About Liberal-Arts MajorsIt’s a little bit shallow and solipsisti…AcademiaHow Americans DieFantastic data visualization. How Ameri…CultureVanessa Otero's Complex vs. Clickbait, Liberal vs. Conservative Media ChartUpdate, June 2020: See Vanessa Otero Ad …CultureWhat’s an environmental issue?…
Apparently the blog-hosting services have made it so easy to create a blog that many tire-kickers feel no commitment to continuing the blog they initiate. In fact, 1.09 million blogs were one-day wonders, with no postings on subsequent days. The average duration of the remaining 1.63 million abandoned blogs was 126 days (almost four months).…
Noticed that you had written about our site, The World Rock Paper Scissors Society (www.worldrps.com) on your blog before and thought you may be interested in the upcoming 2003 Rock Paper Scissors International World Championships taking place on October 25th. Couple notes about the Championships: – We have built a new Championship specific site at…
Surely not all the bells and whistles are defensible, college officials concede, but given the expectations of students who have grown up with DVD players in their own rooms, any campus without, say, a nightclub and a food court is as obsolete as an eight-track cassette. “These are not frills,” said Daniel M. Fogel, president…
What does it look like at exactly 25 degrees N, 8 degrees E? What about the other places on the globe where latitutde and longitude lines intersect? Find out at Confluences. —Degree Confluence Project (Orbitals) Link via Rosemary Frezza, who also sends this BBC article: “A Unique Picture of the World.” Similar:Updating a handout I originally…
Listeners who have come to hate the labels believe their favorite artists no longer need the labels. If only that were true. Maybe Prince can afford to cast his label aside and go directly to the fans. But he did so only after becoming a household name. The vast majority of musicians will never find…
Google is engaged in a battle royale with rivals Overture -acquired by Yahoo – and Sprinks for the lucrative classified text ad business. Initially welcomed as the potential savior of small websites, including blogs, Adwords payments have trickled away in recent weeks, webloggers note. —Andrew Orlowski —Google shafts blogger, adds gagging clause to Adsense (Register) Is…
—Senators butt heads over Iraq funding (Yezbick) Is there subliminal editorializing in this headline? :-) Similar:Fact Check: No, an NPR story on the Trump supporters' attempted coup dated January 6, 2021…A conspiracy theory featuring a news sto…CultureThe captain will shortly address the officers and crew. Please have the custodial bots pol…AestheticsBlender 3D Flyover of Fantasy Steampunk…
Web pages soon plunged in Inktomi’s search rankings and disappeared from key sites like MSN, where Inktomi feeds its listings. After he demanded to know what happened, Spooner learned from Inktomi that his site contained editorial flaws that hurt his ranking. And he would have to become a paid-inclusion customer to learn what these flaws…
Literature is defamiliarizing the ordinary, making us see even the most quotidian things in a new way. And games? We might describe them in several ways, but they are certainly ritual spaces in which rules that are not the ordinary social and cultural ones apply. So perhaps the concept of the literary game — a…
It is not surprising that the feminization of the television industry would give female characters more prominence, but it is a little disconcerting to see how men have waned in the process. Suddenly, sensitive shows are dealing with men as an oppressed minority group. Television writers who once focused on women’s dilemmas are now exploring…
A while ago, I lamented that, when copying and pasting from an online source, it’s a pain to have to re-create the links and other HTML embedded in the text. DrWeb sent me this e-mail, and gave me permission to post it here: Just a note.. saw your post on the Kaironews site, and decided…
“We now have a greater understanding of why biscuits develop cracks shortly after being baked.” — PhD student Qasim Saleem, quoted in an article by Christine McGourty —Broken Biscuit Breakthrough (BBC) A biscuit in the UK is what Americans refer to as a “cracker”. Thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. Similar:I Made Cheerful Maze Game in ScratchWell,…
[M]ore than 1,000 fans [were] turned away from turnstiles for up to 1-1/2 hours over a bizarre ticket snafu.|The fans – many of them season ticket holders – were forced to wait on line until as late as the fourth inning to get replacement tickets after accidentally tearing their ducats out of ticket books without…
In other words, a White House leaker is leaking to the Washington Post about Novak’s White House leakers, but the leaker to the Post draws short of dribbling out the identities of who leaked to Novak and whom else they tried to leak to. The Post source does, however, pass stern judgment on Novak’s leakers,…