Forty-five percent of Americans believe the news media in this country are too liberal, while only 14% say the news media are too conservative. These perceptions of liberal inclination have not changed over the last three years. A majority of Americans who describe their political views as conservative perceive liberal leanings in the media, while…
A very outgoing young man in my class (“Troy”) keeps a blog (Internet diary) about his schoolwork, partying, and politics. As I read his entries, including his grousing about my class, I tell myself that I am not eavesdropping, and that he is entitled to write whatever he likes in a public forum. Yet his…
[T]he recipients of higher education (along with the parents whose experience is 30 years out-of-date if they had one) do not know in advance what they need. If they did, they wouldn’t need it, and what they often want, at least at the outset, is an education that will tax their energies as little as…
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:I accidentally started a…
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:Hero Worship (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 11) Orphaned Boy Idolizes DataRewatching ST:TNG The Enterprise-…AmusingLego goes steampunkBe still, my nerdy heart. Steampunk —…AestheticsTwo Cheers for the Middle Ages! by Eric ChristiansenI love good writing. “Even those who dou…CultureApple Watch is ugly and boring (and Steve Jobs would have agreed)I…
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:[E-Mail is for Old People]…
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:The joy of text – the fall and rise of interactive fictionAlthough the IF community first formed a…CybercultureIn May, 2001 I was blogging about lanuguage, design and Cliffs NotesIn May 2001, I was blogging about B…Amusing"The threat is no longer simply…
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…