In December, 1990, Galileo began its “Earth-1” maneuver: the first Earth flyby. This happened to coincide with the buildup to the first Gulf War. nasa had to inform the North American Aerospace Defense Command that the blip that would appear on its radar screens on December 8th—an incredibly fast-moving object that might well seem to…
If you’re a freelancer, your online portfolio is your life. If you work for the man, it’s a great resource for that next job promotion, working with the design firm across the street. In either case, it is imperative that you create a website of value and visual interest. The part that most visual designers…
But just think of how much talent and intelligence we waste, simply because our educational system isn’t particularly interested in motivating and challenging our most gifted students. | Most of Michael’s classmates from the alternative high school, even the highly gifted ones, did not go on to earn college degrees. In fact, most of them…
The automated essay scoring engine behind Criterion, called e-rater, has been used to score more than 1.5 million essays on the Graduate Management Admission Test, or GMAT, in tandem with human readers. The machine score and the human score are in agreement 97 percent to 98 percent of the time. —For Student Essayists, an Automated…
I had been describing my reaction to the men who’d kill my daughter for the glory of Allah: give me the gun, show me the cave. The author of the piece suggested I would be perfect for the role of the WW2 black-out warden who scolds people for half-closed windowshades. Why, it’s almost as if…
Headless Heroes, Car-crash Residue and Styrofoam Peanuts As part of Seton Hill University’s “Labor of Love” (a day of community action and volunteerism), about 150 people showed up on campus for breakfast, a pep rally and the send-off. Some went to a food back, a mom’s shelter, and various other sites (some of them on…
Recall is a search engine at the Internet Archive that indexes the text of over 11 Billion pages. The archive has pages dating way back to 1996 through the present day. —‘Recall’ Search Engine (Internet Archive) The engine is in beta. I tried typing in a quoted two-word query, but the results came back as if…
Naked and empty-handed, I ran back to the forest in search of my body. As I approached my corpse, I was attacked by a half-dozen zombies. An hour later, after being continually slaughtered, I decided to call it a night. — Aaron Delwiche —Warning: Do not follow strangers into Kithicor forest at night. (Aaron Delwiche’s…
Shopping for Digital Cameras A communications faculty member suggested that the humanities division purchase a bunch of inexpensive digital cameras for students to check out. We’re thinking of buying 5 or 6 cameras in the 2 megapixel range. Obviously we want the students to be able to use the cameras with a minimum of fuss,…
Writing flash regularly — sometimes several a day — has taught me how to edit myself more closely than I’ve ever been able to — and it’s really got me in a new habit of getting the most juice out of verbs. I also am learning to really appreciate the art of indirect suggestion. I’m…
…an interactive tutorial on evaluating the quality of Internet resources. —Welcome to Internet Detective (Social Science Information Gateway) Thanks for the suggestion, Mike. The Social Science Information Gateway uses “SOSIG” as its logo. That’s not quite an acronym… what does the “O” stand for? Similar:Books Come Alive! Catalina Magdalena Cast (Stage Right Greensburg) The cast for…
Java and .NET take vastly different approaches to development, said John Rymer, a vice president with Forrester Research. Java’s philosophy of development is to expose low-level system interfaces to give developers greater control. Microsoft simplifies the development process; the developer has less control — but the tools are easier to use. — Vincent Ryan —Is…
just finished a draft of an encyclopedia entry about “artificial intelligence.” It’s for the Routledge Encyclopedia of Narrative Theory and so, of course, it deals with how AI relates to narrative. Following Jill’s example, I have posted this draft in case anyone has comments on who I might have slighted, how I might have misrepresented…
For those with time to notice, blogs are also a great cheap farm system for talent. You’ve got tens of thousands of potential columnists writing for free, fueled by passion, operating in a free market where the cream rises quickly. | Best of all, perhaps, the phenomenon is simply entertaining. When do you last recall…
In terms of self-representation, the homepage is like a statue carved out of marble labelled carefully at the bottom where the weblog is like an avatar in cyberspace that we wear like a skin. It moves with us – through it we articulate ourselves. The weblog is the homepage that we wear. — Tom Coates…
People tend to make the United States Superman. They think the United States is all-powerful, the bastion of freedom, democracy, strength. They thought that the United States would come in and with superhuman power overnight transform Baghdad into New York and Mosul into San Francisco. It is traumatic to realize that America is not God…
There are the always-in-fashion temptresses — DeepThroat, Hooker, FunLove, Love Letter, NakedWife, Paradise — and the ones that seem to refer to the person who created the worm: Annoying, Brat, Coma, Faker, Glitch, SadHound, Slacker, Small, TheThing and Yo Momma. And there are also names that seem to make no sense at all: Gokar, Klez,…
MOther of God i need freaking cliff notes for peace like a river please someone help i love felicia — fava —Desperate for Study Guides (see comments) (12 Frogs) From another comment: “J., do you get the sense that some teacher assigned Peace… as summer reading and a whole bunch of people blew it off?” Sigh.…
The case of an Oklahoma teen who was charged with a felony for writing a violent short story about attacking his school has been dismissed by a judge who ruled that prosecutors failed to prove the teen actually intended to commit the act. —Kim Zetter —Teen’s Felony Case Thrown Out (Wired) A turning point in…
Thirty-eight percent of the undergraduate students surveyed said that in the last year they had engaged in one or more instances of “cut-and-paste” plagiarism involving the Internet, paraphrasing or copying anywhere from a few sentences to a full paragraph from the Web without citing the source. Almost half the students said they considered such behavior…