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:Journey's End (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 7, Episode 20) Picard must relocate…
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…
The Secret Life of Bees: A Reflection This year the incoming freshman class was asked to read Sue Monk Kidd’s The Secret Life of Bees, a coming-of-age novel set in the deep south during the summer of 1964. Faculty, staff, resident assistants, and anyone else who wanted to lead a discussion was given a free…
“I have no idea how to make the plastic milk jug look gay,” Bellisle said. “I don’t want to make him a bottle of water, for obvious reasons. Maybe I’ll use a soy-milk container when I draw the gay jug. Or maybe they’ll let me switch him with the Chicano, this tin can here. I…
The Enlightenment knew what to say about religions, all of them: “Écrasez l?infame!” In the 19th century, the progressive party believed that one of the reasons for European superiority over the benighted regions of Asia and Africa was the conquest of superstition. | Today, credulous doting on Islam is not just an expression of western…
I wish I had the answer. I don’t, but I’ve taken some small steps of my own. First, I will not open e-mail attachments, period, unless I know the item is coming beforehand or have extremely good reasons to believe it’s not carrying an evil payload. If you want me to see a file such…
We hear it echoed in recent debates over the ways professors spend their time. What do we do all that time when we’re not pontificating? Surely it can’t take all that time to write the lectures we deliver. Surely there can’t be that many books in our fields worth reading. The only logical solution that some people can draw…