“While I’m an admirer of Emily Short and Andrew Plotkin, I don’t see either of them shooting for literary effects — rather, they excel by exploring and extending the possibilities of IF. I think my list of ‘favorite IF authors’ would probably not contain any surprises, but I think Graham Nelson’s Jigsaw probably deserves a…
“In June 1999, Bhutan became the last nation in the world to turn on television…Bhutan’s isolation has made the impact of television all the clearer, even if the government chooses to ignore it. Consider the results of the unofficial impact study. One third of girls now want to look more American (whiter skin, blond hair).…
WebWasher Jumped the Shark?Literacy Weblog) For about five years, I’ve used WebWasher — a free program that blocks ads from web pages. Since then, it’s probably saved me several days of time that I would have spent waiting for ads to download or trying to figure out how to close an annoying pop-up without accidentally…
“I nonetheless found the darknet command line calm and comforting. Not threatening at all. I suppose it had something to do with the rhythms of the interaction, for while I knew the machine was capable of unleashing unthinkable power, I also knew it would sit dormant forever, waiting for my fingers to hit the keys.…
“Not only is the First Amendment pressed into service at the drop of a hat (especially whenever anyone is disciplined for anything), it is invoked ritually when there are no First Amendment issues in sight. | Take the case of the editors of college newspapers who will always cry First Amendment when something they’ve published…
Purple BarbieLiteracy Weblog) I recently re-read Brenda Laurel’s Utopian Entrepreneur, which got me thinking quite a lot about what the landscape of cyberspace will look like when my daugher Carolyn starts exploring it. And just now I found that the link to Brenda Laruel’s legendary “Purple-Moon” website forwards to a Barbie website. Of course I…
“So perhaps journalists, playing Wizard of Oz for so many years behind the veil of assorted editors, fact-checkers and media executives, are now feeling a bit naked out in the open. It doesn’t help that media companies have cut fact-checking down to the bone (if it exists at all). With the Net and bloggers breathing…
“Faced with a limited amount of food, [the developing fetus] has choices about how to use it. Dr Barker’s suggestion is that food will be allocated in ways that give an individual the best chance in early life, at the expense of later years when he will have had children and might, indeed, have died…
“The instructional methods that help students learn technology (‘Do X or else undesirable Y will result; don’t do A or else undesirable B will happen; you must do Z first and then C, or else you will have to start over again’) are so alien from the paradigms of humanities pedagogy (‘Everybody’s opinion matters; the…
“[T]he younger people are, the more likely they are to text. | More than eight out of ten people under the age of 25 are more likely to send someone a text message than call. | But, at the other end of the scale, just 14% of those aged over 55 said they preferred to…
Webloggers kick Trent Lott out of his job! Weblogger Salam Pax gives the best on-the-scene reports from Iraq! Webloggers take down the top management at The New York Times! Well, two out of three ain’t bad…. But most journalists — if not the public — couldn’t keep their eyes off the train wreck and continued…
“Doctors said they were forced to refrigerate dead babies in hospital morgues until authorities were ready to gather the little corpses for monthly parades in coffins on the roofs of taxis for the benefit of Iraqi state television and visiting journalists. The parents were ordered to wail with grief – no matter how many weeks…
“BlogTalk, the European blogging conference, is about to get under way. If you’re in the U.S. and awake at this hour (which probably means you haven’t gone to bed yet), you can add to your sleep deprivation by watching the conference’s live video stream.” Dan Gillmor —Blogging and Streaming at BlogTalkDan Gillmor) Dan Gillmor is…
“We wanted a true persistent world. If you walk into a room, turn on a light, and then leave, when someone else comes along three days later that light should still be on. There are a lot of games that clean up after themselves. If you open a door, it closes itself. If you kill…
“The most common way for a story to get started is for mainstream media to comment about the world of blogs, Google, websites, or the development of some new facet of the Internet. Of those stories we traced, the least common way for a story to get started is for a blogger to start a…
“Last week, New York Times columnist Maureen Dowd misrepresented a Bush statement to imply that he said the Al Qaeda terrorist network is ‘not a problem anymore,’ and the distorted quotation has since been repeated by MSNBC ‘Buchanan and Press’ co-host Bill Press, CNN’s Miles O’Brien and others, including numerous foreign press outlets. At a…
Hong Kong scientist: SARS came from cats. British scientist: SARS came from space. Disney: The Cat [came] from Outer Space. Tracking SARSLiteracy Weblog) Similar:While searching my bag for a cable, I found an unexpected wealth of food-substitute items.AmusingManhunt (ST:TNG Rewatch, Season Two, episode 19) — Silly Lwaxana Troi comedy of manners(Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year…
“I’m 40 years old, I make my living as a consultant, and I’ve never created a presentation using Microsoft PowerPoint. Clients occasionally look at me as if I’m from Mars when I show up without slides. I’ve found PowerPoint presentations to be superficial ways of delivering information. They are not actual presentations; they are, in…
“Under Section 215 of the USA Patriot Act, passed in October 2001, a secret court can authorize the FBI to inspect or seize bookstore or library records without showing probable cause. Further, the law provides that the bookstore or library is forbidden to disclose that the inspection happened….Resistance to the Patriot Act has been building…
“[F]or the Web to flourish it needs to remain open, nonproprietary, innovative, free and inclusive. “‘Oh my God, the entire world is inside my laptop,’” Berners-Lee shrieked in pretend shock toward the end of his speech while pointing to the need to develop new ways to organize and access data. “He also tried to assure…