One of several paintings that were, according to a spam I received Sunday, stolen from a museum in Manchester, England. WARNING: Picasso, Van Gogh, Gauguin have been stolen in UKE-Mail) When I went online to check the validity of this spam I found a BBC story which reports “The paintings – Van Gogh’s The Fortification…
“Writing for the Web is not the same as writing for print. People read differently on the Web. They scan read?jumping quickly from one piece of content to the next. People are much more action-orientated on the Web. They get online to get something done. Words should always be driving actions.” Know your reader Take…
“For years Slashdot has had an abundance of game related content. Unfortunately, we’ve also had limited space to post those stories. We strive to cover a wide range of tech news, and this often means passing on a good game story because something else is more important. But today I get to announce the creation…
“The pundits are blogging. The journalists are blogging. And now the candidates are blogging.| Who needs television? Let’s just eliminate the middleman….Candidate gives speech. ABC News reports speech. ABC’s Note blogs speech. Then candidate blogs his own speech, knocking down any negative interpretation by other bloggers. And we blog the whole incestuous process.” —Modem MadnessWashPost…
“The anti-science movement in health promotion has arisen as part of the humanistic perspective within the discipline that positions itself in direct opposition to a science-based approach that it terms ‘positivism.’ According to this view, the application of the scientific method — that is, an approach to the world founded upon experimentation and hypothesis testing…
“[Cyberpunk novelist William] Gibson is currently winding up the book tour in Ireland and Britain. Once it is over, he’ll end the weblog, he says. ‘I have to go do whatever it is I do, to find the next novel,’ he said. ‘Writing novels is pretty solitary, and blogging is very social.’” Karlin Lillington —Gibson…
“In an enormous blow to the music and motion picture industries, a Los Angeles federal judge dismissed a lawsuit against file-sharing services Grokster and StreamCast Networks Friday, saying that they can not be held culpable for illegal file trading done over their networks. | The ruling, made by U.S. District Court Judge Stephen Wilson, represents…
“A world population that peaks at 9-10 billion is not one in which we have to worry about Parson Malthus, the English 19th century economist who prophesied a future in which people multiply faster than the resources needed to sustain them and hence starve to death by the millions. Indeed, it comes as somewhat of…
“Most fourth graders spend less than three hours a week writing, which is about 15 percent of the time they spend watching television. Seventy-five percent of high school seniors never get a writing assignment from their history or social studies teachers.|And in most high schools, the extended research paper, once a senior-year rite of passage,…
That’s a good one. Via Microdoc News. —What is the best search engine?Ask Jeeves) Similar:Things may be awful, but at least an invasive species of spider the size of a child's hand…Amusing100 Word ChallengeIt is a weekly creative writing challeng…CultureFie upon your multi-page, ad-stuffed crapfest of shame. (Don't click!)What I wrote is not actually a…
“Forty percent of students lack basic reading skills, and their academic performance is dismal compared with that of their foreign counterparts. In response to this crisis, schools are skilling-and-drilling their way ‘back to basics,’ moving toward mechanical instruction methods that rely on line-by-line scripting for teachers and endless multiple-choice testing. Consequently, kids aren’t learning how…
fisk (v): debunk via critical annotation, typically with heaping doses of contempt. Recently Jill Walker lamented that it was hard to teach her students to blog critically. Perhaps we should first teach them to fisk. Over the past month, I’ve seen the verb “fisk” pop up in weblogs discussing media coverage of Iraq. The eponymous…
Google: “switch[ed] to Blogger“: 165. Google: “switch[ed] to Movable Type“: 534Blogger vs. Movable TypeLiteracy Weblog) Similar:Results of the 18th Annual Interactive Fiction Competition The 18th Annual Interactive Fiction Com…Current_EventsContext for Hayles, My Mother was a Computer (Ch 3 & 4)My undergraduates are working their way …AcademiaA week of nonstop breaking political news stumps AI chatbotsChatbots are…
“Forty German authors are hoping to set a record on World Book Day on Wednesday by conceiving, writing and printing a book in 12 hours. | Each of the authors has two hours in which to write two pages of the book.” —Authors Plan ‘Fastest’ BookBBC) Similar:Death of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced…
“TypePad is the first new consumer-grade weblogging product in more than a year, but it shows a change in the marketplace: grabbing the new middle ground of users who want all the advanced features of a self-hosted weblog, but none of the tears of having to learn about Linux or Perl or FTP. This should…
“Whoo whoo whoo oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh oogh ooh ooh oooh oooh.” — Primatologist Jane Goodall imitating a chimpanzee in the U.S. State Department, yesterday. —Notable QuotesABC News) Similar:William Shakespeare, Playwright and Poet, Is Dead at 52 On this date — April 23, 1616 — the cr…CultureIt's a Didactic Day in the…
“With regard to the article by David Whitehouse posted Friday, 18 April, 2003, 13:45 GMT 14:45 UK: Does anyone actually read these BBC stories before they are posted? It would be polite to to spell Mr. Rutan’s name properly (‘Burt’ not ‘Bert’). Moreover, this is not the ‘world’s first manned sub-orbital space programme’. I cannot…
CNN/Reuters: News reports have filtered out early this morning that US forces have swooped down on an Iraqi primary school and captured 6th- grade teacher Mohammed al-Hazar. Sources indicate that, when arrested, Al-Hazar was in possession of a ruler, a protractor, a geo-board, base-10 blocks, algebra tiles, a computer, a data projector and a graphing…
“In the last 24 years, Mr. Gottman and his colleagues have recorded thousands of such conversations, using careful techniques to measure and notate the participants’ emotions each step of the way. After Angie and Dave’s talk, Mr. Gottman says, his assistants reviewed a videotape, scoring each sentence and facial expression on such measures as disgust…
“A panel of celebrity judges will help eliminate two contestants each week, leaving one lucky winner the undisputed leader of Iraq at the end of the season. Viewers can participate by casting phone-in votes, although Darnell noted that voting is restricted to calls originating from within the continental U.S.” —New Fox Reality Show to Determine…