“Only a few years ago professors rarely encountered marketing in the Ivory Tower. When we did, the marketing had substance — book dealers with free review copies of books, office-supply vendors with reorder requests, discounts on scientific or literary publications, and the like.|Now we’re deluged with ploys that have little to do with our academic…
“The Sims Online married a hot concept — multiplayer online gaming — to The Sims, the best-selling PC game series of all time. In addition, it was designed in part by Will Wright, one of the game industry‘smost renowned developers. All of this combined into a rich maelstrom of hype: The Sims Online was featured…
I’ve come across two websites that use news photos to tell very different stories. A Tale of Two Cities contrasts photos of anti-war protests in San Francisco with photos of Iraqi citizens kissing US soldiers and celebrating in Baghdad. But “A Tale of Two Photos” shows a wide-angle shot of the site of statue torn…
“With the burgeoning Sars epidemic spreading fear among travellers worldwide, the Hong Kong tourist board must be ruing the day it commissioned a series of magazine ads telling readers a visit to the city will ‘take your breath away’. Shortness of breath is one of the main symptoms of Sars – severe acute respiratory syndrome…”…
“The Matrin County School Board has a new way of post a student’s grades online for a parent to check. Pinnacle is the name of the program, a simple java applet. Not only does Pinnacle log student’s grades, but also attendance and conduct. The way grades are accessed are by inputting the first 6 digits…
Why is such a high-tech nation eschewing texting? | The short answer is that, in America, talk is cheap. Because local calls on land lines are usually free, wireless operators have to offer big ‘bundles’ of minutes?up to 5,000 minutes per month?as part of their monthly pricing plans to persuade subscribers to use mobile phones…
“A team of cold-hearted, killjoy scientists at NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory callously announced Monday that the likelihood of complex life on Mars is ‘extraordinarily low,’ dashing the hopes of the public just like that.” —Mean Scientists Dash Hopes for Life on MarsThe Onion) Similar:Stunning, bleak unemployment chart from the front page of the New York…
“Although it had no sound, no color (black-and-white), and no animations, it did have one feature that would make it part of computer gaming history — graphics. Mystery House was the first computer game to ever contain graphics (70 simple 2D pictures drawn by Roberta Williams). Before then, all computer games were text-based. Due to…
“Saying they are appalled by the way the United States and Britain defied the will of the United Nations and attacked Iraq, the four [German] professors declared war on borrowed English terms in German such as ‘okay,’ ‘T-shirt’ and ‘party.’ They have devised French-language alternatives: ‘d’accord,’ ‘tricot’ and ‘fete.’” —German Professors Declare War on English…
…So I Became an Asshole. My Parents Said I Could Be Anything I Wanted…Serendipity) Slogan on a T-shirt worn by a student I just passed in the hall. Similar:Four Benefits of Being in a RelationshipThe pandemic sucks. We’re spending more …CultureThe Tyranny of Now (Appreciation of Harold Innis)As a grad student at the University of…
“Fleishman posted the book online in PDF format last month. He expected a few hundred downloads. Instead, it was grabbed about 10,000 times in just 36 hours.|It took Fleishman a couple of days to realize how much traffic the book was attracting. But by the time he pulled the file offline, he was on the…
“Peter Arnett, recently fired from NBC for giving an interview to Iraqi TV, has provided a lesson in media relations in today’s global society…. We live in a celebrity age. Arnett had turned himself into a controversial celebrity. As such, anything he says is fair game. The Dixie Chicks just learned this when lead singer,…
What does the above title make you think? It’s a quote from an article in the Chicago Daily Herald., which reports that in a particular precinct, a worker registered 127 residents of a treatment center for sex offenders; 120 residents of that facility later submitted absentee ballots. “In the clerk’s race, 229 voters were cast…
“Bidding on the auction site eBay ended Friday after a month on the Internet auction site with no offers reaching the minimum reserve price. Amboy, with seven residents, has a listed value of $1.9 million, but the top bid reached only $995,900.|Amboy has a post office, motel, cafe, gas station, church, gift shop and two…
I found this quote on Megnut: “59% of all Americans believe that what is written in the Bible’s Book of Revelations will come to pass.” She was citing a BBC article about Bush and religion. My question is this… what, specifically, does the study say 59% of Americans believe about Revelations? Conservative evangelical churches can’t…
“Former astronaut Sally Ride says before Columbia exploded, the U.S. space agency may have gotten too used to foam breaking off the fuel tanks and striking the shuttle’s thermal protection system. | Investigators believe hard foam insulation falling from the external fuel tank during launch may have damaged the shuttle’s wing. The spacecraft broke apart…
“Fourth-graders in the United States score better in reading than many of their peers around the world, but poor and minority U.S. students still lag behind other U.S. learners, a new international study shows. | Students in U.S. public schools outperformed 23 of 34 other countries in the project, known as the Progress in International…
“It is bound to go down as one of the great moments in PR history. | With US tanks rolling into Baghdad and the sound of artillery fire reverberating around the city, Iraq’s ever jovial information minister popped up yesterday to declare that the ‘infidels’ were facing ‘slaughter’…. Standing on the roof of Baghdad’s Palestine…
After I dubbed Yahoo’s new search engine “Yahoogle”, Clancy Ratliff wrote (in a KairosNews discussion thread): You know, I love the name “Yahoogle.” I wish it were called that and not “Yahoo Search.” We could also have “Lycoogle,” “AltaVoogle,” “NoogleLight,” “Dooglepile,” “AskJoogle,” etc. Instead of “Dooglepile,” I suggest “DogPoogle.” Actually, somebody has already registered “Yahoogle.com,”…
“Cecile de Brunhoff, the inspiration for Babar, the enchanting little elephant whose adventures captivated generations of children, has died in Paris. She was 99.” —Inspiration for ‘Babar the Elephant’ DiesAP) To say that somebody was the inspiration for a cartoon Elephant suggests something unflattering. The headline could have been clearer: “Inspiration for ‘Babar’ Stories Dies”…