“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”…
A chart comparing newspaper references to the terms “weblog” and “blog”. Not only is usage of both terms on the rise, “blog” is overcoming “weblog”. Via Torill Mortensen —“Weblog” vs. “Blog”Eszter’s Blog) Similar:Infographics: the PowerPoint of the 2010sI used to say that PowerPoint slideshows…CybercultureThe Chicago Tribune Has Made the Best Internet Mistake of the DayEvery…
“Be pro-active, not reactive. Tell stories that provide background and context FIRST. We’ve tried to avoid two traps some media organizations, including The Bee, have fallen into: The ‘minority of the week’ story (writing about minorities for the sake of writing about minorities, i.e., ‘Here are our Latinos!’). The ‘minority bad news story of the…
“It is very puzzling that in a country where a 12-year-old knows baseball statistics, adults don’t know the simplest statistics about tests, diseases, and the consequences that may cause them serious damage. Why is this? One reason, of course, is that the cost benefit computations for doctors are not the same as for patients. One…
“The government is not a grotesquely inefficient and expensive IT customer by accident; it’s GI&E by design. It is in the best interests of proprietary vendors for the government to be painful to deal with precisely because it sets up barriers of entry to innovation and entrepreneurship.|If the government truly was a ‘better’ customer, it…
“Detective Smith — who calls himself a ‘Starbucks, Barnes & Noble kind of guy’ — has become something of an expert in early teenagedom, and he has done so without the benefit of having offspring of the appropriate age. He ventures into cyberspace under some 30 different screen names, mostly as girls, each with her…
“The findings prove that the world experienced a Medieval Warm Period between the ninth and 14th centuries with global temperatures significantly higher even than today. | They also confirm claims that a Little Ice Age set in around 1300, during which the world cooled dramatically. Since 1900, the world has begun to warm up again…
“Kelley’s insightful window on the details of the war brought him increasing readership (118,000 page views on a recent day) and acclaim, including interviews in the The New York Times and on NBC’s Nightly News, Newsweek Online and National Public Radio.| The only problem: Much of his material was plagiarized — lifted word-for-word from a…
“University officials say once file traders are notified they’re breaking the law, they don’t tend to repeat the offense. | But some believe the recording industry is so fed up with the continuing problem of illegal file swapping that it’s trying to send a message to administrators and students.” —RIAA Hits Students Where It HurtsWired)…
“Recent recruits who grew up on popular commercial games like Half-Life, Counterstrike and Quake 3 have a natural affinity for the training games, many of which are adapted by the military from the retail versions. Some military officials are enthusiastic about the benefits of running troops through the exercises at minimal expense.|But as video war…
“Today’s web sites, particularly e-commerce sites, can be more complex than standard software products that often confine users to a very limited set of activities. Web tasks are also vastly more complex than those users have with most software applications. For example, our tests asked users to complete shopping tasks. No two users looked for…
“Just as Old Testament prophets called for conversion and repentance, doctors have to ‘convert’ patients away from smoking, obesity, stress, alcohol and other indulgences… As prognosticators, doctors foretell what is going to happen if patients don’t change their way of life. The prophet role provides power over people. Some doctors consciously avoid it. They encourage…
“Although it took millions of people around the world to compel the Gray Lady to describe the anti-war movement as a ‘Second Superpower’, it took only a handful of webloggers to spin the alternative meaning to manufacture sufficient PageRank? to flood Google with Moore’s alternative, neutered definition.|Indeed, if you were wearing your Google-goggles, and the…
“The Hassans decided to make the journey after an American helicopter dropped fliers over their farming village that showed a drawing of a family sitting at a table, eating and smiling, with a message written in Arabic. | Sgt. 1st Class Stephen Furbush, an Army intelligence analyst, said the message read: ‘To be safe, stay…
“A gentle waterfall pours from the cliff into a large aqua pool. The rocks are molded concrete and the pool reeks of chlorine. Under clear resin, our tabletop bears a colorful design of the Mayan alphabet and calendar. Down one level to the right is an area with carpeted steps and a large video screen…
“Often the best reports were those that were carefully written and edited. Some were essentially radio reporting on TV. Technology made some reports stand out but got in the way when it was used for its own sake. Too often the rush to get information on air live created confusion, errors and even led journalists…
“Children don’t go to work in either family businesses (which are fewer and fewer), nor do they go to work to help support their families as in the past. These are small-scale examples but they speak to a larger societal issue: we have taken away nearly all of the ‘traditional’ past-times of children and replaced…