“Attendance is up. Detentions are down. Just six months after Maine began a controversial program to provide laptop computers to every seventh grader in the state, educators are impressed by how quickly students and teachers have adapted to laptop technology.” Sarah Mahoney —Laptops Win Over the Skeptics, Even in MaineNY Times) According to the article,…
“We struggle with what we own today. Our fingers are already too thick and clumsy to stab the buttons on our gadgets, and, as our eyes age, we squint even harder to see the shrinking screens on our stuff.” Jefferson Graham —Hello, Tech Designers? This Stuff is Too Small.USA Today) Maybe by the time today’s…
“In much of the world, after all, the popular conception of DDT is of a dangerous and toxic chemical that pollutes water and poisons the food chain; in the United States, DDT is remembered as the pesticide that helped put bald eagles on the endangered species list. But a growing body of scientific evidence suggests…
Worth a thousand words:Bob Gillis —Starting Fire With an Ice Lens (Primitive Ways) Similar:To Learn More, This High-Schooler Left The ClassroomNick Bain, 17, was in class one day when…CultureI had some unexpected downtime today, so I filled out another span of my #blender3d #steam…Aesthetics5 of the Fiercest One-Liners in HistoryYes, the Spartans’ one-word response to …CultureEarth…
“Most writing-oriented sites are focused on one area — genre fiction, magazine writing, book publishing, newspaper journalism, etc. — ignoring the basic fact that many full-time freelancers need to multitask to earn a liveable income.” Mike Arnzen —Handy [Writing] Job HunterGorelets) Similar:Show, Don't (Just) Tell (another update)AcademiaWhere is the comma in "God Rest Ye Merry,…
“Why aren’t American scientists barking? Why do they remain mute?|First, most scientists feel more comfortable in labs and classrooms than on op-ed pages and TV studios — and they have no real clue about how to go about challenging what they read and see. Second, in virtually 100 percent of cases where scientists have stepped…
“There is, alas, no scientific claim so preposterous that a scientist cannot be found to vouch for it. And many such claims end up in a court of law after they have cost some gullible person or corporation a lot of money. How are juries to evaluate them?” Here are Park’s warning signs: The discoverer…
“Richard Fletcher’s fine, concise history of early Muslim-Christian relations…. calmly and effectively disposes of the popular myth that Islam is an inherently violent and intolerant faith, while at the same time showing that Christians could not be expected to see it in any other way. He shows clearly that far from forcing their subjects to…
“This project, the Memex Simulator, examines the ideas of the Memex and implements them as faithfully to Doctor Bush’s original specifications as is possible given the small amount of information available on the as-of-yet unrealized physical design. Because of the prohibitive complexity and cost of film and hardware for a device such as the Memex,…
“Persuasion in itself is obviously not new. From Cicero’s oratory to modern TV commercials, communicators have tried to persuade audiences. What’s different is that websites and other computerized designs are going beyond one-way rhetoric and becoming interactive. For most people, doing something is much more engaging and thus potentially more compelling and persuasive than passively…
“Such manuals are written at a tenth-grade reading level on average, according to a new study, while data suggest that nearly a quarter of U.S. adults read at or below a fifth-grade level, and at least 25 percent read at about an eighth-grade level.” —Car Seat Instructions too ComplexMSNBC) Thanks for the link Mark. Similar:The…
“A smart shopper can buy a 5-pound bag of Gold Medal flour for 69 cents. That’s enough to feed three people for a day – 7,500 easy-to-digest, relatively nutritious, and potentially tasty calories. All for less than 0.7 percent of an average American’s income.|Compare this American to one of our ancestors half a millennium ago,…
“My smmr hols wr CWOT. B4, we used 2go2 NY 2C my bro, his GF & thr 3 : kids FTF. ILNY, it’s a gr8 plc.”|[T]he 13-year-old’s teacher could not decipher what the youngster had written. “I could not believe what I was seeing. The page was riddled with hieroglyphics, many of which I simply…
An excellent collection of images by a futurist illustrator. The website itself is rather difficult to navigate. First, it uses frames. Second, nothing happens when I click on the images that are supposed to be “portals”. Third, there’s really no text anywhere that I could quote in order to introduce the content of the site.…
“The SCI FI Channel has cast the key roles of Starbuck and Apollo for its upcoming original miniseries Battlestar Galactica, based on the 1978-’80 TV series. Oregon native Katee Sackhoff (Halloween Resurrection), 22, will play a female Starbuck in executive producer Ronald D. Moore’s reimagination of the series, SCI FI announced.|Meanwhile, British actor Jamie Bamber…
“The Congress Online Project will release its 2003 report about congressional Web sites on Monday, March 3. This report names the winners of the Congress Online Gold, Silver, and Bronze Mouse Awards and provides guidance to congressional offices on how to improve their own Web sites. We don’t want to give away any secrets until…
Rosemary Frezza wants to make sure Literacy Weblog readers get their Peeps fixes: Lord of the Peeps (just what it sounds like — Middle Earth with Peeps), PeepHenge (work it out) and Captain Kirk chatting up a green dancer in Star Trek Peeps.PeepsE-Mail) Similar:Why Computers Will Never Write Good Novels If it were possible to…
“Ashcroft has assigned two attorneys to investigate the case of a Texas Tech University student who is miffed that Professor Michael Dini required biology students seeking his recommendation to get an A in his class, know him well and – here’s the rub -‘affirm’ that there is a scientific answer to the question of how…
“And now with Blogger, they can watch the people who are building the pages that comprise Google’s map to gain knowledge about their map that they can’t get from scraping.” Jason Kottke —Google is Not a Search CompanyKottke.org) Similar:The End of Headphone Jacks, the Rise of DRMWhen you plug an audio cable into a smar…BusinessJust…
“It moved silently through the living[room] and drifted to the staircase. Gliding wraithlike over the staircase it then entered the bedroom where my wife and I lay sleeping peacefully….On this occasion I awoke to the sense that there was a large menacing presence approaching me silently out of the gloom, so I opened my eyes,…