Looking at the show from a political standpoint, it‘shard to press it to one side or the other. While the show is far from ?centrist? or ?moderate? it instead stands to the far left and right virtually at the same time. On some issues, it stands firmly in the realm of the new Democratic ideals,…
Consumerist Pac-Man and Socialist Tetris (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) “Pac-Man” is a game about gathering resources while fleeing from predators. It gives pleasure to those areas of our brain that remember what it was like being a tiny but clever mammal, surrounded by threats that are deadly but not too bright. Inky, Blinky, Pinky and Clyde pass…
When shown images of real-life violence, people who played violent video games were found to have a diminished response. However, when the same group were shown other disturbing images such as dead animals or ill children they had a much more natural response. When the game players were given the opportunity to punish a pretend…
Last Thursday, President Bush signed into law a prohibition on posting annoying Web messages or sending annoying e-mail messages without disclosing your true identity. In other words, it’s OK to flame someone on a mailing list or in a blog as long as you do it under your real name. Thank Congress for small favors,…
Family members learned early Wednesday that 11 of the 12 coal miners who were initially thought to have survived an explosion in a coal mine have died. —Allen G. Breed —Families Say 11 of 12 W.Va. Miners Dead (AP|MyWay) This is horrible. The lead of Breed’s original story says the miners “were found,” but does not…
A senior at UMass Dartmouth was visited by federal agents two months ago, after he requested a copy of Mao Tse-Tung’s tome on Communism called “The Little Red Book.” Two history professors at UMass Dartmouth, Brian Glyn Williams and Robert Pontbriand, said the student told them he requested the book through the UMass Dartmouth library’s…
If they want to deliver a written paper, they need to understand that, no matter how short they think it is, the odds are against their finishing it. They need a conclusion they can jump to when they get the five-minute warning. That conclusion must be brief. Rather than reading a full paper, it’s better…
While the editorial page of The Wall Street Journal is conservative, the newspaper’s news pages are liberal, even more liberal than The New York Times. The Drudge Report may have a right-wing reputation, but it leans left. Coverage by public television and radio is conservative compared to the rest of the mainstream media. Meanwhile, almost…
In the 40 years since Derrida paid that visit to Johns Hopkins, succeeding generations of scholars have had time to fall in love with theory, fall out of love with it, and learn how to live with it. As in any long-term relationship, there’s a continuing re-evaluation and reimagining of what works and what does…
Wikipedia, the online encyclopedia that allows anyone to contribute articles, is tightening its rules for submitting entries following the disclosure that it ran a piece falsely implicating a man in the Kennedy assassinations. Wikipedia will now require users to register before they can create articles, Jimmy Wales, founder of the St. Petersburg, Fla.-based Web site,…
Abortion, legalised throughout the United States by the Supreme Court’s Roe v Wade ruling in 1973, prevents unwanted pregnancies from becoming unwanted children. Higher abortion rates from the 1970s onwards thus help to explain why crime rates fell in America about two decades later. That’s the theory. But a paper published last week? by Christopher…
Irked by a reporter who told him he seemed to be “off his game” at a Beijing public appearance, President George W. Bush sought to make a hasty exit from a news conference but was thwarted by locked doors. — Locked doors thwart Bush’s bid to duck question (Reuters | MyWay) In Bush’s defense, that was…
But in another sense, academic blogging represents the fruition, not a betrayal, of the university’s ideals. One might argue that blogging is in fact the very embodiment of what the political philosopher Michael Oakshott once called “The Conversation of Mankind”?an endless, thoroughly democratic dialogue about the best ideas and artifacts of our culture. —Robert S.…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005, Day 2Keynote: David Warner, Riding the Cutting Edge of Distributed Intelligence (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Warner identified himself as “dangerously overeducated.” Characterized his presentation as “confessions of a serial stunt scientist,” and warned that he would jump topics around. The cup of tea I brought to the table went cold untouched —…
On Oct. 31, the Serious Games Summit gets underway in Washington D.C. Its sole focus: To bring together the computer gaming industry with other experts from various fields for more than just a good time. —Beyond ‘Flinch and Twitch’ Games (Cybershake) Thanks to some (partial) funding from SHU, I’ll be going to this event. My students…
In God’s atemporal view, the act of creation is simultaneous with the moment of your reading this. God doesn’t look back to creation, nor forward to your clicking on… more» —Arts & Letters Daily A wonderful little blurb that uses the context of encountering this bit of text in a web browser to draw the…
A complaint was filed against Miner because he used the word “subhuman” when writing about gay people. The university’s Judicial Affairs panel found that those remarks violated the school’s university code of conduct. […] As punishment, Duquesne University made Miner take the offending blog off his online profile. We checked that profile and the blog…
This is Denny Hastert and welcome to my blog. This is new to me. I can’t say I‘m much of a techie. I guess you could say my office is teaching the old guy new tricks. But I‘m excited. This is the future. And it is a new way for us to get our message…
Officials at Proctor Jr.-Sr. High School have banned access from school computers to an Internet site that students have been using to post to weblogs, or blogs. Principal Chris Sousa said the decision to block the site from school was made because blogging is not an educational use of school computers. —Brendan McKenna —High school…
“But I do know that it’s true,” said the author of The Book of Virtues, “that if you wanted to reduce crime, you could, if that were your sole purpose, you could abort every black baby in this country, and your crime rate would go down. That would be an impossible, ridiculous, and morally reprehensible…