It’s an outlaw town, a ghetto of perfunctory design that assaults almost every one of our senses–if it had an odor, it would be that of a rotting corpse covered in Dollar Store cologne. It’s a beast that has yet to be tamed, and has actually grown wilder as the years go by. And despite…
The gathering was the monthly meeting of “Dorkbot,” a loose forum for the exchange of creative technological ideas that is developing a cult following around the world. […] Repetto has finished a project called “foal table.” The idea originated in a request from a friend working on a theater production to design a table that…
Email as a collaboration tool sucks. Everyone knows this. Everyone says it. Everyone writes about it. And everyone agrees that its inefficient, it’s chaotic, its silo’ed and its full of spam. Yet, in spite of these shortcomings, we can assume with confidence that email is still the preferred method of “collaborating” and sharing information with…
Content rules. It did ten years ago, and it does today. People don’t use things they don’t understand. Writing for the Web is still undervalued, and most sites spend too few resources refining the information they offer to users. Jakob Nielsen —Growing a Business Website: Fix the Basics First (Alertbox) Similar:80 Days review80 Days was my…
The cubicle was not born evil, or even square. It began, in fact, as a beautiful vision. —Julie Schlosser —Cubicles: The Great Mistake (CNN Money.com) Similar:6 Problems with our School SystemI spend a lot of time re-educating my st…AcademiaLoved part 2 of The Importance of Being Earnest (live videoconference play from @ThePublic…AmusingWe Are Hopelessly Hooked [on…
By always placing the most recent version of its articles at a static URL, Wikipedia concentrates the power of its inbound links on a particular topic to a single URL. A reader searching for information on Hurricane Katrina who clicks through to Wikipedia from Google gets Wikipedia’s latest information on the storm and recovery efforts…
—What’s On Your Office Door? (Pedablogue) Left to right: Pittsburgh goes blog wild! I’m not featured in this article, but my blog is one of the many that’s aggregated on this site. Rules Grammar Change and School ‘Fine’ U.S. Teens Report Grad Student Deconstructs Take-out Menu On the door itself — just the institutional nameplate, a…
Expiry Date for Courses (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) In my in box today, a question to ponder. What courses from your program should not be accepted for transfer credit after 10 years have passed? If you started a science major 10 years ago, and took some foundational courses, and then dropped the major, how much of what…
Though there is a rich history of pseudonymity in American journalism, there is none of anonymity. It has long been understood that if the publisher of a reputable periodical grants a writer use of a pseudonym, then that publisher knows the writer’s true identity and takes responsibility — legal and otherwise — for that writer’s…
Am I mad? Possibly. But, at one level these are just a bunch of “high-flown” questions that really only matter to artists and cynical bastards like me :D. At another level, these issues are critical to advancing the art (that’s right, art) of game design and making a game that Strongbad said were for “intellectual…
On the handheld front, Sony and Nintendo continue their fight for the minds and backpacks of the nation’s gamers by releasing ever-larger portable consoles. The Nintendo XL features six screens, a folding seat and a selection of overpriced candy bars, while the PlayStation Still Ostensibly Portable can now play all known forms of media, including…
Because so many deaf children have problems with basic language skills, they get a disproportionate number of exercises related to these “abstract little pieces.” And unfortunately, that’s exactly what most educational games offer–more of the same thing that’s been shown not to work for these people. So what do I propose? For one thing, I…
Folding seems clear; you might fold a card to fit in an envelope, or a pocket. But you’re not supposed crease these cards; that would jam the machine. Punch cards aren’t to be used in your ways, for your purposes, but for those of the company that issued them. “Spindle” is the word that most…
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,…
Researchers unveiled a prototype of a $100 hand-cranked laptop computer on Wednesday and said they hoped to place them in the hands of millions of schoolchildren around the globe. About the size of a textbook, the lime-green machines will be able to set up their own wireless networks and operate in areas without a reliable…
As Riya learns who’s in your pictures, it begins to auto-tag the snaps itself, quickly scanning the rest of your photos and identifying each person it recognizes. Riya also uses text recognition to read street signs and other text in photos. —Riya Eases Pain of Pile of Pix (Wired) Similar:Apple Watch is ugly and boring…
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 —…
Serious Games Summit DC 2005 Ian Bogost: Project Management: Avoiding Mistakes… If I Only Knew Then What I Know Now (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Bogost reminded the group that, despite the fact the room was arranged for a lecture, this is a roundtabe. Why is an academic talking about project management? “After all, uiversities are not exactly known…
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…
I couldn’t help but make a joke with the title, because it’s seemingly right on the money. You see, Google is getting ready to take the wraps off of a new service called Google Base. If it can be posted online, it would appear that they would, in fact, prefer it belong to them. At…