Tuesday, March 3, 2009

Don't forget your fantasy assignment...connect to your govt

Hello dear students,

Write a twitter to the powers that be in the govt (white house) what you would like to tell them in 164 characters or less!

See you in class!

dr. g

Friday, February 6, 2009

So much for social networking!

Here is an online tale of social networking sleuthing:


"Apple retail stores are famously stocked with Internet-accessible workstations that, while intended to be used as demonstrations for prospective buyers, are also free for the public to use. That's led to some problems with nonshoppers monopolizing the machines and taking up space: in mid-2007, Apple blocked access to MySpace, which was then the world's biggest social-networking site.
I hit up Apple's Fifth Avenue flagship store in midtown (you know, the big glass cube), the 14th Street store in the Meatpacking District, and the store on Prince Street in the downtown neighborhood of SoHo.
At the Fifth Avenue store, I was able to access Facebook from one laptop, but on another, the facebook.com domain redirected to an Apple Store page. In the Meatpacking District store, meanwhile, two laptops loaded Facebook without a problem, but a desktop computer brought up a message explaining that the parental controls feature in the Safari browser had blocked it."

Procrastinators of the World, Unite!!!

Here is a story MSNBC just posted:

MSNBC
- Feb 06, 2009
- 2 hours ago
That means Channel 7 viewers will have until June 12 to prepare for the digital television transition. That’s the new date set by Congress to allow people ... (sic) to have more time to convert to HDTV.

Wow! It is amazing how Americans procrastinate in technology adoption. When seatbelts were frist proposed in the1960's the American Auto companies kept pushing back the date saying it would cost too much and they couldn't handle it.
It wasn't until the late 70's early 80's that seatbelts were mandatory in cars.

Once again, we put money above all other considerations, even saving lives.

Stolen from someone else's blog!!!! (is this ethical or normal on the net?)

Wikipedia links used to build smart reading lists - tech - 02 January 2007 - New Scientist Tech Tuesday, January 9th, 2007 From the “so cool it is uncanny” department… Software that generates a list of reading material tailored to a person’s individual interests has been developed by a PhD student in the US. Alexander Wissner-Gross, a physics student at Harvard University, teaches a course to under-graduates student at his university. While preparing the reading list for his course, he began to wonder about ways to automate the process. (Check out his paper about this topic.) Wissner-Gross says he saw similarities between the structure of his course and the way information is connected via links in Wikipedia, a free online encyclopaedia written and edited by volunteers. “Increasingly, a net user who wants to learn more about a subject will read its Wikipedia page,” he adds. “However, for further depth in the subject, there has been no system for advising the user which other [Wikipedia] articles to read, and in which order.” Wikipedia links used to build smart reading lists - tech - 02 January 2007 - New Scientist Tech Just One More Thiing the government's been hiding from us Duncan Mansfield reports for The Associated Press, "A three-year veil of secrecy in the name of national security was used to keep the public in the dark about the handling of highly enriched uranium at a nuclear fuel processing plant - including a leak that could have caused a deadly, uncontrolled nuclear reaction."