Links for 07-11-2006
Story openings, bad science teaching, social bookmarking showdown, Big Brother hits Second Life, laser arphids…
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“…one of the things I want to talk about, at least in passing, is what it means to say the book is ‘hard sf’…” Niall Harrison grapples with definitions of sub-genres in the context of Peter Watts’ ‘Blindside’.
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“…readers at the beginning of a new book want less to know what *is* happening than to find out *what is happening next*.”
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“Even more useful than mashing up social networks and digg and bookmarking would be adding user-specified Affinity Ratings to digging and tagging.”
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“Science teaching is in a dangerous decline that is putting Britain’s technological future at risk. Only a complete overhaul of education policy can rescue the situation, a high-powered House of Lords committee warns today.”
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“There’s a score of services out there, and no single service has it all. Some social bookmarking sites focus more closely on sharing and discovery, while others offer more options for sorting and organizing.”
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“First off, the total posting volume of the blogosphere has leveled off somewhat, showing about 1.3 million postings per day, which is a little lower than what we were seeing last quarter but still about double the volume of this time last year.”
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“An ABC News undercover investigation showed Army recruiters telling students that the war in Iraq was over, in an effort to get them to enlist.” That’s not a pretty story.
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“Parents who engage in the age-old tradition of picture-book reading are not only encouraging early reading development in their children but are also teaching their toddlers about the world around them…” Whoa, newsflash.
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“Contestants will have to spend at least 8 hours a day in the transparent virtual Big Brother house for a total of one month, and will complete various tasks such as building replicas of famous buildings.” I knew it was too good to last.
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“Machinima [...] is animation that is made by harnessing 3-D game engines, such as those used in Xbox or PlayStation games, and adding original content–dialogue, dramatic situations, and new or modified characters.”
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This is a difficult line for the studios to walk. On the one hand, they know they have to cut salaries, but without good talent, they won’t have much of a product to sell.
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“[It] could equally offer myriad peacetime solutions, opening land-locked countries to trade, enabling heavy construction materials to be delivered into urban centres … and facilitating a more robust and agile air transportation network.”
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13 – Laser RFID tags“Conventional tags get their power from a radio signal transmitted by a reader. The new tags will instead draw power from a laser beam produced by a reader, a photocell on top of the tag converting this laser light into electricity.”
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