CourseSmart E-Textbooks Track Students’ Progress for Teachers: Using electronic textbooks mean the professor can essentially look over your shoulder to make sure you’re doing the reading.

They know when students are skipping pages, failing to highlight significant passages, not bothering to take notes — or simply not opening the book at all.

[…] In the old days, teachers knew if students understood the course from the expressions on their faces. Now some classes, including one of Mr. Guardia’s, are entirely virtual. Engagement information could give the colleges early warning about which students might flunk out, while more broadly letting teachers know if the whole class is falling behind.

The Times was able to post an actual report on a student as an example of what the professors are looking at.

How the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year was faked with Photoshop: Here’s the analysis of how the winner of the 2013 World Press Photo of the Year apparently faked the image.  It’s an interesting look at image forensics.

Now, the event itself isn’t a fake — there are lots of other photos online that show the children being carried through the streets of Gaza — but the photo itself is almost certainly a composite of three different photos, with various regions spliced together from each of the images, and then further manipulation to illuminate the mourners’ faces.

What surprises me, however, is that anyone thought it was legit.  Look at the image – it almost looks like a painting to me.  I feel like the perspective is all wrong too.  Is it just me?

Solving Equation of a Hit Film Script, With Data: A computer might write your next movie.

[…] a team of analysts compare the story structure and genre of a draft script with those of released movies, looking for clues to box-office success. His company, Worldwide Motion Picture Group, also digs into an extensive database of focus group results for similar films and surveys 1,500 potential moviegoers. What do you like? What should be changed?

“Demons in horror movies can target people or be summoned,” Mr. Bruzzese said in a gravelly voice, by way of example. “If it’s a targeting demon, you are likely to have much higher opening-weekend sales than if it’s summoned. So get rid of that Ouija Board scene.”

Bowling scenes tend to pop up in films that fizzle, Mr. Bruzzese, 39, continued. Therefore it is statistically unwise to include one in your script. “A cursed superhero never sells as well as a guardian superhero,” one like Superman who acts as a protector, he added.

San Francisco Is Building A Social Network For Emergencies Only: This is another idea down the line of recovers.org – a social network and communications system to be used when a disaster of some kind occurs.

What’s become clear over the last year is that there’s is a need for disaster and crisis coordination online, beyond hashtags. And San Francisco, the earthquake capital of the country, might have the solution.

In collaboration with the design firm IDEO, the city is creating a social networking website and app to connect people who want to help with those who need it. Through the SF72 platform, you will be able to preregister your home, supplies you have — say, an emergency generator — and relevant skills, such as emergency first aid. Instead of scanning hashtags, people will be able to simply log in to a preexisting community, knowing there will be specific offers for help organized by neighborhood.

An E.V. That Wraps Around a Wheelchair: This vehicle is essentially an exoskeleton that goes over a wheelchair, and “wraps” it so it’s able to travel on the road.  It’s a great idea.

The Kenguru is seven feet long — nearly two feet shorter than the dinky Smart Fortwo — and five feet high. There is, of course, no room for a passenger. The car weighs just 900 pounds, batteries included.

[…] As a neighborhood vehicle, the Kenguru has a top speed of about 25 miles per hour and generally cannot be driven on highways. Travel range is estimated at 45 to 60 miles, with a charging time of eight hours.

Shodan: The scariest search engine on the Internet: After this article was published, Shodan went offline, which is probably for the best, because Shodan is a search engine that scours the Net looking for control interfaces for various hardware objects and real-life systems.

He found a car wash that could be turned on and off and a hockey rink in Denmark that could be defrosted with a click of a button. A city’s entire traffic control system was connected to the Internet and could be put into “test mode” with a single command entry. And he also found a control system for a hydroelectric plant in France with two turbines generating 3 megawatts each.

Fixing E.T. for the Atari 2600: E.T. for the Atari 2600 was one of the worst video games of all time.  In fact, it may have sparked the 1983 meltdown in game console sales.

Well, this guy wanted to fix it, so he did.  He hacked the kernel of the game, and made some necessary changes.  Along the way, he explains quite a bit about why the game is the way it is, and why other games aren’t.

The myth: A lot of people blame poor collision detection for this problem. That is simply not true. The collision detection in E.T. is perfect. There are no bounding boxes like in more modern games. Collision detection happens at the pixel level. You can’t get any better than that. If you fall in to a well, it’s because your player character visually overlaps it.

The actual problem: We don’t want pixel-perfect collision detection!

The reason that people so easily fall in to wells is that they don’t expect to fall when, for example, E.T.’s head overlaps a well. After all, his feet are clearly on solid ground!

I’m working on a survey with a research team from my alma mater – Augustana College (we made the Final Four, baby!) – on the topic of organizational journalism.  This is a high-fallutin’ word for all the news and updates people post to their websites.

I’ll be discussing the results in part at the Now What Conference in about three weeks, and we’ll be writing a white paper on it for release in May.

To this end, I have a survey that I want you or someone you know to take.  If you manage the news for your company, or you know the person who does, please go to this link and take this survey.  It’s short – will take 3-4 minutes at most – and you’re welcome to provide a name and address at the end to get a white paper with the results.

Enough jabbering.  Take the Organizational Journalism Survey

If you have greater interest here, I’ve written about this before.  It’s a subject in which I’m keenly interested, and which I feel is vastly misunderstood in today’s organizations.

• Rivers, Not Trees: The Challenge to Organizational IA
• The Information Needs of the Indoctrinated Audience
• The Psychology of News

At some point, the words “blog” and “post” got all mixed up, and now “blog” is used for everything.  This remains a pet peeve of mine, so this post is a last gasp of protest before I shut the hell up about it.

A “blog” is a publication comprised of multiple installments.

A “post” is a single installment in that publication.

Therefore, a blog is a collection of posts.

This single post is not a “blog.” This blog, in fact, is comprised of 7,000 posts over 10 years.

Therefore, this is incorrect: “I wrote a new blog today.”  No!  A thousand times, no!

And do not say: “Come look at my new blog,” unless you mean the site in general, not a specific post.  If you mean a specific post, then say “Come look at my new blog post.”

Saying “I wrote a new blog today” is only correct if you create a new blog, wrote a bunch of posts for it, and then shut it down.  To use “wrote” in the past tense implies that the blog is finished and has been shut down, and the word “new” implies that it was just created, so somehow the lifecycle of that entire site/publication/platform got rolled up into one day.

Someone who just wrote an article doesn’t say: “Check out the magazine I wrote today.”

(However, an opinion columnist does say: “Check out the new column I wrote today.”  In that case, the group and the singular is the same, which is problematic.)

For the last time: “Post” is a singular noun.  “Blog” is a collective noun.  You did not “wrote a blog.”  You may “write a blog,” meaning you continue to post updates to a specific website, but the only thing you “wrote” in the past tense was a “post.”

(Finally, “pedantic” is an adjective.)

I gotta say, I was pretty amazed to find this article over at XKCD that attempts to answer the question “How many unique English tweets are possible?”

This is interesting, primarily because I’m just coming off a very brief but intense fling with information and communication theory.  In the span of three weeks, I read the following:

• The Information: A History, A Theory, A Flood
• An Introduction to Information Theory: Symbols, Signals and Noise
• Information: A Very Short Introduction 

In all three, I got introduced to Claude Shannon, a mathematician who invented the field of information theory – the science, essentially, what what comprises information and how that gets communication.  He wrote a paper in 1948 which more or less defined the field.

This field necessarily got all mathematical in the early 20th century when the telegraph showed up, because the goal was to cram the most information into the least amount of bandwidth – communicate the most with the least.

This necessarily leads to very philosophic questions about what information actually is and how it goes from random data to coherence.  Think about: random data is communicating…random data.  Not meaning.  Not information, really.  From the article.

For example, “Hi, I’m Mxyztplk” is a grammatically valid sentence if your name happens to be Mxyztplk. (Come to think of it, it’s just as grammatically valid if you’re lying.) Clearly, it doesn’t make sense to count every string that starts with “Hi, I’m …” as a separate sentence. To a normal English speaker, “Hi, I’m Mxyztplk” is basically indistinguishable from “Hi, I’m Mxzkqklt”, and shouldn’t both count. But “Hi, I’m xPoKeFaNx” is definitely recognizably different from the first two, even though “xPoKeFaNx” isn’t an English word by any stretch of the imagination.

It also depends greatly on the context of the receiver – how much do they know about what you’re going to say?  What can they extrapolate from the data to form meaning?

information is fundamentally tied to the recipient’s uncertainty about the message’s content and their ability to predict it in advance.

Anyway, the XKCD article is interesting, and information theory is worth looking into.  I wish I could recommend the books I mentioned above, but none of them really got at the core philosophy of information in the way I wanted.