Lee Drutman has a good review in the July 5 LA Times of a book with a really long title. In fact, since I am on the internets so often doing the google and other stuff, this title is actually longer than my attention span enables me to read.

Full disclosure: one of the founders of this site, due to launch May 19, is a former student of mine. But here's an interesting re-mediation: Web back to print.

WordHustler is conceived as a social network that, according to the press release, "provides writers with a bevy of innovative tools designed to help authors of all genres to get their manuscripts into the hands of editors and find publishing success."

George Miller (D-CA), normally among the most progressive and sane of legislators, has sponsored an educational reauthorization bill, the ‘‘College Opportunity and Affordability Act of 2007," that in its 747 pages (yep, I read 'em all) puts forward plenty of good stuff.

Here's an interesting intellectual property case: Sony's Playstation 3 first-person action shooter game, Resistance: Fall of Man, has tread where angels usually go--and the Dean and Canons of Manchester Cathedral aren't happy about it. The interior of the British cathedral has been digitally represented in the game, and players can engage in violent virtual acts within.

Back in October, I posted about the Blue Eye "smart table" that allowed users to copy 2D and 3D objects almost instantaneously, as well as remix and store them. Now Microsoft has come out with a similar project, dubbed Surface, which incorporates other features, like the ability to upload and download images simply by setting your camera or cellphone on the table's surface.

... with localized slowly evanescent field patterns, for wireless non-radiative energy transfer.

That, my friends, in case you were wondering, is what Aristeidis Karalis, J.D.Joannopoulos, and Marin Soljačić have been up to of late.

What does that mean? Well, possibly less hassle for those of us burdened with too many PDAs, cell phones, mp3 players, and domestic robots that uncomplainingly do all our housecleaning and yardwork when we have stacks of 80 papers to grade. In a presentation this week at the Industrial Physics Forum in San Francisco, the MIT scientists, taking a leaf from much ballyhooed and maligned Nikola Tesla, outlined a scheme that could make plug-in rechargers a thing of the past.

NewScientistTech is reporting on a "smart table" that instantaneously turns 2-D and 3-D objects into digital images that can be manipulated by touch and even animated. Check out the video on Blue Eye, developed by researchers at Eindhoven University, Netherlands. Like the Fingertip Digitizer, Blue Eye is making multimedia digital technology ever more haptic, not to mention black box. Now I just want to know the (unaffordable) pricetag on this baby--probably me and about a zillion would-be game designers.

One of the virtues (and curses) of early early morning radio is that one can hear about stories in depth. If you're multitasking, it's worth listening to the Smart City interviews with Doug Thomas, USC professor and author of Hacker Culture who has lately been looking at education, cultural narrative, and technology with John Seely Brown of PARC fame; and with Mimi Ito, a cultural anthroplogist who's worked for a number of Silicon Valley companies and author of a book on mobile phones in Japanese life.

I have to say, given the many ongoing discussions about plagiarism in this forum and in the composition field in general, that I was rather amused when I got the following notice in a Council of Writing Program Administrators email this morning:

The Network for Media Action’s fall campaign boilerplate “news
release” is ready for use. The topic this year is, more or less,
“what happens in the first-year composition course anyway?” The
boilerplate puts a positive spin on this, as indicated in the working
headline: “Freshman Comp: Gateway to Success,” a theme that carries
through the piece. It runs about 1300 words.
This boilerplate is available for use without permission from its
author and with no credit or attribution to him needed. You might wish
to ask your public relations office to release it to your local news
media, with or without adding local numbers or statements or quotes;
you might wish to use it as the basis for an op-ed piece in your local
newspaper; you might use it as the basis for a letter to the editor of
your local paper. At any rate, the idea behind these campaigns is to
get the voice(s) of WPA(s) into the public conversation.

The British general interest science weekly, NewScientist, has a special report in the September 18 edition on social networking. In several feature articles, an interview with MIT's Sherry Turkle, and a short fiction by sci-fi star Bruce Sterling, the magazine looks at the implications of not only social networking, but also cell phones and other new media.

According to American science writer Amanda Gefter in an opinion piece for the report: