Month: June 2003

blogcount

Blogcount tries to work out that notoriously difficult sum: How many blogs are there? (via Lisbeth)

females are cheaper

Female EverQuest avatars for sale at ebay are significantly cheaper than male equivalents. Edward Castranova, who wrote a fascinating paper about the economy of EverQuest last year, has just published a paper about this too: The Price of ‘Man’ and ‘Woman’: A […]

defence description

Torill has posted a beautiful description of Lisbeth’s defence, and Lisbeth describes it herself, too. There’s even a video to watch of the actual diploma being handed over!

how to fake french

The wife of a Frenchman let me in on a secret method of holding up your side in a conversation in French even when you can hardly speak the language. You simply need three phrases: – C’est vrai! This mean’s “It’s true”, […]

dr lisbeth!

Today Lisbeth‘s defending her PhD thesis on virtual worlds! I wish I could be there, but at any rate, Torill promised me she’ll blog it. Lisbeth’s a bit nervous, but she’ll be fine: she does wonderful work, has strong ideas and will […]

the world as a blog

Go look at this map of the world that dynamically displays blog posts, as they’re written, glued to the appropriate place on the map – it’s awesome to watch. For your blog posts to show up here, you need to have the […]

save /dev/null

Where, exactly, is /dev/null? I imagine it as a sort of void, a black hole of the system to which I can banish things, send thoughts into exile. I sent all my mail to /dev/null, this afternoon, due to a forgotten then. […]

81 hours

Assessments for my web design course are finally finished, after a two hour phone meeting with the external examiner. We had 27 students complete the course, and the assessment was budgeted at 90 minutes per student per examiner, which is pretty close […]

assessment ideas

Now look at this: a grading system based on Slashdot and karma (scroll down to read about karma, it’s under Assignments). Alex Halavais’s Media in the Information Age course, taught last autumn, had students write 500-1000 word responses each week. Students were […]

surnames

Good grief, only 2% of American women keep their names when they marry! Here you have to justify a choice to take your husband’s name, it’s so rare. I couldn’t find the exact numbers at Statistics Norway but among the peope I […]