Monthly Archives: February 2007

Trek Tech: Tricorders

By Michael Becker | Published: February 27, 2007
Okay, so I’m not the first to note that cer­tain ele­ments in our soci­ety and tech­nol­ogy are rather like cer­tain ele­ments of a cer­tain sci­ence fic­tion fran­chise. How can a per­son fail to note it these days? Look at my phone, for cry­ing out loud: a Motorola Razr that looks about as much like a [...]
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A New Approach to the Memex

By Michael Becker | Published: February 26, 2007
In 1945, Vannevar Bush pub­lished his now infa­mous arti­cle in the Atlantic enti­tled “As We May Think.” In that arti­cle, he pro­posed the idea of the memex, a com­puter like device that would record its user’s inter­ac­tions with the world for easy retrieval later. The sys­tem was based on micro­film (it was 1945, after all), [...]
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Thesis News

By Michael Becker | Published: February 25, 2007
I sub­mit­ted the sec­ond sec­tion of the­sis pages to my com­mit­tee. Only an untold num­ber left to go...
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An Extended Metaphor

By Michael Becker | Published: February 14, 2007
Imagine two bath­tubs in the same room, about five feet apart. One is mostly full of blue water. The other is mostly full of red water. You are sit­ting on a stool between the tubs, and you would like to get some of the blue water into the red to make a lovely pur­ple hue. Now [...]
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Academic Freedom

By Michael Becker | Published: February 14, 2007
What does aca­d­e­mic free­dom mean in the dig­i­tal age? I was brows­ing the Wired Campus blog, pro­vided free cour­tesy of the Chronicle of Higher Education, and saw two sto­ries that inter­ested me in par­tic­u­lar. At the uni­ver­sity in Fresno (Cal State or UC, I can’t recall), a new pol­icy has been put in place that [...]
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