Monthly Archives: March 2007

Airbrushing History?

By Michael Becker | Published: March 31, 2007
Members of the House of Representatives have accused Google Maps of attempt­ing to obscure the fall­out of Hurricane Katrina by post­ing pre-hurricane images to their satel­lite imagery site. Lawmakers inves­ti­gat­ing this sup­posed slight claim that it does an “injus­tice” to Katrina vic­tims, some of whom used the site when it had post-hurricane imagery to see [...]
Posted in Digitalia | Tagged | Comments closed

Musicians Support Neutrality

By Michael Becker | Published: March 29, 2007
The AP reported yes­ter­day that many musi­cians are com­ing around to sup­port Net Neutrality. It’s a switch, given that a free Internet was behind the Napster and file-swapping con­tro­ver­sies from the mid-1990s–controversies that seri­ously affected the way the music indus­try does busi­ness. In those days, it was in the best inter­est of the major record [...]
Posted in Entertainment | Tagged , | Comments closed

Tagging Art

By Michael Becker | Published: March 28, 2007
The New York Times reports that art muse­ums are rethink­ing the ways they clas­sify their online col­lec­tions. One solu­tion that has worked well for Web 2.0 sites is social tag­ging. Now, sev­eral muse­ums have launched tag­ging projects that allow the pub­lic to asso­ciate key­words with works of art, with the goal of mak­ing it eas­ier [...]
Posted in Social Networking | Comments closed

Ph.D. Problems

By Michael Becker | Published: March 25, 2007
The fol­low­ing let­ter was printed in the Bozeman Daily Chronicle this past Wednesday. I think it’s funny as hell, given the errors in fact present in it, but it also lacks almost any sem­blance of logic. It is reprinted here with­out per­mis­sion of the Chronicle, so if they have a prob­lem, they need to con­tact [...]
Posted in Higher Education | Comments closed

Site News

By Michael Becker | Published: March 23, 2007
A few bugs dur­ing the upgrade to a shiny new ver­sion of WordPress, but after a lit­tle trou­bleshoot­ing, most things have sur­vived the tran­si­tion. The only thing still not work­ing is the cat­e­gory heat map that used to occupy the side­bar, about halfway down. There have always been prob­lems with the heat map plu­g­ins that [...]
Posted in Miscellany | Comments closed