Hypercrit

Michael Becker writes about journalism, new media and digital culture in general.

Month: August, 2008

An old Jedi mind trick

A new bit of research news has brought up old memories for me today. Researchers at the University of California have found that an area of the brain called the perirhinal cortext may help with the formation of associative memories.

Ohio University student expelled for plagiarizing Wikipedia

An Ohio University senior was expelled for plagiarizing three phrases from a Wikipedia article, the Chronicle of Higher Education reported today. Worse yet, the student was on a study-abroad trip in Greece when she was expelled and was told to make her own travel arrangements home.
The student, Allison Routman, said she didn’t know she had done […]

Computer program developed to detect art forgery

The Chronicle of Higher Education reports researchers have developed a way to use a computer and image software to analyze a painting and determine whether it is genuine or a forgery.
The experiment was performed on 101 high-resolution scans of Van Gough paintings from museums in the Netherlands. The program analyzed the artist’s brush strokes and create […]

Blog update

My categories list is too long, so I’m going to be simplifying it over the next few weeks, when I have the time. I hope to narrow it down to about five or six broad categories, which I’ll supplement with WordPress’s built-in tagging system. Wish me luck.
Edit: I’ve included a few other minor changes that no […]

Is Google making us ask unanswerable questions?

British neuroscientist Baroness Greenfield points out that prescriptions for drugs like Ritalin and diagnoses of ADHD are on the rise. She correlates that with an increase in computer use over the past decade, asks a few open ended questions and implies that computer use is rotting children’s brains.
I don’t doubt that computers will change how we […]