Lunsford is a professor of writing and rhetoric at Stanford University, where she has organized a mammoth project called the Stanford Study of Writing to scrutinize college students' prose. From 2001 to 2006, she collected 14,672 student writing samples—everything from in-class assignments, formal essays, and journal entries to emails, blog posts, and chat sessions. Her conclusions are stirring.
"I think we're in the midst of a literacy revolution the likes of which we haven't seen since Greek civilization," she says. For Lunsford, technology isn't killing our ability to write. It's reviving it—and pushing our literacy in bold new directions.

The Yes Men
Rosetta Stone
Zombie Punk
Cock Robin
Yippee Skippy
Ear Fetish
Shop
Key to the Stone
Mooveee

When it comes to research, professors are more like our students than we might care to admit. As much as academics of my generation and older may love books and libraries (see "Stacks Appeal" and "Red-Hot Library Lust"), we do not use them the way we once did. Thanks to the library's online services, I can access most journal articles online almost instantaneously (a miracle of ease compared to the hundreds of hours and dollars I once spent copying them from bound volumes).

Moreover, at this stage in my career, I own nearly all the books that might be relevant to my research, and, if I don't, I can find them on Google Books, buy them (used or new) from Amazon.com, or, if they are newly published, download them onto my Kindle. Fetching books from the library (or worse, waiting for them to arrive via interlibrary loan) has become too much of a hassle to be bothered with. I have passed whole semesters without setting foot in the library, even as I urge and require my students to do so.

The WebDAV-Sync tool is at the same time a command-line tool and an Ant task. It has three parameters: a URL which refers to a WebDAV collection, a local directory and the synchronization direction. The tool keeps the URL in sync with the directory depending on the direction, which can be down, up or bi-directional.

The down direction is useful for cases where a lot of random file access will follow. A typical example is the compilation of program sources, but it applies as well to docment processing tasks. The up direction is rather for updating offline work on the server. With the bi-directional mode both sides are mirrors of each other.

It takes only a few seconds to check if a local directory of around a thousand files is in sync with the WebDAV collection. This is important to reduce the overhead in build scripts when only a few files or directories have changed.

WebDAV-Sync is hosted on SourceForge.

For more than 200 pages, novelist and sometime New Yorker writer Mark Helprin churns out a truly astonishing pastiche of the pretentious and the profane, not bothering to address hundreds of thoughtful writers, but content to lambast (over and over and over again, in some horrible parody of Neitzschean "eternal return") anonymous commenters on blogs.

Digital Barbarism:
A Writer's Manifesto
Harper
256 pages
$24.99
Standing up for copyright term extension isn't popular at the moment, unless you're a lobbyist, but that's exactly why Helprin takes the topic on. As a writer, he has a personal stake in copyright, and he wants to leave his copyrights to his grandchildren just as he might any other piece of property.

One can't help but suspect that the best way to achieve this goal is not to turn out this book, however, which sadly makes Helprin look (variously) petty, uninformed, angry, unfair, curmudgeonly, and downright misanthropic.

« RPGMapMaker » is a tool for drawing maps with polygonal grids. This kind of maps is used in Role Playing Games, but of course can be designed for any other purposes.

In addition to having most of the capabilities of a real painting program (such as lines, rectangles, ovals and round rectangles, drawing and filling with color and pattern, text, rubber, pipettes tools, etc.), « RPGMapMaker » has also unique features that greatly simplify the building of this kind of map, such as:

Various kinds of grids. You can create a grid map made of hexes (well suited for world, region or village maps), or with squares (well suited for dungeon maps) or with lozenges (well suited for pseudo-3D castle and dungeon maps).

"Claudia Linden made it clear that Linden Lab has no plans for a "grid merge" at this time and that the Adult Content changes are a distinct intiative."

Artist: Neko Case
Album: Middle Cyclone
Song: I'm An Animal

Tabbed by: Jimbob - jimbobriley(at)gmail(dot)com

Note about chords:
F - x33210 - pull off to - F* - x33010
C - x32010 - hammer on to - C* - x32030