Category: links

Shadow Scholar

The story of someone who makes his living writing papers for students. He has worked on everything from admissions essays and undergraduate assignments to large graduate theses. In his words, “I’m a hired gun, a doctor of everything, an academic mercenary.”

You would be amazed by the incompetence of your students’ writing. I have seen the word “desperate” misspelled every way you can imagine. And these students truly are desperate. They couldn’t write a convincing grocery list, yet they are in graduate school. They really need help. They need help learning and, separately, they need help passing their courses. But they aren’t getting it.

For those of you who have ever mentored a student through the writing of a dissertation, served on a thesis-review committee, or guided a graduate student through a formal research process, I have a question: Do you ever wonder how a student who struggles to formulate complete sentences in conversation manages to produce marginally competent research? How does that student get by you?

Can’t say that I’m surprised by the article, but it is disheartening — I don’t see how any self-respecting graduate student could have someone else write their papers. It’s frustrating when you know people that work their asses off to produce solid work, while some idiot that they’re up against just dips into the bank. That said, I have to admit being amused by the thought of people paying to have ethics papers written for them.

One letter Wheel of Fortune

Caitlin Burke solved a puzzle on Wheel of Fortune with just one letter on the board. Pat Sajak and the contestant beside her seemed stunned, thinking it was a miracle, but it wasn’t — she used logic.

Part of the art of designing a game show is making the basic and routine seem chaotic and unpredictable. The trick is, most people watch a show like Wheel of Fortune, and their heads begin swimming with the nearly endless possibilities: twenty-six letters and those hundreds of thousands of words. Burke’s strategy, her puzzles-within-puzzles way of thinking, is designed to narrow the range. That’s why she started with the smallest words first.

Very impressive. There’s a clip of her solving the puzzle in the Esquire article.

Shakespeare in original pronunciation

Paul Meier, a theatre professor at the University of Kansas, has been researching the original pronunciation of Shakespeare, enabling audiences to hear what the plays would have sounded like in the Bard’s time.

“The audience will hear rough and surprisingly vernacular diction, they will hear echoes of Irish, New England and Cockney that survive to this day as ‘dialect fossils.’ And they will be delighted by how very understandable the language is, despite the intervening centuries.”

The clip above features an interview with Meier, and some examples from an OP production at the university. For a longer scene, check out this video for a longer scene.

Robot arm picks up anything

A team of researchers from Cornell, University of Chicago and iRobot, have created a robot gripper that can pick up almost any small object. It uses the jamming of particulate material inside an elastic bag to hold on to things, as opposed to traditional designs modelled around the human hand.

The gripper consists of a rubber membrane around a granular material that can form around objects, then grab them when a vacuum pump is used to harden the material. The gripper was designed to allow robots to pick up various objects without a lot of computational overhead.

Hockney’s iPad art

David Hockney is showing his iPad artwork at an exhibition in Paris. He’s not adverse to using technology to create art, but found that computers were too slow.

It has given him a new way of sharing his creations. Fleurs Fraiches has its origins in smaller drawings that Hockney made on his iPhone and then e-mailed to friends. After a short while he’d produced hundreds of drawings, loving them for their immediacy, and for the instant responses and critiques from those who received them.

“You can make a drawing of the sunrise at 6am and send it out to people by 7am.”

Yup, the iPad is only for consumption of media, you can’t use it to produce content.

Benoit Mandelbrot, RIP

Mathematician Benoit Mandelbrot has passed away at age 85. He only received tenure at Yale ten years ago.

Dr. Mandelbrot coined the term “fractal” to refer to a new class of mathematical shapes whose uneven contours could mimic the irregularities found in nature.

Here’s a photoset with a few examples of his work, or you could watch this amazing video of the Mandelbrot set in action. Rudy Rucker offers a tribute to Mandelbrot with some more examples and memories of a meeting with the man.

Update:From the BBC, How Mandelbrot’s fractals changed the world.

Finishing Touches

For Hoefler & Frere-Jones, it’s all about the sweating the small stuff. While developing Gotham, they noticed that the fractional one appeared naked and needed a serif. So, they decided to add it to all of the other fractions.

It’s something that we added because we felt it mattered. Even if it helped only a small number of designers solve a subtle and esoteric problem, we couldn’t rest knowing that an unsettling typographic moment might otherwise lie in wait. We’ve always believed that a good typeface is the product of thousands of decisions like these.

That’s called attention to detail.

Typographic Maps

Typographic Map sample

Axis Maps has released a Typographic Maps art project, which accurately depicts the physical features of the cities using nothing but type. So far, they’ve only created maps of Boston and Chicago, but I imagine there will be more down the road. Their blog entry has a few additional details about the process, including the fact that they were created through manual tracing and adjustment, nothing automated.