Strwbrries
12-12-2007, 03:22 PM
The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency made a special announcement in October that it is once again safe to eat squirrels in New Jersey. (In January, EPA had discovered lead in tissue samples from local squirrels, but later said the lead might have come from defects in the sampling machine.) [New York Daily News, 10-30-07]
The following month, hearts bled for University students ...
As protesters gathered at colleges around the country to criticize federal budget cutbacks that would raise the price of subsidized birth control at student health services, one University of New Mexico student described the imminent horror to Albuquerque's KFRQ-TV: "(Students shouldn't) have to make a choice between their birth control and their cell phone bill or their birth control and their gym membership ..." [KRQE-TV, 11-12-07]
Meanwhile bloggers in forums around the world are frightened at the technology that is about to come amongst them and worry for the soon to be declining numbers when.....
Software engineers told Fortune magazine in November that they are constructing a filter to eliminate stupid messages to online forums and bulletin boards. Lead researcher Gabriel Ortiz said his team had compiled a database of idiotic comments and that the new software would detect unintelligible remarks and either alert the writer to fix them or divert the message to the recipient's "junk mail." Easy dumb messages to filter: those with the tacky, immature repetition of a closing consonant, e.g., "That thing is amazinggggg!!!" More difficult: how to treat sarcasm and irony, in that smart writers sometimes deliberately use dumb statements to mock other writers. [CNNMoney-Fortune, 11-7-07]
That concludes this week's news of the weird....and now back to your regularly sponsored forum posts.
The following month, hearts bled for University students ...
As protesters gathered at colleges around the country to criticize federal budget cutbacks that would raise the price of subsidized birth control at student health services, one University of New Mexico student described the imminent horror to Albuquerque's KFRQ-TV: "(Students shouldn't) have to make a choice between their birth control and their cell phone bill or their birth control and their gym membership ..." [KRQE-TV, 11-12-07]
Meanwhile bloggers in forums around the world are frightened at the technology that is about to come amongst them and worry for the soon to be declining numbers when.....
Software engineers told Fortune magazine in November that they are constructing a filter to eliminate stupid messages to online forums and bulletin boards. Lead researcher Gabriel Ortiz said his team had compiled a database of idiotic comments and that the new software would detect unintelligible remarks and either alert the writer to fix them or divert the message to the recipient's "junk mail." Easy dumb messages to filter: those with the tacky, immature repetition of a closing consonant, e.g., "That thing is amazinggggg!!!" More difficult: how to treat sarcasm and irony, in that smart writers sometimes deliberately use dumb statements to mock other writers. [CNNMoney-Fortune, 11-7-07]
That concludes this week's news of the weird....and now back to your regularly sponsored forum posts.