Lost in navigation

I just read a kind of cute, kind of sad story. Ever heard of the English villages of Wedmore and Barrow Gurney? Me neither. But more and more stranded truckers are becoming involuntarily familiar with these villages’ narrow streats, through which it apparently is more or less impossible to bring a large, heavy vehicle.

So why is Barrow Gurney, a village to small to have a sidewalk, home to 15,000 dead-ended trucks a day? You said it – GPS navigation systems. For some reason the GPS manufacturers are not able to correct the inaccuracies in their system that tells the truck drivers that these villages are a good shortcut to Bristol Airport.

Facebookademics and the media

The last couple of days two newspaper articles about academic research on Facebook have been the subject of much discussion on the email list for the AoIR (Association of Internet Researchers). It started with this story in the Washington Post, which portrays recent work about social networking sites as an academic landrush in which scholars are rushing to claim the new territory as their own.

The following outcry among the internet researchers is interesting, because it illustrates the conflicted relationship between academia and the press. That is something I’ve personally experienced from both sides: As a journalist trying desperately to get scholars speak in a manner which could be communicated to a general, non-academic public, and as an academic opening the newspaper and finding myself quoted saying exactly the opposite of what I thought I had said. Needless to say, both experiences are extremely frustrating.

Are computer games addictive?

The question above might sound like a no-brainer to anyone who has ever achieved their all-time high score in Tetris at a point in time when they should much rather have been doing something else, such as studying for their exams or setting up an academic blog. But then it depends a little what kind of meaning you put into the word ‘addictive’ – is it accurate as a clinical diagnosis? When does something go from being a tempting way to kill time, to be something that actually takes control over your life and forces you to seek help?