Despite once achieving high visibility and big successes, government-sponsored gamification projects have fallen on hard times, and nobody in government seems willing to drop a few more quarters into the machine to continue playing.
Publications
IoT Going to War on Land and Sea
Despite the seeming hegemony of the Internet of Things, there are a couple places where the tiny sensors have yet to travel. One of them is deep in the world’s oceans, and the other is on the frontlines of today’s modern battlefield. The Army and Navy mean to change that.
An essay contest for students
The Library of Congress is inviting fifth and sixth graders in the Mid-Atlantic region to share the books that have shaped their lives in an essay contest. If you know a student who reads, let him or her know about this contest, being held in conjunction with the National Book Festival.
Worth Reading: Cyrano de Bergerac
The plot has become a cliché, which can mask the hilarity, bombast and humanity of this great play.
Worth Reading: Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
One of Dickens’ best-known and best-loved books, a great mystery and a story of redemption—for Pip, his benefactor and his tormentor.
Supreme Court sidesteps decision on Microsoft’s Irish email servers
A new law allowed the justices to dismiss a DOJ suit seeking to enforce a warrant for data held in an off-shore datacenter. But the larger question of what happens when the United States orders a company to violate the laws of another country remains to be answered.
Worth Reading: The Iliad and The Odyssey by Homer
The granddaddies of action adventure stories. But beyond the carnage and monsters there are characters that make these classics worth reading.
Captcha Technology Evolving to Combat Test-Aware AI
The next thing in biometric authentication could be a new version of something already familiar to web users — Captcha, the tried, true and too often maddening method of convincing a site you’re not a bot by typing in distorted letters and numbers on the screen.
Worth Reading: Summer of ’49 by David Halberstam
Halberstam brings all of his reporting talent to bear on one idyllic season of the National Pastime and a pennant race between perennial rivals the Yankees and the Red Sox.
Worth Reading: The Master and Margarita by Mikhail Bulgakov
The Master reexamines Pontius Pilate and Jesus, Margarita must decide what she is willing to do for love, and Satan punctures bureaucrats, hypocrites and thieves in Soviet-era Moscow.