Supreme Court will hear disgraced journalist’s moral character case

For the first time in 11 years, the California Supreme Court agreed to hear the case of a would-be lawyer denied admission to the State Bar because of moral character issues. The bar petitioned the court to consider the case of Stephen Glass, a disgraced former journalist who won national infamy for making up whole or parts of stories and now wants to practice law in California. Although the Committee of Bar Examiners (CBE) denied Glass admission on moral character grounds, it was overruled by both a State Bar Court hearing judge and a split review panel that said he should be admitted.

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Video games hit higher level of U.S. education

Engineering professor Brianno Coller's (video game for) third-year students at Northern Illinois University in DeKalb (has them) build virtual race cars, complete with roaring engines and screeching tires, that must maneuver an increasingly challenging course. Along the way, they're exposed to computational math, a basic building block of engineering.

Around the country, pockets of faculty have been adding games to their courses as a way to stimulate learning. At Boston College, nursing students conduct forensics at a virtual crime scene. At the University of Wisconsin-Madison, a game called Melody Mixer teaches students how to read and compose music. Students at Mercyhurst College in Erie, Pa., play World of Warcraft, a multiplayer online game, in a course on intelligence studies.

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Fun at the FactFest

PolitiFact.com and FactCheck.org (are) the two best-known of various sites that trawl through politicians’ public statements and dig out their lies, evasions and economies with the truth.

The FactFest produced a lot of theoretical proposals. Better crowd-sourcing tools, to help catch falsehoods. Snazzy stuff, if it works. But with the web increasingly divided into like-minded echo chambers, it’s not clear whether such a flood of factuality would inform people better—or just reinforce their convictions about what a lying bunch the other lot are.

Read more at The Economist

Tool Reveals Which Celebs, Models Have Been Photoshopped

Researchers at the Department of Science at Dartmouth College have developed a software tool that can rate photographs based on how much they have been digitally altered with programs such as Adobe Photoshop. The proposed tool is part of an effort to bring truth to advertising and restore the perception of natural beauty.

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Stephen Colbert on CNN's iReporters

Tablet Owners Define New Category of Shoppers

The increasing number of tablet owners in the U.S. is changing the way people shop from in-store to online — 20% of all mobile ecommerce sales now come from tablets and 60% of tablet owners have purchased goods using a tablet.

Tablet users spend an average of one hour and 35 minutes on their devices and typically spend 10-20% more on purchases than shoppers without tablets. By 2016, mobile commerce is expected to increase to $31 billion in the U.S. – a tremendous jump from only $3 billion in 2010.

Read more at Mashable