Icon See It Now

Microsoft’s menu bars are awash in anachronistic images, and it’s especially evident in the latest edition of the Office 2003 application suite. This struck me as I was authoring my 364th “Inside PCMag.com” newsletter. Clicking on the Save icon, I found myself wondering why it’s still an image of a 3.5-inch floppy disk. When was…

'The other phone's a little…'

—‘The other phone’s a little…’ (No Media Kings) Jim Munroe is a new media generalist — a writer, interactive fiction designer, and video filmmaker. I enjoyed his video “>interactive,” and was Googling just now for something or other, and came across this short film, with a very dry, understated punchline that made me laugh out loud.…

Selling You a New Past

She singled out a campaign by Disney – “Remember the magic” – which, she claimed, was used to invoke real or imaginary childhood memories in consumers. | She reported an experiment in which people were shown an advert suggesting that children who visited Disneyland had the opportunity to shake hands with Bugs Bunny. Later, many…

Was It as Bad for You as It Was for Me?

It’s poor chemistry between writer and reader (pontificator and pontificatee, in the academic version), like lack of sizzle between jaded full professor and enthusiastic asst. prof. It’s failure of Interrogator A to make the noises and gestures that work for Hegemonized Reader B. It may be Defamiliarizer A’s clumsy attempt to shake up the ideological/emotional/instrumental…

The Great Library of Amazonia

Books take time to transport. Their text vanishes and their pages yellow in a rash of foxing. Most important, it’s still shockingly difficult to find information buried in books. Even as the Internet has revived hope of a universal library and Google seems to promise an answer to every query, books have remained a dark…

In the early days of computer gaming…

..the most evocative and atmospheric experiences were conveyed entirely through text. Text adventures, with their terse locations, thrived on the role of objects, which were there to be discovered, smashed, used, examined and combined: you find the lamp, but now you need the oil to fill it and the match to light it. Only then…

Blogging E-Mailed Comments

The author of one of the books I blogged wrote me an interesting reply, but sent it via e-mail. Can I place her comment in my blog comments without violating some written or unwritten code? —John SpurlockBlogging E-Mailed CommentsE-Mail) If I were to send a letter to the editor to a newspaper, I shouldn’t be…

An Act of Empathy

Convincing medical school faculties that a professional actor can teach empathy to doctors might sound like a losing battle. However, the directors of many residency programs are starting to acknowledge that they need help in this area. New national requirements, recently set by the Accreditation Council for Graduate Medical Education (ACGME), list interpersonal and communication…

Why Computers Have Not Saved the Classroom

Putting computers in classrooms has been almost entirely wasteful, and the rush to keep schools up-to-date with the latest technology has been largely pointless. —Bob Blaisdell reviews Todd Oppenheimer’ s The Flickering Mind —Why Computers Have Not Saved the Classroom (CS Monitor) Oppenheimer argues that when technology is working, it is because enthusiastic teachers have made…

Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations?

[A]ttractive professors consistently outscore their less comely colleagues by a significant margin on student evaluations of teaching. —Gabriela Montell —Do Good Looks Equal Good Evaluations? (Chronicle) Thanks for the suggestion, Jim. I mentioned about this article couple days ago in a comment I added to a post about ‘ bad genes,’ but it’s worth repeating as…