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Amusing | Culture | Design | Ethics | Media | Modding | Rhetoric | Technology

Internet Explorer and Murder Rates: More Fun with Causation and Correlation

NFGT

IE.png – mlkshk.

Current_Events | Ethics | Games | Journalism | Social_Software

Manti Te’o's Dead Girlfriend, The Most Heartbreaking And Inspirational Story Of The College Football Season, Is A Hoax

Screen Shot 2013-01-17 at 1.04.42 PM

Great example of investigative journalism, piecing together a coherent narrative from conflicting bits and pieces culled from various sources. A reminder that journalists — even when they are fighting deadlines, and even when they are writing more-fluffy-than-the-crime-beat pieces — must verify claims before going public. Too many sports journalists reported unconfirmed bits and pieces of [...]

Aesthetics | Design | Ethics | Games | Media | Philosophy | Writing

Mother 3: My Mom, and Me

mother3hinawagrave

Thoughtful, powerful, personal analysis of a computer game. Blogging this as an example of “new games journalism,” so I can have it handy the next time I teach Video Game Culture and Theory.

When someone you love dies, your view of the world takes on an air of mysticism. You find meaning in places you [...]

Books | Business | Culture | Ethics | Humanities | Literacy | Literature | Media | Rhetoric

Worried about the future of books? Here’s what you can do.

It’s a lot easier to be selfish, to be an artistic libertarian who decides “I will just concern myself with making my work and I’ll just hope and pray there’s still some kind of an apparatus in place to edit, design, produce, market, distribute and sell it when it’s done, or else imagine that I’ll [...]

Academia | Amusing | Current_Events | Education | Ethics | History | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology | Writing

Wikipedia hoax about a war that never happened deleted after 5 years

My first-year writing students generally know they aren’t supposed to use Wikipedia as a source in a research paper, but many can’t quite articulate why. A willingness to trace a citation to its source and evaluate the source, rather than accept the source uncritically, is crucial to intellectual competence in the Information Age.

An article [...]

Current_Events | Education | Ethics | Psychology | Weirdness

Family Questions Boy’s Suspension Over Gun Gesture

A six-year-old who was warned not to pretend to shoot his classmates with scissors later made a shooting gesture with his fingers, and has now been suspended.

A parent reacting to the story told a reporter “I wouldn’t expect someone to do that to my child, and if they did, I would expect some type [...]

Academia | Business | Culture | Design | Education | Ethics | Modding | Rhetoric

Why Students Today Complain About Grades—and How We Can Fix It

I periodically get emails from former students who thank me, several years after a class is over, for challenging them in a way that prepared them for life after college. I don’t get so many grateful comments while the students are still in college.

I don’t blame my students, but a certain proportion does seem [...]

Amusing | Culture | Ethics | Philosophy | Rhetoric | SciFi | Sociology

After Hours – Why The Star Trek Universe is Secretly Horrifying

After Hours – Why The Star Trek Universe is Secretly Horrifying

Business | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Ethics | Government | Media | Politics | PopCult

That Was Fast: Hollywood Already Browbeat The Republicans Into Retracting Report On Copyright Reform

So, late Friday, we reported on how the Republican Study Committee (the conservative caucus of House Republicans) had put out a surprisingly awesome report about copyright reform. You can read that post to see the details. The report had been fully vetted and reviewed by the RSC before it was released. However, as soon as [...]

Current_Events | Cyberculture | Ethics | Journalism | Media

Coverage Rapid, And Often Wrong, In Tragedy’s Early Hours : NPR

Nearly everyone reported so many things wrong in the first 24 hours after the Sandy Hook shootings that it’s hard to single out any one news organization or reporter for criticism.

Among the news outlets that wrongly reported major parts of the journalistic building blocks of “who, what, where, when, why and how,” were CBS, [...]