Features

Current_Events | Journalism | Media

Rookie News Anchor — Fired Instantly for Dropping ‘F***ing S***’ On the Air

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Yes, it is nerve-wracking to speak live on the air, but… wow.

 

Academia | Cyberculture | Design | Education | Media | Social_Software | Technology

Grading the MOOC University

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The MOOC classrooms are growing at Big Bang rates: more than five million students worldwide have registered for classes in topics ranging from physics to history to aboriginal worldviews.

It creates a strange paradox: these professors are simultaneously the most and least accessible teachers in history. –Grading the MOOC University – NYTimes.com.

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Current_Events | Cyberculture | Ethics | Government | Media | Social_Software | Technology

Police, citizens and technology factor into Boston bombing probe

In addition to being almost universally wrong, the theories developed via social media complicated the official investigation, according to law enforcement officials. Those officials said Saturday that the decision on Thursday to release photos of the two men in baseball caps was meant in part to limit the damage being done to people who were [...]

Culture | Current_Events | Cyberculture | Essays | Ethics | Media | Social_Software | Sociology | Technology

Boston bombings: Social media spirals out of control

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A thoughtful analysis.

Problem-solvers in the Information Age must train themselves to ignore floods of true-but-trivial and unreliable-but-accessible information. I see this all the time with students who Facebook their way through my class presentations on the function of scholarly peer review, but then submit pages from content farms in their term paper drafts.

According [...]

Academia | Aesthetics | Education | Media | Rhetoric | Science

Higgs Boson Video

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Great video about subatomic particles, from Piled Higher and Deeper.

Aesthetics | Business | Culture | Design | Ethics | Media | Modding | Rhetoric

little drops — Why Dove’s “Real Beauty Sketches” Video Makes Me Uncomfortable… and Kind of Makes Me Angry

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Very insightful…. A reminder that even the much-praised Dove “we are exposing their advertising techniques” campaigns are just that — campaigns, designed to sell a product. (The parent company of Dove also owns Axe, which is blatant in its use of demeaning sexual stereotypes.)

Brave, strong, smart? Not enough. You have to be beautiful. And [...]

Current_Events | Cyberculture | Ethics | Journalism | Media | Writing

Boston marathon bombing: All the mistakes journalists make during a crisis like the Boston attacks.

First, do not pass on speculation. For much of the day, the New York Post was sharing unconfirmed reports, which were later proven erroneous, that 12 people had been killed in the attack. I actually retweeted BuzzFeed’s Andrew Kaczynski, one of [...]

Books | Culture | Cyberculture | Design | Literacy | Media | Science | Technology | Uncategorized

The Reading Brain in the Digital Age: The Science of Paper versus Screens: Scientific American

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As digital texts and technologies become more prevalent, we gain new and more mobile ways of reading—but are we still reading as attentively and thoroughly? How do our brains respond differently to onscreen text than to words on paper? Should we be worried about dividing our attention between pixels and ink or is the validity [...]

Business | Culture | Cyberculture | Design | Essays | Games | Media | Personal

LucasArts’ eulogy reminds us of the inhuman cost of game development

Game development culture often involves 18-hour work days during crunch times that last for months. I remember as a teen or college student enjoying a “lost weekend” of doing nothing but playing the latest game (the X-Wing games, The Dig, and Full Throttle come to mind), but expecting the professionals who produce games to work [...]

Aesthetics | Cyberculture | History | Media | Writing

30 Best Text-Adventures/Interactive-Fiction Games Over 5 Decades | Gaming Enthusiast

Nobody has to twist my arm to get me to reblog someone’s interactive fiction post.

As gamers, we know perfectly well that the graphics is not everything that counts. The story, the immersion, the memorable characters – those are the things we really dig. So what would we get if we leave those and [...]