Features

Cyberculture | Design | Media | Sociology | Usability

Teenage Usability (Jakob Nielsen’s Alertbox)

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Teens often work on laptops with track pads, making interactions that require precision — such as drop-down menus, drag-n-drop, and small buttons — difficult. Design elements such as rollover effects and small click zones are also problematic, if they’re usable at all. Small text sizes and dense text make reading difficult. Combine these elements with [...]

Business | Culture | Rhetoric | Sociology

Why Can’t Millennials Find Jobs?

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Half of hiring managers say wearing attire ill-suited for an interview was one of the biggest mistakes they saw. Others include lack of eye contact (33%), checking phone or texting (30%), fidgeting (26%) and bad posture (22%). Other interview horror stories? Nearly half of hiring managers (44%) said showing up late or on the wrong [...]

Business | Culture | Ethics | Rhetoric | Sociology | Technology

Texting? Pets? Millennials Are Flunking Job Interviews – CNBC

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The other day, a Facebook friend posted a snapshot of a young store employee absorbed by a smartphone instead of stocking or cleaning. My 15yo has expressed zero interest in Facebook, though my 11yo is irked that some of her preteen friends already have accounts (despite the official 13+ Facebook policy). But soon I will [...]

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 [...]

Business | Culture | Essays | Ethics | History | Psychology | Rhetoric | Sociology

Diamonds Are Bullsh*t

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I did propose with a diamond ring, for which I paid a substantial portion of my income, but since I was in grad school at the time, my income was very modest.

The next time you look at a diamond, consider this. Nearly every American marriage begins with a diamond because a bunch of rich [...]

Culture | Education | Psychology | Sociology

Are Grading Trends Hurting Socially Awkward Kids?

One might argue that the new emphasis on sociability is precisely what autistic spectrum students require. Don’t they, more than anyone else, need to develop their communication and collaborative skills? And in our increasingly social 21st century, aren’t these skills more important than ever before — both for life in general, and for jobs in [...]

Culture | Education | Humanities | Language | Sociology

A Wealth of Words

People with similar vocabulary sizes may vary significantly in their talent and in the depth of their understanding. Nonetheless, there’s no better index to accumulated knowledge and general competence than the size of a person’s vocabulary. Simply put: knowing more words makes you smarter. And between 1962 and the present, a big segment of the [...]

Academia | Culture | Health | Media | PopCult | Science | Sociology

Does Movie Violence Increase Violent Crime?

The Twitter version: There’s a slight decrease in violent crime when violent movies are playing. People who like violence tend to go watch the movie instead of going out and doing violent things.

Laboratory experiments in psychology find that media violence increases aggression in the short run. We analyze whether media violence affects violent [...]

Academia | Culture | Education | Psychology | Sociology | Writing

Study shows college students think they’re more special than ever…even those that can’t read or write and barely study

A hype-heavy treatment of a recent study (named vaguely as the “American Freshman Survey,” in the article, but not actually cited or dated… I found a copy of a 2011 report).

While students are much more likely to call themselves gifted in writing abilities, objective test scores actually show that their writing abilities are far [...]

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