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Next Time, Fail Better

Humanities students are not used to failure. They want to get it right the first time. When they are new to the game, they want to get good grades on what are essentially first drafts. Once they learn how much work it is to write and edit a really good essay, their goals shift—from getting [...]

Academia | Books | Culture | Cyberculture | Humanities | Language | Literacy | Media | Modding | Technology | Usability | Writing

Context for Halyes, My Mother Was a Computer

Hayles is an established authority on a humanities-centered approach to human-computer interactions, and My Mother Was a Computer (2005) is her third book on the topic.

At times she writes with the expectation that her readers already know some foundational topics that she may have spent more time introducing in her previous books.

In the [...]

Business | Cyberculture | Design | Journalism | Media | Modding | Social_Software | Technology | Usability

The Future of Magazines Should Look a Lot Like Spotify | PandoDaily

Thanks for the link, Kary.

To subscribe to the New Yorker, Wired, Vanity Fair, GQ, The Atlantic, Details, New York, and Time, you’ve got to have seven different apps, many of which are bloated. Some issues of Wired, for example, have weighed in at 500MB each. And what do you get inside? Aside from the [...]

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ASCII by Jason Scott / FaceFacts

After taking a whole bunch of new high-quality images, I found myself running out of space on my production machine. I briefly toyed with the idea of uploading a big chunk of files to The Cloud — thinking I could just get it back if I ever needed it — but then the voice of [...]

Aesthetics | Design | Media | Usability

Why Your Infographic Is Evil (And Three Ways To Fix It)

“I can understand why readers like them so much, and in my position I have to follow the trends,” she said. “Even when I can’t stand them.”

So until the trend dies, we’ve compiled a list of do’s, don’ts and best practices for [...]

Amusing | Business | Cyberculture | Ethics | Social_Software | Technology | Usability

Twitter / Search – “couldn’t remove your contacts” – All Tweets

Twitter / Search – “couldn’t remove your contacts” – All Tweets.

Business | Cyberculture | Ethics | Social_Software | Technology | Usability

How iPhone Apps Steal Your Contact Data and Why You Can’t Stop It

Nothing really new in this article, but it’s useful to be reminded of how valuable our data is to those who want to make money off it (without our permission).

Apple allows any app to access your address book at any time—it’s built into the iPhone’s core software. The idea is to make using these [...]

Amusing | Business | Cyberculture | Design | Ethics | Media | Rhetoric | Usability

Hollywood Edition « Aaron Klein

Since they’re so persnickety about licensing agreements, let’s amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special “Hollywood Edition” of our products.

Here are some of the special new features we’ll be giving them…

Before you can do a Google search, you have to sit through five minutes [...]

Books | Cyberculture | Media | Technology | Usability

Kindle Touch converts book addicts to e-book fanatics – Setonian Online

I know what you’re thinking: Why get a Kindle Touch when you already have an iPad, provided graciously by none other than Seton Hill University? That’s simple. The Kindle Touch’s 6” display features the most advanced E Ink Pearl to date. The biggest advantage to E Ink is it’s anti-glare feature. While there will still [...]

Academia | Cyberculture | Design | Media | Social_Software | Technology | Usability

Open Source Citation Style Language Editor Under Development

The original headline for the press release highlights the names of the two groups doing the work, which is of course flattering to the groups, but far less newsworthy to the public the PR people are supposed to be relating with. “A large amount of researcher time is spent formatting documents, rather than getting on [...]