Examining the ‘10%’ MemeJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Many of my students are thinking and talking about the gay marriage issue. Johanna Dreyfuss mentioned the “10%” statistic, citing the Kinsey report, via http://www.socal-glide.org/statistics.html. I’ve encountered this statistic in student papers before, so I know that Kinsey didn’t actually claim that 10% of the population was gay. According…
What stinks about the whole affair is not the glee with which Drudge refuses to let the facts get in the way of a good lie, but that most of those lies (including, apparently, this most recent one) are supplied to him by print journalists who don’t have enough evidence to put them into their…
The Nietzschean diet, which commands its adherents to eat superhuman amounts of whatever they most fear, is developing a strong following in America. … “One must strive to eat dangerously as one comes into the Will to Power Oneself Thin,” Nietzsche wrote. “What do you fear? By this are you truly Fattened. You must embrace…
Today’s computer constructs were made up in situations that ranged from emergency to academia, which have been piled up into a seemingly meaningful whole. Yet the world of the screen could be anything at all, not just the imitation of paper. But everybody seems to think the basic designs are finished. It’s just like “Space,…
The notion that women want to be with their kids is crucial to the logic of de Marneffe’s argument. With it, she inverts the whole Friedanian case against domesticity. In de Marneffe’s view, it is a mistake to equate staying at home with forgoing an adult identity, because it is precisely in caring for children…
For many under 30, the host of Comedy Central’s “The Daily Show” is, improbably, an important news source. A poll released earlier this year by the Pew Research Center for the People and the Press found that 21 percent of people aged 18 to 29 cited “The Daily Show” and “Saturday Night Live” as a…
It’s a dangerous mistake to believe that statistical research is somehow more scientific or credible than insight-based observational research. In fact, most statistical research is less credible than qualitative studies. Design research is not like medical science: ethnography is its closest analogy in traditional fields of science. —Jakob Nielsen —Risks of Quantitative Studies (Alertbox) Note… he’s…
Scientists have cast doubt on the well-established theory that a single, massive asteroid strike killed off the dinosaurs 65 million years ago. New data suggests the Chicxulub crater in Mexico, supposedly created by the collision, predates the extinction of the dinosaurs by about 300,000 years. —Dinosaur impact theory challenged (BBC) Other cosmic news: Mars “soaking wet…
So why this terror of the new medium? I don’t think it has much to do with the concern to protect the weak and feeble-minded potential murderers out there. This is all about money. Television is one of the media which has the most to lose, as statistics show that games take time away not…
The electric shock hadn’t hurt Jeremy very much, but he had bumped his head on a metal leg of the auditorium seats which he fell into. I had told him to ham it up when I applied the electrode of my violet-ray machine to his outstretched hand, but this was much more than I expected.…
From Yahoo! News: Update: Torill responds.The Importance of PunctuationJerz’s Literacy Weblog) Bork bork bork!
44% of Internet users have created content for the online world through building or posting to Web sites, creating blogs, and sharing files In a national phone survey between March 12 and May 20, 2003, the Pew Internet & American Life Project found that more than 53 million American adults have used the Internet to…
While no replacement for writing articles and books, and no one is going to get tenured or promoted through blogging (at least not today); but what I’ve called a serious blogger would get a big plus on the positive side on the ledger from me when it gets to merit review time! Failing to reward…
I reworked the draft, adding some charts and tables to demonstrate that the program wouldn’t require any new dollars. But mostly I substituted abstract nouns for concrete ones, stuffed sentences with nominalizations, and replaced active verbs with passives, violating the rules of writing that students in the M.F.A. program would be expected to follow. —Dennis…
Sensory Immersion vs. PainJerz’s Literacy Weblog) My son got a splinter in his hand this weekend. He wasn’t too happy when my wife told him she’d have to remove it with a needle. I suggested that maybe I could try tweezers first. “What are tweezers?” he asked. “Kind of like little pliers,” I said. I…