Science Fiction Writer Arthur C. Clarke Dies
Sky News: The science fiction writer Arthur C. Clarke, who wrote more than 100 books including 2001: A Space Odyssey, has died in Sri Lanka at the age of 90, according to an aide.
The Little Red Lighthouse and the Great Gray Bridge
When I was little, I loved a book about a little red lighthouse that was dwarfed by the construction of a new bridge. I was just thinking about that book recently, and made a mental note to ask my mother what the title was so I could get a copy and read it to my…
'I shot French literary hero out of the sky'
Scotsman: “I did not see the pilot and even so, it would have been impossible for me to tell that it was Saint-Exupéry. In our youth at school we had all read him, we loved his books. I loved his personality. If I had known I wouldn’t have fired. Not at him.” — 88-year-old Luftwaffe…
Bonus: What’s With the Remix Disrespect?
So I’m sitting at Julie’s place, right, having some rather delicious cherry M&Ms (which my momma could alphabetize in her belly!), when she pops up this blog by Dennis Jerz wherein I spy this quote, in response to Jeff Rice: So students who can only remix don’t get practice thinking critically about culture — and…
Journalism Net Effect Defies Expectation
Wired | AP offers a brief report on the Project for Excellence in Journalism’s new report: Only a few years ago, newspaper Web sites were primarily considered an online morgue for that day’s newspaper, Rosenstield said. “The afternoon newspaper is in a sense being reborn online,” he said. A separate survey found journalists are, to…
Beware the Plath copycats
Guardian If generations of gloomy boys could pretend they were the next TS Eliot, then there have been plenty of gloomy girls who have their very own role model in Plath. And a very powerful role model: unlike Eliot, she succeeded in killing herself. Cue thousands of lines of self-pitying poetry without the command and…
Dr. Jerz, the Facebook n00b
I thought maybe two or three students would “friend” me out of pity, but I was rather surprised that within about 24 hours I had 35 confirmed “friends” — several of those within the first few minutes of registering for the service. Only half of those contacts are from Seton Hill — the rest are…
Blews
Microsoft researchers discuss Blews, which is a horrible title for a promising new tool that sorts blogosphere chatter according to the red/blue political shift, and also identifies the emotional intensity of the response. Our current visualization shows the count of liberal inlinks to a news article as a blue “wing” on the left, and the…
Journalist-Bites-Reality!
How broadcast journalism is flawed in such a fundamental way that its utility as a tool for informing viewers is almost nil. (Steve Salerno, Skeptic) The mythical Red State/Blue State paradigm is just one of the more telling indications of a general disability the media exhibit in working with data. A cluster of random events…
Greensburg library scuffle injures director; police seek couple
The Tribune Review published this story about an incident at my local library. The director of the Greensburg Hempfield Area Library was injured Wednesday afternoon while blocking a married couple who allegedly tried to steal a Christmas novel. […] Muccari said he was near the entrance for the 4:22 p.m. incident because he was posting…
Teaching a Class of Bleary-eyed Students Who Have Just Submitted a Big Paper
They’re definitely stressed. They’re sleep-deprived. They may be furious (at me!). But they’re still riding the intellectual buzz that comes from finishing a research paper. I love what happens in the classroom on the day a major assignment’s due. Students come to class after having wrestled a mess of free-write drafts and marginalia and Post-It-Notalia…
If I have to teach you how to be a reporter…
Of course I don’t know what kind of back story there might be between these two, but keep it off camera, okay, boys? Comically unprofessional. glumbert – Anchor vs Reporter (I’d never heard of this site before… at first I thought it had something to do with journalism, but it seems to be a random…
Seven Social Sins
According to Bloomberg, the Vatican has announced a new list of “social sins.” Consistent with much of the church’s social teachings in the modern age, the list is an interesting mix of traditionally conservative and traditionally liberal ideas. It seems to me that 6 and 7 are already contained in 5, but the Bloomberg article…
Bad Science Journalism and the Myth of the Oppressed Underdog
From Michael White, of Adaptive Complexity: There is a particular narrative about science that science journalists love to write about, and Americans love to hear. I call it the ‘oppressed underdog’ narrative, and it would be great except for the fact that it’s usually wrong. The narrative goes like this: 1. The famous, brilliant scientist…
Common Errors in English (Introduction)
From the introduction to a great list of common errors in English (Paul Brians). The concept of language errors is a fuzzy one. I’ll leave to linguists the technical definitions. Here we’re concerned only with deviations from the standard use of English as judged by sophisticated users such as professional writers, editors, teachers, and literate…
A Call for Slow Writing
Lindsay Waters, Inside Higher Ed: [T]he first step to re-establishing the essay as the standard in humanistic writing is to reinvigorate the sentences we write, so that, when one reads an essay, one feels it. One feels it the way one tastes — and here I’m going global — a good curry. It really sets…
'Sexed-up' numbers should not always be accepted as science
Times Online: In December 2005 a study in the journal Nature offered the observation that the circulation in the North Atlantic Ocean, which sustains the Gulf Stream, had weakened by up to 30 per cent over the previous few decades. This figure and its juxtapositioning alongside the melodrama of films such as The Day after…
Area Eccentric Reads Entire Book
Satire from The Onion. While it’s difficult to imagine what compelled Meyer to read more than just the back cover of To Kill a Mockingbird, friends and family members claim the strange behavior goes all the way back to his childhood. “I remember when Phil was a little kid, instead of picking up a book,…
You Know What's Stupid? Everything I Don't Understand
Great satire from The Onion. [W]hat kind of pathetic loser would actually enjoy something that’s so incredibly not among my personal preferences? Not me, that’s for sure. Maybe my standards are too high, but if you like any of the hundreds upon hundreds of things that are too multifaceted for my attention span, you should…
Publishers are braced for the slow death of the book – Times Online
Times Online: The slow death of the book may be with us. That was an incredibly painful sentence to write. Most bibliophiles balk at the merest hint that digital e-books could replace “real-books”. But vinyl-lovers sneered at CDs. Those who lovingly categorised their CD collections were seduced, in turn, by the iPod. The ancient poets…