New English Jobs at Seton Hill University — Composition and Creative Writing

Two positions. Assistant Professor of Composition Institution: Seton Hill University Location: Greensburg, PA Category: Faculty – Liberal Arts – English and Literature Posted: 11/10/2008 Application Due: Open Until Filled Type: Full Time Seton Hill University invites applications for an Assistant Professor position in Composition, beginning fall, 2009. The faculty member will teach first-year composition courses,…

Unhappy People Watch TV, Happy People Read/Socialize

A new study by sociologists at the University of Maryland concludes that unhappy people watch more TV, while people who describe themselves as “very happy” spend more time reading and socializing. The study appears in the December issue of the journal Social Indicators Research. Analyzing 30-years worth of national data from time use studies and…

Novels ‘better at explaining world’s problems than reports’

Fiction – including poetry – should be taken just as seriously as facts-based research, according to the team from Manchester University and the London School of Economics (LSE). Novels should be required reading because fiction “does not compromise on complexity, politics or readability in the way that academic literature sometimes does,” said Dr Dennis Rodgers from Manchester University’s Brooks World Poverty…

Nasa Mars mission declared dead

Nasa says its Phoenix lander on the surface of Mars has gone silent and is almost certainly dead. | Engineers have not heard from the craft since Sunday 2 November when it made a brief communication with Earth.|  Phoenix, which landed on the planet’s northern plains in May, had been struggling in the increasing cold…

Experience: I escaped from a death camp

Stark, unadorned writing. No melodramatic flourishes or sentiment. Just the truth. Powerful. Fewer than 100 survived Treblinka. I am the last one. The will to live is stronger than anything else; I never gave up. Maybe I’m meant to be alive to tell the story. This is the last generation to hear first-hand from survivors.…

The Incredible Vanishing Book

Many professors will spend countless hours putting together elaborate and voluminous course packets of photocopies for classroom use (I used to be one of them). And now, it is more frequent for technologically minded teachers to file-share large numbers of PDFs through password protected sites on campus. This is so wrong it hurts. We are…

Twitter, Flickr, Facebook Make Blogs Look So 2004

When blogging was young, enthusiasts rode high, with posts quickly skyrocketing to the top of Google’s search results for any given topic, fueled by generous links from fellow bloggers. In 2002, a search for “Mark” ranked Web developer Mark Pilgrim above author Mark Twain. That phenomenon was part of what made blogging so exciting. No…

The Unfinished Swan

Via The FPP — first-person painter! I wish the creator hadn’t chosen to go eerie with the mood, that seems like cheating a little… it’s so easy to go scary. Still, it’s beautiful And it’s an XNA-developed title. Interesting. The Unfinished Swan – Tech Demo 9/2008 from Ian Dallas on Vimeo.

E-mail error ends up on road sign

Thanks, Mike, for pointing out this one, which is a close second to “Translate Server Error.” The English is clear enough to lorry drivers – but the Welsh reads “I am not in the office at the moment. Please send any work to be translated.” When officials asked for the Welsh translation of a road…