Assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria

On 28 June 1914, Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria, heir presumptive to the Austro-Hungarian throne, and his wife, Sophie, Duchess of Hohenberg, were shot dead in Sarajevo by Gavrilo Princip, one of a group of six assassins (five Serbs and oneBosnian Muslim) coordinated by Danilo Ilić. The political objective of the assassination was to break off Austria-Hungary’s south-Slavprovinces so they could be combined into a Yugoslavia. The assassins’ motives…

Raise It Up! :: Star-Spangled Banner – 1814-2014

I usually start my American Lit I course with an analysis of “The Defence of Fort McHenry.” “Two hundred years ago, Francis Scott Key, inspired by the sight of the flag’s ‘broad stripes and bright stars,’ wrote a song that gave new significance to a national symbol and started a tradition through which Americans have…

How Bill Gates pulled off the swift Common Core revolution

While I appreciate the efficiency of uniform standards, I am concerned because it becomes even more efficient to teach to the test, which means more students will arrive in my college classes expecting to be told exactly what to do. I want them to take risks which means I have to convince them that I…

Even in the U.S., Chinese Students May Have Tiananmen ‘Amnesia’

But now that he was at college in America, someone had mentioned Tiananmen, a friend. And he went online, to YouTube and Google, and pulled up videos and photographs from 25 years earlier, images not easily accessible behind China’s Great Firewall, as its Internet-censoring regime is called. He kept looking at one, he said, “the…

What Makes Ohio State the Most Unequal Public University in America?

So while university presidents are making huge salaries, Tom Frank explains, students “borrowed and forked over enormous sums in exchange for the privilege of hearing lectures…lectures that were then delivered by people who earned barely enough to stay alive. It is a double disaster of the kind that only we Americans are capable of pulling…

Ethics of standardized testing

A blogger who had a much worse day than I did writes: Today I finished administering the sixth day of New York State Common Core assessments. I was a facilitator in a process that made my 10 year old students struggle,to the point of frustration, to complete yet another 90 minute test. I sat by…

Standardized-test robo-graders flunk

“According to professor of theory of knowledge Leon Trotsky, privacy is the most fundamental report of humankind. Radiation on advocates to an orator transmits gamma rays of parsimony to implode.’’ ANY NATIVE speaker over age 5 knows that the preceding sentences are incoherent babble. But a computer essay grader, like the one Massachusetts may use…

#MyNYPD Hashtag Promptly Hijacked

Someone is regretting this PR move. The official @NYPDnews Twitter account made an attempt at social media outreach today only to get promptly torn to shreds by users resisting the PR push. Hijacked hashtags are a common Twitter phenomenon, but tend to be played more for giggles (“trolling,” some call it) than to make a…

Phoenix journalist admits ‘bad reporting’ in claiming White House press censorship

NEWS FLASH: If your sources are an off-the-record comment and a thing you chose to do, and you claim that everyone is forced to do the thing you chose to do, then your news item will probably fall apart. “I took a conversation about the preparation for a press briefing and muddied it with my…

DOJ Enters Into Landmark Web and Mobile App Consent Decree

Under the consent decree cite to http://www.ada.gov/hrb-cd.htm, H&R Block must undertake a number of stringent requirements including:Make its web content conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0 level AA by January 2015.Make its mobile apps conform to the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines WCAG 2.0 level AA by January 2016.Appoint a Web Accessibility Coordinator…

Standardized testing: I opted my kids out. The schools freaked out. Now I know why.

And so, on the first day of testing, I arrived to pick my daughter up at middle school at 9:25 a.m. I went into the office and checked her out. She and I started walking to my car. It was just as I started reaching for my keys that we realized that someone was in…

TSA Agent Confession

It was May 2007. I was living with a bohemian set on Chicago’s north side, a crowd ranging from Foucault-fixated college kids to middle-aged Bukowski-bred alcoholics. We drank and talked politics on the balcony in the evenings, pausing only to sneer at hipsters strumming back-porch Beatles sing-a-longs. By night, I took part in barbed criticism…

Replaying Childhood: On Gifting my Video Games to the Library of Congress

Tevor Owens writes: Giving up my games ended up being a bit of an emotional experience. I think the emotion of that experience underscores why it matters for the Library to collect games. The box of games and systems had sat in our basement for the last five years, and my mother’s basement for a…

How Copyright Law Gave Us STAR WARS

In an alternate universe George Lucas never made Star Wars because he was able to get the rights to Flash Gordon. See, that was Lucas’ original intention, and he even went to meet with King Features Syndicate, who held the rights, to talk with them about making a movie based on the classic comic strip…

Why NORAD Tracks Santa

The call had come in on one of the top secret lines inside CONAD that only rang in the case of a crisis. Grabbing the phone, Shoup must have expected the worst. Instead, a tiny voice asked, “Is this Santa Claus?” “Dads pretty annoyed,” said Terri Van Keuren, Shoups daughter, recalling the legend of that…

The Bill That Could Save College Students $1,200 a Year

Faculty who need to publish for professional reasons can be motivated for reasons other than a royalty check, so this sounds like a good idea. The Affordable College Textbook Act, introduced by Durbin and Franken this month, aims to lower book costs by promoting the use of open-source textbooks. Open books, as defined by the…

Terrified Obama Trapped Inside Healthcare.gov Website

“Goddammit, I don’t know what to do!” Obama said, banging his hands in frustration against a wall of binary as the entire healthcare.gov mainframe suddenly froze, forcing all previously flowing lines of code to come to a complete standstill. “I can’t fix this! Get me out of this place!” “Please! Just get me out of…

Google Books ruled legal in massive win for fair use (updated)

Update in a legal battle that’s been going on for 8 years. A long-running copyright lawsuit between the Authors’ Guild and Google over its book-scanning project is over, and Google has won on the grounds that its scanning is “fair use.” In other words, the snippets of books that Google shows for free don’t break…

How Television Covered the Kennedy Assassination – a 1964 TV Guide Article

It was a new, shocking, traumatic thing for Americans — who were used to getting their bad news from kindly gentlemen who filtered it for them and helped them digest the worst bits — to watch reporters, live on air, learning new details and reacting as they happened. First CBS Bulletin (at 10:45 into a…

Rare Philadelphia win – for a Whig!

For the first time in 159 years, Philadelphians have elected a Whig to public office – specifically, putting a member of the Modern Whig Party into a spot as judge of elections in Northeast Philadelphia’s 56th Ward, in the Rhawnhurst section. Robert “Heshy” Bucholz, 39, a software engineer with four children and a fifth on…