New rules governing drone journalism are on the way — and there’s reason to be optimistic

Mapping disasters? So long as you’ve got ATC clearance, it’s possible. Imaging structures in 3D? Totally possible. Covering protests? With the caveat that you can’t fly over people, very possible. Similar:Among today’s major professional accomplishments: installing this hook. #springbreakMy office door feels more complete now. …AcademiaJournalists prefer plain language.AestheticsThat story about the pope requiring Catholics…

Pick Up Your Smartphone Less Often. You Might Think Better

Research suggests we neeed to be bored sometimes in order to be creative. The constant distraction offered by a smartphone keeps the brain from entering the boredom phase that often sparks creativity. Delete a time-killling app on your phone today! (I haven’t played Candy Crush in months, but it’s still there on my OS device.…

How One Stupid Tweet Blew Up Justine Sacco’s Life

A PR professional should have known better. But mistakes can have serious, disproportionate consequences enacted by vigilante mobs. It may not be fair, but labeling it unfair doesn’t undo the consequences. Sacco’s Twitter feed had become a horror show. “In light of @Justine-Sacco disgusting racist tweet, I’m donating to @care today” and “How did @JustineSacco…

Naomi Baron’s Words Onscreen: The Fate of Reading in a Digital World

What’s the deal with ebooks? They run out of battery, they hurt your eyes, they don’t work in the bath. After years of growth, sales are stagnating. In 2014, 65 percent of 6 to 17-year-old children said they would always want to read books in print—up from 60 percent two years earlier. via The New…

Brian Williams is Giving NBC an Opportunity to Bravely Break with Tradition

NBC has a marketing decision to make, not whether the punishment of expelling the nation’s top-rated nightly news anchor fits the crime. The question NBC needs to ask itself is: “Where can we go from here?”

The Hubble spotted this smiley face in space

Reading each other’s facial expressions is so important to our survival as a species that our brains are hardwired to respond to expressions on faces that aren’t even there. This adorable image — in which the galaxy cluster SDSS J1038+4849 seems to be smiling at the camera — comes courtesy of the Hubble Space Telescope. It was spotted…

NASA | A View From The Other Side

A number of people who’ve seen NASA’s annual lunar phase and libration videos have asked what the other side of the Moon looks like, the side that can’t be seen from the Earth. This video answers that question. The imagery was created using Lunar Reconnaissance Orbiter data. A number of people who’ve seen NASA’s annual…

Vandal scratches Poe phrase into car at dealership

Language nerds will appreciate this news story about a Latin vandal. The scratching on one of the cars spelled out “Nemo me inpune lacessit.” The phrase means “No one attacks me with impunity.” The quotation, in fact, comes from Edgar Allan Poes classic horror story “The Cask of Amontillado.” It is the family crest of…

The Alot is Better Than You at Everything

There is no Englilsh word “alot.” That is, there wasn’t, until this cartoonist created an imaginary beast who could help make sense of all the sentences that use the non-word “alot” (instead of “a lot”). Hyperbole and a Half: The Alot is Better Than You at Everything. Similar:How the printing press changed “you”: when reading…

“Do Date” vs “Due Date”: Do Profs Really Have to Explain the Difference?

If there really are teachers who list assignments by “do date” rather than “due date,” I’ve never heard from one. Students who fall behind sometimes say “I didn’t know whether the readings listed for Monday are due on *Monday* or whether they are due on *Wednesday*.” How likely is it that the student really *is*…

Lego signs multi-million-pound deal with BBC to create Dr Who set

The concept for a Doctor Who set came from the Lego Ideas website where fans can submit suggestions, which are then put to the vote.The winning design created by Dr Who fan, Andrew Clark, featured a mock-up of various doctors, including David Tennant and Tom Baker, alongside Billie Piper, K9 the robot dog, and versions…

You’re Just Gonna Be Nice by A. Lange

In a study, over 1000 gamers were surveyed to see how the average player interacts with a game system that allows the player to choose a “good” or “evil” path through a game story. The finding was that the average gamer prefers to be good or heroic in such games. Gamers are most interested in…

Harper Lee to publish new novel, 55 years after To Kill a Mockingbird

Lee said in an announcement from her publisher, Penguin Random House, that she completed Go Set a Watchman in the mid-1950s, but set it aside after the publication of her debut and never returned to it. “It features the character known as Scout as an adult woman and I thought it a pretty decent effort,”…

Never trust a corporation to do a library’s job

The Internet Archive is mostly known for archiving the web, a task the San Francisco-based nonprofit has tirelessly done since 1996, two years before Google was founded. The Wayback Machine now indexes over 435 billion webpages going back nearly 20 years, the largest archive of the web. For most people, it ends there. But that’s barely scratching the surface.…

Desiderata (Nerdy Inspiration)

This is a little story about an inspirational prose poem from the 1920s, a repeatedly unsuccessful US presidential contender from the 50s, a spoken-word recording released by Star Trek’s Mr. Spock in the 1960s, a Grammy-winning new-age anthem from the 70s, and a software company that taught my son to play chess. Similar:STEM Needs a…

Why the Weather Channel’s Hype Has Lost Me for Good

After the break, we’ll tell you how important it is for you watch our live WeatherFear (TM) StormPorterCast (TM) Mobile NewsHole Coverage Team tell you to keep watching for the next XtremeSnowFerno (TM) WeatherUnleashed NatureBlast ScareCast (TM), so that the advertising manager can sell your eyeballs (and thus earn enough to buy his kid another…

Graphic Design Pun Cards

Sara Heffernan designed these wonderful visual-textual gags. Graphic Design Pun Cards on Behance. Similar:What are 'Judeo-Christian values'? Analyzing a divisive termblock of American society. But for crit…AcademiaThe Hut Where the Internet Began – Atlantic MobileLet’s start at the end point: what you’r…CybercultureMillennials Shy Away from Voice MailI was happy a few years ago when Seton H…CultureShe…

The Challenger disaster, Jan. 28, 1986

On this day in 1986, the Challenger space shuttle broke apart 73 seconds into its flight and plunged into the Atlantic Ocean. All seven of the Challenger astronauts, who had blasted off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Center, perished. One of the crew members, Christa McAuliffe, had won a nationwide NASA competition to be the first…

Associate Dean of What?

The idea of students as customers relies on models of customer service that are not what experts in the field actually teach (as explicated in this letter to The Chronicle by Clara Burke). We develop crude quantitative evaluative tools while businesses use more and more complex qualitative focus groups and sophisticated assessments. And we apply…

I’m Asking My Students to Be Deliberate about the Word “Novel”

In the past few years, I have noticed more students are applying the word “novel” to any text they might be asked to study in class, whether that text is a book-length fictional narrative, a play, a poem, a political manifesto, or a collection of academic essays. I wrote up this lecture to introduce the…