They Smiled Too!
Victorians had to stay still for 3 seconds for formal portraits, which makes them seem stiffer than they really were.
Wearable Tech: Rest in Peace, Google Glass: 2012-2014
I did enjoy the opportunity to play with Google Glass briefly, and can imagine certain instances (for instance, while crawling through the real Colossal Cave in Kentucky) when having a hands-free recording device would have been really handy. The social questions raised by Google Glass won’t go away; in the near future, when this sort…
Measuring Humanities Degrees Misses Much of Their Value
“I don’t see why we are fixated on the single category of income as a measure of success,” James R. Grossman, executive director of the American Historical Association, wrote in an email to The Chronicle. “If humanities majors tend to become teachers, social workers, clergy, does that mean they are less successful than money managers or engineers?…
National Day on Writing
NCTE, the National Writing Project, and The New York Times Learning Network invite you to celebrate writing in all its forms: through photos, film, and graphics; with pens, pencils, and computers; in graphs, etchings, and murals; on sidewalks, screens, and paper. This year we encourage you to focus your writing on your community in any way you…
Granting a Student SuperAdminGoddessOMGWhatHaveIDone Network Privileges
I should probably not grant a student superadmingoddessomgwhathaveidone access to a network at 11:59 on Friday night, but I just did. #trust Similar:York Plays 2025: Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of footage.Five cameras, adding up to ~100 hours of…AcademiaSemantic ablation: Why AI writing is boring and dangerousWhen an author uses AI for “polishing” a…Cyberculturexkcd:…
A New Talent Emerges
I tried hard to frown disapprovingly when my beautiful daughter demonstrated that she can burp the alphabet, but she did *such* a good job… Similar:The Declaration Of Independence, 240 Years Later (NPR)When in the Course of human events, it b…CultureNerd siblings are awesome siblingsMy 15yo wanted to show me Terminator 4, …HomeWriting That Demonstrates…
How To Talk To Babies About Semiotics (and Marxist Theory)
BABY: read dog book again ME: okay fine show me where the yellow doggie is on this page BABY: [points] ME: good now show me where the brown doggie is on this page BABY: [points] ME: now show me where the author is BABY: [stares blankly] ME: that’s right the author is dead via Mallory…
What Is Gamergate, and Why? An Explainer for Non-Geeks
I’ve been following the frustrating slow burn that is #Gamergate for some time. I’m planning to introduce it in my online Video Game Culture and Theory class this January. This ground-level introduction will help add context to the mayhem. Until recently, you might have lived a life blissfully unaware of the online #Gamergate movement. But…
The Masque of the Red Death, by Edgar Allan Poe
So, who else is taking advantage of current events and assigning “The Masque of the Red Death”? Are we thoughtful educators? Shameless opportunists? Both? (The disease Poe describes is more sudden than that caused by the ebola virus.) No pestilence had ever been so fatal, or so hideous. Blood was its Avatar and its seal—the…
The First Programmer Was a Lady
Over a hundred years before a monstrous array of vacuum tubes surged into history in an overheated room in Pennsylvania, a properly attired Victorian Gentleman demonstrated an elegant little mechanism of wood and brass in a London drawing room. One of the ladies attending this demonstration brought along the daughter of a friend. She was…
The right — and surprisingly wrong — ways to get kids to sit still in class
When it came time for me to make suggestions to the school about how they could best meet this little boy’s needs, my answer was simple: “He needs more time to play and move his body. Fifteen minutes of recess is not enough. I recommend an hour-long recess session everyday.” Most of these teachers had…
Harvard University says it can’t afford journal publishers’ prices
Robert Darnton, director of Harvard Library told the Guardian: “I hope that other universities will take similar action. We all face the same paradox. We faculty do the research, write the papers, referee papers by other researchers, serve on editorial boards, all of it for free … and then we buy back the results of…
Writing a Cutline (Caption) for the News: Three examples of an often overlooked journalism skill
In journalism, the “cutline” is the text below a picture, explaining what the reader is looking at. It’s what most people call a caption, but to a journalist, a “caption” is more like a title that appears above the photo, while the “cutline” is a few lines of text under the photo. An AP style…
Man Infected with Ebola Misinformation Through Casual Contact With Cable News
On the other end of the link, the New Yorker has illustrated the blog post with a screen shot from Fox News, but the text of the post actually blames CNN (which recently hyped ebola as the ISIS of bio-agents). An Ohio man has become infected with misinformation about the Ebola virus through casual contact…
Jeff Bezos Plan for News: The Washington Post Becomes an Amazon Product
For the past few months, a group inside the Post has been working on a new application that will offer a curated selection of news and photographs from the daily newspaper in a magazine-style, tablet-friendly format. The application will come preinstalled on Amazon’s newly updated Kindle Fire tablet, expected to be launched later this fall…
When a Textbook Plagiarizes Your Student’s Work
In a few days I’ll be gearing up to teach my freshman writing students about plagiarism. Not the “terrify them and make them fear punishment from the authorities” speech, but the “why people who work in a community of minds take plagiarism so seriousy” speech. How interesting, then, that I found a textbook published in…
Saturday morning cartoons are no more
I certainly have fond memories of Saturday morning cartoons, but I can think of scores of things I’d rather my kids do instead of staying at home watching TV all day. I am no TV snob — I love me some Star Trek and with the kids have recently watched Doctor Who and the 1980s…
Today Was The First Day Without Saturday Morning Cartoons In Over 50 Years
I certainly have fond memories of Saturday morning cartoons, but I can think of scores of things I’d rather my kids do instead of staying at home watching TV all day. I am no TV snob — I love me some Star Trek and have recently watched Doctor Who and the 1980s BBC Hitch Hiker’s…
The Interactive Fiction Competition
Download and Play The Games of the 2014 IFComp The Interactive Fiction Competition. Similar:Scammer tricks YouTuber who exposes scams to delete his anti-scammer channelThis one is hard to unpack, and painful …Current_EventsVerify or Duck! Journalists should confirm all details they didn't witness.New instructional web page — Verify or …AcademiaI didn't ask for the AI icon…
Sources tell Seton Hill University’s Dennis Jerz that TV news websites emphasize self-promotion over reporting the news
Sources tell Seton Hill University’s Dennis Jerz that online write-ups of TV news stories seldom miss the chance to self-promote. Sources tell Jerz that two of the first three paragraphs in the text version of this Miami CBS TV news story put the name of the TV reporter before any actual news allegedly spoken by some nameless source.…