Generally, it is the chemical breakdown of compounds within paper that leads to the production of ‘old book smell’. Paper contains, amongst other chemicals, cellulose, and smaller amounts of lignin. Both of these originate from the trees the paper is made from; finer papers will contain less lignin than, for example, newsprint. In trees, lignin…
Live in the DC area? June 19 I’ll be speaking about the play Rossum’s Universal Robots for a panel on “robots and theater,” sponsored by Cultural Programs of National Academy of Sciences. (The event will also be webcast.) D.C. Art Science Evening Rendezvous (DASER) is a monthly discussion forum on art science projects providing a snapshot…
My student journalists tell me they learn a lot from assignments that involve livetweeting events. It’s encouraging when students ramp up the social media work on their own, outside of classroom assignments, as part of their work for The Setonian Online. This article offers a helpful reminder that even the pros have to experiment in…
Most handwringing about the state of journalism is done by journalists. They are worried about losing their jobs, so it’s not surprising that they tend to be fretful. But turn the issue upside down for a second, and think about the state of journalism from journalism’s audience. The real purpose of journalism, after all, is…
Kids learned better in a sparse lab setting than they did in a decorated room. Of course, if they were familiar with the room, and the decorations came from their own artwork and class projects, perhaps the items would be reminders rather than distractions, but the study didn’t test that possibility. For the study, 24…
Americans with four-year college degrees made 98 percent more an hour on average in 2013 than people without a degree. That’s up from 89 percent five years earlier, 85 percent a decade earlier and 64 percent in the early 1980s. […] If there were more college graduates than the economy needed, the pay gap would shrink.…
Cory Doctorow tries to wake young people up to the realities of an online world controlled by companies that are hungry for your personal data. Facebook is a company whose business model is based on the idea that if they spy on you enough and trick you into revealing enough about your life, they can…
Vintage TV news coverage of Pac-Man. Similar:30 Web Designs Featuring Vintage Style Typography30 Web Designs Featuring Vintage Style T…AestheticsTeacher suspended after pro-Trump yearbook photos alteredFree speech is valuable. It’s dangerous …CultureCan the multiverse explain human history?Where did this idea of parallel universe…CultureFraternity Announces "Legal Action" Against Rolling Stone”The Rolling Stone article viewed by mil…AcademiaYour first…
A review of three books — The App Generation, Status Update, and It’s Complicated — that explore and critique the function of social media in our lives. I used to ask the internet everything. I started young. In the late 1980s, my family got its first modem. My father was a computer scientist, and he…
I arrived in Toronto in 1992 as a 22yo grad student, and left it as a 29yo assistant professor, husband, and father. I spent a lot of that time walking. Just before I woke up on September 11 2006, I was having a dream about walking down Yonge street. I wrote down as much as…
“It doesn’t have to be good. It just has to be a pun.” The Punslingers event may be the only sport on Earth in which the highest level of play is the most painful to watch. –Ted Trautman, Paris Review.
The professionals don’t always spend 45 days designing a single tweet, but this one got just two favorites. Shortly after, Lindsay met with a copywriter and graphic designer to brainstorm tweet ideas for the next month. It was then that the copywriter suggested a tweet centered around the idea that Camembert, a French cheese popular…
This week, as part of a contract dispute with the publisher Hachette, we’re seeing Amazon behaving at its worst. The company’s willingness to nakedly flex its anticompetitive muscle gives new cause for concern to anyone who cares about books — authors, publishers, but mainly customers. Here’s the back story: In an effort to exert pressure…
Last week, Facebook asked me what sportsing teams I cared about (and helpfully supplied me with a list of the teams I’d be statistically most likely to favor if I had any interest in sportsing). Now Facebook is asking me what TV shows I’ve watched. Well, yes, I’ve watched episodes of each of these shows, but I…
Inhabiting an improvised play designed to heal trauma. Fascinating exploration of art and the human mind. Eugene had already called on some group members to play certain roles in his story. Kresta, a yoga instructor based in San Francisco, was serving as his “contact person,” a guide who helps the protagonist bear the pain the…
I wrote down this example on a student paper a while ago, and thought I’d add it to my existing handout on showing and telling. Winning is important to me. It doesn’t matter to me what I do, so long as I win. Unengaging and unconvincing. This is like saying “I am a hard worker”…
In the Star Wars films, the empire is evil to the core. But TIE Fighter let you see the empire from a new perspective. The game didn’t make you feel like a bad person doing bad things, but like a pilot who might reasonably have believed that what he was doing was in the galaxy’s…
When a Facebook executive whines about all these shallow viral links clogging our feeds, Slate’s Jordan Wiessmann clicks him a new one. If only we, the American people, could summon a champion. Someone who could, with the change of a single algorithm, turn the entire media ecosystem on its head. But who? –Jordan Weissmann, Slate.…
Big difference between the clickbaity verson on BoingBoing (“Everything you know about teenage brains is bullshit“) and the dry, academic version on cell.com: [C]urrent evidence suggests that typical Internet activities do not impair social development during adolescence. | Both adolescents and adults are now using the Internet more than ever. Evidence increasingly suggests that time…
While reflecting on my semester for my annual report, I noticed I hadn’t updated my handout on Bloom’s Taxonomy in a while. Like, 12 years. If your instructor asks you to write a 500-word analysis, but instead you provide a 500-word summary, it won’t matter that your grammar is flawless and your facts are correct.…