I wish I understood Russian, so that I could make sense of this 1935 Russian film featuring a mechanical man remote-controlled via saxophone. Apparently the capitalists take control of the invention and turn it on the workers, at least temporarily. The climax features the workers gaining control of the machines and using them to fight…
Here’s a brief video, made up of clips I took at the Carnegie Science Center in July 2009, just a few weeks after the opening of the new, permanent exhibit, Roboworld. The clips have been sitting idle on my hard drive for years, but I’ve recently gotten some practice with Apple’s iMovie, and thought I’d…
For me, the July 4 weekend marks the halfway point for the summer — if it’s not the chronological center of the summer, it is the time when I look at the number of weeks before fall classes start, and look at the list of things I had hoped to accomplish for the summer, and…
My students are finishing up Hayles, My Mother was a Computer. Some years go, I remember seeing a video of a little girl in a martial arts uniform, barking out “Know what you want! Make a plan! Add a role model! Review your progress!” over and over again, while kicking, chopping and spinning. Her philosophy…
Jerz > Writing > Academic As anyone who’s ever put off a term paper will tell you, good research takes time. If you are writing an academic paper, start in a library database, looking for peer-reviewed academic sources. It is a risky temptation to start with Google instead. Start With Good Academic Sources If your college instructor has…
Jerz > Theater > Musical Theatre Education Packets > Charlie and the Chocolate Factory / Willy Wonka Prev: Math Next: Science and Health Lesson plans for social studies — geography, history, economics. (See also sections on English literature and writing, math, science and health, art, music, and faith connection.) 4) Social Studies/Geography: 4.1) Make sure your student can locate the home countries of each of the Golden Ticket finders, plus…
Jerz > About > Dennis G. Jerz [ Professional Biography | Writing Handouts | Theater Resources ] York Corpus Christi Play With the combined support of the Church and the merchants who “sponsored” individual plays, the annual performance was a well-established tradition in the English city of York by the end of the 14th century and continued through the late 16th century. (RUR) Rossum’s Universal Robots…
The layout of this display at the Carnegie Science Center almost makes it look like the Maria duplicate in Metropolis came before Karel Capek’s play RUR (which was written in 1920, first performed in 1921).
Jerz > Writing > Academic > Research Papers [ Title | Thesis | Blueprint | Quoting | Citing | MLA Format ] This document focuses on the kind of short, narrowly-focused research papers that might be the final project in a freshman writing class or 200-level literature survey course. In high school, you probably wrote a lot of personal essays (where…
Jerz > About > Dennis G. Jerz [ Professional Biography | Writing Handouts | Theater Resources ] Dennis G. Jerz Associate Professor English — New Media Journalism Seton Hill University Greensburg Pennsylvania Contact Information Background and Links In 2003, I was hired to lead a brand new program in new media journalism. I’m told that it appears in the catalog as “Journalism New Media” because…
Jason Kottke uses standard Latin typesetting dummy text to express his opinion of the technology media’s coverage of the iPad. Hilarious! Lorem iPad dolor sit amet, consectetur Apple adipisicing elit, sed do eiusmod incididunt ut labore et dolore magna aliqua Shenzhen. Ut enim ad minim veniam, quis nostrud no multi-tasking ullamco laboris nisi ut aliquip…
There’s no information in the non-subscription IMDB, but there is an entry for a movie based on Rossum’s Universal Robots. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1300594/ The original play was a talky social comedy mixed with a melodrama (complete with a “missing papers” plot twist), and the big action sequences happened off-stage (with characters either referring in passing to events…
Barbara Ganley, Centers for Community Digital Exploration Barbara Ganley is Founder and Director of the new national organization, Centers for Community Digital Learning, Barbara Ganley has spent her career exploring integrated learning across formal and informal contexts. For nineteen years as a lecturer in the Writing Program and English Department at Middlebury College, and director…
[I came in about 10 minutes late so I didn’t catch the beginning. These are my rough notes, lightly edited.]
[My own thoughts will appear in brackets. I regularly assign Rose’s essay, “I Just Wanna be Average” to my freshman writing students. He considers the editorial a valuable form of public writing, and teaches graduate classes that ask students to use their specialized subject knowledge to produce editorials of value to the broader community.] Bringing…
Via Language Log: It is a small but not insignificant recent change in written English that in Britain the newspapers have started spelling acronyms in lower case with capital initial instead of all in caps. The Universities and Colleges Employers Association and the the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs are not UCEA and…
Robots gloating, and occasionally philosophizing, over their decision to destroy the humans. Love the binary solo. The guy on the left does an excellent imitation of a standard PC speech synthesizer voice. Overall, this is a great send-up of the “arrogant humans create robots who turn on them” meme (which was first widely spread by…
Invisible Games: The Phelps Telegraph Machine (pictured) was at that time in widespread use throughout North America. Oskar Karolson, an operator in rural Ontario, a young-to-middling man of Jewish-Polish extraction with a love of puzzles, who taught the wheat farmers’ children mathematics and piano, had had a new Phelps delivered to his remote station sometime…
James Hays and Alexei Efros from Carnegie Mellon University have developed an algorithm to help people who want to remove bits of photographs. The parts being removed could be unsightly lorries in the snaps of the rural idyll where they took a holiday or even an old boyfriend or girlfriend they want to rub out…
The BBC televised a 38-minute adaptation in 1938 – probably the first ever example of science fiction television. —My Science Fiction Life: The Story of Science Fiction in Britain (BBC) The excerpt is from the entry on one of my favorite plays, Rossum’s Universal Robots.