It’s one thing to be able use a service like Facebook or Instagram, and to use it well; it’s quite another thing to code a web page by hand, tweak a CSS file, or design the navigation for a large website. While I don’t expect my English students to be professional programmers, I do aim…
Grail to the Thief stars a thief from the future named Hank Krang, who “recently had a self-aware time machine called the Time Excursion Digital Interface, or TEDI, fall into his lap after a poker game. He has decided to use this technology to go throughout time, stealing priceless artifacts.” His first destination? Arthurian times,…
I am not a fan of Adobe Flash, which is a closed, proprietary system that requires your users to install a specific, resource-intensive player. Don’t build your business on someone else’s property. Long live HTML5. Cassette tapes, 8-tracks, and … Flash. All three of these mediums need a player to work, and all three mediums…
“We have about 850 graduates, and we have a professional photographer snapping their picture when they shake my hand and get their diploma,” said Ronald Machtley, the president of Bryant. “I don’t think their mom and dad and grandma want to get a picture of them holding up their cellphone.” —Go Forth and Conquer, but…
Heidi Blake and Jonathan Calvert who run The Sunday Times investigative Insight team placed an advert in a Bulgarian paper. The reporters from a Bastion of British investigative journalism pretended to be a UK-based couple wanting to circumvent the adoption process and buy a Bulgarian baby. A sharp-eyed Bulgarian reporter saw the advert and was…
Users are now able to create audio and video playlists with WordPress 3.9. They work as a shortcode, just like the image galleries do currently. Uploading audio and video is handled through the usual media uploader, with images and everything else. From there, you have the option to add them to a playlist. —Smashing Magazine.…
The eighties, at least, were drenched in cocaine and neon, slick cars and yacht parties, a real debauched reaction. But nineties white culture was all earnest yearning: the sorrow of Kurt Cobain and handwringing over selling out, crooning boy-bands and innocent pop starlets, the Contract With America and the Starr Report. It was all so…
A first draft gives you something to go on in the future. Because you will rewrite this draft. And you’ll rewrite it again after the first time. So, don’t rush the process. (And I’m talking to myself as much as to you.) At the same time, I think its important to acknowledge that writing “masterful…
Data visualization is one of the most important tools we have to analyze data. But it’s just as easy to mislead as it is to educate using charts and graphs. In this article we’ll take a look at 3 of the most common ways in which visualizations can be misleading. —Heap Data Blog. Similar:Swiss cheese…
INCIDENTAL COMICS: Understanding Poetry. Similar:Candy Land Was Invented for Polio Wards It is a game absent strategy, requi…AestheticsGoogle 1407Philipp Lenssen and I had a bit of fun i…AestheticsAn open letter to Trump from the US press corpsThis is the message I’ve been waiting fo…CultureCan you tell the difference between factual and opinion statements?I got a…
I’ve blogged a bit as part of today’s Day of Digital Humanities. Day of Digital Humanities on Twitter. Similar:Tolkien v. Orwell: Who understood modern surveillance best?Interesting set of observations explorin…CultureWriting That Demonstrates Thinking Ability While reflecting on my semester for …HomeVerizon Forced Me to Remove Parentheses, Quotation Marks, and Apostrophes from a Customer …When I…
Interesting social science approach to how university faculty spend their time. [O]n a recent trip abroad when an immigration officer asked how I could afford to be away from work for a month. I said simply that we were on winter break and the officer jokingly lamented about going into the wrong profession. I didn’t…
I played the open-source version of Uru with my daughter for a few weeks when she was about six or seven. I enjoyed the opening tutorial game, but after that found little to do and found the learning curve was too steep to keep my daughter interested. She was happy running around and endlessly re-dressing…
The brain was not designed for reading. There are no genes for reading like there are for language or vision. But spurred by the emergence of Egyptian hieroglyphics, the Phoenician alphabet, Chinese paper and, finally, the Gutenberg press, the brain has adapted to read. Before the Internet, the brain read mostly in linear ways…
“It’s not a game I made for other people,” he says. “I made it for myself.” That might be the creative creed for a new generation of independent video games and game makers that has sprung up in the past five years or so. Unlike the makers of mainstream blockbuster games — slick packages produced…
What sex was for the Puritans, technology has become for us. We’ve focussed our collective anxiety on digital excess, and reconnecting with the “real” world around us represents one effort to control it. | And yet the “real” world, like the “real” America, is an insidious idea. It suggests that the selves we are online…
Victoria Blodgett, director of Graduate Career Services at Yale University, told me, “People who take their Ph.D.s into other realms are not necessarily being hired for their content expertise, but for their process skills: the ability to do excellent research, to write, to make cogent arguments.” These skills, it turns out, are in high demand.…
Wonderfully silly take on old-school point-and-click adventures. I’ve only played through the first few turns but found quite a few good laughs. I’ll be back to play more when I’m done chauffeuring the offspring this evening. A young man stands in his bedroom. It just so happens that today, the 13th of April, is this…
Revenue is not the same thing as profit, but still I was surprised by these findings. The Pew research team attempted a revenue estimate for all the branches of the United States news industry it has covered in past reports. The surprising conclusion: Even though newspaper advertising revenue has fallen by half over the last…
The real concern here is that the little guys—the Pies ‘n’ Thighs, the charitable causes, the artists and merchants trying to scrape by with the help of their Facebook fans—will find that they can’t reach even the users who really do want to see their updates. So far, the data suggest that they’re being spared…