INCIDENTAL COMICS: Understanding Poetry. Similar:Cause and Effect (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 18) time loop. Ka-boom. The En…Rewatching ST:TNG A smart, charac…AestheticsRatified 100 years ago today, the 19th Amendment, proposed by Illinois Republican James R…CultureMonument Valley: Minimal story, but an engaging world and a satisfying ending.I was in no rush to finish the beautiful…AestheticsBlender…
I’ve blogged a bit as part of today’s Day of Digital Humanities. Day of Digital Humanities on Twitter. Similar:LEGO turned itself around by analyzing overbearing parents[C]hildren play to get oxygen, to unders…CultureWhen a Blogger Shares a Too-good-to-be-true Meme Featuring Hilarious Handwritten Notes fro…Or something like that.HomeComputers and Writing Conference 2013Where a nerd can be a…
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…
Great article featuring the little girl from the 1981 Lego ad. What’s the problem with girl LEGOs? Why is everyone against pink? ask many parents. I’ll let Rachel Giordano answer that question: “Because gender segmenting toys interferes with a child’s own creative expression. I know that how I played as a girl shaped who I…
Similar:I am not really sure why I have kept it up this long. I have no immediate or foreseeable p… CultureFake News Is Not the Real Media Threat We’re FacingConservative talk radio predates the Int…CultureStandardized testing: I opted my kids out. The schools freaked out. Now I know why.And so, on the first day of…
I turned off the extra screen on my desktop computer. At first, the smaller workspace felt punishingly cramped. But after a few days of adjusting to the new set-up, an unusual serenity invaded my normally harried workday. With a single screen that couldn’t accommodate too many simultaneous stimuli, a screen just large enough for a…
They don’t even seem to want to watch Frozen. Instead they are playing Animal Jam. Similar:Memorizer (Memorization Tool)A Midsummer castmate shared a link to th…CybercultureHow important is the look 'n' feel of your website?”The look ‘n’ feel of your website is im…BusinessA colleague bakes Irish soda bread to share on the Humanities floor every St Patrick's DayPersonalIt's…
When I got to college, I had already learned complex grammar fairly well thanks to 3 years of High School Latin. At the University of Toronto during grad school, I took a history of the English language course, which helped tremendously when I later took a medieval drama course. It was very clear during that…
Greater parental involvement in school (serving on committees, checking the kids’ homework) does not correlate with greater academic achievement. I wonder how these findings would relate to homeschooling. The theory was that more active and invested mothers and fathers could help close the test-score gap between middle-class and poor students. Yet until the new study,…
NEWS FLASH: If your sources are an off-the-record comment and a thing you chose to do, and you claim that everyone is forced to do the thing you chose to do, then your news item will probably fall apart. “I took a conversation about the preparation for a press briefing and muddied it with my…
“The big danger always confronting CNN — and it’s confronted CNN since CNN went on the air and started doing 24-hour news — is how loud to shout, how much to do this, how much ‘breaking news’ is really breaking news, and how do you convey to your audience this a huge story?” Sesno said…
[C]hildren play to get oxygen, to understand hierarchy, to achieve mastery at a skill, and to socialize. The patterns were simplified into four categories: under the radar, hierarchy, mastery, and social play. —LEGO turned itself around by analyzing overbearing parents – Quartz. Similar:We Are Hopelessly Hooked [on our Gadgets]We check our phones 221 times a…