If you’re legally present on a public street or sidewalk, you can legally photograph anything in plain view. (This includes children and crime victims… but just because it’s legal doesn’t mean it’s always a good idea.) If law enforcement engages you, ask whether you are free to go; if so, then move out of the…
Standardized testing rewards standardized thinking, while excluding creativity, resilience & other “soft” skills. I have started gong out of my way to remind students in my classes that I am not comparing their papers to a “correct answer” in the back of my book — I want them to learn a habit of mind that…
It’s a good day when one’s nerdiness is an asset to a colleague. Similar:Nicholas Winton, “Britain’s Schindler,” Dies at 106Nicholas Winton, a British stockbroker w…CultureFlannery O'Connor: "I am in a state of shock"There’s often a moment in a lit class wh…BooksDouble Entry Journals: Your Scholarly Research Notes for College-level Critical ThinkingWhat is a double-entry research…
I’m a happy, responsible, and no-longer-obligated-for-jury-duty citizen. Similar:"I'm a geek. Deal with it." –my 11yo daughter. #geekgirlproblemsAmusingPie, anyone?PersonalIT CAN'T HAPPEN HERE — Berkeley Rep audio productionSinclair Lewis’s 1935 anti-fascist novel…CultureThe problem I just learned about calls for tea in the big mug.CultureAnother fun 10 sq cm of a #neovictorian #steampunk control panel. #elegance #design #aesth…AestheticsNot…
Keep a local backup of anything important you’ve entrusted to online services. There’s no guarantee that, years from now, those services will honor the terms you agreed to. Backed by new investors, including singer Justin Timberlake, Myspace (after dropping the capital ‘S’) has been rebranded as a music-streaming service, with a new sleek interface, and…
Penn and Teller are involved with this story. Worth a read. The only record of the game’s existence was a handful of review copies that had been sent out to journalists in the weeks before the publisher went bust, in 1995. The game remained a curious rumor until September, 2005, when Frank Cifaldi, a freelance…
Judge: Apple conspired to fix eBook prices. #ethics #books The Federal lawsuit claimed that Apple, led by then-CEO Steve Jobs and senior vice president of Internet Software and Services Eddy Cue, conspired with HarperCollins, Hatchett, Macmillan, Penguin and Simon & Schuster to drive e-book prices up from the $9.99 price point Amazon had established. –readwrite.com Similar:Vortex (#StarTrek…
RT @spj_tweets: How TV could suffer the fate of newspapers: @alanmutter shares the second installment of his two-part blog – http://t.co/l… Similar:Yes, I do feel rather awesome right now.Lost brand-new earbuds. Reached in pocke…PersonalDesert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever CreatedPenn and Teller are involved with this s…BooksProto iPads and Paper Coexist in Classic Star…
RT @DepressedDarth: Dear J.J. Abrams, If the new Star Wars is bad, you will forever be known as Jar Jar Abrams. Sincerely, Star Wars fans Similar:The Host (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 4, Episode 23) Dr. Beverly Crushes on a SymbiontRewatching ST:TNG Trek explores some …CultureKids, Pants, Booze, Music: Trouble In River City And AlwaysHe’s not…
I really like MailChimp’s “Social” plugin, which not only publishes a WordPress blog entry to Twitter and Facebook, but also collects responses from Twitter and Facebook users and collects them as WordPress comments. Today I installed a different plugin, Twitter Tools, which is really just a single tool — it lets you create a WordPress…
Habits for happiness: tips for looking on the bright side of life. At bedtime, in order to avoid a nightly litany of complaints, I ask my glass-is-half-empty-and-I-hate-the-pirate-glass-and-there’s-a-bug-in-it tween to list three good things, two neutral things, and one sad thing about her day. Sometimes if she needs to share more than one sad thing, I…
While researching my obligations for #juryduty Thursday, I came across this “Juror’s Creed.” The gender-specific reference to men, the instruction to reflect upon the virtues of democracy, and the instruction to respect the judge’s education all hint at a historical context for the creed. Institutions never put their creeds into writing unless they feel those…
Spent a productive work day doing nothing but optimizing my blog. Added a very nice plugin for displaying thumbnails of related posts. Similar:Rossum's Universal Robots (Act 1) Artistic ProsperityThe first act of Artistic Prosperity’s v…CultureKeeping it classy. My 20yo son encounters the fruit-eating scene from the 1996 point-and-c…PersonalLast night I dreamed I was a stagehand…
RT @mykidcancode: Managing Your Preschooler’s Fascination with Apps – bit.ly/lv1ZyR #parenting #technology Similar:Getty makes 35 million photos free to useIn essence, it is admitting defeat. By o…BusinessMTV VMAs: Will Smith Family's Reaction Was to Gaga, Not Miley (Video)I didn’t watch the show, but I did see t…Businessink: Inkle's open source scripting language for writing interactive…
Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in my trash folder! Similar:Overheard at Quora: "Why after all these years is Moodle still so ugly?"Moodle is a free course-management tool …AcademiaI didn't exactly set out to achieve this goal, but it's not hard to do the minimum to keep…EducationAlmost Flat DesignApple, Google and Microsoft have very di…AestheticsLove…
“Bach is not for the weak of mind.” — Miss Renee, my kids’ piano teacher. “I’m in trouble.” — Peter, my son. Similar:Shakespeare-themed Math PuzzlesI didn’t know I had a Shakespeare-themed…AmusingThe storage shelves of my fantasy steampunk CGI starship will need props with appropriate … AestheticsI actually don't mind Canvas — it just happens to…
While I am uncomfortable with the whole “classroom as marketplace” metaphor, since it’s pretty much gamifying without the fun, I am nonetheless interested in this strategy for encouraging students to collaborate by having them attach a value to the artifacts they present to the class for sharing.. We shop for everything from apps to ideas.…
The researchers found that each singer’s heartbeat was linked to the song’s melody – i.e. the speed and structure of the music. They also found that when the choir sang together, their heart rates tended to increase and decrease at similar times. “As soon as the singing begins, (the hearts) start following each other,” Vickhoff…
We live in an elegant universe. The cosmos is like a string symphony. Genes are selfish. There is an endless battle between thermodynamics and gravity. Do you love these statements, or hate them? The reading world gets pretty divided over whether or not it’s okay to apply metaphors and similes to descriptive science writing. It…
Literature majors and students otherwise drawn to literature courses can be an introverted bunch. Students overall can at times resist course projects that fall outside the expected parameters of a given discipline. Yet my class proved my assumptions wrong. Many of the students were nervous, to be sure, but overall they seemed to enjoy the…