The Tribune-Review is very dependable in its coverage of the local arts. (That’s me kneeling in the white shirt, with a tie around my head.) It’s not always the adults who are the teachers. In Stage Right’s production of the Broadway musical “Godspell,” director Anthony Marino says it’s the youngest performers who spread the word…
Here’s a great article I’m asking all my journalism students and all my lit-crit students to read. Words do more than just describe the world. They literally define it. They shape and frame it. “Most people don’t understand this,” says linguist George Lakoff of the University of California, Berkeley. “Most people think that words just…
Is higher education ready for the switch to mobile technology? It’s kinda cool to be working at a university where the Luddites are the ones who are attached to their laptops, but I’m conscious of our need to do more. When I put a ton of work into a website for a performing arts school…
While competing in the Sprite Slam Dunk Contest Saturday, contestant Gerald Green reportedly incorporated characters, dialogue, and set design from 16th-century English playwright Christopher Marlowe’s The Tragical History of the Life and Death of Doctor Faustus into his elaborately choreographed dunk routine. “Lo, Mephistophilis, for love of thee/Faustus hath cut his arm, and with his…
Lessard pushes back in useful ways against the notion that modern computer games emerged fullly-formed from the coding experiments of Will Crowther — a notion I’ve helped to promote (though of course I’m exaggerating as I present it here). I’ll want to read through the essay again in more detail, but here is part of…
Apparently these are two famous and physically attractive celebrities who are popular enough that lots of people will wade through lots of words in order to look at pictures of them doing things that celebrities do. Which presumably does not usually include talking about the federal budget. Kate Upton and Ryan Gosling Explain the Sequester.…
The ways that the informal speech of women impacts the language is soooo underexplored. For the past five years, Sali Tagliamonte, a linguist at the University of Toronto, has been gathering digital-communications data from students. In analyzing nearly 4 million words, she’s found some interesting patterns. “This reduplication of letters, it’s not all crazy,” she told…
Fascinating. Barsalou then goes all math geek and applies to the data the Bayes’ Theorem formula for calculating conditional probabilities. After a little mathematical shake and bake, he determines there is a 61.9 percent chance that any given casualty is wearing a red shirt. That still sounds high, but it’s not really once you consider…
Here’s a brief clip of a rehearsal of “All for the Best,” from the Stage Right! Greensburg production of Godspell. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5P8Kje6PvHg (I’m in the back on the left, wearing a tie as a headband.) Similar:Bury Berry Family Members – a review of "Very Berry Dead" – 'Burgh VivantThe cast of comical, quirky characters a…AwesomeLotteries: America's…
Since he started teaching at Johns Hopkins University in 2005, Professor Peter Fröhlich has maintained a grading curve in which each class’s highest grade on the final counts as an A, with all other scores adjusted accordingly. So if a midterm is worth 40 points, and the highest actual score is 36 points, “that person…
Okay, so yeah. One of these describes a very unpleasant, completely ruined vacation. The other sounds like hell. Similar:Google, AI Announcements, and the Future of LearningGlenda Morgan does not sound that impres…AcademiaThe Soldier Formerly Known as Bradley ManningHere is the entry on it from The Times’s…Current_Events14 questions for new journalists to consider when filing a…
Apple’s marketing strategy in the 1980s presented its products as democratic and liberating, but the freedoms the Apple users enjoy include the inability to customize or otherwise access the working interior. Apple users trade freedom for security. In short, expansion slots made standardization impossible (partly because software writers needed consistent underlying hardware to produce widely…
Journalism without the sourced quotes from eyewitnesses is weak. Opinions with shoehorned-in-because-the-job-description-requires-it quotes is weak journalism. But this is an interesting challenge to the traditional assumptions I have been passing along to my journalism students. I hate useless quotes. Most often, for journalists, such quotes are the equivalent of the time-card hourly workers have to…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=517BhV1j0uU Similar:How Zuckerberg’s Facebook is like Gutenberg’s printing pressHistorian Niall Ferguson notes that Sili…BooksTaking the Lid Off the McDonald’s Coffee CaseHave you heard the story about the lady …BusinessUpdating a villain's lair in #Blender3D. Still a work in progress.AestheticsAfter you finish your brass-polishing shift, join me at the Gear and Heart to swap stories…AestheticsParamount Erases…
I noticed with interest that Kindle now lets you highlight text in different colors. It’s also very easy now to tweet a brief quote. Is it time to revise the blog-based pedagogy I’ve developed over the past 10 or so years, and ask students to tweet a few passages while they read them for the…
Patience and hard work are also attributes of hunters, peasants, and Benedictine monks. What sets scientists apart is their rigorous observation of natural phenomena, allowing patterns to emerge that can be expressed in abstract formulae, which, in turn, can be applied to produce identical results any time they are reapplied in identical conditions. To “do…
An asteroid is making the closest known fly-by for a rock of its size today, just hours after a meterorite crashed to Earth in Russia, with nearly a thousand people injured by space debris in an event unprecedented in modern times. Scientists insist the events are purely coincidental… Follow all the latest news, reaction, and…
They say polo ponies can run 35 mph and then stop on a dime. But how would you like to be the cameraman who’s forced to stand still, as a massive horse comes barreling at him? That’s exactly what 60 Minutes cameramen Chris Albert and Don Lee did to film “The Sport of Kings,” a…
That’s the kind of a person it takes to be a writer: someone who’s zealous and ready to argue, someone who has Philip Roth tell him, “It’s torture, don’t do it,” and replies, “You had me at ‘torture.’ ” You don’t enter into it because it’s a great lifestyle decision—it isn’t—you do it because, for…
Not much has changed for educational game developers, either. Targeting schools as potential buyers is still less profitable than targeting home schoolers, parents, and grandparents. There really isn’t a lot of funding in school budgets for games and even if there were, figuring out the differing sales processes is time-consuming. Larger school districts may even…