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. (I’m in the back on the left, wearing a tie as a headband.) Similar:Homage to PoeMichael Dirda offers a thoughtful assess…BooksIan Bogost Has Won a HuffPo Badge for his Anti-Gamification Comment on HuffPo Daniel Donahoo:…
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:Carolyn is the Production Understudy for PPT’s Dial M for Murder in September A great professional experience for he…CultureClickbait writers hate this English professor's time-saving trick!Defeat clickbaiters with this one weird …CybercultureUnplugging for a Few Hours at…
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…
Similar:Imaginary Friend (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 22) Glowy Alien Befriends Mopp…Rewatching ST:TNG If there’s one thin…PopCultSuddenly Human (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Four, Episode 4) Picard Bonds with Human Te…Rewatching ST:TNG after a 20-year break …CultureDress rehearsal for The Nutcracker.AestheticsAt Home In Fantasy's Nerd-Built WorldsIn other words, more than the profound l…AestheticsThe Siege (#StarTrek…
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…
My students did well on those questions because we practiced bad writing. My teaching was not evaluated on the basis of how well my students did, but I felt I had a responsibility to prepare them for the examination in a way that could result in their obtaining college credit. I would like to believe…
Until now, the web has been space-based, like a magazine stand; we use spatial terms such as “second from the top on the far left” to identify a particular magazine. A diary, on the other hand, is time-based: One dimension of space has been borrowed to represent time, so we use temporal terms like “Thursday’s…
Blogging this mostly because of the good writing. Facebook is a continuing nightmare of privacy disasters. It’s the bathroom door that resists all efforts at locking, swinging open again and again while you’re trying to poop. When even Mark Zuckerberg’s own sister (and also the company’s former marketing director) can accidentally share photos in wider…
Pretty awesome, focused use of Inform 7. (I’m generally content just to let my students explore, trusting through experience that they will learn from testing each other’s games and asking me specific questions realated to the stories they are creating, such as, “So how do I make it so you can’t enter the TARDIS without…
Makers, take note. Let’s be clear. This is NOT an attack on teachers. That’s because teachers are being pushed hard to focus on standardized, multiple-choice tests. But as the national Gallup organization points out, we should care about this because “Hope, engagement and well being of students accounts for one third of the variance of…
I just freshened up an older instructional page, Resumes: Top 5 Tips for Job Hunters. I still need to update the examples, but my advice is pretty much the same as it was in the late 1990s when I posted the first draft. Value the Chance to Try Again Balance Creativity with Function Details, Details,…