Fascinating… asking test subjects to think more globally (in terms of the relationships between the parts that make the whole) reduced the bias that makes people think of women as body parts. People were also better at discerning women’s individual body parts than they were at men’s individual body parts, further confirming the local processing,…
Focusing on the materiality of writing, this page offers a brief but fascinating overview of how design and culture affect the act of writing (and vice-versa). Just as we find laptops essential for writing, researching, and storing valuable information, the Victorians found their writing desks indispensable for storing writing materials; valuables, including money and jewelry;…
As tablets, smartphones, and microportables of various sorts become more common, this is not a surprise. It’s really only a question of when. Newsweek will eventually transition to an online publication, owner IAC/InterActiveCorp (IACI) said today, marking the beginning of the end for the magazine’s 79-year run as a print weekly. —Bloomberg. Similar:12 Mistakes Nearly…
Sal Khan has done something remarkable in creating such a vast and varied library, and he deserves to be recognized. His commitment to making the site free is a rare and selfless act, and he deserves to be praised. Sal Khan is a good guy with a good mission. What he’s not, though, is a…
The other day, my wife suggested a Carnegie Science Center-related post. Only once before — in 2003 — has she volunteered a topic like that, so I took her up on the offer. I’ve noticed that, on every trip to the CSC, my wife slips away to browse the museum store while I’m watching the…
I love the WordPress Social plugin, which grabs Twitter and Facebook responses to a WordPress post, and compiles them as comments along with the original post. But I get plenty of social media attention on the stand-alone pages on my site — that is, instructional handouts that I use year after year, so it’s posted…
SomethingSoSam. Similar:I accidentally started a Wikipedia hoaxHoaxes roam the Information Superhighway…BooksCreationism dismissed as 'a kind of paganism' by Vatican's astronomerBrother Consolmagno, who works in a Vati…CultureWhat are 'Judeo-Christian values'? Analyzing a divisive termblock of American society. But for crit…AcademiaDisaster (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode 5) Picard Trapped in Elevator with Wee…Rewatching ST:TNG A character-based…
Imagine writing a letter of reccommendation for one of the hundreds of students in your money-saving Massive Open Online Course: I’m pleased to recommend the person who identifies herself as Amy Clayton in my MOOC of 11,389 students, Education and Society. I have known Ms. Clayton since she began the course on May 16, 2012…
Why don’t states require students to take four years of English and math, and three or four years of science? Why isn’t there a class dedicated to teaching the fundamentals of writing? For that matter, why don’t we require more than two years of history or social studies and foreign language? The students want it—69…
“I think this is a clear example of the fact that sensitivity matters as a photojournalist,” says Gutierrez. “If you can’t feel and if you can’t approach this like a human being you’re not going to make pictures that mean anything.” That sense of care works its way up the chain of command at newspapers…
On the topic of massively open online courses, an academic says what many of us who teach online are thinking. Do you really WANT TO SAVE SOME MONEY using INFORMATION TECHNOLOGY? Ok, try this one on for size. Why weren’t you blathering on asking why the heck we all bought Blackboard or if you really…
My wife confiscated my preteen daughter’s blush. To protest the injustice, my daughter tied herself to a pole and wrote this protest note. Similar:NAVY TO DROP ALL-CAPS COMMUNICATIONSCaps off to the Navy’s plan to drop all-…CultureA Successful Failure: The TI-99/4A Turns 40My family had one of these when I was 12…AwesomeThe Drudge Report is pulling…
Social media networks like Twitter and Facebook have become part of the fabric of news stories — or the story itself — in recent years, notably during the Arab Spring. But in the hours after the Aurora shooting, the abundance of eyewitness journalism and conversation on Reddit turned the news aggregator into a surprising source…
July 20, 1969: astronauts from Apollo 11 visited the lunar surface. The Atlantic. Similar:Star Wars' Original, Scum-Caked BrillianceThe B-movie shoddiness of actors and aes…AestheticsDefend the Open Web: Keep DRM Out of W3C StandardsThe DRM proposals at the W3C exist for a…BusinessWhat have my students learned about creative nonfiction writing? During class they are col…What have…
I’ve taught an online “Video Game Culture and Theory” course about four times now. This fall I’m getting ready to teach my first online section of an American literature survey that I’ve taught multiple times before. Because Seton Hill is a very high-tech school, I have few technical worries, but it will be different teaching…
This book explores the relationship between living, code and software. Technologies of code and software increasingly make up an important part of our urban environment. Indeed, their reach stretches to even quite remote areas of the world. Life in Code and Software introduces and explores the way in which code and software are becoming the…
A certificate of debt, found in a regional archive, attests that Mittenwalde lent Berlin 400 guilders on May 28 1562, to be repaid with six percent interest per year. According to Radio Berlin Brandenburg (RBB), the debt would amount to 11,200 guilders today, which is roughly equivalent to 112 million euros ($136.79 million). —Reuters.com. But…
Because, as we all know, headlines spring suddenly into existence, like Athena from the brow of Zeus. It can’t be the journalists who choose certain stories that fit the public’s desire to read about family tragedy. —MISSING IN IOWA: Grandmother: ‘It’s absolutely no family’ – CNN iReport. Similar:I played hooky from work to see Wild…
There are two varieties of fairy tales. One is the literary fairy tale, the kind written, most famously, by Charles Perrault, E. T. A. Hoffmann, and Hans Christian Andersen. Such tales, which came into being at the end of the seventeenth century, are original literary works—short stories, really—except that they have fanciful subject matter: unhappy…
Yes, the Mars rovers are cute and wonderful, but I do feel bad that my kids didn’t have the space shuttle program to look forward to, as I did. Okay, the dramatic music and the studio lighting on the talking heads may be a notch or two over the top. But there’s no argument from…