This sounds like a brilliant way to repurpose antiquated technology and improve pedestrian life. The city has converted 10 public pay phones in three boroughs – Manhattan, Brooklyn and Queens – into free Wi-Fi hot spots, infusing a blast of modern technology into some of the city’s most notably outdated infrastructure. The project is considered…
My daughter is thrilled to be part of this talented cast. (She plays young CMHWHLB.) Similar:Masked, vaxxed, and settling in to watch live theaterBarebones is a little black box theater,…BooksHomeschool prom 2017PersonalThe Emma Watson nude pictures hoax shames our ‘news’ cultureDid you hear that a shady group of antis…CultureBound Together by an Historic Moment I…
Today, I managed to get in a couple of hours of web development and PR/social media work that is stretching my skills a bit. The new pack of iPad styluses I ordered from Amazon has shipped. I’m caught up in the online faculty development class I’m taking. My inbox is brimming with opportunities to collaborate and connect…
If brass lanterns or slathering-fanged grues mean anything to you, you might want to look into Inklewriter. I teach a text-adventure (“interactive fiction“) unit in my “New Media Projects” course. My mainstay for that unit is Inform 7, a robust tool with loads of examples and a user community that I know well (through my…
Although I do use both Twitter and Facebook, I often regret putting time and energy into a walled garden, sparking and contributing to conversations that happen elsewhere, and not on my blog. In many ways, hosting conversations on Twitter and Facebook are superior to letting people post comments on my blog (because I get literally…
Working on a project that involves using WordPress as the starting point for publication to Twitter and Facebook. From what I can see, the Holy Grail of WordPress, Facebook and Twitter integration is the plugin Social, offered by MailChimp. With an active blog, Twitter feed and Facebook page conversations with customers can become a bit fragmented. Like most bloggers,…
But what about tweets containing “church” AND “beer”? So in honor of the 4th of July, we selected all geotagged tweets[1] sent within the continental US between June 22 and June 28 (about 10 million in total) and extracted all tweets containing the word “church” (17,686 tweets of which half originated on Sunday) or “beer”…
A few years ago, in Niagara Falls for an Irish Dance competition, we stopped at a hydraulic power museum. My son spotted what was wrong with this sign. Similar:Dress rehearsal of The NutcrackerPersonalStarting my “Writing about Literature” class by having students react to a John Donne sonn…PersonalCollege bookstores adapting to changing times with additional servicesIn the…
My daughter (in pigtails) joins the Wacongo Dance Company in an audience participation segment… then joins her cast waiting to perform her own show. Similar:Dear organization from my past that just sent me a scolding email…Dear organization from my past that just…CultureThe Formation of LoveRelationships start with a period of cou…CultureLast weekend I roughed out…
Here’s a brief video, made up of clips I took at the Carnegie Science Center in July 2009, just a few weeks after the opening of the new, permanent exhibit, Roboworld. The clips have been sitting idle on my hard drive for years, but I’ve recently gotten some practice with Apple’s iMovie, and thought I’d…
For me, the July 4 weekend marks the halfway point for the summer — if it’s not the chronological center of the summer, it is the time when I look at the number of weeks before fall classes start, and look at the list of things I had hoped to accomplish for the summer, and…
Summer vacation means if I am telling my kids steampunk bedtime stories, and the story requires an ether-powered vehicle larger than a life pod, but smaller than the ship-of-the-line where most of the plot takes place, I can visit Wikipedia to look for a class name — I like “sloop” — and then dash out…
Do we really need Justin Bieber to make this story relevant? They’re steampunks, part of an international movement that’s a mashup of do-it-yourselfers, ahistorical recreationists and science fiction aficionados who are happily reliving a past that never was. The Victorian era was “a wonderful era when people were still being surprised by the world,” says…
Kierkegaard recognized, over 150 years ago, that we live life forward but we understand it backward. He was speaking about our being immersed in time itself: The simple truth that we live our present moments in a sort of confusion continuously being clarified by the retrospective understanding that comes later. Most novelists work to soften…
Despite the lopsided drawing and grey shading around the eyes, these are not the zombies, these are the protagonists of a government-issued graphic novel designed to teach general disaster awareness. Similar:Computer Interfaces in Star Trek's "Assignment Earth"I was watching classic Star Trek with my…Cyberculture‘Belonging Is Stronger Than Facts’: The Age of Misinformation As much as…
Imagination is a powerful social tool. The novel provides us with a sustained window into another world, while still exercising the creative faculties that make us co-creators of the worlds we read about. Having said all that, I am aware that there may be some confirmation bias operating, as I here introduce an article that…
Will the celebrity interpretation spark or short-circuit a student’s own interpretive creativity? Were I to use this, I would want to use the video as one of several possible sources of authority, including the student’s own, original, interpretation. ‘So long lives this, and this gives life to thee’ The Sonnets by William Shakespeare allows you…
It’s just this feeling I have when I view the last several dozen images saved to my photostream. Similar:This was a rough term. Still have a winter term course to publish before midnight but time…AcademiaReception after faculty workshop. #partylikeaprofessorPersonalEaster Blessings 2021 Current_EventsA student who is writing her research paper on Taylor Swift made a passing…
Google, which declined to comment on the gender breakdown of its social network, has a long tradition of using its own products internally before releasing them to the public. Products like Gmail and Google Buzz had lengthy incubation periods inside the company before they were released to the public. But that internal testing process can…
Despite iPod-strong sales, air conditioning remained a luxury for many years. Newspapers in the ’20s and ’30s were still filled with headlines about thousands of deaths and “prostrations” linked to summer heat. It would be decades before most newly built single-family homes in the United States had A.C. — hard to believe today, when Census…