Nothing looses a flood of my childhood memories like picking up a Richard Scarry book, with its cartoon 3D diagrams of complex processes such as how wheat becomes bread, how rain becomes electric power, or how justice relentlessly pursues an unrepentant banana thief, all told within the context of the story of the pig family’s…
Since they’re so persnickety about licensing agreements, let’s amend all of our terms of use to require all movie moguls to use a special “Hollywood Edition” of our products. Here are some of the special new features we’ll be giving them… Before you can do a Google search, you have to sit through five minutes…
I did not actually think this Kickstarter project was going to make it when I pledged earlier in the week, but it squeaked by. CASSETTE: A Documentary Film about the Cassette Tape. by Zack Taylor and Seth Smoot — Kickstarter. Similar:Iffy "Cloak of Darkness" on Inform7/Parchment”Iffy Cloak of Darkness” is based on the…CybercultureComputer scientist Leslie…
My son’s robot-building team is making good progress. Still Rolling Team Arm: It shoots! Similar:Yes, I do feel rather awesome right now.Lost brand-new earbuds. Reached in pocke…PersonalAcademics work to detect ChatGPT and other AI writingToday I met a class of English majors wh…AcademiaNow you can fact-check Trump’s tweets — in the tweets themselvesThe Washington Post, which…
[View the story “On Her One Free Day Between Two Shows…” on Storify] Update, 23 Sep 2018: I entrusted to Storify whatever my daughter did, and I didn’t save it when Storify went under. It’s not easy to search Twitter for your own posts from a specific date, but I managed to find these. Similar:Now…
Smith sat down with All Things Considered’s Melissa Block to talk about writing a poem in a hurry. She called the day she spent with NPR’s producers “delightful, and a little terrifying.” But reflecting on the headlines isn’t exactly a new activity for Smith. In fact, she said she often finds that news events are…
I know what you’re thinking: Why get a Kindle Touch when you already have an iPad, provided graciously by none other than Seton Hill University? That’s simple. The Kindle Touch’s 6” display features the most advanced E Ink Pearl to date. The biggest advantage to E Ink is it’s anti-glare feature. While there will still…
[A]n interview I did with key staff at Seton Hill University in Greensburg, PA, not far from Pittsburgh. This is the most connected university I’ve ever seen – every student, and there are around 2200 of these, gets an iPad and a MacBook (!), and, of course, they bring their own wireless devices to campus…
The original headline for the press release highlights the names of the two groups doing the work, which is of course flattering to the groups, but far less newsworthy to the public the PR people are supposed to be relating with. “A large amount of researcher time is spent formatting documents, rather than getting on…
I was happy to see this review of a great film I used a few weeks ago in my “Video Game Culture and Theory” class. The first five minutes of Get Lamp alone are worth watching for those who may have tinkered around on a MUD at some point, but know little about the origins…
Some passages that struck me as I reviewed the influential Roland Barthes essay. [I]n ethnographic societies the responsibility for a narrative is never assumed by a person but by a mediator, shaman or relator whose ‘performance’ — the mastery of the narrative code — may possibly be admired but never his ‘genius’.T he author is…
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Note headline; here is the only time this Reuters article refers to the “parliament was slipping into the Thames” issue: [Professor John Burland of Imperial College London] dismissed concern in the media that parliament was slipping into the Thames, while the commission’s spokesman denied the walls around the palace were suffering from a particularly bad subsidence…
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TV_Wo5BsQyA Ensemble number from Stage Right Greensburg’s opening night of an original musical version of The Little Mermaid. (Script adapted from Hans Christian Andersen by Anthony Marino; music by David Mahokey and Greg Keresten; lyrics by Greg Keresten; choreography by Renata Marino; musical director Cindy Baltzer; set design by Mark Kissner; construction by Mark Cole;…
In my mind, the house is clapboard, with a black, precisely shingled roof and shutters in a bit of disrepair. The sky is always an intangible, faded blue, and the forest surrounding the clearing is dark green. In other words, it’s always summer — and hot, since I imagine the house surrounded by long, tan,…
Students learn to evaluate one another’s thinking and challenge one another–and, far more important, they learn from one another and correct themselves. I cannot think of a better skill to take out into the world. By blogging and responding to one another’s posts, my students aren’t learning how to write for an English professor. They…
While I’m not quite ready to ditch the traditional term paper, students in most of my classes use blogs for brainstorming, prewriting, reflection, and synthesis; I encourage students to post new media artifacts as part of a “creative criticall presentation” in lit and media classes. For freshman writing, I stick fairly closely to a shared…
At night, instead of getting ready for bed as she was ordered, my ambitious little diva created this costume. (Note fork.)
When my daughter was five or six, and she got into trouble along with her older brother, she would overhear me explaining to my son why I would punish him more severely than his sister. Pretty soon, when they both got caught, my daughter would shriek, “You have to punish Peter more than me, because…
Publishers who want to create titles for Apple’s iBooks store must use Apple’s iBooks Author application, which runs on Mac OS X only. Publishers who use Windows or Linux computers in the office need not apply. If you want to create EPUB books, you can get software that runs on any platform. Just as with…