Near the end of a review of a time-management game, Emily Short offers some fairly brilliant narratological observations. A Little Princess and Jane Eyre — and buckets of other classic and semi-classic literature for young women — revolve around the idea of patient, perennial self-sacrifice and obedience as a way of life, with the hope that one day,…
Phil Komarny, my school’s VP for IT, offers a preview of a plan to implement printing from campus iPads. He’s right — printing is less important when so many of us have iPads, though the occasional need to print flyers, recommendation letters that need to be snail-mailed, etc. means I’m grateful every day for my…
Strict safety rules for equipment and low budgets at childcare centers were largely blamed for playgrounds that don’t make kids feel like playing, Kristen Copeland, MD, of Cincinnati Children’s Hospital Medical Center, and colleagues reported. “Fixed playground equipment that meets licensing codes is unchallenging and uninteresting to children,” they wrote in the February issue of…
I almost cried while reading this. But the best part is getting to share with my kids, share the geeky things that informed my childhood and continue to inform my existence: Star Wars, Star Trek, math, science, reading, writing, music, computers and video games, movies and television. I can’t tell you the joy of having…
“People tend to try to learn in blocks,” Bjork said. “Mastering one thing before moving on to the next.” Instead of doing that Bjork recommends interleaving. The strategy suggest that instead of spending an hour working on your tennis serve, you mix in a range of skills like backhands, volleys, overhead smashes, and footwork. “This…
The new censorship technology announced by Twitter allows the company to block tweets or users on a country-by-country basis. Previously, blocking tweets had to be done globally, meaning if an oppressive regime asked Twitter to remove a tweet or block a user, it had to be done for everyone in the world. Now, Twitter can…
I think they mean “Teaching digital humanities to undergraduates could boost…” Pedagogically, undergraduate forays into the digital humanities need not be as complete or ambitious as building formal archives and discovery tools from scratch, the panelists said. Rather, the point is to spur students to “think critically and differently” about digital gateways and to “encourage…
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:One of the Sadder Lost and Found Messages You'll Probably See TodayNot my item, but…
My son’s robot-building team is making good progress. Still Rolling Team Arm: It shoots! Similar:First Evidence That Social Bots Play a Major Role in Spreading Fake News Shad and co say bots play a part…AcademiaIf You're Getting Walled in a Cellar I Feel Bad for You SonAmusingCommonly Misused Words: THAN and THEN AmusingGoogle engineers mined the…
[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:Sports…
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…