With Web sites like LOL Facebook Moments, which collects and shares embarrassing personal revelations from Facebook users, ill-advised photos and online chatter are coming back to haunt people months or years after the fact. Examples are proliferating daily: there was the 16-year-old British girl who was fired from her office job for complaining on Facebook,…
From one of my students, a blog-based presentation on music in horror games. Regardless, safety in ARG’s may not necessarily diminish the game’s terror-effects. Many horror movies and games are based upon the principles of Freud’s theory of The Uncanny, or what makes something scary (Helene Cixous, a literary critic, gives an advanced yet interesting…
The story line is similar to the Disney-movie version of the story about a mermaid who braves the forces of a sea witch to win her prince. Stage Right artistic director Anthony Marino adapted the film script for the stage with original music by David Mahokey of Connellsville, a Point Park University student, and Greg…
It takes a digital humanist to make this kind of argument. I don’t mean to invoke the turf-fencing debate about what the digital humanities means, I mean to honor a question that forces us to remind ourselves that we are the Eloi, the pampered elite whose world of comfort exists only because of the toil…
I don’t know what Kid #1 will do with his BA in English (OK, writing…whatever!). Maybe he’ll write the next great American novel. Maybe he’ll be a marketing rockstar. Maybe he’ll write for ZDNet. Maybe he’ll be the next Sondheim. It doesn’t matter. The more I think about it, the more I wish my doctors…
Now, it’s worth noting that Brisbane’s question makes perfect sense, considered from the newsroom’s perspective. Romney’s claim that Obama makes speeches “apologising” for America isn’t readily amenable to fact-checking. Instead, Romney relied on what are sometimes called “weasel words”, in which an allegation is alluded to, without being made head-on. (Romney, for instance, never quotes…
Not quite as dramatic as the creation of the evil robotess Maria (in the 1927 Fritz Lang film Metropolis), but more educational. Kids and some dads from my son’s FIRST Robotics Competition club discuss strategy. I’m blogging the process; soon I hope to get the kids involved, but for understandable reasons, they are mostly interested…
They gathered professional violinists in a hotel room in Indianapolis. They had six violins — two Strads, a Guarneri and three modern instruments. Everybody wore dark goggles so they couldn’t see which violin was which. Then the researchers told the musicians: These are all fine violins and at least one is a Stradivarius. Play, then…
Nobody’s perfect, but this proofreading error is embarrassing in a serious story about an accident that involves suffering and potentially death. Panic, confusion aboard sinking cruise chip – CNN.com. Okay, well done, CNN. Similar:Journalists dream of puns like this.AmusingIs your child texting about recursive acronym palindromes? Is your child texting about recursive …AmusingWhat Is Newsworthy?…
The sermon was so powerful that the designers of the Martin Luther King Jr. Memorial in Washington selected those lines to be inscribed on the memorial’s towering statue of the civil rights leader. But because of a design change during the statue’s creation, the exact quotes had to be paraphrased, and now one of the…
A dozen atoms have been made to store a bit of data magnetically – a feat normally performed by a million atoms. The work could one day help shrink the devices that store computer data. —Smallest magnetic memory uses just 12 atoms – physics-math – 12 January 2012 – New Scientist. Similar:Making Interactive Fiction Mainstream:…
The ability to alter the contents of a book will be easy to abuse. School boards may come to exert even greater influence over what students read. They’ll be able to edit textbooks that don’t fit with local biases. Authoritarian governments will be able to tweak books to suit their political interests. And the edits…
Leo Tolstoy is scribbling furiously in the light of a dimly burning candle. At such close quarters, its searing heat has covered his forehead in a permanent patina of sweat, making the great novel a true work of toil. Suddenly, in the middle of a particularly vivid war scene, he curses out loud and blows…
If you can’t code, can critique produce new knowledge in digital humanities? Like the PowerPoint templates that emulate chalkboards, or the 3.5-inch diskette that often still decorates the “save” button in apps used by people who never touch floppy disks, the very term “digital humanities” exemplifies the debate. It’s a transitory term, like “electric icebox,”…
Despite the fact that some computer games are clearly a site of narrative production and consumption, the relationship between narrative, on the one hand, and games, on the other, has remained somewhat uneasy, if not contentious, within the critical literature for both game studies & narrative theory. —Emerging Genres, Progressive Readings: Games, Fiction, and Narrative…
An end to bad heir days: The posthumous power of the literary estate – Features – Books – The Independent. Similar:You Can Smell Trump's FearLike all successful demagogues, Trump ha…CultureTolkien v. Orwell: Who understood modern surveillance best?Interesting set of observations explorin…CultureRefreshing my memory of working with reel-to-reel tape as a radio news intern (c. 1989).HistoryWhat…
Using the iPad requires more than just a change in mindset; it involves a cultural change, one that can be painful. One of the drawbacks I found this semester was that students used and discussed the iPad only in my class. That made my class unique, but it also meant that students defaulted to familiar…
In the FIRST Robotics competition, individual teams of kids have six weeks to assemble a robot from a collection of loose parts. Here is our kit, just before we started inspecting the inventory. In March, FIRST team members around the country and in other parts of the world will play a game (the exact details…
“The hardest fun you’ll ever have.” — FIRST Robotics slogan At Carnegie Mellon, waiting for the FIRST Robotics Competition 2012 Kickoff to start. I’m one of the mentors of our new club, the JCP 4H Gears. Today we will get a box of parts, and we’ll be told the rules of the game that will…
To be sure, such optimism must be tempered in today’s bleak economy, where hardly any form of education is a sure ticket to a job and where many in the private sector may still look with indifference or even disdain on a humanities degree. But as David Brooks himself went on to point out in…