Designed exclusively for Amazon Prime subscribers who own a Kindle (sorry, iPad users – the Kindle App alone will not suffice), the Kindle Owners’ Lending Library allows consumers to borrow one book per month without any due dates. Amazon can only offer this option because the books are digital; the company isn’t loaning consumers much…
Testing out the new WordPress iOS app on my iPod Touch. Improved authoring tools, very much appreciated. Similar:Why teens are leaving Facebook: It’s ‘meaningless’However, there’s a silver lining for Mar…BusinessDetailed Articulation of Feet in Unity3DI’m following a lot of tutorials, and co…AestheticsDeath of the narrator? Apple unveils suite of AI-voiced audiobooksApple has quietly launched a catalo…CybercultureThe…
One of the most popular pages on my site — a single page that earns about 20% of my hits — started out as a class assignment for a technical writing student whose project for a real-world client ran into a snag. In Fall 2002, I showed my student Kathy Kennedy a model of a…
Similar:Brothers (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season Four, Episode 3) Awkward Android Family ReunionRewatching ST:TNG after taking a break f…MediaBrilliant, Troubled Dorothy Parker by Robert GottliebIn 1915, Parker, aged twenty-two, went t…CultureDrumhead (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 4, Episode 21) Federation Loyalist Tramples Justi…Rewatching ST:TNG An earnest, somewha…EthicsText Messaging Declines in U.S. for First Time, Report SaysI don’t text…
I believe I feel like a pribbling idle-headed mumble-news. (Thanks for the link, Jessica!) Tastefully Offensive | Premium Funny: Shakespeare Insult Kit – StumbleUpon. Similar:Theory Trading CardsThis set of 21 Theory Trading Cards, pub…AcademiaWhen a Textbook Plagiarizes Your Student's WorkIn a few days I’ll be gearing up to teac…AcademiaTwitterverse, are we grieving over coder droves…
My 13yo son plays through chapter 2 of my 2001 Interactive Fiction Competition entry, Fine Tuned. Similar:Multimodal News Packages (for Student Journalists)A multimodal news package simply means “…AcademiaDress rehearsal for The Nutcracker.AestheticsShe was a musical ingenue Sunday, filmed a slasher movie past midnight Monday, and was pre…AcademiaText Wrangler Discontinued (Free Mac Text Editor)I still miss…
The local paper’s headline spins the news a bit more negatively than it probably deserves. I rather enjoy the opportunity to look at some familiar words in a fresh light. Introduction to the Lord’s Prayer: (Current Text) Priest: Let us pray with confidence to the Father in the words our Savior gave us. (New text)…
[poll id=”2″] Similar:My brother set my parents up for a Mother's Day video call.AmusingAny Interaction with a Service Dog Is DistractingThe director of our counseling and accom…AcademiaApparently Facebook Doesn't Know Me Very WellI’m actually rather happy at the thought…AmusingSurprised by Mama Cass Elliott's "Different" — powerful folk-pop ballad in trippy 60's "H…I miss the convention…
While teaching Richard II in a Shakespeare class, I had to get up to speed on the rules and customs of succession, as Shakespeare knew them, so that my students and I could understand and explore the political issues that Elizabethan audiences would find in the play. News from England today bears word of some…
Students collaborate on a breaking news journalism assignment. I wrote a mock police report, an official statement from a university official, and some personal info from various simulated sources, and gave students 45 minutes to churn out a news story. Here, students collaborate on a Google doc while consulting their textbook on a iPad. My…
In the mid-1950s mathematician John McCarthy issued a call for research on “Automata Studies,” but the phrase was so bland that few people understood what he meant. So he came up with a more provocative description of the idea he was promoting. He called it artificial intelligence. via John McCarthy, the father of artificial intelligence,…
A fantastic series of photos exploring the world as it was. The photo of Louie Armstrong playing his trumpet in front of the Egyptian pyramids is pretty cool, but I’m going to call out this one. NASA’s Project LOLA or Lunar Orbit and Landing Approach was a simulator built at Langley to study problems related…
The problem is that Google is killing off the current crop of social functions from Reader – and in doing so, they’re fundamentally altering the way most of us use Reader, and in the process they’re sending a huge archive of curated posts and shares and comments down into the void. And this is a…
Similar:Shall I Encode Thee In DNA? Sonnets Stored On Double HelixIf you took everything human beings have…CultureYou come very close to successfully combining argument and explication here… I recently came across a box of old wr…AcademiaThomas Jefferson on "newspapers without government" vs "government without newspapers"Those darn founders with their darned re…CultureMultimodal Composition: Every time a…
Of Archimedes, he who allegedly popularized the word “Eureka!”: “His cleverness is beautiful. Understanding Archimedes is like understanding the most elegant joke in the world.” The researchers paid their respects to the 10th-century scribe who copied down works by Archimedes of lasting importance. The palimpsest contains the only version of “On Floating Islands” in Greek…
The value of this essay is not specifically in the nostalgia for ye goode ole days of bloggynge, but rather the combination of work-ethic angst and the recognition of the value of investing effort in long-term projects, as opposed to seeking immediate rewards for clear-cut, predetermined actions. The philosophical reflections of the shovel-wielding ditch-digger are…
The greatest abstract for a journal article ever – 22 Words. Similar:Students Don't Read Syllabi, Exhibit 58623https://twitter.com/ConnorMEwing/status/…AcademiaThe Mystery of Charles Dickens by Joyce Carol OatesDickens is so brilliant a stylist, his v…AestheticsIt’s alive! What NPR learned from turning its @nprnews Twitter account from a bot into a h…My student journalists tell me they lear…CybercultureOh the…
[J]ournals ceased being a means of communication a long time ago – more than 20 years ago for sure. New research would be unveiled in seminars, circulated as NBER Working Papers, long before anything showed up in a journal. Whole literatures could flourish, mature, and grow decadent before the first article got properly published…. The…
“It’s always the end of the world,” said Russell Grandinetti, one of Amazon’s top executives. “You could set your watch on it arriving.” He pointed out, though, that the landscape was in some ways changing for the first time since Gutenberg invented the modern book nearly 600 years ago. “The only really necessary people in…
Caves and sandboxes are some kinds of game spaces I’ve explored in conversations (and an unpublished manuscript) with David Thomas, so I was very interested in these musings from Not Your Mama’s Gamer. In a landscape polluted by smog and litter, box stores, fast food chains, more subdivisions and ever more streets–it becomes harder and…