The inter tubes are clogged with pundits mocking the AP for a story claiming that “residents are bracing themselves for temperatures near and above boiling point.” In defense of the AP, I will point out that the article does not specify the planet on which these “residents” reside, so this could be a northeastern quadrant…
Academic journals generally get their articles for nothing and may pay little to editors and peer reviewers. They sell to the very universities that provide that cheap labour. As other media falter, academic publishers have soared. Elsevier, the biggest publisher of journals with almost 2,000 titles, cruised through the recession. Last year it made £724m…
“Being literate in 2011 means being digitally literate,” says Chris Lehmann, principal of Science Leadership Academy, a public high school in Philadelphia that has been using social media since it opened in 2006. Sheninger and others also say it is naïve to think that kids raised online will respond to school the same way as…
Uncanny footage of an outdoor sculpture. – YouTube. Blender Camera Mapping Tutorial Similar:"Why are you throwing out all the books?!"The short answer is because we’re about …AestheticsStudents Speak Up: Trust Us With DevicesThe students who are, in the first few w…CybercultureSynchronous Online Classes: 10 Tips for Engaging StudentsEvery time I have taught an online class…AcademiaKindle…
Fort Ligonier re-enactors. French and Indian War. Similar:How to Create a Welcoming Culture for Autistic StudentsAn autistic undergraduate has tips for p…AcademiaThis morning I awoke to YouTube’s live footage of crowds circling a mosque in Mecca. For m… CultureMy J-Term course on August Wilson doesn’t actually start until tomorrow, but the first ass…We’ll cover all…
The tldr version: The iPad has is very useful for brainstorming, and a resource to consult during class discussions, Yes, they are good ereaders, but they are also good for collaboration and sharing (one looks at the text while another takes notes; students start a project, then swap iPads, to comment on each other’s work,…
After observing children on playgrounds in Norway, England and Australia, Dr. Sandseter identified six categories of risky play: exploring heights, experiencing high speed, handling dangerous tools, being near dangerous elements (like water or fire), rough-and-tumble play (like wrestling), and wandering alone away from adult supervision. The most common is climbing heights. “Climbing equipment needs to…
NPR.org » Going, Going, And Gone?: No, The Oxford Comma Is Safe … For Now. Similar:Rereading “Writing to Learn”Rereading “Writing to Learn,” William Zi…AcademiaCarolyn Gombell Is Not a Real Person: #JusticeforCarolyn Is a Campaign Against Twitter Ref…Fascinating use of social media. To be c…Current_EventsOut of the Zuckersphere, (back) into the BlogosphereThis is why I still…
Great example of how a reporter can take a press release and turn it into human story by adding an anecdotal example that demonstrates why the reader should care. David J. Loehr, a playwright who lives in southern Indiana, was taking his car to the dealership when a story on the radio gave him an…
In an occurrence which became somewhat of a tradition for shuttle crews and those of the International Space Station expeditions, the Expedition 28 crew and the STS-135 Atlantis astronauts formed a microgravity circle for a portrait aboard the orbiting complex’s Kibo laboratory of the Japan Aerospace Exploration Agency. This image was taken on July 15,…
Borders, which employs about 10,700 people, scrapped a bankruptcy-court auction scheduled for Tuesday amid the dearth of bids. –via Borders to Shut Down – WSJ.com. Similar:Amazon Staff Meetings: “No Powerpoint”I am not a big fan of traditional slide-…BusinessVideo ResumesI’m thinking of asking students in a med…BusinessWhy won't the University of Maryland talk about the chocolate…
Sean Hoare, the former News of the World showbusiness reporter who was the first named journalist to allege that Andy Coulson was aware of phone hacking by his staff, has been found dead. Hoare, who worked on the Sun and the News of the World with Coulson before being dismissed for drink and drugs problems,…
It’s good to see some activity in this area. I liked holding onto my college textbooks, in part for the notes. (A few weeks ago, I passed two of my college physics textbooks to my science-geek son.) It’s nice that Amazon stores your notes for you in the cloud, but it appears you have to…
Then the researchers handed over the instructions and taught the PCs a “machine-learning system so it could use a player’s manual to guide the development of a game-playing strategy.” They didn’t teach the PC how to play Civ, but they taught them how to read about it. The system had no pre-programmed notion of turn-based…
Google+ has beautiful photos and videos. Twitter? Just page after page of mind-numbing 140 character items. Now, Flipboard demonstrated to all of us that photos and videos CAN be added into the display, and the new Twitter UI does do some of that, but it just isn’t enough. Google+ is blowing Twitter away here. —Google+…
This painting, of two impish children taking advantage of a moment of unsupervised freedom as their mother naps, is one of my favorites from the Westmoreland Museum of American Art, here in Greensburg. The pun in the title intrigues me, as does the amazing complexity of the children’s clothing. The painting was not there when…
We’ve all seen how Ken Burns brings old photos to life by panning and zooming. This clip demonstrates a striking effect of mapping a 2D photo onto a 3D surface. The animator has to clone in order to create the missing data — the background details that are hidden by foreground objects. But the end…
Yay, me. I got the MouseLook script to work in my Blender Game Engine work-in-progress. Thanks to [2.5] FPS MouseLook Script. Based on models I had already created for one reason or another, the game currently involves donuts, paneled walls, tables, and iPad projectiles. Oh, and you’re a little bot. You may have guessed that I’m not…
I love this piece, on display at the Westmoreland Museum of Art, as part of “They Practice What They Teach: Artist Faculty of Carnegie Institute of Technology.” Similar:Do you really keep a diary?ALGERNON Do you really keep a diary? I’d…AmusingIn September, 2000, I was blogging about PICK UP AX, Bellamy's Looking Backward, WB Yeats,…In September…
On July 8, I went on the Google+ Diet, using Google’s new social network for all my online communication. As part of the diet, I stopped using Facebook, Twitter, Foursquare, and several other services. I even stopped using e-mail. As I explained in my column last week, the purpose of the experiment was to see if…