Here are the slides for the half-day workshop I presented with my colleagues, Laura Patterson and Christine Cusick. Similar:Why Shouting Down Speakers Is Absolutely WrongWilson offers a good explanation of the …AcademiaNew book: basic skills for the multimedia journalistLooking forward to this promising resour…CybercultureBeowimp (spoof I wrote for my high school lit magazine c. 1985)I…
The North Quad Residential Complex at the University of Michigan is the ideal place for a conference on Computers and Writing. I’ll do my part to fetishize the awesome people-focused technology in this place. A team from Seton Hill University (Laura Patterson, Christine Cusick, and I) gave a workshop on teaching writing with iPads. I…
A few weeks ago, I bought an audio recording of Great Expectations from thebestaudiobooks.com. I bought it from a handheld iOS device, and so I when I received the download link by email, I didn’t download it right away. The next time I was sitting at my laptop and remembered the link, it had expired.…
[View the story “Making Writing Socially Engaging: Asking Why New Media Draws Us In” on Storify] Similar:No one’s ready for this: Our basic assumptions about photos capturing reality are about to… Everyone who is reading this article…CybercultureThis Is What It Looks Like Just Before the Muslim Brotherhood Jumps YouAs the recent death toll in Egypt…
Bradley Dilger’s talk from this morning’s Computers and Writing town hall. Reading code means language awareness — knowing how to read code, and where to find it, but also the different forms it comes in. We think first about markup and source code, but we need to consider standards, specificiations, documentation, APIs, and other texts…
In a way, Bug Chucker also suffers from the same direction problems most were able to overcome with the original Myst. Experimentation was as vital in that as it is in Bug Chucker and the senselessness of testing is every bit as grating. You’re never sure if what you’re doing is right. End of the day, I look…
This guy is Sean Power, a Canadian author and tech consultant. His laptop got stolen, along with a lot of other stuff. But he’s using Prey, free software that can track your computer. ReplyRetweet In my bag: my birth certificate, short form birth certificate, health card, cell phone, 17″ macbook, and $$ :/ seanpowerMay 12, 2011 at…
My 13yo was Horton the Elephant and my 9yo was the Sour Kangaroo (with attitude). Similar:For some reason, I saw a bump in traffic to a page that linked to a "make-your-own-Trump-e… This sort of thing was funnier back …AestheticsBeautiful set. Support the humans who do arts in your community (instead of settling for …Beautiful…
Mike Arnzen posted his weird and wonderful address to graduation seniors. “Scary Things”: An Address to the Class of 2011 — The Goreletter — Michael Arnzen. Similar:How to Lie with Data VisualizationData visualization is one of the most im…DesignIntroduction to The Skin of Our Teeth (optimistic, absurdist metatheater; Thornton Wilder,…https://youtu.be/1okt8MIVTtsAcademiaWhat Each Side of the COVID-19…
I think I would need to do more than dance a bit at the county fair to raise enough to buy this. This is the fully-functional road car purpose-built for principal shooting. Production designer Ken Adam stood firm in his belief that if the film was to be about a car, a real car would…
I just got an email from Amazon saying that typos and omissions in my Kindle edition of The Lord of the Rings have been corrected, and I can opt to receive the updated edition for free. However, like a certain similarly magical gift that I’m sure we’re all thinking of right now, this boon comes…
I’ve no idea where the “Bacon Starry Night” meme comes from. Other than Vincent Van Gogh, and bacon, of course. My wife asked whether there is a bacon “The Scream.” Not yet, apparently. Similar:My journalism students just gave me this wristband: "What would Jerz do? / Verify or duck…. AestheticsSweet Lenten RegretsThis Lenten evening /…
The key point here is that all sellers now get a 30% commission and Apple now wants a 30% fee, which is all of our gross margin and then some. The six largest publishers have now all adopted the agency model. These publishers account for nearly 90% of all ebooks sold. Random House was the…
The New York Times Makes The Nerdiest Correction Ever – Featured on BuzzFeed. Similar:Free Game Friday: Text-Based Games 2012 Interactive Fiction contest we’ll…AmusingMy Parents (aged 72 and 78) Demonstrate a Ballroom Dance PoseThis is how my parents finish their Arge…AestheticsDear readers: Please stop calling us ‘the media.’ There is no such thing.When my students refer…
Based on the constructivist theory of learning suggesting that students make sense of new information by joining it with information they already have, his guidelines suggest that students begin with a quick pre-read, in which they underline words they don’t know but don’t stop reading until they reach the end. They then would follow up…
Even the access to paying customers is hard to justify. The terms of the deal mean that for each Skype customer, Microsoft is paying about $1,000. And on average, those customers are worth a profit of about $30, presuming most of Skype’s income comes from subscriptions and call charges. That’s a huge disparity. Windows Live…
This is one of those “duh” studies, like “doctors who are totally stoned more mistakes in the operating room than doctors who are not,” but I do understand the value of conducing formal research to quantify cultural information. “A house is just a place to keep your stuff while you go out and get more…
I’d love the retro goodness of a MOO event with smart and innovative colleagues. I don’t think I’ll be near a WiFi connection at that time, though. We’d like to invite all in the Techrhet community to the online collaborvention event, “Through the Looking Glass and Back: A MOO Rhetrospective,” to celebrate our MOO past as it…
Take a look at the photo published above, famously snapped in the Situation Room as the U.S. raided Osama bin Laden’s compound in Pakistan. The astute viewer will notice that, like some sort of sexist version of Highlights magazine, Secretary of State Hillary Clinton has been Photoshopped out of the picture (not to mention Counterterrorism Director Audrey…
The whole “reality is an illusion” idea has been kicked around by everyone from Siddhartha to the existentialists. It is Oxford philosopher Nick Bostrom who is most often associated with the idea that we are living in a computer simulation. His premise is based on a series of assumptions: 1). A technological society could eventually…