Recently, while getting the kids ready for bed, my wife picked up the mouthwash, twisted off the lid, and handed the bottle to our daughter. Carolyn, 8, stared in shock. “You didn’t do the dance!” Carolyn has dexterous little fingers that love to pry things apart. When we added mouthwash to the bedtime routine a…
Results: Books Faster Than Tablets The iPad measured at 6.2% lower reading speed than the printed book, whereas the Kindle10.7% slower than print. However, the difference between the two devices was not statistically significant because of the data’s fairly high variability. Thus, the only fair conclusion is that we can’t say for sure which device…
Nearly one in five (19%) who have an account no longer visit Facebook or are using it less. Of the group that are saying goodbye to Facebook (), 45% have lost interest, 16% are leaving because their parents are there, 14% say there are “too many adults/older people” and 13% are concerned about the privacy…
Students almost universally hate close reading, and they rarely wind up understanding it anyway. Forced to pick out meaning in passages they don’t fully grasp to begin with, they begin to get the idea that English class is about simply making things up (Ah yes–the tree mentioned once on page 89 and then never again…
A great collection of bite-sized interpretations. On “Richard Cory”On “Miniver Cheevey” On “They shut me up in Prose”On “Because I could not stop for Death” Similar:Fun and Games with Samuel Beckett and Pict.Beckett’s masterpiece Waiting For Godot …CultureMultimodal News Packages (for Student Journalists)A multimodal news package simply means “…AcademiaTolkien v. Orwell: Who understood modern surveillance…
Wonder Woman to finally start wearing pants “It’s a look designed to be taken seriously as a warrior, in partial answer to the many female fans over the years who’ve asked, ‘how does she fight in that thing without all her parts falling out?’” said incoming series writer J. Michael Straczynski. “It reflects her origins…
I keep forgetting that I can’t use my iPad to blog with MovableType. The WYSIWYG editor does not work, and I can’t even seem to paste a URL when using the text editor. At any rate, this is a Flash video from USA Today. Similar:Oscar Wilde and the Importance of Being Earnest (Part 1 of…
Similar:Woman Yelling at Cat About Academic Argument: an evidence-based defense of a non-obvious p…See: Academic Argument: Evidence-based D…AcademiaDesert Bus: The Worst Video Game Ever CreatedPenn and Teller are involved with this s…BooksDo Black Holes Create New Universes? Physicist Lee Smolin InterviewCan’t wait until we get this end-of-year…CultureImaginary Friend (#StarTrek #TNG Rewatch, Season 5, Episode…
My son has finally found a math textbook he enjoys. A few years ago, he was happy to play Timez Attack, which was really the first 3D game he had played. Now my daughter is ready to learn her times tables, but we’ve been playing Fate and Lego Indiana Jones, Lego Star Wars and Dungeons…
The command line will live on as long as authors and readers keep enjoying fiction made with it. But many have pointed out there is a huge market of readers (print and digital) and casual gamers who ought to love all this free IF, but sadly, they aren’t exactly flocking to it. One reason must…
I’ve been blogging about the climate change issue for some time now. Here’s the latest, which responds to the exposure of private e-mails in which a climatologist is accused of acknowledging deliberately tweaking the data in order to make a stronger environmental case. [N]ot only did British investigators clear the East Anglia scientist at the center…
Graham of Daventry posted to my blog, with news that the fan-produced Kings Quest, non-commercial sequel has risen from the dead. http://tinyurl.com/2em59… The first release date is scheduled for mid-July. Similar:Techno-greebles. Geometrically these are identical plain cubes, with custom shaders that s…DesignParamount Erases Archives of MTV Website, Wipes Music, Culture History After 30 Plus YearsI…
“[T]here’s leaning left, and then there’s behaving like an idiot.” —Jeffrey Goldberg (The Atlantic) quotes an unnamed Washington Post source on the resignation of Dave Weigel, who until today covered the political right on a blog for the Washington Post. Weigel came under fire for blowing off steam in an online forum, where he invited…
This document is a code of best practices that helps U.S. communication scholars to interpret the copyright doctrine of fair use. Fair use is the right to use copyrighted material without permission or payment under some circumstances–especially when the cultural or social benefits of the use are predominant. It is a general right that applies…
Tomorrow afternoon, about 110 full-time students in SHU’s Writing Popular Fiction MFA program will be given their university-provided iPads. In addition, the Seton Hill University Griffin Technology Advantage program includes MacBooks for all incoming undergraduates, as well. I’ll be observing WPF student teaching demonstrations Thursday through Saturday, so I’ll get an early look at how…
Since Seton Hill is giving iPads to all full-time students, I have been looking at the comparative features of several eBook readers. Right now, the Kindle app for the iPad looks good, because it offers notes and highlighting, but it lacks an iintegrated pop-up dictionary, which severely hurts is usefulness to student readers. I like…
Insanely detailed analysis of the computer interface designed for Star Trek: The Next Generation. Bracercom.com The LCARS Frame Here are the common fame structures, notice I did not segment it but kept it continuous for the number of segments in a frame is up to the number of options you want your application to display…
What if the cell phone had been invented in 1977? The product, and advertising, would look something like this, according to Behance. Similar:Renata, Carolyn and Alex in a scene from this weekend's Pippin.CultureFinished the female officers for my neovictorian steampunk personal project. #blender3d, #… Female officers, from the le…AestheticsPlaying with depth of field (blurring…
Long notorious for crippling their phones and strangling app developers who wanted access to their devices, the carriers have loosened their policies, since AT&T made its fateful deal with Apple, which ripped control of the device out of AT&T’s hands. The result showed to the world how the wireless industry had purposely crippled cell phones…
Lots of speculation and rumination in this article, which I’m blogging because of this paragraph: Earlier this year, for the first time in American history, the balance of the workforce tipped toward women, who now hold a majority of the nation’s jobs. The working class, which has long defined our notions of masculinity, is slowly…