A website will re-create the 1969 moon mission in real time (allowing for the 40-year time lag). http://wechoosethemoon.org/ Similar:Tolkien v. Orwell: Who understood modern surveillance best?Interesting set of observations explorin…CultureChildren struggle to hold pencils due to too much tech, doctors sayWhen I was in middle school, I developed…CultureGo Forth and Conquer, but Postpone the Selfie“We…
First, there is a general increase in use of Facebook and a general decline in use of MySpace across the board. In 2007, 79% of the study participants were using Facebook while in 2009, 87% of the sample reports doing so. In contrast, while in 2007, 55% of the group reported using MySpace, in 2009,…
She said the manhole she fell in to was left open and unattended with no warning signs or orange cones. She said two workers with the New York City Department of Environmental Protection failed to secure the area as they prepared to flush the sewer. “It was just really gross and it was shocking and…
Post office boxes! Post office boxes! My face hurts from laughing. New Live Poll Allows Pundits To Pander To Viewers In Real Time Similar:For Two Months, I Got My News From Print Newspapers. Here’s What I Learned.Farhad Manjoo says he’s a better, more-i…CultureHow hate and misinformation go viral: A case study of a Trump retweetOn…
Older words also making their debut as a result of renewed interest online: sock puppet (a false identity used to manipulate opinions in online forums) and fan fiction. (Via Guardian) Similar:Show, Don't (Just) Tell (another update)AcademiaDozens of Colleges’ Upward Bound Applications Are Denied for Failing to Dot Every II’m not saying that the Upward Bound…
The gradual, and almost invisible, transformation of many “liberal arts colleges” to more comprehensive institutions is similar to another gradual trend that has reshaped the composition and the work of the American academic profession. Over the past three decades, colleges and universities have replaced tenure-track faculty positions with part-time and full-time term-contract positions — a…
A roundup of the initial reactions, via BBC: “One of Google’s major goals is to take Microsoft out, to systematically destroy their hold on the market,” said Mr Enderle. “Google wants to eliminate Microsoft and it’s a unique battle. The strategy is good. The big question is, will it work?” At the popular blog, TechCrunch,…
I have to make a conscious effort to say “Grand Theft Auto” when I’m talking about the game. An excellent group blog begins its afterlife. Grand Text Auto, for six years (May 2003-May 2009) a single blog with six co-authors (Mary Flanagan, Michael Mateas, your very own Nick Montfort, Scott Rettberg, Andrew Stern, and Noah…
I tell my kids steampunk bedtime stories about the adventures of Captain Rod Gearhart and the Magnificent Blimpship. Since I also enjoy playing with Blender 3D, it seemed natural to make these clockwork heart decorations. (My wife offered detailed pointers to tweak the one on the right.) Similar:It's exam week, and at the moment I…
At the recent Computers & Writing conference, I found myself, in the Q & A during several sessions, strongly advocating coding skills as a 21st-century core literacy. (See Ian Bogost, Procedural Literacy. In the following reflection, I talk mostly about my use of Inform 7, but I also touch on Scratch.) Here at Seton Hill,…
This bit of educational theatrical fun sounds awesome! Via. Travelling from past to future through a landscape of machines and ideas Walk the Plank and Thingumajig Theatre have created an interactive journey through the courtyard of Manchester’s Town Hall. The audience will help inventor and mathematician Charles Babbage find the clues to repair his Difference…
The Facebook epic fail isn’t just grist for the teen angst mill. It also affects the head of the British secret service. Via. The new head of MI6 has been left exposed by a major personal security breach after his wife published intimate photographs and family details on the Facebook website. Sir John Sawers is…
From a thoughtful review of the Kindle: The Kindle DX’s five-way joystick is quick, convenient, and expertly designed. (Plastic Logic’s touch screen really isn’t markedly better than using Amazon’s joy stick, but that’s because the touch options are fairly rudimentary.) The problem is the dearth of good places to direct the cursor. That’s a real…
This weekend, how can the kids and I spend our time better than playing: Political Machine 2008 (try explaining “special interest groups” to a seven-year-old) Liberty’s Kids (1776, from the perspective of Ben Franklin’s printing apprentice, among others) Sid Meier’s Civil War Collection (sort of a stretch, I know, but the fate of the union…
There’s no information in the non-subscription IMDB, but there is an entry for a movie based on Rossum’s Universal Robots. http://www.imdb.com/title/tt1300594/ The original play was a talky social comedy mixed with a melodrama (complete with a “missing papers” plot twist), and the big action sequences happened off-stage (with characters either referring in passing to events…
The grainy images of Neil Armstrong stepping onto the moon have been grist for the moon conspiracy theory mill for decades. The final loss in quality came when Nasa made its US recording of the event–the one always seen in archive footage–by simply placing a 16mm film camera in front of a television monitor in…
For a period of 2 million years, ending with the last ice age around 10,000 B.C., the Earth experienced a series of convulsive glacial events. This rapid-fire climate change meant that humans couldn’t rely on consistent patterns to know which animals to hunt, which plants to gather, or even which predators might be waiting around…
I spent a few hours cleaning up my e-mail archives yesterday. I was amazed of the amount of space that was taken up by 4MB flyers for events I did not attend, 2 MB PDFs of one-page forms that I could have printed out from a 3kb HTML page, and batches of photos (@1MB each) that…
The personality profile is a staple of intro to journalism classes, but newspapers don’t tend to collect all their profiles in one place, so I often have trouble finding models. Entrants in the Hearst Journalism Awards have to supply a profile as part of their application process (which also includes general news and on-the-spot reporting). …
The journalism class that I’m preparing to teach this fall is a writing course, but it’s also very content-heavy — lots of specialized vocabulary, lots of unique professional practices to teach. This fall, I’m not using a big $100 journalism textbook. Instead, I’ll be spending more time with several smaller texts. In place of assigning chapters for…