If I were a children’s author, I would write the story of Reba the Rebarbative Rhubarb. Of course, at the end, she’d be Reba the Redeemed Rhubarb. Similar:The real Lord of the Flies: what happened when six boys were shipwrecked for 15 months “I have always understood the Nazis,” …BooksThoreau's Cellphone ExperimentWhen I teach “Intro…
Powerful journalistic storytelling. There’s no way to tell this story without being disturbing. And then there’s the big twist that comes in from left field at the end… stunning. No significant facts were in dispute. Miles Harrison, 49, was an amiable person, a diligent businessman and a doting, conscientious father until the day last summer…
If the newspapers do not survive, then what takes on the crucial social and economic roles they have performed over the past century and more? That is unknowable. Failing some inventive institutional spark, some vital functions might simply go unperformed. The Internet is creating a “tragedy of the commons” situation for news, and no one…
Does Adobe Shockwave fit your definition of malware? I train my kids not to click on random boxes that pop up, and I don’t want any boxes popping up on computers my kids use. So I was very annoyed the other day when I first saw this box — intrusive auto-update window that shows only…
I smell trouble. Via Trekmovie.com: Genki’s “Red Shirt” cologne (whose tag line “Because Tomorrow May Never Come” is priceless) celebrates the sacrifices of those often nameless crew of the USS Enterprise. Described appropriately as a cologne for those with a “devotion to living each day as it could be your last” the cologne has top…
On the first day of classes, I make sure that everyone knows that cell phone use during class is NOT going to be allowed. Not a text, not a tune, nothing. On day two, I backtrack just a bit and introduce them to the county’s disaster alert program that residents and students can sign up…
Repeat after me. Newspaper ≠ journalism. Journalism ⊃ newspaper. Why a once-profitable industry suddenly seems as outmoded as America’s automakers is a tale that involves arrogance, mistakes, eroding trust and the rise of a digital world in which newspapers feel compelled to give away their content. “Most of the wounds are self-inflicted,” says Phil Bronstein,…
“Playing video games all day, alone and friendless, is is simply the best way that we have to prepare our children for a life of solitude in a barren wasteland.” Similar:Wanted in College Graduates: Tolerance for Ambiguity”What answer do you want?” “Just tell…AcademiaA very happy geekling playing Dungeons and Dragons on her one free evening.…
The new Kindle is still way out of my price range, though of course I’m still craving one. This news took a bit of the edge off of that craving, since I regularly load my MP3 player with the sounds of a computerized voice reading common-domain texts. Amazon.com will let copyright holders opt out of…
Citing the challenging times faced by its members, The American Society of Newspaper Editors today announced it has canceled its 2009 convention. — ASNE According to the ASNE website, one of the items on the agenda at the conference was a motion to drop the reference to “paper” in the organization’s name, and to expand…
Kathleen Blake Yancey offers a thoughtful overview of the challenges and opportunities that technology brings to teachers of English. I particularly like her analysis of an effort, organized by high school students, to get AP test-takers to insert the catchphrase “THIS IS SPARTA!” into their exams. [‘T]he students understood the new audiences of twenty-first century…
The Baltimore Sun publishes this item under the “entertainment” section: Sanders admitted inserting a graphic phrase into a video to make it appear that John Gibson of Fox News was denigrating U.S. Attorney General Eric Holder. In the faked video, which appeared first on YouTube and later on The Huffington Post, Gibson is shown using…
Nerd heaven. In chase mode, Pinky behaves as he does because he does not target Pac-Man’s tile directly. Instead, he selects an offset four tiles away from Pac-Man in the direction Pac-Man is currently moving (with one exception). The pictures below illustrate the four possible offsets Pinky will use to determine his target tile based…
I recently gave a brief presentation on games to our school’s education faculty. One faculty member (I believe he used to be a school principal) got fairly excited, asking me whether he could use Crazy Machines to set up a scientific experiment to show his students. I suggested that he was thinking of the game…
You are pleased to find scientific evidence of a phenomenon that you had been familiar with all along through your love of interactive fiction. You check BoingBoing, where you find exactly the same lame second-person intro gimmick. When the volunteers read statements that began, “You are…” they pictured the scene through their own eyes. However,…
Great little feature on a nostalgic pleasure. The Ferris wheel takes you nowhere but up and around. And it is precisely the lack of direction that makes you feel as if you are going everywhere. It doesn’t feed us, doesn’t clothe us, doesn’t give us a home. But man, we’re told, does not live on…
This is fairly recent news, and at the moment I only see press releases and mission statements, and bloggers. So I’m still not sure what to make of this, but it’s definitely something to watch: an elementary school with a curriculum built from the ground up on the procedural principles of gaming. Out of school…
I’ve had a recurring dream since I was a teenager, somehow riding along behind my old car — it’s always the car I’ve most recently traded in or otherwise lost — with a remote control in my hand. I’m controlling my car, which keeps rushing ahead of me, eventually disappearing around the corner where I…
What does my ten-year-old son think he has learned from playing Civilization 3? Similar:John Speed’s 1611 map of #medievalyork features a “scale of paces.” My #unity3d placeholde…John Speed’s 1611 map of #medievalyork f…PersonalChatGPT Can't Kill Anything Worth PreservingMany are wailing that this technology sp…AcademiaTwittering The MachineI’ve never been a phone guy. My vo…AcademiaA Successful Failure:…
Disturbing, yet cool. Biotele.com A beam of white light is made up of all the colours in the spectrum. The range extends from red through to violet, with orange, yellow, green and blue in between. But there is one colour that is notable by its absence. Pink (or magenta, to use its official name)…