A wonderfully readable, thought-provoking article about the intersection between the worlds of words and computer programming — both ways of modeling and human capabilities, experiences, and desires. It used to be that we in English departments were fond of saying there was nothing outside of the text. Increasingly, though, texts take the form of worlds…
The Freytag Pyramid Concocted 146 years ago by a German philologist, Freytag’s pyramid was long held aloft as the one-size-fits-all narrative template, despite the fact that it describes the tidy Aristotelian side of storytelling (Ben-Hur) far better than its frayed quantum fringes (Memento). Techniques like open-ended conclusion, audience interactivity, and nonlinear chronology “were part of…
A snip from the Washington Post’s brief piece on how high-profile news magazines have changed along with journalism: Many of the recently laid-off staffers, Stengel says, “were people whose jobs really didn’t exist anymore.” Similar:If you think I'm wrong that the media fairly covered the Cannon Hinnant murder, but you're…Plenty of news organizations have report…Current_EventsMicrosoft…
On October 10, 1765, an Annapolis printer changed his newspaper’s title to the Maryland Gazette, Expiring. Its motto: “In uncertain Hopes of a Resurrection to Life again.” Later that month, the printer of the Pennsylvania Journal replaced his newspaper’s masthead with a death’s-head and framed his front page with a thick black border in the…
The College Media Advisers issues a censure of Western Oregon University for firing its newspaper adviser in the wake of a student report that publicized a computer security breach. See the press release amd the letter of censure (PDF). Wickstrom’s firing followed the June 2007 Journal publication of a story concerning a university computer security…
Bring on the bongo drums and the black turtlenecks — this looks like fun. Students in a poetry class were asked to write their poetry on a piece of fruit, and then share their text with the class. Melanie stood holding her Cassaba melon like a globe or Yorick’s skull in her left hand and…
An informative tribute, from the BBC. It’s remarkable how many of the genre’s classic elements can be traced back to the feverishly fertile imagination of one man, Edgar Allan Poe. Once you start looking, the clues are everywhere. Edgar Allan Poe is best known for his gloomy gothic tales Born 200 years ago, on 19…
Educated Americans have a tendency to think that (i) intelligence can be directly assessed through the surrogate of compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar, and that (ii) compliance with the rules of Standard English grammar can be checked quickly and easily by glancing in Strunk and White’s brainless little pamphlet of 19th-century grammar…
Here’s an excerpt from an article that appeared in the Winter 2008 issue of the Seton Hill University alumni magazine, Forward. Page 1 | Page 2 Similar:Christmas Day Truce 1914: Volunteers re-enact football game on Belgium fieldsMen in authentic period uniforms of the …CultureCollege Instructors Don't Require Enough WritingI was surprised a few years ago…
I made this slide up for a conference presentation a few years ago. (Of course, it applies to the procrastinating professor, too.) Similar:Beard Typeface GuideChristian Goldeman felt compelled to mat…AestheticsWhy fake news worksFake news works on our emotions, usually…CybercultureRobot wars: 100 years on, it's time to reboot Karel Čapek's RURI was honored to play Alquist…
I’ve been using Google’s Picasa for years. It’s a very efficient tool for sorting, cropping, and otherwise tweaking images, and it’s integrated with Google’s online photo album and Google’s YouTube service, so it’s very convenient. It’s also behaving very strangely. After I updated recently to Picass 3, I notice that, every second the program is…
Ricardo Montalban (1920-2009). My kids know him as the grandfather in Spy Kids 2 and 3. Let’s hope they lay him to rest dressed in a spotless white suit, in a casket lined in soft, Corinthian leather. He will always be Captain Kirk’s finest foe, the would-be conqueror who first tried to steal the Enterprise…
There are no real details on the official site, but this is still worth watching. Legends of Zork, which is being published by Activision, is currently in beta with no official release date yet disclosed. Prospective players can join the beta at the game’s official website, as well as sign up for automated updates on…
Three teenage girls who allegedly sent nude or semi-nude cell phone pictures of themselves, and three male classmates in a Greensburg Salem High School who received them, are charged with child pornography. WPXI I’ve got nothing much to say about this, other than Seton Hill University is in Greensburg, so it’s likely some of my…
This past year has been catastrophic for the New York Times. Advertising dropped off a cliff. The stock sank by 60 percent, and by fall, the paper had been rated a junk investment, announced plans to mortgage its new building, slashed dividends, and, as of last week, was printing ads on the front page. So…
Forget WALL-E and GORT. Forget sexy Summer Glau and Tricia Helfer in Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles and Battlestar Galactica. OK, don’t forget them. But check it out: Long before Autobots, Fembots, and the Urkelbot, PGA SF authors obsessed over electricity-, steam-, and clockwork-powered machine-men or “robots” (a term introduced in 1921) that might free…
At M.I.T., two introductory courses are still required — classical mechanics and electromagnetism — but today they meet in high-tech classrooms, where about 80 students sit at 13 round tables equipped with networked computers. Instead of blackboards, the walls are covered with white boards and huge display screens. Circulating with a team of teaching assistants,…
As old media races to catch up with the Web and figure out how to successfully monetize print content online, one publication is taking a drastically different approach: web to print. The Printed Blog, a startup founded and funded by former business productivity software entrepreneur Joshua Karp, is launching a twice-daily free print newspaper in…
Some great writing and insightful observations in this review. The story’s arc is like that of a football thrown lazily against a crisp autumn sky: Even a dog can figure out where it’s going to land. Hell, I could accurately predict individual lines of the game’s dialogue. I’m not saying the narrative in Gears of…
Naturally, as an English professor, I’ve got a vested interest in the future of reading. But you can’t have an intellectually healthy society without literacy. I had a high school physics teacher — Admiral Peebles (a retired nuclear submarine expert) who praised literacy as a core skill. “Give me students who can read and write,”…