Our provost sent this link to English faculty members this morning. One of my recent juniors was particularly eloquent on the subject. After having sat in my classroom for a year forcefully projecting his boredom, he started an e-mail dialogue with me over the summer. “The reason for studying fiction escapes me,” he wrote. “Why…
Thanks for the link, Rosemary. From The Atlantic. Economists and ecologists sometimes speak of the “tragedy of the commons”–the way rational individual actions can collectively reduce the common good when resources are limited. How this applies to traffic safety may not be obvious. It’s easy to understand that although it pays the selfish herdsman to…
Mike Arnzen writes about the thinking behind his decision to revise his syllabus to include a statement on the use of electronic devices in class. In some ways, there’s no difference between a student texting and a student flipping through a magazine in the back row of a class, but there are times when we…
If my old shoebox of Meego Star Trek action figures turns up, I’ll consider myself very happy. Seton Hill’s librarian, David Stanley, reports an even more significant historical find. From the Reeves Library blog. Kelly Addleman, our public services librarian, received an email from a researcher in Germany who has been making a survey of…
Boston.com: A man from Somerville, Mass., and his friend who went around the country this year removing typographical errors from public signs have been banned from national parks after vandalizing a historic marker at the Grand Canyon. Similar:Volunteering at our local food bankEthicsLearn from this typesetter's mistakeWisdom to keep in mind as I plan for…
A good lesson in journalistic humility. FoxNews. One morning, there was a fatal accident. One person died. One lived. As always, I dutifully jotted down the information from the report. And a few hours later, I announced to all of Ohio who died and who survived this crash. But I was wrong. See, the police…
From the BBC… thanks for the suggestion, Rosemary. The 3,000-year-old skeletons were in such good condition that anthropologists at the University of Goettingen managed to extract a sample of DNA. That was then matched to two men living nearby: Uwe Lange, a surveyor, and Manfred Huchthausen, a teacher. The two men have now become local…
Facebook’s advertisers in ur feed, annoying ur friends. (Wired) Undeterred by the setbacks with its Beacon platform last year, Facebook is rolling out more advertising that uses your friends to sell you stuff. Similar:Maybe I'll just delete these QUARTER OF A MILLION spam comments.Not kidding — 254,460 spam comments in …CybercultureJournalists call out White House…
Excellent example of effective journalistic use of a striking detail. This made my morning. The gnome, about a foot tall, wore a hat, a blue shirt over a bulging stomach and a wide grin as it sat on a table in open court throughout the two-day trial. Morrison and the weapon were separated by about…
An Ohio State press release discusses how a student’s psychological profile correlates to academic integrity. An interesting study in rhetoric, focusing on promoting a cultural identity for the “academic heroes” who do honest work, rather than hunting and trapping those whose behavior is less exemplary: The students completed measures that examined their bravery, honesty and…
The latest Pew report: Since 2006, the proportion of Americans who say they get news online at least three days a week has increased from 31% to 37%. About as many people now say they go online for news regularly (at least three days a week) as say they regularly watch cable news (39%); substantially…
Josh suggest this story. Experimental software now under development can automatically swap eyes and facial expressions from one face to another, and the software is being tested as a way to anonymize faces that appear in Google Maps. This story is about more personal, more targeted, use of image-processing software. (NYT) Ellen Robinson, a volunteer…
Wondermark Similar:How children lost the right to roam in four generations –How children lost the right to roa…CulturePope Francis declares evolution and Big Bang theory are right and God isn't 'a magician wi…The theories of evolution and the Big Ba…CultureSurprise: Humanities Degrees Provide Great Return On InvestmentCompleting a humanities degree is a good…AcademiaCan the…
I need a new office chair. Similar:Paradise (#StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch, Season 2, Episode 15) Anti-technology colony welcomes Si… Rewatching ST:DS9 In a runabout o…MediaThe Way of the Warrior #StarTrek #DS9 Rewatch (Season 4, Episode 1) Worf joins the station…Rewatching ST:DS9 We cold open into a…MediaJohn Speed’s 1611 map of #medievalyork features a “scale of paces.”…
It’s hard to believe that the word “hello” entered common discourse so recently, and that an inventor suggested it in a conscious attempt to develop a protocol for using the telephone. (Wired, apparently borrowing heavily from Wikipedia.) Bell’s famous first words spoken over what we now call the telephone — “Mr. Watson, come here. I…
An iPhone is too expensive for my budget, but I’m still happy to see this, from Wired: Open iPhone. Go to App Store. Download Frotz. The classic text adventures from Infocom made us all learn the shortest possible way to write responses, and this brevity of input seems perfectly suited for iPhone use. Similar:Son Doong…
I’ve gone underground to finish off a few projects related to Colossal Cave Adventure, so the blogging has been light. But I’m surfacing in order to blog about this poll, which shows that a majority of respondents said that the government should not force bloggers to give equal time to opposing views, some 31% disagreed. …
A short comedy sketch that emphasizes the importance of finding the right editor. Similar:FDR and Grilled MillionairesTonight we’ll be blocking my big scene a…CultureSherlock Holmes and The Woman (WAOB Live Virtual Performance)I was happy to play Watson. The daughter…BooksCommonly Misused Words: ITS and IT'S AmusingIn January 2001, I was blogging about Bill Clinton's #WhiteHouse…
From The Washington Post: It hit Mark Gruntz all at once, while he was sitting flat-broke in an airport in Greece: He had lost credit for three summer courses, wasted $11,474 in student loans and gotten kicked off a boat. All because he hadn’t cited Wikipedia enough in a paper about a movie. Last week,…
Teaching a large first-year course at a British university, I am fed up with correcting my students’ atrocious spelling. Aren’t we all!? But why must we suffer? Instead of complaining about the state of the education system as we correct the same mistakes year after year, I’ve got a better idea. University teachers should simply…