Active verbs form more efficient and more powerful sentences than passive verbs. This document will teach you why and how to prefer active verbs. (Active and Passive Verbs) I’m slowly rolling out a new template for my online handouts. For years, I’ve been using Dreamweaver to manage my academic website, but I don’t have a…
This list from Mark Potts (of “Recovering Journalist) is just the thing I needed in order to motivate me to ask my students to think of the online version of the paper as the primary product, and the print version a useful offshoot. (At present, the reverse is true.) What would you do if you…
Wilfred M. McClay: The humanities are imprecise by their very nature. But that does not mean they are a form of intellectual Âfinger-Âpainting. The knowledge they convey is not a rough, preliminary substitute for what psychology, chemistry, molecular biology, and physics will eventually resolve with greater finality. They are an accurate reflection of the subject…
Language Log has a good post on a phrase that I’ve seen cropping up increasingly in journalism: Person of interest, called a “euphemism for a suspect” by the National Association of Police Chiefs, is now routinely used in investigations of all types, from murders to brush fires. Donna Shaw, writing in the American Journalism Review…
Online University Reviews has posted an entry guaranteed to generate some in-bound link traffic. There are many sites I’d never heard of before. Academics are flocking to the Internet like never before, particularly to start a blog. Faculty members in colleges across the world are connecting with people on a whole new level. Let’s face…
Great news for fans of robot history and cinema history: Last Tuesday Paula Félix-Didier travelled on a secret mission to Berlin in order to meet with three film experts and editors from ZEITmagazin. The museum director from Buenos Aires had something special in her luggage: a copy of a long version of Fritz Lang’s Metropolis,…
From MetaFilter, which is better known as a link filter, comes this detailed story about one small but important part of the Battle of Gettysburg. They smash into the oncoming lines and stop the Southern charge, but their success proves their undoing. As they push the center of the rebel lines back, the wings enfold…
It’s been several years since I attempted a redesign of my curricular website, which holds trusty old handouts, some of which I tweak on a regular basis, and some of which I haven’t touched in years. I’ve been thinking a lot about navigation and layout, especially now that most people’s computer monitors have fairly high…
Beyond balancing difficulty is the simple question of whether it serves any purpose in the game at all. Back at the Pickford blog, another article goes into the various game design options that let a player break down the difficulty at their own pace. Although these games still utilize difficulty to a certain extent, there…
I’m fairly proud of myself because last week I did something I’ve been wanting to do for years… I made little tiny icons, and put them in the right place on my two main websites. Now you should see them in your browser bookmarks and tabs. Incidentally, I love what Firefox 3 does to the…
I’m not a big fan of SHU’s content-management system, Jenzabar, but because the service was recently overhauled and upgraded, I thought I’d give it another chance. How frustrating — the site breaks the “go back” button. Every time you try to go back, it dumps you into a general screen, and of course then you…
Fantastic narrated slide show on the impact of drugs on a community. Striking black and white images, with an equally powerful interface. (Brenda Ann Kenneally.) Similar:Collegewide game encourages small interactions around campusI confess I often check my messages and …AmusingReport to the bridge so the captain can assess your virtual upholstery skills. #blender3d …AestheticsD&D-Themed movie…
Look who‘s up there with Ada Lovelace and Grace Hopper: Famous women programmers are Adele Goldberg, who worked at Xerox PARC laboratory and wrote a number of SmallTalk books, Grace Hopper, a pioneer in the field who wrote the first compiler, Ada Lovelace, credited as being the first programmer, Emily Short, who played a major…
Inside Higher Ed goes to hell. Job Listing #666. University of Hell at Seventh Circle. Visiting Assistant Professor, two years (with possibility of converting to tenure-track position at culmination of two-year appointment). Beginning September 2009. Teaching load of forty-three courses per semester, with no more than thirty-nine preparations (i.e. instructor will teach more than one…
Federation of American Scientists (FAS) makes a First-Person Shooter (FPS). Whoever wrote the description of the game won’t get a job at PC Gamer anytime soon, but the game itself looks interesting. Players navigate a nanobot through a 3D environment of blood vessels and connective tissue in an attempt to save an ailing patient by…
Science Journal (WSJ): “We think our decisions are conscious,” said neuroscientist John-Dylan Haynes at the Bernstein Center for Computational Neuroscience in Berlin, who is pioneering this research. “But these data show that consciousness is just the tip of the iceberg. This doesn’t rule out free will, but it does make it implausible.” Through a series…
Editor and Publisher: The newest version of the Associated Press Stylebook is available, and if you follow it, “WMD,” “iPhone” and “anti-virus” are in, while “barmaid,” “blue blood” and “malarkey” are out. Those are just some of the changes to its rules for certain often-used phrases and words. There are also new acceptable forms of…
I noticed something fishy about Josh Harris’s Jupiter Media Metrix back in 2000, when I wrote “Parasites on the Internet.” Now Harris tells BoingBoing that his next project was a $25 million joke: I now acknowledge that Pseudo Programs, Inc., a New York City based Internet television network founded in 1994 and sold from bankruptcy…
Wired: The Petabyte Age is different because more is different. Kilobytes were stored on floppy disks. Megabytes were stored on hard disks. Terabytes were stored in disk arrays. Petabytes are stored in the cloud. As we moved along that progression, we went from the folder analogy to the file cabinet analogy to the library analogy…
Jakob Nielsen: Print publications — from newspaper articles to marketing brochures — contain linear content that’s often consumed in a more relaxed setting and manner than the solution-hunting behavior that characterizes most high-value Web use. In print, you can spice up linear narrative with anecdotes and individual examples that support a storytelling approach to exposition.…