Information Week: The recording played Thursday predates Thomas Edison’s invention of the phonograph (previously thought to have recorded the first sound) by 17 years. It captured about 10 seconds of the French folksong “Au Clair De La Lune” on April 9, 1860. Édouard-Léon Scott de Martinville recorded the voice by using a “phonautograph” to scratch…
I’ve been making an extra effort this year to create some new worksheets designed to teach basic, stand-alone concepts in my Introduction to Literary Study class. Here’s a new worksheet to help students write a sonnet. Below is the part they’re actually supposed to submit… after that I’ve included the text that explains the assignment.…
Blackboard, a company that sells popular course-management software, recently won a $3.1 settlement against Desire2Learn. According to Slashdot, Blackboard has been granted a patent that covers a single person having multiple roles in an LMS: for example, a TA might be a student in one class and an instructor in another. You wouldn’t think something…
Here’s a “glass is half full” headline that makes me proud to work at Seton HIll: Seton Hill U Students Step In, Help Officer Being Attacked By Man Here’s a “glass is half empty” headline that makes me go “oops”: Seton Hill student turns Taser on Greensburg police officer Here’s a more neutral headline that…
The New Yorker discusses the fate of print news: Philip Meyer, in his book “The Vanishing Newspaper” (2004), predicts that the final copy of the final newspaper will appear on somebody’s doorstep one day in 2043. It may be unkind to point out that all these parlous trends coincide with the opening, this spring, of…
New to me… disemvoweling: a compromise between preserving free speech and letting trolls take over a public online forum. In the fields of Internet discussion and forum moderation, disemvoweling, (also spelled disemvowelling) which appears to model the word disemboweling, is the removal of vowels from text either as a method of self-censorship (for example, either “G*d”…
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From Orwell’s 1984, which I’m teaching today in my History and Future of the Book class. This is an excerpt from the book-within-the-book, purportedly written by Emmanuel Goldstein. By comparison with an existing today, all the tyrannies of the past or halfhearted and inefficient. The ruling groups were always infected to some extent by liberal…
I love the retrofuture. The year I was born, 1968, Mechanix Illustrated offered this prediction of life in the year 2008. I’m still waiting for my flying car, but some of the other predictions were remarkably accurate. The single most important item in 2008 households is the computer. These electronic brains govern everything from meal…
Play This Thing offers this review of “Photopia” (a text game by Adam Cadre). Photopia is very, very linear. It has very simple puzzles. It’s barely interactive at all. And yet it works. Photopia could be a short story, but it would lose most of its impact. It’s difficult to explain why that is without…
The Times Online has a story about children’s non-profits that are seeking to ban potential employers from checking social profile websites as part of the job application process. I would agree that what a child posts at age 14 is probably not relevant to a job he or she might want to get at age…
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Mike Edwards describes his first time teaching Bartleby the Scrivener: I stole the idea for my lesson plan from a colleague, who’d used it to great success. Minor modifications on my part, but it went like this: for homework, I’d asked them to read the story in its entirety, and told them to be prepared to lead…
For my “History and Future of the Book” course, I’ve been using a Kindle that my university library purchased on my request. Gizmodo has a good article on the digital rights associated with Kindle e-books. In the fine print that you “agree” to, Amazon and Sony say you just get a license to the e-books–you’re…
The Australian publishes an interesting detail about coverage of climate change: Duffy asked Marohasy: “Is the Earth still warming?” She replied: “No, actually, there has been cooling, if you take 1998 as your point of reference. If you take 2002 as your point of reference, then temperatures have plateaued. This is certainly not whethat you’d…
Carolyn, my five-year-old, wept in the middle of “Owly 2: Just a Little Blue.” The Owly books use no words, just icons and facial expressions to tell some very complex stories. Carolyn likes stories about adventure and friendship, and she’s a visual learner. Once I helped her interpret the first few speech bubble icons, she…
Language Log offers a great post about the comics convention of using typographical symbols to represent swear words. In any case, ! — * @ # $ % & seem to be the characters most commonly used in the U.S. (I suppose £ and € get some play outside the U.S.) At the moment I…
This article from Politico poses some interesting questions. The notion of the Democratic contest being a dramatic cliffhanger is a game of make-believe. The real question is why so many people are playing. The answer has more to do with media psychology than with practical politics. Journalists, for instance, have become partners with the Clinton…
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BoingBoing links to an interesting story about time travel and a self-policing community of time-travelers (modeled on a Wiki community). 11/21/2104 At 02:21:30, SneakyPete wrote: Vienna, 1907: after numerous attempts, have infiltrated the Academy of Fine Arts and facilitated Adolf Hitler’s admission to that institution. Goodbye, Hitler the dictator; hello, Hitler the modestly successful landscape…