Confusing ”b” and ”d” (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) Hold your hands like this, and imagine an “e” in between them, and you’ve got the word “bed”. My five-year-old daughter was having so much trouble telling the difference between her ”b” and ”d” that my wife urged me to look up dyslexia on the internet. Along the way,…
Asking contributors to “write the story on open-source car design” had all the appeal of asking people to rewrite their college term papers. Asking them to talk to someone they admire and respect was met with a far warmer response. —Jeff Howe —Did Assignment Zero Fail? A Look Back, and Lessons Learned (Wired) An assessment of…
But before I can suggest what one might learn from reading a good novel, they pop the question about The Boy Who Lived: “How do you like ‘Harry Potter’?” Of course, it’s not really a question anymore, is it? In the current state of Potter mania, it’s an invitation to recite the loyalty oath. And…
Gamers never sit around and fondly recall games that were so ludicrous they circled back and arrived at greatness. There is no game analog to, say, Sid and Marty Kroft children’s show, or Plan Nine From Outer Space. When a game is bad, it’s just … bad. I think this tells us a lot about…
Wow. I needed that. The summer’s more than half over, and I’ve got to start focusing on getting things off of my summer “to-do” list. Similar:Jeff Bezos Plan for News: The Washington Post Becomes an Amazon ProductFor the past few months, a group inside …BooksWhy Study Humanities? What I Tell Engineering FreshmenScience writer Jon Horgan…
Your job is very simple! All you need to do is look out for the features that mark out sprial and elliptical galaxies. In fact, as you’re a human and not a computer, most galaxies should be easy to classify since they’re obviously spirals or obviously ellipticals. On this page, you will practice classifying galaxies.…
—Bull Run Victim Photo — Editing QuibblesYahoo | AP (will expire)) No, Lenahan lies on a hospital bed. The redundancy of “as shows” and “showing” and “he was gored” and “were gored” also bothers me. And the inconsistency doesn’t do much for me, either. The same caption refers to “traditional bullrun” and “morning bull run,”…
I used to think that things like rocks and buildings and my own skeleton were fairly solid. But they’re made up of atoms, and atoms, as you can see here, contain so little actual material that they can barely be said to exist. We are all phantoms. —Hydrogen Atom Scale Model (Phrenopolis) Similar:Perseverance lands on Mars…
On a balmy morning in June, Rebecca Miller, a petite 26-year-old actress and Brown University graduate, was perched on a wooden bench in the East Village, just a block from the apartment she shares with her fiancé, a theater director, and two cats. By the looks of her outfit, she was firmly grounded in the…
“You know, they’re not that bad, but they were meant to be private. And it is making me feel very vulnerable that the entire country has to see them now because of this situation.” —Miss N.J. releases blackmail photos (MSNBC) Amy Polumbo, the 22-year-old Miss New Jersey, says she had put the photos on a password-protected…
The mission stencil story is an interactive, choose-your-own-adventure story that takes place on the sidewalks of the Mission district in San Francisco. It is told in a new medium of storytelling that uses spraypainted stencils connected to each other by arrows. The streetscape is used as sort of an illustration to accompany each piece of…
—What People are Doing [US Social Networking Sites] (Businessweek) An interesting, but not very well-sourced graphic, that shows 70% of youth (ages 18-21) are members of social networks, but only 37% create content on those sites. (I’m not sure what the researchers count as “creating content” — there’s a separate column for “Critics” who comment on…
Not knowing what they could and should do to plan for the future was a constant refrain among the undergrads. Whether or not college faculties and administrators are comfortable acknowledging that a majority of students have enrolled because of their belief that a college degree will lead to an attractive and secure career, the fact…
—Lego White and Nerdy (YouTube) Weird Al’s awesome “White and Nerdy” has spawned not just one but several different Lego versions (of various quality levels). Similar:Reading fiction early in life is associated with a more complex worldview, study findsThis study relied in part on the reponde…AcademiaNorth Sea cod: Is it true there are only 100…
Q: What do you come across when you get a planet with antlers? A: Uran-moose! My five-year-old daughter made up that joke in the car this afternoon. I helped her a bit with the set-up. Her first version was, “What do you come across when you get Uranus with antlers?” Similar:I am a dog and…
Born July 24, 1914, Mirvish took over his father’s grocery store at 15 and eventually came to amass an enterprise that includes Mirvish Village, the Princess of Wales Theatre, the Royal Alexandra Theatre and the Old Vic Theatre in London. —Entrepreneur and theatre impresario Mirvish dead at 92 (Canada.com) Honest Ed’s was a Toronto landmark, well…
Our research indicates that each of these six areas will have significant impact on college and university campuses within the next five years. * User-Created Content. It’s all about the audience, and the “audience” is no longer merely listening. User-created content is all around us, from blogs and photostreams to wikibooks and machinima clips. Small…
Schwartz is describing how the two main characters in the student film will sit on a couch, simultaneously reach for popcorn and inadvertently touch hands, when Kit Reiner of Silver Spring and Max Simon of Potomac — both 18 — cry out, “Just like in ‘Lady and the Tramp’!” And Schwartz could take it no…
We thought our “Pimp my Book Cart” contest was a funny idea that would spawn a dozen or so entries. But it seemed to spark something, and we started hearing from folks all over the country. It even spawned a “Pimp my Book Trolley” contest Down Under in Australia (we’re judging that one too). Still,…
“The development of literacy was certainly helped by the introduction of paper, which was made from rags,” says Dr Marco Mostert, a historian at the Centre for Medieval Studies, Utrecht University and one of the organisers of this year’s International Medieval Congress at the University of Leeds. “These rags came from discarded clothes, which cost…