There are remarkable parallels between “The Canterbury Tales” and modern rap, Brinkman said at Wellesley College during a recent stop on his tour of high schools and colleges across the eastern United States and Puerto Rico. “Chaucer and rap are both performance-based and they’re both battles of words where your proficiency gets you by,” said…
The recent conference on the Holocaust held in Tehran should be viewed by the world as exactly what it was: nothing more than a propaganda effort by Iranian President Mahmoud Ahmadinejad to bolster his own political agenda and image as someone willing — even if ignorantly — to confront the United States and Israel. While…
In the late 1930s and early 1940s, for instance, Disney was inundated with letters from outraged parents who felt that Snow White’s flight through the woods or Pinocchio’s excursion on Pleasure Island or the devil in “Fantasia” or Bambi’s mother’s death were all too real and terrifying and hardly a gloss. Disney would typically respond…
It’s a story about community and collaboration on a scale never seen before. It’s about the cosmic compendium of knowledge Wikipedia and the million-channel people’s network YouTube and the online metropolis MySpace. It’s about the many wresting power from the few and helping one another for nothing and how that will not only change the…
“I am seeking a new position as i have recently been laid.” —Cover Letters from Hell (Killian Advertising) That is… laid off. Blogging this to save it for a professional development unit in “Intro to Literary Study” next term. Similar:A warning to college profs from a high school teacherMy students did well on those questions …AcademiaToday's…
In this idea originated the plan of the ‘Lyrical Ballads’; in which it was agreed, that my endeavours should be directed to persons and characters supernatural, or at least romantic, yet so as to transfer from our inward nature a human interest and a semblance of truth sufficient to procure for these shadows of imagination…
Underneath the veneer of “natural language,” Inform 7 actually has a pretty rigorous syntax, and it can be very picky about how you word certain kinds of phrases. But then there are other areas where the syntax is very loose, and it’s easy to be fooled into thinking that you can write your game in…
Our story about the the most popular Halloween costumes of the season, first published Oct. 14, misidentified the super-speedy The Flash and Boy Wonder superhero Robin as Marvel comics characters. In fact, they are DC Comics superheroes. We regret this error; it is against Bankrate’s policy, and just plain unwise, to cause offense to superhumans…
“Vote with Your Feet” Discusison I was reading a forum in the Chronicle of Higher Education, in which a poster asked for tips on teaching long night classes. I came across a reference to a “‘vote with your feet’ discussion.” I’d never heard the term before, but I gather it means you say “Everyone who…
The Office had nothing around it but the two gas stations and a very busy road. It wasn’t leaning against anything, wasn’t under an overpass or covered with stickers from a nearby venue. It was its own thing, a classy, self-contained room that a young fellow spent his youth wiling away the hours in, trying…
“New Media Projects” introduces students [all English majors in this section, though it’s not restricted as such] to Inform 7, The Games Factory 2, Flash, Blender 3D, and Hammer. All students completed short projects in each medium, and selected tools to use for a midterm and a final project. Students kept a development journal on…
Just as you can’t be too rich or too thin, I’d always thought, so you can’t have too many tools on your Swiss Army knife – but that was before I took delivery of the new Giant Swiss Army knife. Grotesque, if superbly engineered, the Giant weighs nearly a kilogram and features 85 devices in…
—Advent Calendar 2006 (Leslie Harpold) A cute Advent calendar. Similar:Confessions of a Nerdy Homeschooling DadAre you unexpectedly home-schooling your…CultureOpen Source College Math BookOne day last year, David Lippman got an …AcademiaWhat is Technical Writing?I noticed an uptick in traffic to an old…AestheticsNellie Bly statue to be unveiled at Pittsburgh airport ThursdayIn 1889, Bly became famous for…
Parents trickled to the school later Tuesday morning to pick up their children. Nearly three months ago, a 10th-grader at the same school, just outside Philadelphia, was arrested for allegedly bringing in a loaded gun. The boy showed the gun to another student, and word soon trickled to a teacher and then a security officer,…
That craft has never been more vibrant, or vital. But the ability to make a living at it will crumble soon. The pros who deal in breaking news have a problem. They can’t possibly compete in the media-sphere of the future. We?re entering a world of ubiquitous media creation and access. When the tools of…
I can never resist a challenge and this one, posed by a mischievous friend, was a humdinger: could I befriend one of my own children on one of those ‘social networking’ websites for teenagers without being caught out? Could I make a convincing youngster and engage my son in online conversations? While it was an…
There is no clacking of keyboards in most classrooms at the Mary Erskine and Stewart’s Melville Junior School, although there is a full range of facilities for computer lessons and technology isn’t being ignored. But the private school’s principal believes the old-fashioned pens have helped boost the academic performance and self-esteem of his 1,200 pupils.…
*clunk* The rotating tin cylinder within the phonograph vibrates slightly as a brass needle scrapes against it. The sound of a throat being cleared emerges from the machine’s hornshell speaker, followed by a thin, haunting voice. “March the 16th.” A deep, shaky breath. “I dread to say it, but I believe I am going mad.…
Someday, much sooner than you’d like, that shiny new toy you just bought will break. When it happens, you’ll swear, you’ll cry — then you’ll sigh and open your wallet.–Kris Wagner —Gadgets Built to Fail (Wired) “They time them so when you finally paid for them, they’re used up.” — Willy Loman, Death of a Salesman…
I have a Verizon unlimited data plan in the U.S. and recently crossed the border to Canada. Prior to crossing the border I called customer service to find out what rates I’d be paying for voice and data. The data rate I was quoted was “.002 cents per kilobyte.” I was surprised at the rate…