This week I am going to ask you to participate in a media fast for TV Turn-Off Week, as part of the Media Fasting Reflection due on May 3. If you give up TV, but watch DVDs on your computer, are you really making any progress? If you turn off the TV, but turn up…
Project, to be penned by Abrams and “MI3” scribes Alex Kurtzman and Roberto OrciRoberto Orci, will center on the early days of seminal “Trek” characters James T. Kirk and Mr. Spock, including their first meeting at Starfleet Academy and first outer space mission. —Trekkies have a new leader: ‘Star’ treatment for J.J. (Variety) The fans, captain!…
I happened upon this page years after I posted it, and thought I’d look up the quote, which turns out to be fake. “The music business is a cruel and shallow money trench, a long plastic hallway where thieves and pimps run free, and good men die like dogs. There’s also a negative side.” —Hunter…
One item to discuss today is the final project for the class, your blogging portfolio. And among the items we need to consider are these: * What should it include? (Will it highlight your best blogging, be an overview of what you tend to blog about and/or how you tend to blog, or a combination,…
“We cannot determine whether the addition to the letter was made by someone within the office or by someone with access to the office, but it is on my letterhead and the responsibility for it lies with me. A valuable lesson has been learned and new procedures will be adopted as a result.” —Lawmaker Puzzled…
McClure said that some students seem to feel “that e-mail is a casual form of communication, where professional relationships somehow do not exist as they do in the classroom — students feel comfortable saying things in an email that they would never say to you in person.” —David Epstein —Be Polite, E-Polite (Inside Higher Ed) Nothing…
Don’t think you’re addicted to TV? Then why not prove it by going cold turkey for a week? You’d be surprised how difficult it can be to disconnect — and what a profound week of self discovery it can be. —TV Turnoff Week April 24-30, 2006 (Adbusters.org) I’m planning to ask my Intro to Literary Study…
Video game studies? Yes, please. And I don’t just mean in gaming schools. Critical perspectives have been developing as well. Metafilter is already wise to ludology,but what about its mother discipline, ergotics? Don’t forget narrative and storytelling. Of course, if cultural studies, or education is your thing, that’s covered too. Other programs focus on application…
You can like a poem before you understand it, and be moved by it, and in fact, that is a sign that you’re starting to understand it, that you’re reading the poem in a good way. Being moved by a poem — laughing or feeling sad or full of longing — or being excited by…
CHERYL: Wait a minute! Did you see that? An apple fell out of that tree! [dramatic music; slow motion shot of falling apple] This means there must be some sort of FORCE! DARREN: A force — a gravitational force! CHERYL: Yes — and wait a minute — suppose the force stretched all the way to…
The system’s software goes beyond tracking simple emotions like sadness and anger to estimate complex mental states like agreeing, disagreeing, thinking, confused, concentrating and interested. The goal is to put this mental state inference engine on a wearable platform and use it to augment or enhance social interactions, said Rana el Kaliouby, a postdoctoral researcher…
Five, the television channel, denied it was disappointed that Diamond, a radio and TV presenter and outspoken Daily Star columnist, had decided against being crucified. No date has been set for the broadcast of the programme. If shown, it may have to change its original working title, Crucify Me. —Nico Hines —‘God made me cancel…
The key word for me here is not ‘Fun’. The concept of fun is well understood, I should think, after many years of games and many hundreds of thousands (if not millions) of releases. There are theories of fun, analyses of fun, examinations of the fun of one aspect of a game or another, and…
The saccharine sweet family shows of the 50s and 60s gave way to harder biting social commentaries like All in the Family. In 1967, the same year that CBS television ended a 17-year blacklisting of folksinger Pete Seeger, President Johnson signed legislation to establish the Corporation for Public Broadcasting (CPB), asserting that “we have only…
Science for non-majors offers an important chance to reach out to students outside the sciences, and try to give them some appreciation for scientific inquiry. This is critically important, as we live in a time where science itself is under political assault from both the left and right. People with political agendas are constantly peddling…
Over a ten-month period, the Center for Media and Democracy (CMD) documented television newsrooms’ use of 36 video news releases (VNRs)–a small sample of the thousands produced each year. CMD identified 77 television stations, from those in the largest to the smallest markets, that aired these VNRs or related satellite media tours (SMTs) in 98…
Veteran commander John Young and his rookie pilot Robert Crippen faced a lot of uncertainties April 12, 1981, as they waited for the space shuttle Columbia to lift off from Florida’s Kennedy Space Flight Center. —STS-1: ‘A test pilot’s dream’: Columbia astronaut recalls first shuttle flight on 25th anniversary (CNN) When my class was watching the…
Fanny Pack This is great if you’re trying to create a singularity of pure geekness that will open up a portal to an alternate universe where they’re still making episodes of Reboot. But if there are even two working neurons in the style portion of your brain, the same neurons that explained that Mr. T’s…
Congress shall make no law respecting an establishment of religion, or prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press; or the right of the people peaceably to assemble, and to petition the government for a redress of grievances. —The Bill of Rights: Amendment I The First Amendment, among…
I called a disabled colleague a spaz after hearing he’d spilt coffee over yet another expensive bit of computer kit…. I use the term with irony as someone who was regularly called a “spaz” in the school playground, though I’m visually impaired and not what we once called “a spastic”. To confuse the issue, a…