The world’s grown too complex for journalists to cover using only literary skills. A generation ago, forward-thinking journalists developed computer-assisted reporting techniques, uncovering stories from public databases, including crime reports, school test scores and census data. Unfortunately, CARR has remained a specialty within journalism, rather than a core skill. Part of this can be attributed…
Like a zombie from a George Romero flick, the PointCast model refuses to die. The latest incarnation? Google Sidebar aggregrates news headlines, plus custom local weather reports and stock quotes in a desktop application window. Sidebar also adds new features, including the ability to read messages sent to a Gmail account and reader-selected RSS feeds…
I know I should worry. I am a historian, after all, and if people will not read fiction, surely they will read less history. And I’m a teacher, and like everyone else in the humanities, I know students just do not read like they used to do. The trouble is, I am not sure the…
What happens when the title of a hit movie doesn’t conform to AP style? That question was answered in recent days when newspapers started reviewing and writing about the new box office hit whose official name is “The 40 Year-Old Virgin.” Of course, as any reporter or editor worth his or her salt knows, there…
Despite “the rhetoric of student culture,” she writes, students are not only studying less, they are also spending less time socializing than students a generation ago. The reason why, she offers, is that they’re too busy holding wage-paying jobs. In addition, efforts to create a more cohesive college community are stymied because the “sheer number…
A childhood interest in the theremin, one of the first electronic musical instruments, would lead Moog to a create a career and business that tied the name Moog as tightly to synthesizers as the name Les Paul is to electric guitars. Despite traveling in circles that included jet-setting rockers, he always considered himself a technician.…
On the first day of classes, the ritual has been the same for decades: Professors hand out copies of the syllabus and walk students through it. But in most courses at the University of Wisconsin at Oshkosh this fall, the only thing professors may hand out is a URL. That’s because the dean of the…
The cool gadgetry on the classic TV series has made dreamers drool since the first time Captain Kirk barked the words “Beam me up, Scotty!” into his little black box and snapped it shut. —Holly J. Wagner —Star Trek Phone Set to Thrill (Wired) Cute, but Kirk never actually said that line, just as Sherlock…
So it was, late on Saturday evening in a valley five miles outside the soulless resort town of Aspen, that Thompson’s final request was granted. On a calm, still night lit by an almost full moon, a combination of fireworks and the writer’s ashes were blasted into the sky from the top of a 153ft…
The nerve of Harjo! What started as a woman’s disdain for the yummy delicacy suddenly became the great fry bread debate. Ask any Indian about it and you’ll either be greeted with rolled eyes – or sparkling, hungry eyes. After all, fry bread is synonymous with Indian culture. —Angie Walker —Indian Fry Bread Sparks Health…
If the number of blogs is growing, the medium must be real. Right ? Right in concept. Unfortunately its impossible to count the number of blogs in the blogosphere due to the number of spamblogs, splogs, zombies, whatever you want to call them. While the number of blogs has been placed by those who like…
Four schools in the UK will be testing a new program idea to use video games for educational use. An IT researcher, along with Electronic Arts (the software game giant) are funding the proposition. ‘We’re looking at developing some of the softer skills that are needed for the 21st century, such as problem-solving, resilience, persistence…
I tried an experiment, changing the ad copy in two publications in very subtle ways, just changing the superlatives I used to describe the product. In one publication I said it was flexible, in the other I said programmable, for example. Sure enough, when the editorial came out in each pub, they used the adjectives…
In the scenario, there are two versions of the gene for magical ability — the M version, which creates muggles, and the W version, which is needed for wizardry. But everyone gets two copies of the gene — one from each parent — and even a single M scuttles any hope for a magical career.…
It‘sprobably true that the easiest eye-catching technology to apply to comics, that some artists are doing, is to use techniques like Flash, and yes, that risks changing the form so much that they?re not comics anymore. —Andrew Stern —Keeping Digital Comics Comics (Grand Text Auto) A good overview of the tension between online comics and other…
Today the theory era is effectively ending and the public intellectual tradition is reasserting itself, along with a renewed attention in the aesthetic that many theorists dismissed as no more than an ideological formation. But thanks to tenure and the intellectual investments we make as graduate students, theory will have a long afterlife. It will…
Disregarding third-party candidates, Professors DellaVigna and Kaplan found that towns that offered Fox by 2000 increased their vote share for the Republican presidential candidate by 6 percentage points (to 54 percent, from 48 percent) from 1996 to 2000, while those that did not offer Fox increased theirs by an even larger 7 percentage points (to…
The PoMos are right: Narratives don’t get built out of facts. Narratives tell us which facts matter. Within a narrative, it’s important that journalistic reports be accurate. But accuracy is not enough to bring about intelligibility or to tear down an existing intelligibility. —David Weinberger —Jay Rosen’s New Lessons (Joho the Blog) A great take on…
Existing legislation already prevents non-official sponsors from using distinctive “Olympic marks” like the Olympic rings. But the new bill will make it illegal to combine words like “games”, “medals”, “gold”, “2012”, “sponsor” or “summer” in any form of advertising. —Olympics bill comes under attack (BBC) Note that the Olympics Bill seems to apply only to advertising…
The skinny bar is made up of old and red stars and is about 27,000 light years in length, about 7,000 light years longer than previously believed. The bar is at a 45 degree angle to the line between our Sun and the center of the galaxy and may put the Milky Way in a…