Is anyone else bothered that our primary feedback on our work comes from children? I’m talking, of course, about course evaluations. But if you think about it for a minute, it’s true: most jobs, you complete a project, someone tells you good job (or should). Moreover, the people who observe and evaluate your work are…
“We really shouldn’t be in here…” Saturday afternoons my wife and I have been taking the kids to the local high school for swimming lessons. Carolyn, who turns 3 next month, is in the first class with toddlers, and Peter (who just turned 7) is in the class for older kids. He can swim by…
They avoid books, libraries, and librarians. They love Google. (We love Google.) Why? Maybe it’s the speed of getting thousands of potential answers in a split second (Fig. 11). Maybe it’s the seeming simplicity of the list, or the delight in the reduction of a complex question to a series of puzzle pieces to be…
I recently spent a day shadowing my daughter who is a freshman in a local public high school. The high school that she goes to is considered one of the better high schools within the district (made me cringe to think what must be happening in the schools that are considered bad). An interesting twist…
“We never envisioned that we were going to be playing video game music,” conductor Miguel Harth-Bedoya said, drawing appreciative laughter from audience members, many of them in their teens and 20s and decked out in everything from tuxes and gowns to jeans and T-shirts. It was a scene many orchestras would envy at a time…
To many guardians of the knowledge cathedral – librarians, lexicographers, academics – that’s precisely the problem. Who died and made this guy professor? No pedigreed scholars scrutinize his work. No research assistants check his facts. Should we trust an encyclopedia that allows anyone with a pulse and a mousepad to opine about Jackson Pollock’s place…
Although she has dug up information about things like the history of the colon, Truss is so uninterested in the actual rules of punctuation that she even names the ones she flouts–for example, the rule that semicolons cannot be used to set off dependent clauses. (Unless you are using it to disambiguate items in a…
In one study, Martha Carr, a professor of educational psychology at the University of Georgia, looked at first graders who were learning to add and subtract using “manipulatives,” like counting with their fingers or with beads. Midway through the year, she noticed that most boys were abandoning the manipulatives and were doing the problems in…
There’s certainly nothing new about student blogs – there are millions of them floating in cyberspace. What separates these online journals from the rest of the pack is that they are university sponsored and featured prominently on a school’s admissions pages. These journals are photo heavy and focus on a few events every few weeks.…
Long gone are the days of fast-talking, whiskey-swilling Murray Kempton peers eloquently filling columns with daily dish on government scandals, mobsters and police corruption. The sort of in-your-face challenge that the Fourth Estate once posed for politicians has been replaced by mud-slinging, lies and, where it ought not be, timidity. When I started out in…
At Kansas State University, the contracts of all faculty members were terminated after a Populist victory in state elections in 1896. Many professors were hired back, but Republicans were removed from the economics department and senior administrative posts. A few years later, Republicans regained control of state politics and did their own purge of the…
Yvonne poured herself a drink and melted into the chair across from Callie. She brushed a strand of moltenly hair from her eyes and proceeded to carve the ham. Callie watched intently. Juice streamed from the ham in rivulets like saliva drooling from the fierce jaws of a wild dingo poised over the dead carcass…
Instead of just putting my CV on the Web like everyone else, I kind of think I would like someone to make a fan site for me, possibly something like the one created for Hasselhoff. Oh, yeah! Check out my experiments with facial hair in the 90s. Instead of building temples to ourselves — which…
—Drive-by Blogging (Google) Weblog portfolios are due soon, so there’s more activity than usual on my students’ weblogs. Moira mentioned that fellow student Evan Reynolds had used the term “drive-by blogging” to describe the sudden rush of blog entries that fill in the gaps and fulfill the requrements of the weblog portfolio assignment. That was a…
For the uninitiated, FUD stands for ?Fear, Uncertainty, and Doubt.? It is a term popular within the free software community, used to describe the use of lies and deceptive rhetoric, aimed chiefly at free software projects. It is an accurate term. In brief, the goal of FUD is to make money when the free software…
If they can do a Brady Bunch movie, you can be sure that sooner or later, somebody’s going to do a B5 movie. The only thing I can say without equivocation is that when that day comes, as the rights-holder, I will make darned sure that it’s done right, because I’d rather have no B5…
A blog is a species of interactive electronic diary by means of which the unpublishable, untrammeled by editors or the rules of grammar, can communicate their thoughts via the web. (Though it sounds like something you would find stuck in a drain, the ugly neologism blog is a contraction of “web log.”) Until recently, I…
—Dennis G. Jerz (IF Wiki) My entry on the IF Wiki. Thanks, Dswxyz, for compiling it. Has it been that long since I entered the IF Comp? I miss Troy Sterling and Melody Sweet (characters from my game, “Fine-Tuned: An Auto-mated Romance“). Incidentally, I just found this SynTax walkthrough for Fine-Tuned, which was reviewed and included…
Checkmate in Four (Jerz’s Literacy Weblog) My seven-year-old son whipped my butt in chess last night. He’s beaten me before… once when I was paying attention to fending off an attack deep in my territory, and he suddenly popped his rook out from behind a row of pawns, pinning down my king. I’m embarrassed to say…
Headline writers have other duties. They tend to be overworked and underpaid, given the power their wield. And while I’m sure the headline writer in this case had no qualms — thinking he or she was capturing the flavor of the issue — this is a small but telling example of how a headline can…