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…
Larry Summers is no more free to pop off at the mouth about a vexed academic question than George Bush is free to wander around the country dropping off-the-cuff remarks about Social Security or Islam. Of course both men are free in the First Amendment sense to say anything that comes into their pretty little…
I‘m very much in agreement with the reservations Joe Harris has expressed about the personal essay — the worry that grading, in some ways, becomes an evaluation of the self that the student represents on the page — but after reading the MetaFilter thread, one of my responses to the Personal Essay assignment has become…
“If you’re on one side or the other of the gender-wars debate, you could pick a specific indicator to buttress your case,” said Kenneth C. Land, a professor of demographic studies and sociology at Duke University, senior author of the study. “But if we take a step back a little and look at what the…
Here’s an example. A professor was asked to send weekly e-mail messages to students who had done poorly on their first exam for the class. These students were divided into three groups. The mail to one group of students included only a review question. A second group received the review question plus some advice–along the…
And so the darkness touches the links, and the darkness tastes their power, and the darkness broods and breeds in its desire. The dragon of the night rises, corporations tangled in its wings. It leaves the links powerless, the search-engines crippled, and the readers lost as the rankings swell like rivers and the paths of…
Hunter S. Thompson, the hard-living writer who inserted himself into his accounts of America’s underbelly and popularized a first-person form of journalism in books such as “Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas,” has committed suicide. —Robert Weller —Writer Hunter S. Thompson Kills Himself (AP/My Way) Some student bloggers beat me to this news. Similar:Scientists should be…
Several events have sparked a debate about whether an ethical threshold has been crossed: the decision by Marqui, a company in Vancouver, to pay bloggers to mention the company; Newsweek‘srevelation that a group of 100 technologists in Silicon Valley accepts free products and services in return for word-of-mouth endorsements (or not); and the news that…
The two researchers, Carol Stoker and Larry Lemke, do think they may have evidence for methane in Mars’ atmosphere. Methane cannot last long without being replenished, and it’s not easy to replenish it. There are non-biological ways (for example, sunlight + C02 plus water, which can be found on Mars), but life is the easiest…
Paradox though it may seem–and paradoxes are always dangerous things –it is none the less true that Life imitates art far more than Art imitates life. We have all seen in our own day in England how a certain curious and fascinating type of beauty, invented and emphasised by two imaginative painters, has so influenced…
“What if I were to collect your papers without names on them, and then — after grading them all individually — averaged the grades and gave everyone the same class average grade? How would things change?” At first, the response was incredulity. “That wouldn’t be fair,” sums up the initial reaction. Naturally, those who assumed…
Bowing to faculty demands, Harvard President Lawrence H. Summers on Thursday released a transcript of his controversial remarks on women and science. He did so while releasing yet another apology for those remarks and as the head of the Harvard Corporation released a statement backing Summers. —Scott Jaschik —What Larry Summers Said (Inside Higher Ed) I’m…
It is not true that there are no controls. It is not true that the blogosphere is the Wild West. What governs members of the blogosphere is what governs to some degree members of the MSM, and that is the desire for status and respect. In the blogosphere you lose both if you put forward…
The New York Times Co. has agreed to buy About.com from Primedia Inc. in an all-cash deal valued at about $410 million. —NY Times agrees to buy About.com (New York Business) About.com is a collection of free resources compiled by “experts” in a format that resembles a blog. The About.com authors are part-timers, enthusiasts who post…
The pile of garbage included the equipment used by the children in the litter hunt: a dozen plastic bags and two dozen pairs of plastic gloves. The cost of this recycling equipment obviously exceed value of the recyclable items recovered. The equipment also seemed to be a greater burden on the environment, because the bags…
A pair of NASA scientists told a group of space officials at a private meeting here Sunday that they have found strong evidence that life may exist today on Mars, hidden away in caves and sustained by pockets of water. —Brian Berger —Exclusive: NASA Researchers Claim Evidence of Present Life on Mars (Space News) The…
We, the guests were already disgusted with the whole affair when Trimalchio, who, by the way, was beastly drunk, ordered in the cornet players for our further pleasure, and propped up with cushions, stretched himself out at full length. “Imagine I’m dead,” says he, “and play something soothing!” Whereat the cornet players struck up a…
Playing off the self-esteem theme, digital artist David Sullivan’s contribution to the show is the Ego Machine, a project that uses Google to project Sullivan’s soul into the future and puts the fun back into funeral. —Michelle Delio —Immortality Through Google (Wired) If it has anything vaguely to do with technology, Wired is there. Similar:Dear…
—Name Voyager (The Baby Name Wizard) Very cool site, that illustrates the popularity of baby names over time, from 1900 to 2003. For every million babies born in 2003, about 1600 were named “Xavier,” while about 84 will go through life with the head-scratch-inducing label “Xzavier.” Thanks for the link, Rosemary. Similar:You Must Not ‘Do Your…