Imagine what higher-ups at the Post must have thought when focus-group participants declared they wouldn’t accept a Washington Post subscription even if it were free. The main reason (and I’m not making this up): They didn’t like the idea of old newspapers piling up in their houses. Don’t think for a minute that young people…
It has taken the dedicated work of professors and academic critics over a period of decades to make sure that Faulkner has an audience. Of course, once properly introduced to him, some of those readers continue to seek out his fiction, which accounts for the continuing interest in even his lesser works. It fascinates me…
He made no mention of the National Guard story in announcing the change, saying he had agreed with CBS executives last summer to leave sometime after the Nov. 2 election. But he was forced to fight for his professional life after anchoring a September “60 Minutes Wednesday” story about Bush’s service that turned out to…
For a moment, I’m paralyzed still taping with the old man in the foreground. I get up after a beat and tell the Marines again, what I had told the lieutenant — that this man — all of these wounded men — were the same ones from yesterday. That they had been disarmed treated and…
A standard modification among the Nerfing community for any spring-powered gun is to simply stretch the spring. The formula for the force exerted by a spring is Fs = -kx, where ‘k’ is a spring constant (which varies from spring to spring) and ‘x’ is the difference in length between the spring at rest and…
—textual genre [spammed to hell] To paraphrase Arthur C. Clarke… “
On the eve of Schulz’s induction into the Army, his mother died of cancer. She was forty-eight and had suffered greatly, and Schulz later described the loss as an emotional catastrophe from which he almost did not recover. During basic training, he was depressed, withdrawn, and grieving. In the long run, though, the Army was…
The objective is to fire three shots at Kennedy’s motorcade in Dallas from assassin Lee Harvey Oswald’s sixth-floor perch in the Texas School Book Depository, all of which has been digitally re-created. Points are awarded depending on how accurately the shots match the official version of events as documented in by the Warren Commission, which…
Frequently with murder stories, reporters must balance the need to collect information with the feelings of survivors, who invariably endow the martyred loved one with a saintliness that blots out not just the negative but even neutral reality. —Unwanted Spotlight: When private people become part of a public story (Journalism Ethics Gallery) Similar:Details matter in journalism.…
Does a bus-driver-training school rank its graduating drivers? No, it ensures that all attain the standard required of a bus-driver. Would you like to be treated by a C-grade doctor? No, everyone wants an A-grade doctor! So doctors and drivers are (I hope!) trained and trained and not let out until they are A-grade in…
Purpose: To introduce the fundamental concepts and methods of object-oriented programming, source code compiling, and creating executable files; to promote the art and science of interactive fiction; and to have fun in a creative and novel way. —Byron Philhour and Albert Boyle —Introduction to Object Oriented Programming through Interactive Fiction (St. Ignatius College Preparatory) Similar:Syllabusing Like…
The first day, when they went to the bookstore and bought the book, I thought most of the kids would try to transfer out of the class. “There is no way I’m going to read a book this thick,” more than one student said to me. Another student told me the longest thing he’d ever…
It must be emphasized that, in the entire history of modern science, no claim of any type of supernatural phenomena has ever been replicated under strictly controlled conditions. The importance of this fact cannot be overstated. One would think that all medical journal editors would be keenly aware of this fact and therefore be highly…
Pupils were left in tears after a teacher told them that an asteroid was about to hit Earth and kill them all. The spoof announcement was designed to teach 14-year-olds the importance of seizing the day but backfired after they became visibly frightened. —Pupils scared by asteroid spoof (BBC) I think I’ll quietly scratch this idea…
Calling a weblog ?literary? does not require content that is about literature or even content that aims to be literature. It is not an attempt at categorizing one weblog and its author as more worthwhile in a canonical sense than any other. To the contrary, I propose that every weblog can be considered literary in…
Just as with Google Web Search, Google Scholar orders your search results by how relevant they are to your query, so the most useful references should appear at the top of the page. This relevance ranking takes into account the full text of each article as well as the article’s author, the publication in which…
One of the really good web resources for internet researchers is the wayback machine maintained by the Internet Archive. I have to admit I am not good at using it, but I really should. This was pointed out by David Brake, PhD researcher in London: You suggest in Personal Publication and Public Attention that “the…
When I teach “memoir writing” to what degree am I “intervening” with human subjects when I grade their personal essays and confessional writing? It’s not research that I would ever report, but I wonder to what degree I am treading on fuzzy privacy matters as a teacher when it comes to grading my “human subjects”?…
Colleges have good reasons for not exposing their flaws, scholars said. Mark D. Soskin, associate professor of economics at the University of Central Florida, said, “Establishing standards or even publishing measured learning would reveal that the emperor, if not naked, has a much skimpier wardrobe than commonly presumed.” Once inadequate teaching and learning are revealed,…
—Computers and Writing (George Mason University) The online syllabus for what appears to be a graduate level course — that’s a hefty weekly reading list, that covers a broad range of topics. The next time I can’t think of a blogging topic (which is admittedly rare), I’m coming back here. Compiled by Byron Hawk. Similar:Star Wars:…